Cable Satellite International
The video transport stack has not evolved much since the 1990s – until this year. The DVB-Native IP, standardised last February is intended to converge satellite and terrestrial delivery based natively on IP - provided the industry can devise compelling use cases to adopt it.
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“The long term vision for DVB NIP is to use internet infrastructure to deliver broadcast content,” outlined Emily Dubs, DVB, Head of Technology at an IBC panel discussion. “It’s a long journey to unify TV platforms and there has previously been an issue of market hesitance. The published standard is now in a phase of test and implementation.”The success of any standard depends on how wide it is deployed and in this case means being embedded by default in all STBs and devices in the market.
“If we’re not doing this it will be difficult to create the economies of scale to build a real market,” stressed Antonio Arcidiacono, the EBU’s director technology and innovation.
DVB-NIP is the result of one year of intense technical work by representatives of more than 13 DVB Member companies from across the media delivery value chain. The new system, designed to use DVB-S2X or DVB-T2 broadcast bearers, is entirely IP-based and no longer relies on the MPEG-2 Transport Stream that has been the basis for DVB broadcast systems up to now.
That Eutelsat and SES played a key role in developing the standard is a very good sign, Arcidiacono said.
The rationale behind DVB-NIP is to use the efficiency of broadcast networks for large-scale content distribution to modern IP devices, fully integrating broadcast technologies with those used in broadband networks. Operators can use the same broadcast signal to cover both professional applications (CDN caches, content distribution to tower sites, hotspots, etc.) and consumer applications (DTH to native-IP TV sets, broadcasting to IP devices via in-home gateway functionality).
Nonetheless broadcasters need a compelling reason to switch to DVB-NIP.
Arcidiacono said: “A public broadcaster like RAI or BBC is already paying for their own transmission in DVB received in the STB. You need to give them something more if you want to convince them to go in another direction because switching means they have to start again from box number One.”
You have to have applications that pave the way, he insisted.
“We have experimented with multicast and with push – to feed the edges of the network in such a way you can integrate with existing terrestrial infrastructure. If you do exactly what has been done before the market will react in defence. You need to invent new applications that will convince broadcasters to reach new audiences with new content and to compete with the major streamers.
Arcidiacono added, “Media companies and operators need to work hand in hand if we want to invent a new way.”
Speaking for STB maker EKT, its CEO Richard Smith said: “We have to be able to deploy this into existing DVB operators up to high end VSAT data operators who want to add video as an offering. For us, it’s all about flexibility to cope with all the new opportunities available through this technology.”
Those opportunities include finally reaching regions with low connectivity and emerging markets, although as the panellists pointed out this does not exclusively mean Africa or India but rural parts of Europe too.
Mohsen Haddad, co-founder of Easy Broadcast said Native IP was an opportunity to have the best of both broadband and broadcast.
“For us, native IP is about marrying the OTT experience on any device anytime with broadcast quality. For an OTT service provider, this is about footprint. They can reach more eyeballs, new markets.”
It seems that e-learning is an early adopter market for the technology. EKT reported it had
15 POCs with existing DTH providers and with educational projects.
“Our expectation is that these will happen shortly,” Smith said. “In some of the educational projects there is government money already set aside. So yes, it will happen.”
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