Video Breakthroughs

Building for Connected TV is complicated

The TV Application Layer originated from our ambition to run BBC iPlayer, News and Sport applications for Connected TVs on as many different devices as possible.

There are hundreds of different devices in the marketplace and they all use slightly different technology to achieve the same result.

Having figured out how to build an application on a specific device we want to use this knowledge to build additional applications for that device.

Our answer to this challenge is the TV Application Layer (TAL). By abstracting the differences between devices and creating a number of TV-specific graphical building blocks (like carousels, data grids and lists), we provide a platform upon which we can build our applications.

Further reinforcing the digital content ecosystem’s roster of technology support, Motorola Mobility’s SecureMedia content protection has been approved by the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) for streaming UltraViolet content. Now, service providers using SecureMedia can offer subscribers ready access to their UltraViolet digital entertainment collections anytime, anywhere and on any device.

SecureMedia is extending the purchasing, collecting and sharing content in the cloud experience to consumers’ favourite connected devices by giving service providers a way to encrypt and process UltraViolet content in compliance with DECE’s specifications for streaming content protection.

It’s rare that moviegoers are encouraged to fiddle with their smartphones during a film, but that’s the case with App, the new Dutch movie directed by Bobby Boermans.

Before going to see the film, moviegoers are asked to download a free app (available for Android and iPhone) to enhance the plot, which involves a 21-year-old psychology student who becomes addicted to her smartphone following a tragic accident.

The App app uses SyncNow, a digital audio watermarking technology originally developed by Civolution to prevent illegal downloads.

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.

The Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) doesn’t respond well when you pass it a local F4M file path for playback. Playing back local HDS fragments is an edge case, but enough people have encountered this problem that I think it deserves a little attention.

At NAB, taking place in Las Vegas April 8-11, Envivio will introduce
new products and showcase new developments in next-generation
software-based video processing that optimize the convergence of
traditional TV and multi-screen services :

- An Ultra HD 4K technology demonstration
- HEVC HDTV video compression, enabling up to 50 percent bit-rate savings while preserving video quality
- HEVC video streamed to a tablet in MPEG-DASH format
- TV Anytime capabilities including applications such as Catch-up and Start-over TV, highlights creation, ad insertion and nPVR
- Introduction of a new product that further personalizes the multi-screen user experience
- High efficiency MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) statistical multiplexing
- Envivio True Motion Experience, a new technology for high-quality streaming in MPEG-4 AVC format to connected TVs
- Video packaged by Envivio Halo(TM) network media processor in the Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) format, protected by Adobe Access

In one of the first significant pre-NAB announcements, cloud encoding companyZencoder is releasing the Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding service, an open API that offers simple and scalable encoding for live video.

Using the API, publishers upload an RTMP stream from a lightweight encoder on a laptop. Once uploaded, Zencoder creates adaptive bitrate HLS and RTMP streams for viewers.

The BBC has called for technology standardisation for second screen services in order to help move the the broadcast sector forwards.

Speaking at TV Connect yesterday, BBC senior technologist for mobile and dual screen, Jeremy Kramskoy, said that common standards were important in terms of bringing down development and technology licensing costs.

He also said that in the future connected home, when synchronisation will increasingly result in different web-powered devices talking to each other, “standardisation has to happen, otherwise it’s going to be a complete nightmare.”

Neil Hunt is likely the most important Netflix executive that nobody's ever heard of. While everyone in tech media knows CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, Hunt's kept a low profile despite the pivotal position he holds as the company's chief product officer. Hunt looks after the video service's technology, including the streaming platform, as well as the tech behind the new feature announced yesterday, which will enable subscribers to share what they watch with their Facebook friends.

Hunt also oversees the unprecedented amount of user data that Netflix sits on. The data helps his team create the algorithms that support Netflix's recommendation features. At a time when the cost of licensing content is spiking, Hunt said in an exclusive interview withThe Verge that these recommendations help Netflix and its subscribers get the most out of Netflix's video library by suggesting titles that customers are more likely to enjoy. Hunt also talked about those nasty holiday site outages, why Hollywood and Web movie distributors need better supply-chain technology, and why he thinks the film industry places too much emphasis on pixel counts when the sweet spot for improving viewing quality is higher frame rates.

I’ve always been curious about what is contained in the bootstrap data for HDS content. Recently, I had the chance to find out and do some fun development with Node.js. We’ve been kicking around the idea of building a tool set for Adobe Media Server using Node.js and possibly socket.io. Last weekend we got some of the ideas going and one of those was parsing the hds bootstrap data created when content is packages for HDS delivery.

The bootstrap data can live in a couple of places:

The .bootstap file contains binary data and the F4M file contains the same binary data that has been Base64 encoded. So, getting to the data is pretty trivial – either read in the .bootstrap file or un-encode the string in that is in the F4M. Getting to the data contained in the bootstrap binary data is the fun part.