Video Breakthroughs

Witbe, the leading provider of quality management solutions for multimedia services over any network, to any device, will be unveiling a unique solution for connected TVs, during TV Connect inLondonthis month. Witbe’s Test & Validation solution will now enable content providers and application developers to benefit from comprehensive and automated quality testing of new services, prior to their launch on connected TV sets.

Witbe’s Test & Validation solutions are already used by some of the world’s largest service providers, application developers and device manufacturers on a comprehensive range of user devices including set-top boxes, iOS/Android apps and computers. As Witbe’s solution for connected TV leverages the same technologies used for testing other platforms, developers and quality assurance engineers can reuse their test scenarios across several terminal types and even test converged services.

Mobile World Congress 2013 - Leading Rovi's showcase will be a demonstration of DivX® HEVC 720p integrated with DivX Plus Streaming®, developed to support the rollout of the newly ratified High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard for mobile and consumer electronic devices. The demonstration is an example of Rovi's focus on bringing technologies to market to promote the rapid adoption of HEVC.

Outlined in its plan for HEVC, announced at CES 2013, Rovi will be readying its MainConcept® branded codec SDKs and DivX solutions to help enable mobile operators, consumer electronic manufacturers, service providers and other businesses meet demands for streaming content through IP wireless services. In addition, Rovi plans on using DivX Plus Streaming technology to package the benefits of HEVC with advanced features such as support for 1080p, subtitles, multiple language tracks, and trick-play functions such as smooth fast forward and rewind for playback. Support for HEVC will also be integrated in the next version of its DivX consumer playback software to enable consumers to enjoy high definition content, including 4K, as soon as it is released. Rovi plans to have an end-to-end solution for professional HEVC content creation, distribution and playback on PC, mobile and consumer electronics devices. The steps outlined in Rovi's plan provide a clear path towards enabling manufacturers and service providers to be better apt at responding to consumer demand for high quality content on any device and enabling content to be properly distributed to the screen size -- no matter the device.

Expway has announced the launch of the 5th generation of its Mobile Broadcast software, the eMBMS solution, at the Mobile World Congress 2013. The solution enables Mobile Operators to broadcast any content, live or on-demand, over their LTE network.

About the eMBMS Solution :

The eMBMS Device Middleware controls the eMBMS LTE modem, receives and decodes the eMBMS streams. It stores or displays the received content through a separate Video Player.

The eMBMS DASH Video Player resides next to the Middleware and is used to play all unicast and broadcast video streams compatible with the newly adopted DASH standard. It uses devices hardware acceleration for best performance.

The eMBMS BM-SC Server handles the service layer at the eMBMS network, allowing the Carrier to push files and delivers live TV streams, on its LTE network, by using broadcast.

MPEG DASH is the biggest factor to consider -- or is it? Here are the key features to know about before making a decision.

2012 saw significant progress on several fronts for media servers. Some changes were small but important, such as naming conventions -- Adobe dropped Flash from its media server names, for instance -- while others were much more impactful for the industry going forward -- almost everyone agreeing that Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, DASH for short, was worth supporting.

In this year's Buyer's Guide, we'll take a look at a few key features you'll need to know about to make an informed decision.

With the clearing of the patent issues that have cast a shadow over VP8's acceptability to open standards organisations as a open, royalty-free video codec, it is likely that its next major stop is becoming an MPEG standard. According to Rob Glidden, video patent analyst, Google proposed VP8 as the codec for MPEG's IVC in January. IVC is the name of one of the tracks that the ISO/IEC MPEG working group wasexploring in its search for a royalty-free codec for web video and other uses. It had been looking at technologies where the patents were expiring.

But it appears that Google wanted to give the process a boost. Glidden points to a posting on the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list from a Google WebRTC developer, where the Google/MPEG LA deal was announced, that notes:

7. Submitted VP8 to ISO SC29/WG11 (MPEG) in January of this year
for standardization.

With the number of devices—and content providers— growing, 2013 was the year multiscreen viewing came into its own.

In 2012, streaming media was all about multiscreen delivery. If given the preference, viewers would rather watch online video on their mobile devices or their big screen TVs than on their computers. No one expects computer viewing to go away, but the growth for 2013 will certainly be in the living room as streaming video becomes more like broadcast TV.

We gained a new term in 2012 to describe what we were seeing: "co-viewing." At the 2012 Streaming Media West conference in Los Angeles, keynote speakerBrandon DiMassa, senior vice president for business development at TV Guide Digital, unveiled surprising results from a company survey.

"Almost 50 percent of our users are telling us that they're doing something that is now being called co-viewing. There's one person who has a remote control watching television, another person with a different device in the room streaming something else on their iPad, their iPhone," DiMassa said.

Looking back, a few key stories defined the multi-screen experience for 2012 and promise to lead the way in 2013.

The encoding business is all about squeezing more bits per buck, and the industry is about to advance another level, where HEVC compression plays a huge role in delivering HD quality with optimised throughput and bandwidth.

French telco Orange may be the first to launch a service based on the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC, also known as H.265), ratified by the ITU in January. According to an announcement at CES 2013, the telco is on the verge of debuting a VoD movies service using HEVC to deliver 3Mbps 1080p HD content on Samsung Smart TVs in France.

Encoder vendors are rushing to adapt to the new technology. French specialistATEME has demonstrated HEVC with constant bitrate (CBR) video encoded offline with software, and the company has begun work on real-time encoding. At IBC last year it showed 4K resolution content at 60fps running at 11-15Mbps. ATEME is far from the only vendor researching and developing the technology. Motorola Mobility has demoed HEVC running HD video at 8.8Mbps using MPEG-4 AVC and at 4.4Mbps with HEVC. Ericsson has an HEVC encoder on trial with several telcos for delivery of linear TV over mobile networks and Rovi is to enable third parties to provide HEVC support on their own devices. Meanwhile, Swiss telco Swisscom plans to use HEVC to boost bitrates of HD content for delivery of multi-screen video services by mid-2014.

It's all about DASH: Adoption is moving at a rapid pace, as industry insiders see a strong need to get DASH implemented in the field in the coming year.

The Pantos spec, as it is known in the industry, is a series of working drafts for HLS submitted by two Apple employees as an information draft for the Internet Engineering Task Force. As of the time of this article, the Pantos spec is currently at informational version 10.

Much has changed between the early versions and the most recent v10 draft, but one constant remains: HLS is based on the MPEG-2 Transport Streams (M2TS), has been in use for almost 2 decades, and is deployed widely for varied broadcast and physical media delivery solutions.

In that time frame, however, little has changed for basic M2TS transport stream capabilities. For instance, M2TS still lacks an integrated solution for digital rights management (DRM). As such, all HLS versions cannot use "plain vanilla" M2TS, and even the modified M2TS used by Apple lacks timed-text or closed-captioning features found in more recent fragmented elementary stream streaming formats.

Yet Apple has been making strides in addressing the shortcomings of both M2TS and the early versions of HLS: In recent drafts, the HLS informational draft allows for the use of elementary streams, which are segmented at the time of demand rather than beforehand. This use of elementary streams means that one Achilles' heel of HLS -- the need to store thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of small segments of long-form streaming content -- is now eliminated.

Google, with its Android mobile operating system platform, has adopted HLS for Android OS 4. Some enterprising companies have even gone back and created HLS playback for earlier versions of Android OS-based devices.

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.