This Sporting Life

Digital TV Europe

In the OTT streaming world, all screens are born equal and delivering live and near-live sports anywhere is fast becoming the norm, despite nagging issues of latency.

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The broadcast of live premium sports is the rock on which payTV service providers have historically built their business. Until recently, it was the last bastion of content keeping OTT at bay. The unrivalled feeling of a shared 'history in the making' experience has seen media rights sky rocket. For example, the collective value of TV rights for FIFA World Cups in 2018 and 2022 is more than $2.5 billion while rights to Premier League soccer from 2016–19, soared to $7.8bn a rise of 70 percent over the last bundle.
To maximise their investment, rights holders and sports franchises are highly conscious of retaining millennials, the demographic who prefer anytime, on any device access to sports content that is not necessarily priced as part of a huge pay-TV package.
NBCU, for example, paid the IOC $7.75 billion to air a decade of Olympic Games from 2022–2032 and has already shifted the entire 4500 hours of coverage from Rio online at NBCOlympics.com and via the NBC Sports app (also to connected TV platforms, including Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, and Win10) offering a free 30 minutes a day pass to entice viewers to subscribe for more.
Sports arguably lends itself to OTT more than any other content genre. One obvious reason is that sport goes beyond traditional linear TV. At Rio, some 28 World Championships took place over 18 days. Although an extreme example, event concurrency within competitions lends itself to OTT since linear TV is not designed to scale for such short-term peaks.
A second reason is that broadcast production creates far more content than is delivered in the feed to audiences through traditional viewing. “Making available unseen content, for example multiple angles of key events, and visualising live data, provides a true immersive experience for audiences,” suggests Deltatre business development manager, Pete Burns. Deltatre delivers digital media services for sports organisations like the IOC and UEFA and apps for BT Sport and ATP Media. “With the growth of AR and VR, I can only see this area growing.”
A third reason for OTT’s superior live sports application is that fans can view sports on a growing number of devices, even during live. With media streaming devices and connected TV’s added to the growing list of smartphones and tablets in the market, global audiences expect to receive content on their devices at anytime. “Having a platform that supports the introduction of new players in this market is crucial,” says Burns.

Going direct 
Instead of regional audiences, sports rights holders can potentially tap a global audience. In addition, observes Kurt Michel, senior director of marketing, IneoQuest, OTT offers owners the potential to have a direct relationships with their fans, and receive instant feedback on what audiences like and don’t like through richer analytics than traditional broadcast provides. “They can better tap social media, since internet connectivity makes it simple to tie that into the viewing experience.”
Examples are multiplying: BT delivered live coverage of the UEFA Champions League on YouTube and will stream CL and UEFA Europa League games in the UK and Ireland for 2016-2018 seasons over a BT Sport app and via the BT Sport desktop player. Eurosport owner Discovery created a Snapchat channel for the Olympics (content supplied by BuzzFeed); Sky is streaming in-game clips of EPL matches this season on Twitter.
Increasing ARPU is one of the KPIs to measure the success or failure of any OTT solution but, notes Deltatre, increasing ARPU would also mean reaching a direct and bigger ROI for the acquisition of sport TV rights.
While sports federations reap massive revenues from selling rights to broadcasters, they are not immune to tandem distribution over their own subscription OTT services. Examples include the NBA, which provides fans with NBA League Pass to access live games and library content and ATP Media which is relaunching TennisTV, its direct to consumer live streaming service from January. 
Sports federations are also using the reach of social platforms to market their product. In turn, social platforms are reaching out to sports as key content to reach wider audiences and switch on new monetization opportunities.
The most aggressive is Twitter which has teamed with the US' four biggest pro leagues to live stream games. This includes a pact with MLB Advanced Media to stream live weekly games from Major League Baseball and the NHL.
“Social giants are increasingly moving into premium sports because the audience and profile of these businesses rely on scale,” says Ampere Analysis research director, Richard Broughton. “Sports are mass market entertainment and capable of attracting large audiences with a high value to sponsors and advertisers.”
There is another camp of online only sports aggregators. One to watch here is DAZN, an on-demand launched this summer by Perform Group in German speaking territories (Germany, Austria and Switzerland – plus Japan) and self-described as the Netflix of Sport. Its rights include ten years worth of Japan's J-League.
All this activity would suggest that the technical challenges of delivering live sport OTT have been mastered. This is not the case. The challenges are driven by scaling requirements, cost constraints and the diversity of viewing platforms. To scale at an affordable cost, content caching via CDNs is relied on but this introduces latency which is particularly sensitive for live events. 
“For caching to be most effective, it must be implemented as close to the viewer as possible and in an increasingly mobile world, this requires a lot of cache nodes in multiple networks,” says Steve Plunkett, CTO, broadcast and media services, Ericsson. “The variety of viewing devices also increases the number of media formats required, increasing the number of files that must be stored and distributed to cache locations.”
What passes for broadcast quality today will change as market traction and content availability of UHD TV and High Dynamic Range video come into play. “Broadcast quality is best defined as a perception by viewers, and is also a moving target,” says Charlie Kraus, senior product marketing manager at Limelight Networks. “A large part of the capability to deliver broadcast quality comes from CDNs and HTTP protocols carrying the traffic. CDNs integrate monitoring in their networks to measure bandwidth and latency, and the players in the viewing devices also beacon video quality metrics such as re-buffering rates. ABR transmission, such as HTTP HLS to mobile devices, ensures the best possible quality video for given network conditions at any point in time.” 
While image quality is considered on par if not better than broadcast, buffering and latency have been far from solved – according to some. “There is still a major latency issue between OTT and broadcast for live delivery,” says Matthew Huntington, CTO Freesat, which carried eight channels of live coverage of Rio Olympics via the BBC Red Button. “The lowest latency that’s been reported to date is 30 seconds, though often it can be more.”

Reducing latency
Plunkett feels latency and buffering have been greatly reduced “but the variability inherent in current unmanaged network access cannot be entirely eliminated.”
A study by network performance analytics firm IneoQuest found that that sports buffering inflicted actual rage in viewers with two out of five consumers likely to wait 10 seconds or less for the video to resume – or leave the stream.
“For live events, CDNs really only help mask the shortcomings of using unicast connections for what would be far more effectively delivered using multicast/broadcast protocols,” says Michel. As viewers continue to shift to OTT viewing, he expects new technologies and protocols to displace standard HTTP delivery for huge live streaming events like the Olympics. “These new technologies will address the 30-60 second delay inherent in today’s streaming, and will dramatically reduce the load on the network backbone.”
Conviva chief strategy officer Keith Zubchevich, points out that pay TV operators supporting both OTT and satellite services (like Sky) are “running into issues of concurrency where you can be watching an event on TV but the goal happens with a second or more delay to your second screen.”  

At the same time, the TV and OTT live video might be undercut by the speed of text to a 'back channel' such as Twitter which might Tweet a goal ahead of the stream.

Despite CDN best efforts live event OTT latency continues to be 30 seconds or more. According to Ineoquest's Michel, “This creates problems for people watching the OTT stream within earshot of people watching the broadcast feed. No one wants to hear about a scoring event from the next door apartment before they see it themselves. What most people don’t know is that this latency is an inherent limitation with current streaming technologies. 
“For example, if we use Apple’s HLS streaming format and iOS players, a 20-30s minimum delay is 'built-in'. This delay is necessary to deal with the fact that internet-based packet delivery is not smooth, and the delay is needed to avoid re-buffering stalls in the middle of playback. This is one of the clear differences between the purpose-built broadcast networks, and the internet.”

Another issue is platform diversity. Offers Zubchevich, “Different versions of Android, or delivery to devices like Roku or a Sky box all have different versions of software and players which create layers of complexity for issues to develop. There may  be no issues in the network itself but that particular consumer's smart device that recently updated a player has a software problem. The ability to detect the issue when it occurs is critical.”

So how can you get a consistent view of a service delivery if it is done over a combination of RF, IPTV and OTT? How do you handle the fact that parts of the delivery infrastructure are outside a rights holders control - an outsourced CDN? 

QoS to QoE

The industry has conventionally fallen back on the metric, QoS, but this is changing. “The QoS concept needs to be broadened beyond its traditional definition of network-to-consumer premises equipment (that multicast networks provide as opposed to OTT),” says Sylvain Thevenot, who manages Netgem Europe. “Indeed, QoS for OTT need to be extended upstream to what we have referred to as CDN/caching edge servers in ISP networks, for example with QoS monitoring tools, as well as downstream in home such as optimised Wi-Fi in gateways and STBs.”

According to Kraus, internet traffic has been treated as “best effort” and QoS has not been a priority. “With video growing to become the dominant type of traffic on the internet, it will not be acceptable to rely on best effort delivery – dropped packets, re-transmission, latency and jitter will result in the poor quality video often experienced today, manifested in re-buffering, frozen images, and stuttering.”

Defending Limelight's performance, he explains that some of the ways QoS is handled is reserving bandwidth for video traffic, and monitoring network conditions to enable pre-emptive adjustments to the network before issues show up on audience screens. “Many CDNs use in-network bandwidth and latency monitoring, along with beaconing data from video players to get constant video quality data that is used by the Network Operations Center to make adjustments on the fly. This is why OTT on-demand and live video has such high quality today.”

Ericsson's Plunkett believes QoS challenging to implement across multiple unmanaged networks and argues for a wider focus on QoE (Quality of Experience) “This takes into consideration a broader number of performance measures than network traffic optimisation alone.”

In order to deliver that, Ineoquest recommends monitoring all content before it enters the network and after it is formatted for OTT, then QoS at multiple points in the delivery networks, and finally measurement at the endpoint. 

“But unless you can correlate all of those measurements by program asset, from one end of the network to the other, the amount of data can be overwhelming, and not very useful for real-time quality management,” says Michel. “We are focused on providing the right measurements in each location, along with that correlated end-to-end view.”

Aside from data analytics tools delivered by CDN vendors and QoS specialists, the most important source of insight comes from the video player. Nagra says its MediaLive Player (as used by Telefonica Spain's Yomvi service) uses existing video capabilities or supplements existing ones, to track an extensive set of performance and usage data points that help service providers quickly detect and solve delivery issues. “Having control over the player layer is key to be able to transform data into actionable insight,” says Trudelle.

4K UHD

OTT providers were at the forefront of introducing UHD 4K, HDR for recorded programming but UHD does create a higher burden on all parts of the OTT delivery system. Not everyone has a 24Mb connection at home and the industry norm for streaming HD content remains 720p.

“For live events, 4K UHD OTT has not been proven,” says Thevenot. “We think most operators will prefer to use a fully managed network with QoS and QoE mechanisms to offer what will be mostly premium sports, initially paid for at a high price by consumers.”

Plunkett agrees, “UHD increases the level of contention that often exists at the subscriber edge. We need to solve this using a combination of better, faster, networks and QoE optimisations.”

Essentially, 4K/UHD doesn’t change the game so much as it raises the viewer expectation and minimum network performance bar even higher. “The providers who can best meet those expectations by having the real-time intelligence tools they need to take the appropriate quality-maximising actions will succeed,” says Michel. “Those who 'fly blind' are unlikely to.”

5G makes everything possible
In home, the availability of high bandwidth Wi-Fi routers has made the opportunity to reach devices a reality with a consequent significant increase in usage and traffic to smartphones amongst customers.

Outside the home, the very nature of mobile networks, with bandwidth dynamically changing within a given cell, can create sudden variations in streaming quality that even ABR struggles to solve. 

In truth the only answer is faster broadband networks, in particular 5G.

“At a certain point the existing 4G LTE technology will not be sustainable to cope with the massive growth in video data,” says Volker Held, head of innovation marketing at Nokia  “We need a new structure. This is the kernel of the 5G business case. Utilising it means we won't need to talk about bandwidth constraints for the foreseeable future.”

The three main goals are sub 1ms latency, over 1Gbps downlink speed and 10 years life span for dormant IoT devices, but there are lots of others including low cost, high efficiency, higher number of connections per area. 

The development of 5G includes a large number of media specific enhancements that will make a very high quality viewing experience possible. Applications 4K to mobile broadcasting, mobile news reporting without satellite uplink; VR and AR which need both high bandwidth and very low latency, greater use of Cloud for storage, on site 'live event experiences' and collaborative gaming.

“The difference in latency from 0.5s to 0.001s with 5G will have a positive impact on live OTT broadcast but perhaps not as much as expected, as it will only improve one element of the chain,” notes Tony Maroulis, research manager, Ampere Analysis. “The data will still have to be captured, encoded, compressed, transferred, received, decompressed, and played back.” 

European operators including BT, Nokia, Hutchison, Telefonica, Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom have pledged to launch a 5G network in every country within the EU by 2020. 

This however is dependent, the operators argue, on freeing up what they see as EC restrictions on net neutrality. 

Demonstrations of 5G are planned at the 2018 Winter Olympics South Korea and FIFA World Cup Russia (where Huawei has shown interest). The first 5G standards are due  by 2019 with 2020 the 'magic' date for commercial deployments.

Broadcasters could, however, mine a treasure trove of user data, Maroulis suggests. “If broadcasters were able to maintain a data connection between the users’ devices and their servers, it would give them better profiles of their viewers and how their engagement changes. Ad-funded broadcasters could offer entirely personalised targeted advertising,” he says.

Latency solved?

Net Insight has worked to synchronise live feeds with frame accuracy whether delivered to a main TV or OTT to a second screen. 

“This means that when the F1 cars are lined up at the start line and they all go into the first curve, I can view this moment on the big screen and see the exact moment the driver steers into the curve in sync on a second screen,” explains Per Lindgren, co-founder/ svp strategy & business development. “This makes for more of a 'game like' experience, as if using an iPad  as a virtual steering wheel.”

Net Insight teamed with Tata Communications for a trial with F1 at the Singapore GP and has now brought the tech to market branded Sye. Tata has integrated Sye into its video connectivity systems.

“OTT and CDN infrastructure is too focused on on-demand distribution not optimised for live,” argues Lindren. “Yet the big money in television still emanates from live events like sports. When you want to swap between channels (or angles in a multi-cam OTT player) it can take anything from 2-20 seconds to start. This delay can add rise to minutes over the course of a live event. In a fast paced sport like F1 you want to change between driver-cams instantly.”

Net Insight's software runs over Tata's Global Video Connect Network, spanning 44 data centres, converting it effectively into a virtual CDN and delivering synchronized content to all end points, so that from there video can be broadcast and streamed simultaneously.

“We’re not trying to be real time, but to harmonize with existing satellite distribution,” said Lindgren. “The aim with satellite is to deliver within 8 to 12 seconds and with the delay resulting from video contribution and other upstream processes being typically around five seconds, we still have 3 to 7 seconds to play with for synchronization.” 

Aside from eliminating social media spoilers, the tech means that applications such as being able to 'swipe' a viewing session from tablet to a TV might actually work. In other words the service provider can move a user to the satellite signal or IPTV multicast on the main set without jumping them forward in time from the delayed internet stream on a handheld tablet to the (almost realtime broadcast).

An F1 directed race feed follows the leading cars 80 per cent of the time with most action captured from the circuit not shown.

Net Insight have taken this approach further, conducting 360-degree tests using  Sye and sees interesting applications for those in live sports coverage. For example, Lindgren suggests that the 6-7 cameras on a VR rig could complement or replace the current single camera onboard positions on race cars. Instead users could switch between each of the individual angles from the VR rig they wanted to watch, or view a panoramic stitched 360-degree picture.