Video Breakthroughs

castLabs, a leading mobile video technologies and services company, today announces that the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) has selected the castLabs UltraViolet Download Service Provider (DSP) for use in the UltraViolet Compliance Verification Programme (CVP). As implementations of UltraViolet-licensed devices and media players (“UltraViolet Players”) become ready, DECE will use castLabs’ reference DSP to verify UltraViolet Players’ specification compliance.

The latest release of the zeebox television companion app adds a remote control feature. Virgin Media subscribers in the United Kingdom will be able to use the zeebox app on an Android smartphone as a remote control, while zeebox will automatically recognise which channel they are watching. Similar features will be coming to Sky+ subscribers and users with an Apple iPhone or iPad.

Anthony Rose, the co-founder and chief technology officer of zeebox, told informitv that zeebox connects over a local wi-fi network and uses DLNA Digital Living Networking Alliance and UPnP Universal Plug and Play protocols to query what is playing on the device and can control any number of set-top boxes on the same network, collectively or individually. 

AmberFin has introduced of group of new file-based media ingest and transcode products that support the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) initiative.

The iCR-300-DPP media ingest workstation and iCR-100-DPP transcoder are both designed specifically to create high-quality MXF-wrapped AVC-Intra or D10 assets compliant with the AMWA AS-11 specification and DPP guidelines from tape or line sources. Both systems are available as standalone workstations or scalable enterprise solutions. The workstations offer clearly defined, documented and extensible APIs. They benefit from AmberFin’s Unified QC (UQC) approach, providing automated and manual quality control operation.

It is possible to overstate the complexity of multi-screen video, but the absolute number and types of display devices are indeed increasing, which means that efforts to promote standards and greater simplicity address a live concern. A current initiative, playing out within the MPEG-DASH Industry Forum, among other places, to enable digital rights management (DRM) interoperability is a case in point.

Building his case for a common downloadable DRM framework that is independent of but compatible with CE devices of all shapes and sizes, Tranter (VP at NDS, now part of Cisco) names three standards that could play a foundational role, namely:

* Simulcrypt—the long-standing DVB protocol published by ETSI used to enable multiple key management systems;
* MPEG-DASH—Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), which became an ISO standard in late 2011; and
* UltraViolet—an authentication and cloud-based rights system deployed over the past few years by a consortium of studios, manufacturers and service providers.

Fraunhofer IIS, the world’s renowned source for audio and multimedia technologies and BuyDRM, the premiere provider of multiscreen media technologies collaborated with HBO Europe's HBO GO broadband SVOD service to showcase the full potential of the new MPEG-DASH ISO standard. As part of the showcase viewers experienced scenes from HBO’s Boardwalk Empire via an Android phone utilizing built-in AAC surround sound technology from Fraunhofer using BuyDRM’s secure video playback client.

In combination with MPEG DASH, Android devices become true and trusted consumer platforms allowing HBO Europe to easily offer content in the most efficient, highest-quality way using the AAC Multichannel solution from Fraunhofer. Subscribers to HBO GO on Android can benefit from foolproof surround sound delivered as easy and convenient as watching a BluRay or DVD.

Using a variety of KeyOS technologies, BuyDRM’s MPEG-DASH client implementation provides stutter-free streaming as network conditions change. BuyDRM integrated MPEG-DASH support and Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM in the showcase using MPEG video and audio codecs that ship natively with the new Android 4.1 operating system.

The living room's been something like a holy grail for electronics manufacturers for decades. It's the place where we spend hours every day sitting in front of our TVs, passively flipping channels and watching ads. Even as our smartphones and tablets vie for our attention, TV dominates: Americans still spend an average of 4 hours, 38 minutes a day watching the boob tube. Netflix, on the other hand, which is so popular as to command as much as half the US’s internet bandwidth, only commands 11 hours of our attention per month.

Set top box creators have come from every angle, vying for a piece of this lucrative pie. Roku, Boxee, Western Digital, Apple, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, TuneIn — on and on the list goes, companies looking to get onto your TV. But these devices create as many problems as they solve, though, adding new remotes, inputs, and interfaces into a viewing experience that's supposed to be simple.

Theoretically, that puts TV manufacturers at an enormous advantage: if Samsung can design the whole interface, from Netflix to your DVR, it should be able to create a seamless experience that improves upon the disjointed universe of set-top boxes. Sony or Vizio could overlay content on top of your TV, so you can watch a show while reading tweets about it; Samsung already has a great ESPN app that just runs a ticker below whatever you're watching. Your set-top box can't do that, since it's on its own input and takes over the whole screen. Just about every manufacturer bought into this logic, and over the last couple of years store shelves have flooded with internet-connected, content-streaming "Smart TVs." But each of these companies has tried to develop its own interface, its own style, and every attempt has fallen flat. Smart TV interfaces are almost universally slow, clunky, and unnecessarily complex.

InStream Mobile brings high quality, low latency HD video to iPads, iPhones, and Android devices, with playback of unicast and multicast video. InStream Mobile takes advantage of transport stream multicast to deliver the highest performance media experience to many simultaneous mobile viewers throughout a facility or campus without a dedicated streaming server. It is designed for H.264 video / AAC-LC audio / MPEG transport stream and features multiple preset channels, instant channel tune-in/channel change, and gesture-based fast channel changes.

Digital Workflow isn’t the most gripping of subjects I’ll admit, but as tapes finally disappear from our production process it’s important to recognise that files can be troublesome things that require careful management.

Fortunately the market has spotted the opportunity and there are now a significant number of products available that will manage your workflows - anything from a drop folder into your favourite transcoder, to a multi-stage system with many components doing hundreds of transactions every minute.

The one thing all the systems have in common is that they package bits of kit made by other vendors and present them to you as part of a co-ordinated workflow. To make this happen each of the applications or bits of kit – transcoders, QC boxes, loudness normalisers, that sort of thing – provide a software interface to the workflow system that allows them to talk to each other. The problem is that all of these interfaces are proprietary and different, so every time you need to add a new box, or a new feature to an existing box, code in your system needs to be rewritten. As the systems get more complex – as they will for many of us - so the problem gets worse.