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Comme de coutume chaque mi-septembre depuis 2010, direction Amsterdam pour l’IBC, le plus grand salon de la télévision numérique avec le NAB de Las Vegas qui a lieu en avril. On y trouve de tout, des outils de captation, de production, de diffusion et de réception. Avec plus de 1700 exposants, on y découvre la floraison de sociétés qui se disputent un marché en perpétuel renouvèlement. Ce salon a lieu juste après l’IFA de Berlin qui est destiné aux produits grand public et auquel je ne me rends pas, réservant ce domaine au CES de Las Vegas en janvier.
Sans grande surprise, les mots clés de ce salon étaient : OTT multi-écrans s’appuyant sur des architectures en cloud et l’adoption massive de la 4K/Ultra HD par les industriels du broadcast.
MPEG-DASH is slowly but surely becoming the main competitor to HLS, driven by adoption by major players and intrinsic strengths. Here's who's using it now, who's going to be soon, and what challenges still need to be addressed. Last year at the European Broadasting Union’s BroadThinking conference, the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) conducted a survey of 13 major European broadcasters on MPEG-DASH adoption. At the time, about three-quarters of them projected to have DASH deployed by end of first half of 2014. Primary sources of concern for the broadcasters were the availability of DASH enabled clients and packaging tools. One year later, we haven’t seen many broadcasters deploying DASH in production, but the traction seems to have shifted to over-the-top (OTT) content distributors and operators. So, who are the actors already in production or close to production with DASH? What are the remaining roadblocks for its adoption? How will DASH be positioned against existing Adaptive Bitrate technologies in the coming months? What is the exact status of the DASH standard and its most promising evolutions? What are the upcoming initiatives aiming at fostering DASH adoption? Let’s get a handle on where DASH is today, and where it’s headed.
Via DASH Industry Forum
Converging CAS and DRM", a presentation by David Bouteruche from Nagra.
Online Video French Squad – HangoutSquad #2 February 27th 2014
Avec le passage au full HD et bientôt à la 4K de a diffusion OTT, le modèle de distribution unicast montre ses limites. La course à l’armement des CDNs dans le déploiement de baies de serveurs et la multiplication des points de peering n’est pas scalable à l’infini, et pourtant le traffic vidéo ne cesse d’augmenter de manière exponentielle, y compris – et surtout – sur les terminaux mobiles. La recherche de modèles de distribution OTT complémentaires avec le multicast est donc une priorité pour continuer d’assurer la qualité de l’expérience utilisateur et optimiser les coûts de diffusion. Les regards se tournent de plus en plus vers le transport multicast qui a fait le succès de l’IPTV, ainsi que le Peer-to-Peer qui, malgré sa réputation sulfureuse, a déjà fait ses preuves pour la diffusion de chaines live OTT à très grande échelle. Pour tout savoir du multicast et du P2P, et apprendre des retours d’expérience et de recherche des membres de la Squad qui travaillent sur ces systèmes hybrides, OVFSquad organisait le 23 janvier 2014 une soirée spéciale de présentations (aka « Conférensquad ») dont voici le compte-rendu et les présentations.
Kaltura has long enabled service providers, universities, enterprises, and media companies to deliver video to viewers, with an extensible platform for publishing, distributing, and monetizing content. But for the most part, while it provided a player and CMS, it was up to those companies themselves to do the work of building their sites and readying them for video. Well, no longer. Kaltura is releasing a new product, called MediaGo, which is aimed primarily at the growing number of media partners who wish to quickly roll up an end-to-end video platform and customize it. This so-called “Netflix-in-a-box” portal enables those customers to quickly start serving up ad-based and subscription video services without having to build any infrastructure of their own.
The reign of end-to-end OTT platforms is over, here comes the modular OTT Platform ! With SOA, FIMS, IMF and DASH, agility time has (almost) come... This is the report/sequel of Vimond's Industry Visionaries IBC2013 talk about “The Future of OTT Platforms: Is it Diversification or Standardization ?” with Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Editor of Streaming Media Magazine, and Nicolas Weil.
A preview of new products, demonstrations and other important technology that is being highlighted at IBC : NEW: Security and ID for multiscreen video NEW: Online video platform developed specifically for premium content CONFERENCE PICK: ‘Broadcast, and Beyond: Reshaping the Media Ecosystem’ DEMO: Multiscreen service monitoring that boosts QoE HOT: ACCESS demonstrates premium content sharing for operator homes D-VDN enables backhaul savings for catch-up TV Multiscreen protection for streamed OTT Better business management for on-demand across all platforms Business-Integrated OTT Solution from Pilat Media
The next-generation of CDN needs to give service providers much greater control over bandwidth priorities in the home, Alcatel-Lucent believes. If there are multiple devices competing for bandwidth, you need to be able to say that a connected television needs priority for streaming and that a smartphone should be given a lower bitrate stream, for example. “Service providers need a way to control the quality that is delivered to every screen and that is not possible today with adaptive bitrate streaming,” Mestric explains. “So in the CDN we will include a session manager that makes the CDN aware of all the different devices and session requests so that if you start to watch video on an iPhone and there is no congestion in the access network you will get the highest bitrate possible, but if someone else in the family turns on a connected TV device the service provider can then limit the bitrate profiles that can be accessed by the iPhone, for instance.” Mestric points out that session prioritization could be useful if there is contention on mobile networks. Then a content provider could prioritize a premium subscriber over a basic subscriber so they get the higher bitrate if there is no chance to provide them both with the best possible experience.
Nothing was more welcome after day 1 of EBU BroadThinking 2013 than a good night of sleep, in order to reset the tech hype counters and make some mental room for two new sessions on broadcasters’ CDNs and the latest advances of hybrid platforms. What would be the best broadcasters’ CDN architectures today, what would be their smartest (green) evolutions, would CDN-Federation standards finally bring interop reality over hopes, what would be the most advanced deployments and future of HbbTV, how it compares with YouView in the UK : day 2 agenda was looking quite attractive – and indeed the presentations were packed with valuable informations and experience feedbacks. So here is the recap of the most interesting DAY 2 presentations and a short report on some insightful demos that were playing on the EBU floor right to the conference.
Vidmind, a pioneering End-to-end Cloud TV technology provider for operators, broadcasters and retailers, announced today its partnership with Media Excel, an innovator of adaptive bitrate, multi-device transcoding for multiscreen video delivery. Media Excel was chosen by Vidmind not only because of its powerful transcoding solution which produces superior quality video in multiple formats but also because of the adaptability of the Media Excel platform. Media Excel’s HERO product can be operated as a local service or on a Cloud service. This allows Vidmind to run the encoding process at the customer’s headend but manage all services through the Cloud.
Deluxe Digital Distribution is expanding its video catalog service, which encodes videos to enable viewing across multiple devices, to cover the needs of over-the-top (OTT) video providers and to enable use with UltraViolet. Deluxe On Demand provides access to tens of thousands of pre-encoded and pre-encrypted movie and TV titles in more than 50 formats, allowing users to access content on set-tops, PCs, Apple and Android devices, gaming consoles and connected HDTVs.
PayWizard, specialists in payment and subscription management, has launched the TV and media industry's first dedicated, end to end payment and subscription solution. The integrated solution brings together a strong heritage in the Pay-TV market with a deep understanding of the challenges TV operators and media companies face in monetising the multiplatform world. Using its award-winning modular Payment and Subscription platform, PayWizard combines payment processing, intelligent subscriber management technology and real-time customer service operations to tailor-make solutions that enhance the consumer experience across all screens.
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“Over the top” (OTT) is one of the most overused and ambiguous buzzwords in our industry.
In order to understand linear video delivery in OTT models, first, you have to look at what OTT means outside of video. To mobile operators, OTT is a scary proposition. Calls, text messaging, and image messaging had been entirely within operators’ control until now, and therefore presented an opportunity for revenue. For those operators, OTT services are an almost unavoidable symptom of smartphones requiring open internet access, and bring with them many services that compete with operators’ traditional revenue models. King of all these is Skype, and it provides a clear example of what “top” the service comes “over” to earn the moniker OTT: Namely the pay wall that is the per-minute billing system of the mobile operator.
In exactly the same way I often dogmatically emphasize that “cloud” is an economic term defining the move of CAPEX to OPEX when building IT infrastructure, OTT is also an economic term first and foremost. At best, it means that the operators are able to derive data transit and bandwidth-oriented revenues for the delivery of network service on behalf of providers who otherwise charge much higher premiums to end users or sponsors. At worst, operators are loss-leading that data transit to encourage subscribers to stay with them rather than take their business to other operators. All the while, OTT services are taking revenue from network operators’ subscribers and not (necessarily) sharing any of that revenue with the network operator.
However, with this economic common denominator noted, in any specific technical context the term OTT has a range of implementation models that ensure that the cost of this data transit and bandwidth delivery itself is as profitable as possible for the network operator, whether profit is measured in operator CDN revenues or in terms of subscriber retention.
We are amidst most radical times in the history of Television with Pay-TV subscriptions experiencing their greatest 12 month losses on one hand and OTT (Over the top) video witnessing overwhelming rise on other. Television which brought visual entertainment to our homes but kept away “when and what to watch” within its control is challenged by OTT which is reinventing Television with freedom to choose what, when and where all for a reasonable price. Over the top video which became popular as a complementary service to traditional TV has started to stand out as an independent medium and for majority of this growing population it is fast becoming the only medium for entertainment. The service platform which was once questioned for its business model and lack of content is finally coming of Age!
4K streaming, mobile broadcasting for the crowd, generalized delinearization, worldwide video events…
OTT delivery is just multiplying the challenges, as customers’ expectations are raising each day in terms of video fast-start, instant channel switching, lack of buffer and high frame size/rate – on all devices in all network conditions. To answer those challenges, OTT delivery answer today is basically more unicast sessions, more servers, more peering – and less and less guarantee of satisfying end-user experience as long as there is no specific end-to-end paid agreement to guarantee that the path will be provisioned from the origin server up to the video device. Even in this ideal scheme, the device might still suffer from poor wireless conditions which jeopardize the experience. So, how do we deal with all this stack of potential problems: do we stick to the aging receipts, rely blindly on Moore’s law and perpetuate a hopeless CDN weapons race? Or do we try to find smarter ways to make the OTT growth reach a sustainable delivery model ?
Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB) today announced that it is first to market with a commercial MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) implementation, making standardised video delivery via the internet a reality for the first time. The MPEG-DASH implementation, along with a Common Encryption (CENC) scheme using Intertrust Technologies’ Marlin DRM, forms part of ADB’s new, ready-to-deploy OTT solution for video service providers looking for a high quality, standards-based OTT solution. The first OTT service which uses tivùon! technology is Infinity, from Mediaset, which went live in Italy on December 11th. Customers with existing ADB-powered HD set-top boxes (i-CAN 1850S, 2850ST, 3820T) received an automatic over-the-air software update, adding support for MPEG-DASH and allowing them to enjoy the Infinity service from day one. All new Italian i-CAN HD set-top boxes will feature the new software.
Quiptel, a five-year-old start-up company, claims it has an online media platform that improves the user experience of streaming audio and video while making more efficient use of available network bandwidth. It is a bold claim, which acting chief executive Richard Baker tested at a low key launch in a London hotel. The patented technology appears to be based on using multiple logical network routes and a network overlay that intelligently manages traffic to optimise use of available access network bandwidth. The result, Quiptel claims, is that more of the available network capacity is used to deliver sound and pictures, while operators can serve more customers with equivalent infrastructure.
Although Ultra HD was the visible headline story from IBC2013, with demonstrations of the new format everywhere, the serious business, when you scratched beneath the surface, revolved around multiscreen TV yet again. The technologies to get multiscreen deployed and then make it a compelling user experience have dominated the last five shows, with only 3DTV offering any serious challenge for the crown before disappearing off our radar. This year the focus was on personalizing and monetizing multiscreen TV more effectively, while there is also a trend towards end-to-end multiscreen solutions (including multi-vendor pre-integrations) and managed services. A key driver for these last two trends is the need to help smaller operators into the multiscreen market.
A preview of new products, demonstrations and other important technology that is being highlighted at IBC : NEW: Edgeware promises new solution to help scale multiscreen TV NEW: Witbe launches new QoE video robot for multiscreen testing DEMO: Advertising and alternative content insertion in ABR video HOT: Thomson shows HbbTV1.5/MPEG-DASH streaming solution CONFERENCE: ‘The Digital Fight for the Net Generation’ Testing for MPEG DASH, HbbTV and CI+ Broadpeak highlights its innovative CDN solutions
It takes a lot of confidence in the online entertainment market to devote two years and $20 million (£12.75 million) to the development of an end-to-end video platform for premium content. London-based Saffron Digital has done just that with Stage, which it describes as the industry’s first true end-to-end solution for premium OTT. It combines all the tools required to launch a multi-platform OTT entertainment service or UltraViolet storefront and is aimed at retailers, MSOs, TV broadcasters, mobile network operators and content owners that are seeking to launch new services or upgrade to the latest technology with the minimum of upfront investment. Stage encompasses a suite of products that includes MainStage for the creation of OTT services, MainStage UV for the creation of an UltraViolet storefront and BackStage, a custom content-management system (CMS). StagePlay is a device player that uses Saffron Digital’s own technology to control every key component of content delivery, ensuring the optimum user experience. StageCraft provides automated ingest, transcoding and encryption of content. - See more at: http://mesalliance.org/blog/2013/08/22/saffron-digital-delivers-stage-ott-platform-to-ibc-in-amsterdam/#sthash.iRnmHj5C.dpuf
Rovi Corporation has unveiled DivX Video Service, an end-to-end video solution for multi-screen video delivery that is designed to integrate with and enhance TV Everywhere and OTT entertainment services. Building upon core DivX video technologies and DRM, as well as MainConcept professional encoders, DivX Video Service offers components for managing the video distribution chain from creation and secure delivery to multi-screen playback. DivX Video Service is available now and supports a range of entertainment distribution models including digital downloads and connected-device streaming. Rovi plans to update DivX Video Service to support HEVC/H.265 later this year.
Geneva in late March doesn’t feel as wild as a Las Vegas boulevard, but still there was a reasonable amount of gaming excitement at the EBU headquarters, where several events were following each other, beginning with a DASH Interoperability Forum meeting which was closely followed by the BroadThinking event, where industry actors and broadcasters come to show off their latest implementations advances and/or share the results of their real-life deployments or research studies. A good way of managing the transition between TV Connect and NAB… Where Broadcast meets Broadband : that’s the promise of the EBU’s hybrid event which flies between industry competition, standardization efforts and broadcasters’ realpolitik – all wrapped in a warm and funny ambiance provided by the various speakers and the EBU team gently lead by Bram Tullemans whom I’d like to thanks personnally here for the presentation invitation (kudos also to Filka, Peter and Eoghan for the organization!). Actually the 2013 edition was a major success because it allowed the participants to get a rather good idea of the general trends of the industry, and at the same time to go deep in technology when needed, while having opportunities to discover edge tech demos on the lobby attending the conference room. It’s virtually impossible to render a complete report of everything that has been said or shown there during two days by so many quality speakers (including OnlineVideoFrenchSquad group distinguished members Lionel Bringuier [Elemental Technologies], Martin Boronski [M6 Web], Thierry Fautier [Harmonic] and Nicolas Weil[Challenge2Media] – Les 4 Mousquetaires /poke @sfaure ), but I’ll nevertheless try to provide you here a selection of relevant informations that will help you grasp the trends and prepare the upcoming tradeshows efficiently… So let’s start with DAY 1 recap !
Agama Technologies, the video service quality assurance expert, is introducing the next generation of its Analyzer OTT for adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming services at TV Connect 2013. The Analyzer OTT supports continuous 24/7 monitoring as well as testing and troubleshooting applications, making it ideal in all phases of deployment, operation and expansion. Both Microsoft Smooth Streaming services and Apple HTTP Live Streaming services can be analyzed in any combination. Sophisticated multi-dimensional presentation of QoE and QoS with timeline analytics provide a solid understanding of relevant technical quality parameters and how they affect the viewing experience.
We're close to broadly available HD streaming which could trigger mass adoption of connected TV. Alex Zambelli gives the story so far.
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