Monday 24 September 2018

Codec wars: Race to the finish line


IBC

The video industry will have to learn to juggle between AV1, H.264, HEVC and VP9 and future codecs like VVC. That’s the lesson from IBC where warring factions in the codec wars came to trade blows without landing a palpable hit.

A survey into codec use released on the eve of the show by developer Bitmovin showed a dramatic surge in the number of users planning to adopt AV1 in the next 12 months. Some 29% of those surveyed say they will work with AV1, double the planned usage rate since 2017.
At the same time, planned deployment of HEVC and VP9 are shown to have decreased, reflecting a trend toward using a wider array of next generation codecs in the future.
Huge impetus was given to the codec by YouTube’s declaration during IBC that it is beta testing AV1 with Chrome 70 and Firefox Nightly.
The conundrum is that AV1 isn’t remarkably better in performance than HEVC, nor are there yet many encoder products to deploy.
Some comparisons of AV1 versus HEVC show subjectively that one is better than the other but other examples, looking at edge definition for example, show HEVC outperforming AV1. The results of a BBC R&D study released at IBC showed the compression capabilities of both are similar.
“It’s a close call between them,” said Ateme consultant Ian Trow. “I won’t pretend to be the judge.”
Most experts seem to agree that AV1 is an improvement over HEVC but on a far more modest scale than the leaps made between predecessor standards.
So how to explain AV1’s sudden rise? AV1 was only launched in March of 2018, as the royalty free codec from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) and endorsed by all major device manufacturers, browser vendors, and content distributors including Netflix. Driven by engineering teams at browser makers and content distributors like Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Facebook and others, Bitmovin suggest AV1 is clearly gaining momentum.
“Already Firefox, Chrome and Edge Web browsers support AV1 in their early release versions, which suggests commercial applications are just around the corner,” it says. “This explains the importance of AV1 for a lot of developers.”
Video streamers are used to royalty free licencing and it’s thought likely that AV1 will take over from H.264 AVC in this area. A royalty-free license could translate into tangible operating-cost savings for YouTube and other video streaming services.
File based downloads will likely be the first wave of AV1 application. “There is significant momentum on that,” said McCann. “I have no doubt that live low latency OTT is key for AV1 but it will be its second phase of development.”
AV1 adoption also benefits from the licencing mess which the HEVC patent holders have got themselves into.
“Let’s not delude ourselves, the rights and royalty maze of HEVC has added to AV1’s acceleration,” said Trow.
Ken McCann, founder at consultants Zetacast said that in informal discussions among HEVC patent holders “there was now consensus that there is a problem. But there’s no consensus about the solution.”
However, the apparent complexity of AV1 is an issue, especially when handling the higher bit rates required for 4K and 8K sport.  BBC R&D’s video coding researcher Andre Dias referred to the extensive processing demands, significant run time, footprint and power needs of AV1.
“As for complexity, decoding times of HEVC are significantly lower than for other tested solutions, while the encoding complexity of AV1 is much higher than the other tested codecs,” he explained. 
“Royalties are nothing alongside transcoding costs in this instance,” noted one IBC attendee who preferred to remain anonymous.
As practical AV1 implementations get more and more mature, it is expected that faster implementations can reach realistic encoding times, “ideally without significantly compromising the compression performance provided by this specification,” added Dias.
BBC R&D is hedging its bets. It is a member of the HEVC development team and has refined its own software implementation called the Turing Codec, optimised for UHD. BBC R&D also supports AOMedia and is fully onboard with VVC, the next-gen codec being developed by a combined MPEG/ITU team called JVET.
The VVC standard is expected to complement emerging delivery protocols and networks, such as 5G, enabling the delivery of higher quality video services such as high frame rate and 360-video.
“The work being carried out in JVET [on VVC] seems to outperform both HEVC and AV1, proving that higher compression efficiency can be achieved and that the VVC standard will be able to deliver substantial coding advantages over available solutions,” reported Dias.
None of this should detract from the current domination of video codec usage by incumbent H.264/AVC. However, H.265/ HEVC has expanded rapidly, up from less than a third (28%) of usage in 2017. According to Bitmovin this indicates developers are working with both codecs simultaneously.
Developments in content aware encoding can be applied over the top of either HEVC or AV1 to further refine compression performance.
Technologies like V-Nova’s Perseus can also be used alongside other codecs including HEVC to improve results. At IBC, V-Nova was demonstrating both its Perseus Pro codec, which uses intra-only compression (i.e. exploiting spatial redundancy within individual video frames) and its Perseus Plus variant, which uses inter-frame compression (also exploiting temporal redundancy between video frames).
The latter is used for lossless contribution, production and imaging workflows; while the former adds layers of detail and upscaling on top of industry-standard codecs like H.264 and HEVC to increase distribution efficiency to viewers.
One demo showed live encoding and distribution for 50fps 4K at as little as 8 Mbps “Up to 70% lower bandwidth than other solutions in use today,” claimed the firm.
“At this this stage there is no truly independent comparison of Perseus with others,” said Zetacast’s McCann. “We need someone to put resources into comparison analysis.”
Cisco’s Visual Networking Index reveals by 2021 that 82 percent of all traffic on the Internet will be video. As a result, video distributors must implement methods to reduce the bitrate of the video they deliver without compromising quality.
The desire to improve the commercial situation for future compression standards like VVC, by reassuring potential users that the mistakes of HEVC will not be repeated, led several industry players to get together and form the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF).
Launched at IBC, the MC-IF said it would facilitate cross-industry discussion on non-technical aspects surrounding the deployment of media standards, notably including licensing.
The initial members include b<>com, Bitmovin, CableLabs, Canon, Digital Insights, Divideon, Ericsson, Harmonic, HEVC Advance, InterDigital, MediaKind, NGCodec, Nokia, OP Solutions, Technicolor, Tencent, Unified Patents, and Zetacast.


MTG: “Gamers used to be nerds. Now they are rock stars”

Sports Video Group

eSports has evolved beyond the realm of niche entertainment and cemented itself into the mainstream. What took it so long?
“Digital gameplay is already more popular as entertainment than music or print and it will soon overtake film,” claimed Arnd Benninghoff, CEO of eSports and gaming group MTGx in a keynote to IBC’s eSports conference theme. “That’s why we believe gaming is the next big entertainment and why we want to be an active player.”
In 2015, the Stockholm-based multi-territory commercial and pay-TV broadcaster acquired a 74%
Video games presenter Julia Hardy and Arnd Benninghoff, CEO MTGx at IBC 2018 in Amsterdam
share in eSports league and event organiser ESL/Turtle Entertainment and full ownership of live event gaming festival DreamHack.
In its last quarter to July, eSports accounted for $46.3 million of MTG’s digital revenues, a 41% increase over Q1 2018 and representing over 41% of total digital revenues. This was driven by more than 60% growth year-over-year in revenue from ESL and DreamHack.
“eSports has fuelled our digital transformation,” said Benninghoff. “ESL is the Champions League of eSports brands. DreamHack is like Coachella without the drink or drugs.”
He likened multiplayer online battle arena game DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) to “playing chess on acid. I can’t pretend I understood it when my nephew first took me to a DOTA event but you only need 15 minutes to understand the rules and the super-excitement of the fans was extraordinary.”
The Group recently split into two separate companies, with MTG focusing on digital video content, online gaming, and eSports while Nordic Entertainment Group takes control of its regional TV business.
“ESL is more and more about owned and operated events and so we continue to restructure, streamline and focus our resources on events where we can scale our media and sponsorship deals in order to maintain our market leadership and build an eSports megabrand.”
It also launched a $30m (€25.3m) investment fund to target US and European online gaming companies. Benninghoff said MTG intends on investing in five to 10 companies annually over the next three years.
He described a virtuous circle in which amateur eSports players were vital to growing the whole ecosystem. “If you invest in grassroots then you can identify new games which may become popular ahead of the curve and you can identify new esports stars. Meanwhile, amateurs get the chance to upload their own game play and potentially gain followers and eventually to participate in an eSports pro team.
“Original titles are key for generating high revenue and story-driven narratives become pop culture hits.”
However, he did have these warnings for other media companies seeking to tap the phenomenon. “eSports is probably over hyped and you don’t make healthy decisions in a hyped market. It is also still in an experimental stage and you can underestimate how long it may take to attract eyeballs. If you mess with the community and they sense you are unauthentic or you lack street credibility, they will leave,” he added.
“One difference to traditional sport like football is that each game, like DOTA 2 or League of Legends, are so different from each other they attract totally different communities.”
Benninghoff feels it important that eSports content remains free and distributed on as many platforms as possible. “I don’t believe we are ready for a SVOD business model yet,” he said. “We need a long tail of sponsors and to get those we have to attract lighthouse investments from major brands.”
A key one for MTG was convincing Mercedes-Benz to invest heavily last year in a long-term ESL event sponsorship deal. “We were able to do this because eSports enthusiasts are 18-30 year olds,” said Benninghoff.
“Twenty years ago, gamers were considered nerds. Now they are the rock stars.”
Sky and ITV are among investors in GINX eSports TV which was described by Michiel Bakker, founder and CEO, as serving to bridge the worlds of online streaming and mainstream TV by being a linear channel dedicated to eSports. It is on track to reach 75m by spring 2019.
“It is shocking how big eSports had to become before it popped up on the mainstream radar,” he said. “eSports has been around for 15 years and it was enormous seven years ago. It’s astonishing it took so long to get noticed but there was a preconceived notion that this was a pursuit of geeks and therefore not relevant to the mainstream. That has completely changed.”
Christopher Mead, senior director of partnerships for EMEA at streaming platform Twitch echoed this by saying the user-generated component of the sport went undervalued. “eSports’ success is in large part because of the ability for players to broadcast gameplay on vehicles like Twitch from their bedroom to one or one hundred or many hundreds of thousands of viewers concurrently. They are the content creators and have a vital role to play.”
Tanya Laird, technology ambassador for ESL UK, explained there were three distinct audiences for live eSports tournaments.
“There is the vast base at home watching live on platforms like Twitch; there are those at the event itself; and the performing pro player themselves on stage who we consider to also be an audience. The interaction between these groups by realtime function like chat is what drives the whole passion for the content.”
Market revenue for eSports is forecast to reach U$1.65 bn by 2020, according to Statista, and eSports has a recently confirmed place at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China edging one step closer to full Olympic recognition. With growing advertising revenues, a global online audience of over 300 million, and construction of dedicated stadiums, pro players are competing for multi-million-dollar prize money.
Moreover, as the availability of high bandwidth streaming media platforms increases, eSports is reaching wider global audiences and attracting investment of entertainment companies, broadcasters and brands.
“The market growth of eSports has been nothing short of incredible, and it hasn’t even reached its full potential,” added Mark Hilton, VP live production for Grass Valley. “eSports is just starting to come into its own in terms of professionally produced content.”

Thursday 20 September 2018

Waste not, want not! Getting the measure of rising e-waste volumes

IEC 
As the amount of electronic and electrical equipment waste (e-waste) generated each year continues to increase, the work accomplished by the IEC becomes ever more essential in helping manufacturers meet legal requirements.
The Global e-waste monitor, a joint report published by the United Nations University, the ITU, and the International Solid Waste Association estimates that in 2017 total e-waste output reached 44,7 million tonnes (mt). Only 20% of this waste was recycled through appropriate channels. By 2021, according to that same report, e-waste volumes are expected to skyrocket to 52,2 mt.
E-waste refers to any refuse created by discarded electronic devices and components as well as substances involved in their manufacture or use. Toxic substances such as lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants (used in circuit boards, for instance) are employed in manufacturing these devices and components. If they are not properly recycled when discarded, these toxic substances can seep into the environment and may contaminate land, water and the air. When not recycled through standardized procedures, e-waste is buried underground in a landfill or burnt in an incinerator. Both will cause environmental pollution.
Global and regional action
Countries around the world have recognized the need for global action by signing different international agreements designed to regulate e-waste. They include The Basel Convention which aims to control trans-boundary movements of hazardous waste and its disposal and the Minamata Convention on Mercury, which sets target dates for the phasing out of products which may contain mercury, such as batteries, switches and compact fluorescent lamps.
Many other agreements or declarations of intent have been drawn up at national level. Several are based on the principle of extended producer responsibility (EPR) which encourages producers to manage the waste generated by their products that are out on the market.
In 2001, Japan started to adopt a new legal framework aimed at providing safer and more effective waste management, following the three Rs principle: reduce, reuse and recycle. Five industry-specific laws were adopted based on EPR. They include a home appliance recycling law (HARL), which concerns products such as air conditioners, refrigerators, television sets and washing machines. In Japan, EPR is compatible with a shared responsibility approach in which everyone bears the burden of waste management: citizens, businesses, municipalities and the national government. For example under HARL, retailers collect end-of-life products, consumers pay the expenses mandated for recycling and transport and producers recycle  the collected products. For producers, take-back is mandatory.
The system has helped to forge a culture of recycling in manufacturing plants. Examples include mass recycling of the rare earth metals used in the nickel-metal batteries for the hybrid cars produced by a leading automotive manufacturer.
In 2017, China adopted a new EPR plan which set targets for the e-waste recycling rate to reach 50% by 2025. The plan requires producers to adhere to environmental protection standards throughout the life of their products, rather than just focus on the manufacturing process. It will initially concern electronics, automobiles, lead acid batteries and packing products.
The latest e-waste legislation of the European Union is its 2012 directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). This was implemented by member states in 2014.
In developing countries, informal collection of e-waste is widespread. Backyard recycling, as it is sometimes called, can cause severe damage to the environment and human health. Crude techniques include open burning to extract metals, acid leaching for precious metals and unprotected melting of plastics. While a growing number of these countries are adopting e-waste legislation, the effectiveness of enforcement and even the type of e-waste collected and recycled varies considerably.
The need for International Standards
Meeting the requirements of International Standards is one of the ways to ensure electrical and electronic products comply with regional and international regulations on e-waste. The IEC is leading the way through the work of several IEC Technical Committees (TCs).
IEC TC 111 focuses on the overall environmental impact of electronic and electrical products throughout their whole life cycle: from raw material acquisition to the manufacture, distribution, use, maintenance, re-use and recycling of their component parts. One of its key publications is IEC 62430, a horizontal Standard which specifies the requirements for integrating environmental aspects into the design and development processes of electrical and electronic products. TC 111 is in close liaison with various IEC product-based TCs which deal autonomously with the environmental aspects relevant to their products. For instance, IEC TC 107: Process management for avionics, prepares Standards which mitigate the use of tin and lead in avionics.
IECQ, the IEC Quality Assessment System for Electronic Components, launched the hazardous substances process management (HSPM) scheme which provides third party certification for manufacturers who comply with the relevant national regulations in each country. One of the IEC’s advisory committees, ACEA (Advisory Committee on Environmental Aspects), considers all the environmental protection aspects that relate to the detrimental effect of a product, group of products or a system using electrical technology, including electronics and telecommunications. It helps to coordinate IEC work on environmental issues to ensure consistency and avoid duplication in IEC International Standards. ACEA activities are focused on issues that relate to eco-design and more specifically to substance management, end of life treatment and environmental labelling.
Urban mining under the spotlight
Rare earth elements are used in the production of electronic goods for which there is a growing or continuous demand. These include mobile phones, LED television sets, electric vehicles (EVs) and oxygen sensors.
An increasing number of companies and initiatives view cities as a “mine” from which rare earth materials can be reclaimed. According to the urban mining philosophy, materials are only temporarily used in buildings, industrial facilities, mobile phones or computers. After they have served their purpose, they can be recycled and reused in other products. Scrap material can be recovered from existing utilities, infrastructure and landfills to create a market in secondary raw materials worth EUR 55 bn, according to UN estimates.
Reusing materials carries the added advantage of being less polluting, as conventional mining for rare earths often involves high levels of toxicity. For example, a scheme developed at the University of British Columbia, in Canada, centres on a method of physically crushing and grinding discarded LED bulbs to extract metals including rare earths. Researchers on the project state that “from the LED itself, we can recover copper and small amounts of rare earth metals including lutetium, cerium, europium and the technology metals gallium and indium”. The researchers admit that “urban mining, even at its most efficient, can probably only meet about a quarter of the current demand for metals, but it can complement traditional mining and do the environment good at the same time”. In the long run, their aim is to limit the exposure of communities to potentially toxic materials and reach the elusive target of zero waste.

Advances in advertising


Digital TV Europe
As consumers fragment across platforms, how can advertisers be sure of the value of their investment?
Today’s fragmented viewership is the biggest issue plaguing advertisers. Gone are the days when TV networks could rely on delivering a broadcast ad to the living room in primetime with the whole family gathered around. Today, advertisers have to navigate myriad devices, platforms and VOD in order to find their audience. However, many of those platforms are giving advertisers better opportunities to target specific audiences. Piecing all of it together is a significant challenge.
“Increased consumer awareness and cross-screen fragmentation means that the development of data-driven TV planning and buying is growing,” says Ed Wale, managing director, UK and Spain, SpotX. “This creates an opportunity for publishers and broadcasters to capture incremental digital ad revenue when making their premium inventory available to brands and advertisers across screens.”
He says this is particularly the case when partnered with granular data reporting that enables digital publishers to offer one-to-one audience measurement. “The risk is that there are eyeballs that are not being counted and credited towards audience sizes when it occurs on a mobile device or outside of the same day, seven-day or even 30- day windows,” adds Belsasar Lepe, co-founder and CTO, Ooyala.
Bridging the gap Multiple efforts are underway to bridge the gap between the traditional sample-based methods for measuring broadcast audiences and new methods for measuring multiscreen viewing. As Tim Jacks, principal, strategy at Cartesian underlines, sample-based methods, where data is gathered from representative panels of viewers, tells us something that data from most multiscreen services won’t – who is watching the programme. “Is it someone watching by themselves, or a whole family? And it tells you what demographics those viewers come from.”
By contrast, online multiscreen data tends to be about what is being viewed – a programme was watched for so long, at such a time, and was paused three times, for example – but doesn’t tell us anything about how many people are watching, or what demographic they fall into. For SVOD services, that’s not usually a problem, but for traditional commercial broadcasters it matters. There are technical and business challenges to overcome. From a business point of view sign-off is required from a range of parties - publishers, aggregators, advertisers and vendors of audience measurement tools and the ad tech that sits in the middle.
 “Each party has distinct business goals, which in turn means a unique set of incentives when designing a universal measurement system,” says Aditya Ganjam, chief product officer at Conviva. “In addition, there is a broader shift from traditional direct buying, which has been a mainstay of TV advertising for many years, to more efficient programmatically enabled addressable advertising.”
When you layer this technology shift on top of multiple stakeholders jockeying for position, it’s easy to see why coming to an agreement on a single measurement system is a headache.
“The reality is that ad sales teams are to all intents and purposes still printing money – legally. There is not yet an overwhelming need to adopt standards that fundamentally change how business is done,” says Lepe.
“An important difference from the current siloed currency systems, is that the most likely agreement will be for a cross-media planning currency,” says Bas de Vos, global director of audience targeting and activation, Kantar. “Trading will remain as it currently operates; in TV with TV ratings; in online on agreed CPM prices defined via programmatic systems.”
There are initiatives to at least have an agreement on the requirements for reporting specific metrics from the IAB and, in the US, the MRC (Media Ratings Council). From a technical perspective, the issue is scale. Panel-based measurement starts to break down when you need to measure consumption of niche content on niche platforms.
“The industry needs a clear, single, independent view,” says Wale. This is beyond the ability of a single broadcaster, particularly when taking into account all the different devices TV is now viewed on. ITV Hub, for example, is available on 27 platforms alone.
“Since TV audiences are typically much larger than most online audiences, on a per programme basis, it follows that hardening audience measurement solutions that can accurately and reliably measure very large audiences that span multiple screens and the three-day, seven-day, 30-day, x-day windows will take time,” says Lepe.
Kantar Media’s Focal Meter tracks online/ player activity on any device connected to the home network. Recently upgraded, it is currently in operation in Norway and Finland, while work on deployments is ongoing in Turkey and Hong Kong with tests being carried out in the UK and Switzerland. A People Meter is also ready to go to market. The most fundamental redesign for 20 years, according to de Vos, it will incorporate real-time data collection to deliver real-time ratings for all TV viewed on the main screen – whether live, time-shifted or VOD.
If a universally recognised audience measurement covering multiscreen and time-shift is not reached, confidence in the medium could be destroyed. “The main danger is the perceived lack of transparency, which would result in missed opportunities for media publishers,” says Jacks. “Last year we saw online brands take huge criticism from major advertisers such as P&G, which stated that it has deep concerns about lack of digital measurement standards and the fraud that comes along with it. If TV wants to take advantage of dynamically-inserted advertising, and the flexibility that comes with it, it needs to ensure that advertisers trust that they are getting what they pay for.”
Ganjam also says there is a need for a single trusted third-party measurement tool to be agreed. “Brands will have to buy across multiple different platforms without a consistent mechanism for measuring performance. This will make designing attribution models more challenging. Furthermore, there will be a trust issue because it will be harder for brands to trust the data coming from individual platforms, publishers and aggregators.”
The transition from sampled data to big data measurement of audiences is underway. Nielsen, comScore, and BARB all have offerings, but not all of these are trusted. “We are in the ‘hardening’ phase of the lifecycle of these solutions and it is not clear how much longer we’ll remain in this phase,” says Lepe. “In that sense, we aren’t at a place where there are good or best examples. There are a lot of works in progress.”
One of them is Nielsen which rolled out a total audience measurement tool that combines panel and census data into a single measurement tool. However, during the initial rollout, some publishers pushed for a more limited release because they felt the data could be incomplete, and might offer misguided direction, according to Conviva.
A single measurement tool still hasn’t been agreed. Another work in progress is Project Dovetail, which is expected to be delivered in September with the publication of multiple-screen viewing figures across TV sets, tablets and PCs. The UK’s BARB has also started reporting TV set audiences for non-linear programming and reporting of dynamically-inserted advertising.
“Building on this, we are committed to delivering comprehensive reporting of TV set usage,” explains Justin Sampson, chief executive of BARB. “Our third strategic priority is addressing the growth in unidentified viewing on TV sets – viewing more than 28 days after broadcast and non-broadcast viewing. This includes viewing to SVOD services, such as Netflix and Amazon. We can measure viewing to SVOD services in the same way that we report our panel members’ viewing to non-linear programmes, but it requires the cooperation of the service providers.”
BARB is also exploring how router meters could be deployed in panel homes to deliver an aggregate level of viewing to SVOD services without their cooperation. It is currently trialling two meters: one from Kantar in BARB’s core panel and another from Nielsen in a specially-commissioned panel. “Our ability to deliver comprehensive insight is improved with the cooperation of media channels and the platforms they are distributed through,” says Sampson. “This is the principal challenge, as we have the techniques to measure new forms of viewing.”
BARB believe a joint industry approach is key to providing equitable figures across all media companies. Its recently consulted a range of advertisers, agencies, broadcasters and social media platforms about their expectations for a cross-platform currency, from which two points emerged. First, the joint industry currency (JIC) principles that underpin BARB (independence, objectivity and transparency) should not be weakened or compromised. Second, the addition of any channels/ platforms shouldn’t impact on the integrity of data collection and reporting methodology.
In addition, the survey clarified three areas where advertisers and agencies expect any cross platform currency to delivery comparability: all reported viewing metrics should follow established TV conventions for duration, viewability and verification; advertisers and agencies expect advertising reach and frequency to be calculated for placements that meet industry-agreed standards for brand safety; and advertisers and agencies should be able to plan campaign reach and frequency into editorial environments classified by genre/ programme and to verify campaign delivery.
Conviva calls for a census-based approach and points out it has the largest independent census data collection and measurement network in the world. This has been deployed, it says, on behalf of many live and VOD publishers and broadcasters “to measure QoE directly from the consumer in-screen experience as well as very detailed engagement data in a continuous, census-based approach.” Ganjam adds: “Most legacy-based approaches were discrete event-based web counting or statistical sampling-based audience surveys. Conviva’s approach is real-time true viewer-level continuous measurement.
It was purpose-built for video, and the sensor technology computes consistent and accurate metrics over a diverse set of streaming devices and application software frameworks.”
Packaging for SVOD Once you have a consistent cross-platform measurement tool, you can use data analytics to extract deep insights about customers’ preferences, helping publishers identify the sub-genre of content to commission in order to appeal to valuable customers. The information could also be used to package and promote a SVOD service depending on the target market. Netflix and Amazon both view data as encompassing more than just engagement data and collect data everywhere along the content lifecycle and user journey.
This allows them a form of content ROI that no other players can match. Crucially, they also benefit from a closed ecosystem and significant investment in data analytics.
“With these insights, they not only know which assets to recommend to a given user from a given catalogue, but also what content to create and add to that catalogue in the first place,” says Lepe. “This approach has fundamentally changed the nature of how you operate if you want to compete in SVOD.”
Traditional pay TV operators have made progress in developing the use of analytics, driven by their increasing base of connected devices. Jacks at Cartesian says the company has worked with multiple operators to apply analytics to STB and device data “to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of their cost base – which content is delivering good value for money, which content is key to customer retention and so on.”
Arguably the best method of quantifying how audiences are consuming video is simply to get the right information from users. “Analytics benefits from audience measurement, not the other way around as the resulting data can then be run through algorithms to better market SVOD services,” says Jacques-Edouard Guillemot, SVP, executive affairs, Nagra. “The operator wants to know which shows are being watched, when and on what device. This creates opportunities, for example, to cluster subscribers very precisely to recommend certain packages of content. If a user likes watching golf, the service provider can suggest and build packages that will appeal to this demographic.”
This is core to Discovery’s attempt to better segment Eurosport’s fanbases. “Data analytics is already helping us deliver content and marketing in a more tailored and personal way to fans, with the goal of providing them with the ultimate experience around the sports they are passionate about,” says the firm’s head of international research, Vincent David.
The reality is that there are multiple ‘standards’ for online audience metrics and they are not always agreed on, nor controlled by the companies involved. De Vos believe this “always online” world will grow towards a set of metrics that the industry agrees on, but it also ensures proprietary data is only available for the campaign at hand and can be configured to expire upon campaign completion.
Kantar says it is noticing increasing demand from clients from expecting the analyst to not only answer, ‘what happened’ and ‘what was the impact’ but towards being more predictive: ‘What’s likely to happen’. “That’s the space that we also hope big data and advanced analytics will fill.”
Impact of GDPR
 Much has been made of GDPR and how it will be the end of services and monetization built around extensive, per-user data and behaviours (like ad targeting). The new legislation means users have to give explicit consent for the PII (personal identifiable information) to be processed. This is particularly relevant within the digital sphere when working with PII as a device ID, a cookie ID or an IP address.
“Strengthened privacy practices will reap long term benefits for the whole advertising ecosystem,” believes Wale. “At the same time, privacy concerns could affect the ability of all parties to efficiently transact at scale.”
Kantar cites the lack of access to audience data in walled gardens and the privacy complexity driven by e-privacy legislation “are undoubtedly a good thing, but it makes our work more complex”. Part of its testing is around blockchain technology.
SpotX developed ‘Audience Lock’ as a kind of ‘data escrow’ to conduct data-driven transactions so that buyers and sellers can maintain complete control of their data sets.  According to Wale, this alleviates concerns by matching user IDs and audience segments in a controlled environment. It also ensures proprietary data is only available for the campaign at hand and can be configured to expire upon campaign completion.
“Measures like these can be valuable to the broadcaster who has a duty to keep its data safe before for legislative reasons, whilst also ensuring it maximises revenue,” he says.
Ooyala predicts that over time these restrictions will encourage more transparency around how data is used.
“It is not hard to imagine a world where our personal data more explicitly becomes a currency that each of us uses to access ‘free’ services online (and maybe even offline),” says Lepe. “And does that mean a potentially smaller audience? Yes, potentially somewhat smaller as some - likely mostly older audience audiences - will opt out. But, I’d wager this won’t be a materially large number.”
Conviva similarly believes GDPR and similar legislation, is good for the industry. “This additional layer of security will help engender trust among consumers, which has been challenged in the wake of recent data-privacy scandals,” says Ganjam. “In terms of impact on a company’s ability to capture data, it doesn’t prevent the collection of audience behaviour data, but does ensure that consumers are fully aware of what data is being captured and how it is being used. Ultimately this will help weed out bad actors and should prove beneficial to the industry.”

Wednesday 19 September 2018

At IBC, Cloud and Software as a Service dominate

content marketing for Irdeto
For all the talk of pioneering technology like virtual reality, AI, blockchain and 5G, IBC 2018 illustrated the profound trajectory of the industry from broadcast to unicast. It’s one in which channels will pop-up or pop-down at the click of a button with the cloud playing an increasingly prominent role.
Traditional hardware innovators, outside of those making production kit like cameras, continue to shift their business into software. Several of these companies were at pains to show how they can add value by offering access to their services in the cloud. This barely conceals the reality that the real power and value today is beginning to shift to the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Google’s designs on the TV space though, including the rapid rise of Android TV, might be more about the universality of its advertising business, while Amazon’s core interest remains retail. One message from the IBC conference was that broadcasters need not fear them, but work with them – much like the partner ethos which has developed between pay TV and pureplay OTT providers.
Indeed, the relationship between TV and OTT is symbiotic and highly valued by both sides. In order to grow its 130 million subscriber-base, Netflix wants carriage deals with pay TV operators particularly outside the U.S. This may change if Netflix gets into live sports, a property which remains the lifeblood of many pay TV players, but at IBC Netflix executive Maria Ferreras denied the company had plans in this area.
YouTube also revealed that viewing on the main household TV is growing fastest. In Europe alone, the time spent watching YouTube on the TV set has grown 45 percent year-on-year.
“As the app has become more and more prevalent across devices, users are getting trained to easily find YouTube,” chief product officer Neal Mohan told IBC. “My four-year-old can turn on the TV and find the YouTube Kids app. That is the modality kids are used to.”
The complexity of reaching audiences on multi-platform and multi-devices is why partnering with those with expertise in cloud encoding, rights management or content protection is a very attractive proposition for pay TV operators.
Global IT players were out in force at IBC too. Intel is selling chips into the rising number of cloud-based playout centres ready for the day when channels will be pay as you go. IBM, taking a large footprint in hall 7 – which is IBC’s traditional seat of content creation – explained how machine learning will automate the more mundane parts of production.
The barriers to entry are lower than ever, with the cost of kit delivering professional results becoming increasingly accessible, serving a pro AV, mobile and global video communications market that is much bigger than broadcasting.
As the dust from IBC 2018 settles, it’s clear that the major preoccupation for the industry over the next year could be the efficiencies of scale that can come from cloud services and the best approach to working with the tech behemoths, who are developing a position of increasing strength in the pay TV landscape.

Tuesday 18 September 2018

Eutelsat wants to relieve the burden of building OTT

CSI

Eutelsat is demonstrating its new Cirrus DTH service platform running live at IBC direct from a Hotbird and integrated on the EPG with service management via Amazon cloud.
A multi-screen offer complements the traditional satellite broadcast with simultaneous OTT streaming through a hybrid platform.

http://www.csimagazine.com/csi/Eutelsat-wants-to-relieve-the-burden-of-building-OTT.php
“For a large pay-TV platform, OTT distribution would be much more expensive than satellite,” said Gerry O’Sullivan, executive VP, global TV and video, Eutelsat. “We are not a B2B house asking broadcasters to buy some bespoke software only to find it’s of no use in two years’ time. We are offering a different paradigm which involves no heavy capex or operations investment.” 

He continued, “You can’t underestimate the burden to broadcasters of building and maintaining a OTT platform. The sheer number of devices and amount of updates is a real distraction. We are offering a turnkey end-to-end solution that takes the burden away from broadcasters, allows them to focus on their core content business, and demonstrates a roadmap for innovation. It means that those who were disenfranchised previously can for the first time launch OTT.”

The first customers for the service will be announced after IBC.

The EPG – which is multilanguage including Arabic – was shown with features such as customised channel numbering and channel categorisation, detailed programme information and subscriber management in both grid and mosaic displays.

“The platform is truely integrated,” said O’Sullivan. “Even sophisticated payTV providers have done OTT as an add on and the user experience between TV and device is not seamless. Cirrus is one platform with pure cloud OTT delivery and a unified viewer experience.”

Support is provided for all Android and iOS devices. “IoS is updating around every four weeks so imagine every time that happens having to rewrite the code, check it, test it just to maintain the existing service. We take of all that back end and guarantee innovation.”
Cirrus will record and store a week’s worth of content for all channels enabling seven day catch-up.

A series of open APIs including for metadata ingestion, live feeds and subscriber management enable customers to connect Cirrus to their STBs, HbbTV sets and mobile devices.

Despite the rollout of fibre and the proven use of 5G in some applications, Eutelsat believe that in mature markets around 15% of TV households will remain best served by a combination of satellite and other delivery infrastructure, a figure rising to 85% in regions like the Middle East.

Technical partners in the project include Irdeto (CA), Nagra (unified back-end) and CDN CenturyLink.

Latency is said to be 5 seconds, similar to competing OTT services. “OTT providers and sports rights holder have experienced major issues with latency in recent time. The only way of viewing high quality video is satellite. We are offering a cost-effective path for DTH broadcasters to address their customer demand for OTT with a seamless user experience.”
Eutelsat carries 6900 channels, 1500 of which are HD and 17 UHD to 1 billion TV viewers worldwide.

UHD – The watershed moment for watermarking

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If it wasn’t already clear from the all UHD HDR FIFA World Cup, it should be clear from the show floor and conference debate here at IBC 2018 that the industry is seeing real momentum in 4K UHD content.
At the turn of the year there was arguably some scepticism about the perceived slow pace of 4K distribution with various arguments from cost of production, to bandwidth bottlenecks, to ill-defined monetization models and the lack of a sufficiently valuable uplift in quality to blame. IBC 2018 has outed UHD HDR as the new standard. There are playout and streaming launches of UHD HDR content everywhere, the hardware and workflows are all in place and attention has even moved to encapsulate 8K.
As a result, the need for robust protection and tracking of high value content is even more important and this is the main driver for watermarking.
Piracy continues to be the biggest threat to the pay TV industry. A report from Digital TV Research has forecasted the cost of lost revenue due to piracy will reach an eye-watering US$52 billion by 2022. Emerging threats over recent years have included OTT credential theft, and the threat from peer-to-peer piracy is far from going away. In the meantime, more recent technology advances have seen the rapid growth of content redistribution piracy, which is now a global problem for content owners and rights holders.
Technology advance is a double-edged sword. On the one hand OTT streaming gives content owners the chance to monetize new audiences, on the other it is much easier for pirates to steal content and, with UHD, the quality of that content is much higher.
It is over a decade since forensic watermarking was first deployed to protect video content, but the field only really took off following MovieLabs’ identification of it as one of the key security mechanisms recommended for both early release windows and 4K UHD content in 2014. Last year the Ultra HD Forum issued its latest guidelines, including a new chapter on forensic watermarking, and only last month MovieLabs updated its own specifications for systems to securely forensically mark video both at the server and/or the client.
MovieLabs is at IBC talking about some of the key issues Hollywood studio CTOs are concerned with as well as its recent alliance with the Digital Entertainment Group and Entertainment Merchants Association to collaborate on a Digital Supply Chain initiative.
This will doubtless also focus on protecting high-value content as the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) becomes an increasingly popular exchange format for 4K and HDR assets.
Fortunately, any gap in the supply chain here is being plugged by a new solution that combines support for JPEG 2000 in IMF into its scalable distributor watermarking solution.
Irdeto TraceMark forensic watermarking enables content owners to keep one master version of the content and send out individually watermarked versions of the content on-the-fly with no delay to distributors. And with support for J2K in IMF exchange formats, Irdeto thinks this will help prevent theft of premium 4K and HDR content and keep those pirates at bay.
“There are a variety of use cases for watermarking, and different approaches are required for video-on-demand and live content, but the defining moment for watermarking has undoubtedly come with the rapid growth of 4K UHD content,” says Peter Cossack, vice-president, cybersecurity services, Irdeto.
He expects that, over the coming year, rights owners will increasingly mandate watermarking and other anti-piracy requirements into their licensing contracts.

Sunday 16 September 2018

Winter Olympics bumped Eurosport Digital to 1.2m subs: now it has to keep them


Sports Video Group

Discovery has revealed that subscribers to Eurosport Player peaked at 1.2 million during the Winter Olympics in February but have since dropped — although not below its pre-Olympic start point of 200,000.
“The Olympics gave us a big bump and a good number of them have stayed with us,” Ralph Rivera EVP and MD Eurosport Digital told an IBC conference session. “We didn’t crash down and the numbers are still significantly above where we started from.
“Getting to over 1 million subscribers was unprecedented,” he added. “It also gave us a credibility in this space of being able to deliver at scale that has paid dividends in terms of forming other partnerships where people have seen what we are able to do and now trust our brand to deliver it.”

This time last year Eurosport Digital – and Rivera — were in a different place. Repeat problems with delays to fans in OTT streaming of the Bundesliga had caused Germany’s national football association Deutsche Fußball-Liga to summon Eurosport to an urgent meeting.
“It was our baptism of fire,” Rivera said. “Fans were pissed off and they told us so directly on Twitter. We didn’t get it right.  It showed us that we needed to develop a bit of a thicker skin and that we needed to develop internal systems around customer service and communications to better manage the situation.
“Being in a direct to consumer business is a fundamentally different challenge to being in B2B [which Eurosport’s linear TV legacy is]. It’s not just about the technology. It’s about a fundamental business model and workflow and mindset which has to be customer centric. You have to be able to deal with customers directly and there are no more vocal or more loyal customers than sports fans.”
Indeed, as Rivera’s boss, Jean-Briac Perrette the President & CEO of Discovery Networks International said in an opening keynote to IBC, “Given a choice, more sports fans will pay to watch sports than eat dinner.”
Without these growing pains, though, and Discovery’s rollout of a live Europe-wide OTT platform across 69 markets and over a dozen languages in just a year, the Olympics would not have been as successful.
“No one who is sane chooses to do that,” said Rivera who joined Discovery from the BBC to spearhead the task. “But we didn’t have a choice given that we had the rights, the Olympics was the deadline and we needed to have that platform in place.
“More work needs to be done to the point where digital doesn’t disadvantage you. Live sport OTT is not for the faint hearted. While TV took 50 years to get to where it is today, consumers expect OTT live experiences to be as good as TV now.”
He said he believes the technology will get to a point where online is as good and even better than TV.
“The next step to that is do what we did for the Olympics all year round. Let’s see multi-court early round action from the French Open. Let’s see every match in a league and not just the top five games. We need to bring down production and distribution costs but when you get it right you can do this.”
VR, data, and social production in Tokyo
A request to OBS to field a mobile studio for social media output at each Olympic venue was initirally rebuffed, he revealed. “The logistics and security of getting a truck from venue to venue in PyeongChang were tough. But we convinced them that having capacity to tell stories in realtime on the ground from what it was like to be in the Olympic Village and in and around venues added another layer of coverage to what OBS were doing.”
Rivera predicted that more rights holders would be allowed to have some form of mobile set up at the Olympics in 2020. “It was a breakthrough in terms of how you can cover an event that goes beyond the competition itself.”
Rivera also expects more VR coverage from Tokyo and in particular 360-cameras on the field of play.
“Imagine looking up and seeing the pole vault above you,” he said.
Eurosport is already working with athletics federations to share more data not just from the training sessions but live in competition with audiences.
“Data helps make the experience more immersive and helps fans understand more of a sport’s dynamics,” he said. “We will work with the Tour de France to get data off the bikes and track the power a rider is generating.”
Algorithms versus curation
Automated production techniques will enable Discovery to clip and distribute more content but Rivera had a warning.
“The challenge is if you serve that type of content 100 percent of the time then all the user gets is what they knew they wanted. We have to balance the algorithm with editorial curation to offer them content of additional interest. It’s a careful balance between algorithm-driven experiences for personalisation and yet still with an editorial judgement that says ‘You didn’t ask for this but you are going to love it – and here you go.’”
All of this will be tested long term with the PGA Tour with which Discovery has signed a massive 12-year multiplatform deal teeing off in January 2019.
“What we are doing is different to what is going on at Disney and Fox,” said Perrette. “We are not trying to be the sports supermarket. We are very focussed on being leaders in verticals around passionate communities.”
Golf as digital lifestyle
Warming to his theme, he added, “We realise there is no ‘one size fits all’. We may take pan-European rights and cover every market on the continent but there is no such thing as a pan-European sports fan. At Discovery and Eurosport we tailored the product to TV in each market by creating local stories, local heroes and characters. A lot of our learning in TV about local relevancy has been transferred to digital.”
When it comes to rights acquisition, Perrette explained that Discovery wants sports that are highly viewed but also those that are lifestyles and participatory such as cycling, tennis and golf.
“Golf is a global sport with affluent participants and where the willingness to pay is high and on top it has 42 weeks a year of programming so there’s a lot of volume,” he said.
Rivera further outlined Eurosport’s plan to make a return on its hefty investment by capitalising on the growing sports gambling market and in e-commerce opportunities in clothing or travel afforded by coverage of lifestyle sports.
Riviera added, “This is absolutely in line with our strategy to super service super fans by taking a vertical [specific] sport and partnering with a federation over a long period to take it to the next level.
“Linear will remain a huge piece of the distribution channel for Discovery and the PGA but we are not going into this thinking everything will be the same in two, five or ten years out. We have to 2030 to see how we can use digital to transform the way golf fans engage with that passion.”



Understanding and Management – the key to Android TV implementations

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In recent times, Google has begun to make serious, some might say game-changing in-roads, into the middleware market. It has convinced many operators that it has no plan to collect their data other than what’s relevant to advertising and the security implications of adopting an open system – while not to be dismissed – are being eased too. So much so that Android TV (Operator Tier) is arguably the middleware that is on the fastest track to growth.
“This time last year there was a lot of debate among operators as the market educated itself about the benefits of Android TV contrasted with that of traditional middleware,” says Frank Poppelsdorf, Vice President, Product Management, Irdeto. “Entering IBC 2018 it’s clear there is a very big difference in terms of people getting into real projects and focussing on the practical issues of implementation.”
Analyst and researcher Rethink TV registers around 70% of operators globally investigating Android TV as a serious option. Provided Google continues its open approach, Rethink forecasts 99.2 million Android TV devices will ship through pay TV operators by 2022.
The main factors driving the trend are content, capex, and time-to-market. To give subscribers what they expect, operators can either laboriously add the major OTT apps onto their set-top box using proprietary middleware, or they can get it for free on Android TV. It comes with fancy features such as voice control which would otherwise be a huge investment for an operator. What’s more, with rapid launch so critical for survival, Android TV offers an ease of integration that bespoke routes can’t match.
It’s a bit of a no-brainer for all bar some of the largest tier 1’s which may have heavy investments in alternatives, notably the North American saturation of RDK.
So far has the market shifted towards Android TV that it’s fast becoming a strong option for many operators. But such a view glosses over the necessary integration of the software with key hardware and a customised UI needed to differentiate and secure each operator.
Android TV can be built into hybrid DTH, DTT, cable and IPTV boxes, as well as into pure OTT boxes, so that it can emerge around any of the main pay TV technologies. Selecting the right chipset and engineering the right level of security into your system is by no means trivial. It requires a properly configured DVB stack to control the broadcast components. And it all has to reliably function with DRM/conditional access.
That’s where Poppelsdorf’s talk of ‘practical issues’ comes in.
“We have a solution for pay TV operators wanting an advanced hybrid set-top box,” he explains. “We offer this through partners or working directly with us. Deploying the same from scratch will take easily 12 months or more which in today’s fast-paced market is not good enough.”
Security remains a concern no matter which middleware you are operating on. Google has taken some steps towards securing Android TV, but there are still steps that operators must take to protect their service, platform and data. It is therefore important to work with the right security partner who can assist in adding layers of security on top of Android TV, to ensure operators can build a robust, futureproof STB platform. The Android TV platform does a lot of the middleware’s ‘old’ job itself but there are many aspects of Android-based integrations that the operator has to understand and manage.

The smart business of securing against home invasion

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In director Michael Mann’s 2015 film Blackhat, a major breach of security is made on a supposedly failsafe international shipping port via a humble drinks vending machine. No longer Hollywood fiction, it’s clear that hackers will seek the weakest link in the chain and with more and more devices connected to the internet that chain is growing exponentially.
There’s no place more vulnerable than the home where all manner of seemingly innocuous appliances and devices, from your fridge to energy and lighting systems, present a web of opportunity for personal invasion.
Though still in their infancy, IoT and smart homes are gaining traction. By 2020, Gartner Research forecasts approximately 20.8 billion IoT enabled devices worldwide, while IDC projects a $1.7 trillion global IoT market.
One of the problems is that there are so many potential end points for hackers to attack. Previously, a common model for IoT devices was to build, ship and forget. This has resulted in a flood of unsecured consumer devices in homes and a challenge in retrofitting security.
Another is the lack of any agreed standard joining IoT devices together. The multiplication of apps intended to hand the consumer lifestyle convenience ends up complicating the benefits of whole-home connectivity and compromising security.
Into the breach have stepped utility companies, internet giants like Amazon and Google, security specialists, telcos and pay TV operators. All are competing for control of the smart home by offering gateways to access personal devices typically unified under a single app.
There’s a genuine business opportunity for service providers in this space which some, including Deutsche Telekom and Comcast, are busy taking advantage of.
“Pay TV operators and telcos are battling to be the trusted interface between the consumer and world of IoT,” says Jim Phillipoff, Head of Business Development, Media & Entertainment, Irdeto.
The key here is trust. Pay TV operators in particular are in a decent position to capitalize on the smart home potential by building on the solid relationship they have with customers. This is immediately at risk if security isn’t tight.
“A connected home is a very personal environment,” says Phillipoff. “From camera’s monitoring your door to nanny-cams taking care of your children, the risk of images ending up on the internet is too high. Everything has to be protected.”
Irdeto says operators can make it extremely difficult for hackers if the operator has control of the gateway and the companion mobile IoT apps are secured with its Cloakware Software Protection (CSP).
“We can essentially secure any potential environment inside or outside the firewall including the gateway combined with CSP to harden the app,” explains Phillipoff.
Operators wanting a turnkey home gateway solution might opt for Indentive’s home IoT gateway device and suite of IoT consumer services – pre-integrated with Irdeto Cloakware security.
Consumers really do care about this. A survey by PwC ‘Smart home, seamless life’ found that safety and security (peace of mind) commands the highest price for smart home devices among consumers, regardless of income.
The majority of people who have not adopted smart home technology – nor plan to – list price as their biggest hesitation, closely followed by security concerns, according to PwC.
Smart home products with strong safety features command the highest prices at retail. Yet while more consumers will buy a money-saving product, the survey reveals that more of them are willing to spend more for safety.
The implications of this for the keen-eyed service provider CFO and CTO shouldn’t be hard to spot.