Outside Broadcasting Election Coverage

Broadcast

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/ob-special-election-coverage/5087134.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=43659

As politicians make their final pitches, Adrian Pennington examines broadcasters’ strategies for ensuring their OB teams will be first past the post with the election results.

Political parties are not the only ones trying to be first past the post in the early hours of 8 May. In the most closely fought general election in generations, the major broadcasters will do battle to be first to declare the results.

ITV made use of the fixed-term election date and got its planning in early. Eighteen months ago, it began booking OB trucks and secured around 60, all but one from the UK. In contrast, the BBC is fielding around 100 SNG vans, including Globecast vehicles from Istanbul, Lithuania, Sweden and Portugal.

The scale of the OB this time around is broadly comparable to previous elections, with a greater emphasis on the Scottish electoral story and digital output.

Sky News has recruited and trained 270 students as stringers, equipping them with Sony PJ620 Handycams and a LiveU LU400 transmission unit to scale coverage to more than 270 declarations at 176 locations. The concept was trialled for the Scottish independence referendum.

This time, the students will typically be paired: one operating the camera, the other entering results data into a custom-built phone app as soon as it is read out. Before going public, the data will be sent back to Sky’s Osterley HQ and checked against a PA results feed before it is put on air.

Sky’s technical team, led by deputy head of news technology Richard Pattison, has assembled each camera pack, which contains four sim cards (one for each main network operator) for belt-and-braces connectivity. Since around 20 of the sites will not provide reliable connectivity, Sky has installed high-speed broadband fibre on location and erected temporary broadband over a satellite dish from Eutelsat service Tooway.

All 150 LiveU feeds will be routed to Osterley over IP in what Sky says will be the largest IP OB of its kind. Each stream will be sent to Google cloud servers to be streamed live to YouTube. Simultaneously, an SD proxy will be sent to Sky’s News Operations Control (NOC) room in Studio B and displayed on 10 4K monitors.

“When our producers choose what they want to put on air, the stream is converted to baseband video and sent to the gallery for playout,” says Pattison.

“To the best of my knowledge, no one has attempted to stream 150 concurrent live streams over IP before,” says Chris Smith, Sky’s news technology development executive. “We considered doing 450 but thought that was too much of a stretch this time.”

The students will film the declarations but will not provide commentary. In addition, Sky’s NOC will ingest 43 satellite feeds from trucks for mixing into the TV broadcast. It is buying capacity for 33 on an ad-hoc basis from providers Globecast, SIS Live and Arqiva.

Due to the number of locations, recces took five months, much longer than usual. “Aside from the technical logistics, we have to gain permission from the local councils, and editorial teams tend to change their mind about the seats they want covered,” explains Sky head of operations Jackie Faulkner.

ITV and STV are producing separate programmes but sharing resources and aiming for 150 live counts. They have more than 300 lenses at various locations, wielded by professional news crews and media students with iPhones, hired by ITV regions. Material is fed to hubs in each region then made accessible to the network.

“Delivering the overnight live programme is hard but getting decent pictures of declarations for next-day packages is harder,” says ITV News head of special events Emma Hoskyns. “It’s one thing to be everywhere, but there’s no point if you can’t land or manage it, or get it on air.”

Working from a database that took months to build, ITV stringers will punch in results as they come in, with tweets automatically feeding the ITV Twitter account and live programme straps. “We like to get a bit competitive with headline results on election specials,” says Hoskyns. “We want to get them out as early – and as accurately – as possible. It’s a fine line.”

The BBC is making every effort to populate home pages for all 650 constituencies with pictures and video, by sending TV and radio journalists equipped with iPhones to each declaration. However, BBC political programmes managing editor Sam Woodhouse believes that measuring a broadcaster’s election night success by how many counts it covers is of little value.

“A declaration lasts three to threeand- a-half minutes. If you broadcast them back to back, it would take at least 32 hours,” he says. “There’s no prospect of getting even half of them on TV. Of the ones we will record live, 80% won’t get on air.”

It’s a historic occasion in one more way: this is the first time since 1959 that BBC election night has not come from TV Centre. At Elstree, a gallery previously used for East Enders Live has been kitted out to accommodate up to 120 live feeds, covering about 230 live declarations. Around 20 BBC OBs will also be delivered via IP. The technology, already trialled during last May’s local elections, promises to excise the cost of satellite and crew by enabling remote operation.

“IP has great potential for delivering sound and pictures from a declaration you couldn’t get from an OB truck,” says Woodhouse. “But it’s not more cost-efficient as IP tends to take an awful lot more planning. You’ve got to make sure the internet provider and local council are in the loop, which is nerve-racking. Trucks give you immediate flexibility of using monitors, ear pieces and mics.”

Most constituencies and party HQs will be covered unilaterally, but the broadcasters are pooling resources with multi-camera OBs at the seats of the three main party leaders, plus Ukip’s Nigel Farage. The BBC is pooling coverage of Witney (David Cameron); Sky will do the same at Doncaster North (Ed Miliband), while ITV has Sheffield Hallam (Nick Clegg) and South Thanet (Farage).

A seven- to eight-camera operation is stationed at Downing Street with a jib. Another pool will be at Sunderland South, which is expected to be the first to declare.

The BBC will air a main live programme for each nation. Each flagship will source its own OBs, with all the feeds routed into hubs at Pacific Quay, Cardiff, Belfast and Elstree, to which all four editorial teams will have access. Like ITV/STV, BBC Scotland’s OB resource “is significantly larger this time, since most of the seats are expected to change hands”, says Woodhouse.

With English local government elections polling at the same time, many counts are likely to be slower and the result looks likely to be in the balance until mid-morning.

“I’ve done every election in 27 years and each one has more adrenaline than the last,” says Faulkner.

Woodhouse adds: “You can rehearse the studio and the graphics all you like, but there’s no way to test whether your system can handle 120 simultaneous feeds until you go live.

“In 2010, we had five declarations a minute during the Today programme and we’re not expecting things to be any quicker. It’s like pushing an enormous rock very slowly uphill for six months then watching it plummet off a cliff. Things you spend days setting up whistle by in 30 seconds on air.”

SIS LIVE DRIVEFORCE

SIS Live is the largest supplier of contribution feeds for election night. It is fielding 39 trucks and staff from its fleet, plus 29 vehicles leased on long-term contracts to Sky, ITV and ITN.

Branded DriveForce, these vans feature an automated, roof-mounted VSAT antenna. The company is also selling satellite capacity and providing 14 additional camera crew, 55 engineers and a trailer with 10 receiver dishes on board.

“Our crew co-ordinates the contribution links, live stand-up and two-ways, as well as managing tape or hard-drive playouts,” says managing director David Meynall.

This is the first election to use satellite capacity in the Ka-band, a more powerful frequency than the traditional Ku-band.

“The big advantage is that customers get the flexibility of guaranteed bandwidth but at far lower cost,” says Meynall. “DriveForce’s design makes for fully automated acquisition of links and simple online booking that frees operators to do other work.”

C4’S ALTERNATIVE ELECTION NIGHT

Channel 4 is leaving rolling coverage of the declarations to other channels. Its Alternative Election Night, produced by Endemol and ITN, is billed as a mix of comedy, entertainment and comment. “We try to cover a lot of ground on a smaller budget than our competitors,” says Channel 4 News deputy editor Shaminder Nahal.

“We planned some signature coverage in the run-up to 7 May that we think spells out who we are.”

This includes live OBs in Birmingham and Leeds and other ‘pop-up reportage’, such as Krishnan Guru- Murthy cycling between towns in the north of England and a roving OB featuring Jon Snow. Pictures for both were streamed via Aviwest camera-backed TX units over wi-fi and 4G with satellite truck back-up.

Outside Broadcast Special: Innovation

Broadcast 

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/ob-special-innovation/5087137.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=43659

A head of the start of last year’s football season, Sky Sports ran a campaign featuring David Beckham as a boffin testing top-secret innovations. He rejected drone cameras swarming over a cricket pitch, a sensation suit to experience the physical impacts of a rugby player, and an X Factor-style voting system for refereeing decisions, in favour of new channel Sky Sports 5.

An ironic poke at Sky’s own pioneering attitude to tech, the message was about not using technology for technology’s sake.

“Ultimately, what matters is how any innovation can deliver a more cost-effective operation, deliver more content from the same investment, or create something not done before – anything that enhances the story - telling,” says Sky Sports director of operations Keith Lane.

BT Sport chief operating officer Jamie Hindhaugh agrees: “Technology is a great enabler, but just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. It’s about subtle improvements to the audience experience without trying to be too clever. That’s a fine balance.”

Drones

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, cannot be flown within 50 metres of people, restricting their use over crowds and in urban areas. But it is only a matter of time before they are as much a fixture of OBs as wire-hung spidercams and aerial shots from blimps.

Keeping within these existing safety regulations, the BBC flew a drone over the Thames for the last New Year’s Eve fireworks spectacle. Meanwhile, drones were used extensively to track skiers at the Sochi Olympics on mountain slopes with no one below.

“We’re looking to replicate this scenario for our host broadcast of the Henley Royal Regatta by following boats down the Thames,” says James Abraham, digital strategy director and executive producer at Sunset+Vine. “Establishing shots by drone – which used to be only achieved by helicopter – is one of the first items on a producer’s shopping list.”

Jeremy Braben, owner of aerial specialist Helicopter Film Services, adds: “UAVs can be deployed remotely and cover a lot of ground, so you don’t have to have operators everywhere. Cranes and wire-cams are limited in their movement but UAVs offer great flexibility and are very easy to set up.”

Batcam co-founder Jon Hurndall suggests jibs and cranes could soon be relegated. “Imagine console-type camera angles, such as tracking overhead coverage of a football match or following a golf ball as the golfer hits it,” he says.

In-air-collision avoidance systems are being advanced so that even if a UAV were flying low to the pitch, it would be nimble enough to dodge a ball being kicked towards it. “It sounds far-fetched, but it will all be possible as the technology develops,” says Hurndall.

Batcam already provides live-to-air footage from its Batcam Live systems, including for Sky’s coverage of the Capital One Cup Final. Its drones will also be in action for the BBC at Wembley on FA Cup Final day.

BT Sport’s Hindhaugh remains wary of wider adoption because of health and safety issues: “The big hurdle is whether rights holders would permit drones to fly around multimillion-pound playing talent.”

The payload that a drone carries reduces the flight time, and UAVs above 7kg are prohibited without special permission. Much R&D in the sector is focused on new, lightweight batteries.

“We hope to see at least a doubling of flight times to 15-30 minutes within the next couple of years,” says Hurndall. “This alone changes potential uses for broadcasters.”

Meanwhile, producers want drones to carry cameras with full broadcast zooms, rather than point-of-view action cams. Helicopter Film Services has tested heavy-lift flyers such as the Aerigon to carry high-speed cameras like the Panasonic Varicam 4K or Phantom Flex4K. “UAVs are opening up new sports like extreme mountain biking or surfing, which broadcasters have not been able to cover before,” says Braben.

UHD Live

Ryder Cup: Sky used 4K super-zooms on Evertz DreamCatcher for the golf tournament

Sky and BT have yet to announce live UHD services, but it’s a case of who blinks first as both broadcasters get ready to launch them for the start of the next Premier League season.

The new 4K cameras, which arrive this summer, should help them decide which system to use as these will be capable of shooting with lenses already in stock at OB suppliers.

Sony has caved in to market demand and released a 4K camera with 2/3-inch sensors designed to fit standard HD lenses, sidelining its large, single-sensor F55. Hitachi, Ikegami and Grass Valley – the first to push the market in this direction – have competing units that should push down prices.

“It’s heading in exactly the right direction,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. “Our suppliers can take these cameras into any OB environment and start using standard HD lenses. That’s a costeffective approach.”

BT Sports’ Hindhaugh adds: “The really valuable thing about the 4K cameras is that the camera positions don’t need to change. With the next evolution of equipment, there is a real opportunity to capture in 4K and down-res for HD, which already gives you an enhanced look on screen.”

Sky’s tests at Ryder Cup and Football League OBs have focused on 4K super-zooms using Evertz Dream- Catcher and kit from replay stalwart EVS. “The idea is to get a sense of how the 4K cameras fit into an HD workflow and to get feedback from operators about how the cameras perform in different lighting conditions – day, night, floodlight – and with different depths of field,” explains Lane.

The intention is to record a 4K image onto a replay server and then zoom electronically into the picture to reframe the image and pick out detail to inform analysis on playout. “There wasn’t much appetite for this in HD because the resolution wasn’t good enough, but it is now,” says Lane.

BT Sport is doing something similar with its Owl cam, trialled at Aviva Premiership matches. Images from a pair of F55s are ‘stitched’ together using software to provide a panoramic angle, from which four virtual camera positions can be extracted. The broadcaster has streamed the Owl to its mobile app and is working with Sony to enable viewers to zoom in and out of the picture from a tablet.

Israel’s Pixellot has developed an unmanned 50-megapixel, 10-camera array for extraction of even more virtual camera angles, but its real application lies in the remote production of an event, negating the need for a traditional on-site OB crew.

As Sony 4K and sports head of business development Mark Grinyer observes, this is a period of transition between HD and 4K, and outside broadcasters want to be able to shoot HD now, but UHD at the press of a button.

Wearable Cameras

Remote-controlled cameras are a staple of events like the Volvo Ocean Race and Formula One. However, technology is advancing into smaller, lighter and higher-resolution optical and transmission units capable of being mounted on virtually anything, or anyone.

Sunset+Vine’s Ref Cam is a recent addition to its Rugby Premiership and European Champions Cup coverage for BT Sport. “It’s a periscope- style camera worn on the referee’s chest, giving a unique perspective when he sets the scrum,” explains Abraham.

For Gillette World Sport, S+V deploys GoProand Garmin-mounted cameras on professional BMX bikes for a unique rider’s perspective and distributes this as an ‘extra’ for online audiences.

Sky employs umpire and ref cams for cricket and rugby league. “It offers an opportunity to see some facial expressions that we would only see from their eye-view,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. “Wearables give an insight into the field of play. The key is to get sporting bodies to accept the use of these devices, which they will, provided it doesn’t interfere with the game.”

Sony’s 4K Action Cam has a steadyshot function designed to alleviate some of the problems of shooting from a moving object. “The real issue with wearable cameras is getting a reliable RF feed for transmission,” says Grinyer.

Links specialist Vislink may have cracked this with HEROCast, a tiny transmitter capable of streaming HD images from GoPros, which has been used to broadcast live from cameras attached to players, refs and goalposts at National Hockey League matches. However, it needs a licence to operate in a certain bandwidth, which may add to its expense.

More sports are on board. At the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in February, mini-cams on bike saddle tubes contributed live race images to the broadcast for the first time. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) plans to do the same in Rio on yachts, on referees in basketball, and on select athletes during pre-Games training sessions.

IMG’s production of this year’s Grand National for Channel 4 included four minicams and RF links on the helmets of four jockeys, including the winning mount Many Clouds. “One ended up in a fence, but using the cam, we had lovely footage of him going to apologise to his horse,” says Alan Bright, director of engineering at IMG.

“Wearable cameras are a great addition but you have to use them sparingly,” warns Abraham. “It’s important that the overall TV package is robust and that we don’t diminish the editorial of the game.”

Second Screen

EVS C-Cast technology: app used for Fifa World Cup

Data is one of the keys to companion apps, and few people believe the second screen has been cracked. This could be down to the different structures of individual sports. In a game of two intense halves like football, viewers don’t like being distracted from the action. In the US, the NFL, on the other hand, has regular time-outs, permitting more natural second-screen interaction.

BT Sport holds up its mobile app for MotoGP (below) as a shining example of how to get it right. “You can watch on your TV and follow by helicam or follow four different riders from bike-mounted cameras on a tablet,” says BT Sport’s Hindhaugh. “It is second screen as a complement to the main action.”

As digital coverage competes with – and in the case of the Olympics, far exceeds – linear coverage, it brings a tension that sports broadcasters have yet to resolve.

“Broadcasters have been very keen to control what is being produced, but today everybody can curate the live event from multiple angles,” says Yiannis Exarchos, chief executive of Olympic Broadcast Services. “The most important challenge for broadcast is how to integrate a more democratic storytelling into coverage of a sport event.”

Sky uses EVS C-Cast technology to give online viewers the option to view replays and select camera angles. “The biggest conflict is between what is happening live and what is provided in an app-based environment,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. “We need to reduce the delay in getting content to the app, but key to any second screen is making it complementary, not a distraction.”

For BT, the second screen is all about choice. “Our role is to curate the story and give an ultimate experience of the coverage that 99% of the audience expect,” says Hindhaugh.

Increasingly, viewers can personalise their live experience, to the extent that they might soon be able to self-select different live audio tracks. “We have to be aware of compliance,” says Hindhaugh. “If we were to isolate a portion of the crowd chanting religious abuse at a football match, we would be the ones falling foul of our licence.”

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) will likely exist as a second-screen promotion for cinema and TV until someone devises a killer entertainment app. But in the US, sport federations like the National Basketball Association (NBA) are keen on live streaming VR as a premium service to fans who can’t attend the game.

“Live transmission is really the killer app for virtual reality, enabling viewers to witness sporting events as they happen from locations beyond a front-row seat,” says DJ Roller, co-founder of NextVR, which claims to be the only company with the technology to transmit live VR. “If there were 200 million VR headsets to make a mass market, we could be transmitting any live event today,” adds the company’s chairman, Brad Allen.

NextVR’s system uses a compression algorithm originally devised for 3D TV. It’s been tested by the NBA and Nascar, where a 360-rig was mounted in the pit lane. Allen says the company demonstrated the tech to the IOC last September. The IOC has confirmed that it will experiment with VR in Rio 2016. Sky and football clubs including Manchester United and Chelsea are also interested, says Allen.

“The holy grail is live VR and how you integrate that across platforms,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. Sky has test-shot VR boxing and football for Jaunt, the US developer in which it has a financial stake.

Sunset+Vine’s Abraham is more sceptical. “VR means a large barrier of entry for the average audience, and in operational terms it could be tricky to set up. Calibration of lenses for tennis or basketball may be straightforward because the court lines are identical at each venue, but the different sizes of British soccer pitches might add time, and therefore expense, for a broadcaster.”

Allen dismisses this, saying that NextVR’s system can be set up in just a few hours and no camera operator is required. “You can have multi-camera VR positions so that the viewer [within a Samsung GearVR application] can switch between cameras at each goal or on the manager and coach,” he says. “This year is about seeding the market. 2016 will see the first pay-per-view live VR stream.”

Eighteen months ago, 3D would have been high on the agenda, but even Sky has quietly pushed live production into the long grass this season.

“3D may come back in the future with 4K,” suggests Lane. “4K resolution will provide a true 3D HD and full dynamic range product. We are still interested to see how 3D goes and we’re still working on selective events.”

Data

The acquisition of data is arguably the most significant trend in sports broadcasting. Technology is enabling sensors to be placed on objects and athletes, opening up a wide range of previously impossible applications and insights.

“Broadcasters have had data available for some time, but the rise of social media and armchair analysts has forced them to up their game,” says Paul Every, product manager at Opta Sports, who pinpoints the 2010 World Cup as a watershed.

Opta is the official data partner to the Premier League and assigns two analysts to log significant events during a live match. The information, including every touch of the ball, is funnelled into a database, from which its editorial team extracts, then distributes, contextual insights. “The challenge for a production company is to make stats meaningful and entertaining, so viewers will want to share it before anyone else does,” says Sunset+Vine’s Abraham. “While they push a piece of branded content out to their peer group, it’s up to us as a production business to editorialise that data.”

Since the 2013/14 season, ChyronHego’s TRACAB video tracking system has been fitted at every Premier League ground to produce real-time 3D positional data and speeds for all players, referees and balls. Opta, Sky and BT Sport can use the X, Y and Z co-ordinates for each object to create graphical analysis such as heat maps. Sky is further exploring how TRACAB can be used to augment other sports.

Sky Sports’ Lane says the next step is to work out precisely what is relevant to Sky’s immediate audience while extrapolating elements to feed its other platforms and programming. “We want to build a digital platform that aggregates data and makes it searchable for parties across the sports business to use,” he says.

Most professional sports teams already track their players for health science and post-match analysis. Much of this data remains sensitive, but it is likely that more data from sensors on wristbands or in clothing will be opened up to fans.

Opta has spoken with every Premier League club about using it. “The prevailing opinion is that performance data can be used by a player’s agent to play off one player against another in transfer dealings, which is why clubs don’t want to stir it up,” says Every.

Wimbledon Tennis 2015: 8K, not 4K, trials

Sports Video Group

There won’t be any 4K UHD test shoots at Wimbledon end of June, but NHK will be there for the latest in its trials of 8K Super Hi-Vision. The behind-closed doors test will feature recordings from one court, believed to be Centre Court, and is being conducted by NHK with IMG and the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/wimbledon-tennis-2015-8k-not-4k-trials-to-be-run-by-nhk-img-and-the-aeltc/

“We will be watching the demo with interest,” said Alan Bright, Director of Engineering at IMG. “Clearly 8K is in the experimentation stage and the Japanese are pushing it with 2020 in mind.

“While the rest of the industry is looking for simpler solutions to 4K, none of us are really saying let’s future proof for 8K. But it looks stunning and it opens up creative options in terms of how you view TV, for example, possibly replacing a wall or window in your living room.”

In terms of 8K’s practical application in sports, Bright believes that 4K cut-outs — in the same way that HD views are being extracted today from 4K images — is a possibility but remains some way off due to bandwidth restrictions.

Wimbledon host broadcaster BBC has a track record of working with NHK on Super Hi-Vision, including organising tests which were transmitted to Washington and Japan during London 2012.

lMG’s Wimbledon activity includes production of the ready-to-air Wimbledon World Feed and overseeing the European Satellite Service, a continuous feed of raw television coverage with graphics from multiple courts.

Led by Japan’s ambition, several camera manufacturers are prepping 8K kit. Among them is Ikegami which has worked with NHK over a decade to develop an 8K studio camera. The latest version is a tenth the size of the 2002 debut model. Meanwhile Red is lining up a 8K sensor for Weapon by the end of 2016.

“8K broadcasting is on the verge of becoming a reality, and it will undoubtedly become the mainstream past 2020,” predicted Hitachi’s COO Sean Moran. Hitachi has also developed a 8K camera with NHK.

“NHK are doing a lot of testing around a 8K solution and Sony is not stepping away from that,” said Mark Grinyer, Sony Head of Business Development, 4K and Sports. “We are looking at it. But the timing is going to take a while and and there are lots of things to sort. For example, there are discussions similar to 4K about what glass you use to capture and there is a whole tool-set [for 8K] which needs developing. I think you’ll see some movies start to shoot 8K for certain scenes long before 8K is a broadcast application.”

SVG Europe Sit-Down: Tripleplay Services’ marketing manager, James Keen

SVG Europe

http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/svg-europe-sit-down-tripleplay-services-marketing-manager-james-keen/

Sports clubs wanting to increase the engagement of fans by using various sports apps often find themselves facing several challenges in implementation. This is particularly noticeable when trying to get the apps to interact with the rest of the stadium technology. Tripleplay works to help stadiums overcome these problems.

“Ensuring fans feel actively part of a club is a key ingredient to getting maximum return on their time within a venue,” says marketing manager James Keen. “Fan experience is a key focus for clubs with many of them clubs exploring social, statistical and club apps to connect fans with each other. Our USP is that we have the technology that integrates mobile apps with digital signage.”

The London-headquartered company has been developing solutions for the sports industry since the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Prior to being invited by Sony’s South African dealer, Dimension Data, to run digital signage system over screens at Cape Town’s Greenpoint stadium and Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, the company had established itself as an IPTV and video streaming software specialist focused on the enterprise market such as hospitals and hotels.

Founder and CEO Steve Rickless pioneered digital TV as part of the team that worked on the original BT Martlesham VOD trials to 2,500 homes in 1995, then spent time at Virgin Media, Oracle, Accenture and KPMG. With Graeme Ogilvie, Operations Director, and Dr. Peter Martin, CTO, in 2001 he launched Tripleplay Services as a consultancy and has since steered it to become one of the dominant players in this emerging market.

“The World Cup was the first time we’d installed IPTV in a stadium and it sparked interest in what we could do,” says Keen. “Slowly but surely we’ve grown a reputation for delivering this streaming media content for clubs by hitting a sweet spot where cost and quality seem to beat our rivals.”

Early adopters

EPL club Chelsea FC was the first to sign Tripleplay to deploy TripleSign Digital Signage across 650 screens at Stamford Bridge and the club’s training ground. Other venues followed, namely: Twickenham, Aviva Stadium, Edgbaston and Rose Bowl, and sports clubs Tottenham Hotspur, Tampa Bay Rays, Swansea City, Brighton & Hove Albion, Derby County and Stade Toulousain, among others

One of Tripleplay Services’ many major sports projects, at Edgbaston Cricket Ground in Birmingham

Last year it began working with Manchester City FC to run signage and TV across over 1,000 screens at the Etihad Campus. The same system links TV screens in the concourse and concession stands with screens at the adjacent fan park. The same platform is used to connect offices, signage and IPTV at Melbourne City FC and New York City FC for Etihad owners Abu Dhabi United Group.

The company has also outfitted the PGE Arena in Gdansk and Zenit St. Petersburg and Spartak Moscow’s stadia ahead of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

“As a software developer we are hardware-agnostic so that means our solutions are agile,” says Keen. “When business models change we can integrate new software and react to client needs rather than having a product locked into particular hardware that can’t be manipulated to individual requirements.”

TripleSign works as either a standalone digital signage system or in conjunction with TripleTV IPTV and TripleLive Live Video Streaming to stream advertising and comms messaging around a stadium or training ground integrated into live TV broadcasts or live camera feeds from the arena itself. New for this year is a 4K option that uses technology hardware from media player specialist Shuttle.

It does not produce the video content but provides the tools for club media teams to do so. “Tripleplay signage has its own content creation software inbuilt for clients to upload video, RSS, text and live TV to create their own content,” explains Keen. “Because it is also a TV delivery platform we can take in feeds from other places like a TV studio or TV production suite. We do this at the Etihad so that the club can live vision mix full production on match day while sending out other signage content over the same Tripleplay platform.”

In addition, the company has branched into developing mobile apps. These include a video analytics application which feeds data from Prozone, Amisco, SportsCode and Opta, plus video content from the training ground and match days into an app personalised for each player for coaching and analysis. Clubs can also offer players a lifestyle app, integrated with Tripleplay’s signage platform, to provide players with bespoke content such as schedules. Alerts and messages can be sent to their phones/iPads and to signage on training grounds.

Debuting next month is a fan engagement app. TripleSport Engage incorporates live video streaming with traditional app features like match stats, results, social media, league tables and standings. This solution incorporates the ability to create push notifications and messages, enabling the club or venue to share time sensitive special offers and promotions which can be either pre-planned or linked to proximity settings; meaning only those inside your venue receive them.

“You can achieve live interaction between fans and screens, for example, by asking users to vote for a man of the match,” says Keen. “If you go to a US sports game the sports is sort of a sideline to the day. Fans arrive at the venue two to three hours in advance and make a whole day of it at the site. In European soccer and rugby, clubs will get a two hour window if they are lucky to maximise revenue at the ground, so they are very keen on harnessing more of that time to attract fans to arrive early and to engage them while they are there.”

He continues: “Manchester City is an exception since it has a brilliant site (built for the Commonwealth Games in 2002) with fabulous infrastructure. It can and does attract fans several hours pre-game to enjoy live music, video and hospitality at the fan park. Other clubs are not as lucky so they are looking to up sell more promotions and concessions from content streamed to fans at the stadium.”

Tripleplay says it is developing a video delivery method that will make it “much easier” to deliver video over HD Wi-Fi in the challenging stadium environment.

DRM takes advantage of Cloud

Cable Satellite International

http://www.csimagazine.com/Digital-Editions/CSIApril2015digitalEdition.pdf

As the video delivery service industry as a whole becomes more software-empowered, the implementation of cloud-centric security management would seem a logical progression. However, the issue is complex and requires some unpicking.

In some ways, the term cloud is a misnomer. Effectively, DRM delivered as a service from a scalable platform allows content owners and providers to shift away from the need to build, maintain and ultimately upgrade the DRM platforms that are essential for the majority of service provision.

“In the past, providers would build their own DRM platforms which would effectively become a software platform needing maintenance and upgrades in line with changes to the underpinning technologies and business evolution,” explains Giorgio Tornielli, VP Product Engineering, Piksel. “The cloud model shifts to a case of integration and customisation with the ongoing platform development and expansion taken care of by the service provider. This approach benefits from economies of scale, specialisation and the ability to provide more ancillary features that would be prohibitively expensive to develop for a single in-house installation.”

Several consumer DRM products (PlayReady, Adobe or Widevine for instance) are already offered as a cloud service. Cloud DRM is also an emerging trend for implementing operator DRM products, and, in particular for smaller operators, suggests NAGRA's Senior Product Marketing Director, Christopher Schouten, as cloud services are an efficient way to optimize their own operations while getting a robust level of service.

Looking further, Schouten sees large operators “starting to run their own cloud infrastructure, implementing a generic IT infrastructure server virtualization approach that brings cost benefits as well as added elasticity.” Such an approach, he informs, “usually relies on a combination of a private cloud environment with some highly scalable online services put on a public cloud or using third party cloud services, for functions such as multi-DRM management.”

So there are two broad reasons why migration of DRM in hosted or cloud environments for pay-TV (VOD) operators is occurring:

1 There are core benefits shared with other cloud technologies

As discussed, it is part of a wholesale shift of the video prep and delivery infrastructure towards pure software subsystems, fundamentally dependent on IP connectivity, which can then be implemented in physical data centres or in cloud CPU resources.

In this case, according to Steve Christian, SVP Marketing, Verimatrix, “DRM technology and business logic does not change.” Some vendors have taken generic implementations of DRM technologies (Verimatrix is one) and are offering a SaaS model of key management based on cloud resources. This, says Christian, “tends to shift the business model for DRM costs rather than the underlying technology.”

2 OTT multiscreen content delivery

Cloud-based DRM is an effort to address subscriber interest in viewing online content that is encrypted in various DRM formats and is made available through multiple online video providers. This results in operators needing to support different content packaging and content protection formats like MPEG-DASH and Common Encryption Scheme (CENC).

As more device functionality is moving to the cloud (user interfaces, DVR storage, preference management etc) vendors sees a greater share of the core rights management logic moving upstream.

“Traditional pay-TV operators have been limited to supporting a single DRM vendor given the operational complexity in rolling out multi-DRM library support into their device footprint,” Sachin Sathaye, VP, Product Strategy and Marketing, ActiveVideo. “The compliance rules associated with supporting DRM vendors further inhibit expanding the DRM solutions to existing devices that lack sophisticated cryptographic features.”

Security and business drawbacks

Deploying DRM in the cloud in a manner that is secure and in agreement with the DRM vendors studio compliance rules, is non-trivial.

“It is very important that DRM infrastructure deployed in the cloud is done so in a manner ensures studio compliance,” stresses Steve Plunkett, CTO, Red Bee Media. “The storage of key material is subject to particular restrictions that must be met to ensure compliance. It also makes more sense to use cloud based DRM when media processing workloads in general are moving into the cloud. Doing so in isolation, while general media processing remains on-premise, can slow down the media transit path and increase workflow execution times.”

Christian emphasises the point: “If the security approach is simply an isolated subsystem divorced from the rest of the deployment architecture, there can be potential barriers to success, including those that arise from managing vital keys and other essential consumption management control information uniformly across multiple delivery formats and device screens.”

The failure to provide a seamless user experience when wanting to transfer viewing mid-stream of Netflix' House of Cards from an iPad to a Samsung smartTV, at best risks alienating the subscriber to another service, at worse pushes them toward pirate sites.

“The real business challenge for operators who wish to target the broadest number of devices is to eliminate service distribution and consumption silos that serve only to frustrate consumers and may nudge them towards alternative sources,” says Christian. “One aspect of this is the need to enable support for multiple native DRM systems on the devices and browsers in use, and to provide the user with a transparent consumption experience.”

The purpose of security goes far beyond the defensive aspects of addressing piracy and theft of service, says Christian, “to that of ultimately enhancing the subscriber’s quality of experience (QoE) while also underpinning the operator’s bottom line.”

Partly for this reason we've not yet seen the wholesale movement of DRM into virtualised environments. “The cloud aspect of DRM is not a process that aggregates large amounts of sensitive customer information, billing or account accessibility,” explains Tornielli. “In essence, it is a streamlining of a well-understood process that has typically resided in-house and can now be consumed as an externalised service due to the maturity of connectivity and virtualised computing technologies.”

André Roy, Head of Security Practice, Farncombe warns that not all cloud-based DRMs are optimised to handle content preparation. “We audit CA (conditional access) systems and can say that there are few cloud-based DRM systems that meet studio content handling requirements for handling unencrypted content. Primarily, having studio quality mezzanine files unencrypted in the cloud would not meet MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) requirements. All encryption would need handling in a physical facility rather than in the cloud.”

One cloud workflow that does meet MPAA requirements is Akamai's. According to Akamai content providers need only upload a single source file to the Akamai Cloud – “which will then facilitate DRM processing in addition to transcoding and stream packaging for optimized, secure delivery to connected devices” the initial reception and encryption is believed to occur in a non-cloud based secure facility.

Verimatrix suggest that Full DRM systems (generally consisting of digital rights to manage, encryption, license management, and a DRM-enabled client) can be deployed in the cloud “very easily as a part of an overall video delivery system” but it doesn't see this as the gold standard right now for pay-TV. “Physical data centre deployment and virtual machine deployments are still quite popular, although interest in cloud implementations is growing,” reports Christian.

Another potential drawback is flexibility. In certain cases, cloud based services will only support a limited set of DRM technologies. “If a particular feature is not available then it is not always possible to just build it yourself and add it to the mix,” reports Tornielli. “The cloud can be defined as a shared multi-tenant environment so the timescale of upgrades, features and fixes are dependent on the diligence of the provider.”

Piksel suggests cloud DRM solutions are a relatively small percentage of deployments (probably less than 1%) “although growing faster than on-premise implementations.”

Only a partial shift of the DRM infrastructure to the cloud is expected from Telekom Innovation Laboratories, the research wing of Deutsche Telekom. “This shift implies the adaptation of the current DRM infrastructure towards more centrally hosted key servers and therefore an overall reduction in the number of key server APIs for the service operator,” says Dr. Oliver Friedrich. “It also implies the adaptation of content servers hosting files encrypted by means of common encryption scheme, which could also simplify the DRM encryption infrastructure.” Therefore, he says, a real move into the cloud is not taking place.

The primary DRM innovation for Friedrich, is driven by the browser and multi-device scenarios and technologies, such as MPEG DASH with CENC and HTML5 EME. The most important factor is the de-coupling of the content from the DRM system itself.

Tackling Fragmentation

Fragmentation of the DRM market coming from the deprecation of the plug-in APIs on the Google Chrome browser and the emergence of a DRM-per-device platform environment has focussed attention on cloud deployment as a solution, argues David Leporini, EVP of Marketing, Products and Security, Viaccess-Orca.

The recent Chrome update is only the beginning of a series of changes to DRM support on web browsers. All browser vendors are moving to embed a specific DRM technology on each of their web platforms. This means that any OTT service viewed on a PC, Mac or the browser of any CE device will need to support multiple DRMs in order to ensure that all viewers can playback the content.

“This is just the start of an industry-wide evolution,” contends Ben Gidley, Director, Multiscreen Solutions, Irdeto. “A single DRM for your OTT service will no longer be sufficient to reach multiple platforms. But as the different DRM technologies are becoming increasingly device- and browser-specific, the impact will not be limited to DRM selection alone.”

As this fragmentation continues, managing multiple DRMs, devices and browsers will become increasingly difficult. “Operators will need to ensure they either have the resources internally or a partner that can provide a multi-DRM platform designed to remove all that complexity,” says Gidley. “This challenge extends beyond just multi-DRM to both the head end and client side.”

Opinion seems divided as to how a cloud solution can solve the issue. “The scenario is now unfolding where each browser vendor is headed towards implementation of a protected media stack implemented around a specific proprietary DRM with no mechanism to expand the default option,” says NAGRA's Christian.

“This seems likely to move the market from a form of streaming fragmentation based around protocols to one divided by proprietary device and browser silos. There’s nothing about cloud implementations of DRM per se that seem to be able help with this self-inflicted wound.”

Some vendors, like Piksel, point to the compatibility and simplification as significant benefits offered by cloud-based DRM. “Each DRM schema has a cost and technical requirement to meet the needs of the addressable audience,” says Tornielli. “These factors are not set in stone and as business evolves, cloud DRM enables organisations to dynamically change which DRM technologies they use, for which devices and services. This simplicity allows DRM to be agnostic to much more critical changes in business strategy.”

Leporini also points to the the reduced complexity afforded by cloud deployments. “The complexity introduced by various content packaging formats, streaming protocols, and DRMs to be supported can be managed using a single platform in a multi-tenant mode of operations,” he says. “In situations requiring real-time on-the-fly packaging of content, such as in certain network PVR and catch-up deployments, content service providers may benefit from the scalability and elasticity of cloud infrastructures.”

For ActiveVideo there are three obstacles that need to be overcome for cloud-based DRM to solve fragmentation: First, the reality that in the pay-TV environment, the DRM is 'baked into' the set-top box or the set-top browsed and cannot be changed; Second, that few IP STBs support multi-DRM, and the increased cost of multi-DRM devices is an impediment to deployment of those devices at scale; and third, not all content owners are able to or willing to invest in multi-DRM solutions.

Recommendations

For an organisation with no existing investment such as a new OTT, SVoD or TVoD entrant, it’s hard not to make the case for cloud based DRM from day one. Little CAPEX, fixed OPEX, rapid time to market and an easy scale up or even down model that reduces risk.

Telekom Innovation Laboratories says it will wait and asses what the strategies of suppliers are. “There are limitations in current implementations,” emphasizes Friedrich. “Moreover, support for interoperability is currently not being offered by most market-leading DRM providers.”

For an organisation with an existing DRM investment, it is a case of examining the numbers, advises Tornielli. “Organisations need to understand how much current DRM actually costs including licences, training, data centre and server costs, upgrades and support. These numbers also need to be considered against the direction of travel of the business. For example, will the service need to support new device types or operating models such as TVoD. Also, ask the same questions of the cloud provider. Get definite costings and pose some ‘what if?’ scenarios to see how alternatives stack up. All clouds are not created equally.”

Vendor strategies

Viaccess-Orca’s approach consists of solving the DRM fragmentation issue facing the industry through its multi-DRM solution called Connected Sentinel, which is available as a hosted service and also integrated with cloud infrastructures for DRM management and content preparation.

ActiveVideo’s CloudTV StreamCast is described as a “comprehensive solution for delivery of online video to any existing pay-TV STB”. It addresses - in the cloud and in real time -- Content Experience and Content Delivery, in addition to Content Protection. “These are the three key technological hurdles pay-TV operators face in bringing online video to STBs at scale,” says Sathaye.

Verimatrix offers cloud-based instances of its Video Content Authority System (VCAS) to help facilitate integration for virtual end-to-end solutions. “While yesterday’s legacy systems tended to have large, proprietary hardware components —making it complex and cumbersome to integrate multiple solutions — software- and IP-based components can better support a cloud-based approach that relies on virtual resources,” says Christian. Verimatrix MultiRights also brings CE devices with embedded, non-Verimatrix clients under the VCAS security umbrella.

Irdeto's service maps a central list of operator owned content with the users entitlements and then maps that to each DRM according to the business rules for each content play. It does this for Liberty Global, Australia's Foxtel and ITV among others.

NAGRA says its MediaLive Services Platform, featuring multi-DRM capabilities and available as a cloud service, provides an efficient architecture for delivering a complete end-to-end content preparation and delivery solution. It includes secure player apps for multiple consumer devices that leverage studio-approved NAGRA anyCAST PRM. MediaLive can also deliver specific vertical functions, such as multi-DRM support and related workflow capabilities, to be integrated into an existing operator platform (that can be in-house or 'cloudified').