DTVE
p28 https://www.digitaltveurope.com/files/2022/09/DTVE-September-2022-lr.pdf
https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2022/09/08/digital-tv-europe-ibc-special-edition-out-now/
OTT services like DAZN and Amazon Prime have respectively
purchased rights for major football events in Europe and NHL in North America.
Amazon also holds exclusive Thursday Night NFL this coming season. Major
mergers such as the swoop for payTV broadcaster BT Sport by Eurosport owner
Warner Bros. Discovery are paving the way for more live events to be streamed
online.
To compete with broadcast and meet customers’ expectations,
direct to consumer providers must reach millions of viewers with impeccable
video quality at the lowest latency possible, as well as add value through
experiences such as betting, social-watching, multi-cam.
“Everything is possible if you drop tons of money, but that
is not a wise business strategy,” says Gwendal Simon, Distinguished CDN
Architect, Synamedia. “Agile, scalable, and efficient CDNs capable of dealing
with highly fluctuating peaks and valleys of demand are key. Intelligent
CDNs pushing traffic to the edge of the network, offloading origin servers, and
reducing network traffic are a must.”
Sports rights are rising too which only raises the pressure
on streamers to get it right. The number of major sporting events available
online is set to drive revenue for global broadcast rights beyond US$85 billion
by the end of 2024, according to a Rethink TV report. The report also
claims rights growth could galvanise the popularity of smaller sports
properties. In part that’s because production, contribution and distribution
can be made over the internet or via the cloud in a far more cost-efficient
fashion than ever before.
Unlike VOD streaming though, where traffic is distributed
over time, live streaming connections happen simultaneously, provoking peaks of
traffic on the network that in generally exceed previous maximums.
“Without a solution to scale, all operators would have to
review their investments and plan to address new capacity needs,” says Damien
Sterkers, Video Solutions Marketing Director at Broadpeak. “Today, this already
represents a serious technical and financial challenge, and it will get even
less sustainable as streaming continues to grow exponentially.”
Respondents to DTVE for this story emphasised that operational
scale is critical, especially when limited on resources.
“At some point, the streaming provider will not only need to
grow in their domestic market but acquire customers outside of their domestic
market,” says Rémi Beaudoin, CSO, Ateme. “However, going outside of their
domestic market also means having to scale up their audience and their
operation and thus they’ll face some new issues and challenges.
Streaming at scale is a top priority for service providers.
According to Alain Pellen, senior market manager, OTT and IPTV, Harmonic, DAZN
is finding it challenging to deliver HD to less than 1 million subscribers in
Italy and is working on improving the streaming experience so it is on par with
Sky on DTH.
The crux of the matter is that, when it comes to large-scale
high profile live events in particular, the viewer experience must be
indistinguishable regardless whether people are attending in person or
streaming from their sofa.
“While the operational complexities should never be
underestimated, the technology stack required to support such events has
largely been figured out but is constantly evolving,” says Marty Roberts, VP of
Media Analytics at Brightcove. “As streaming becomes a more significant part of
how brands and businesses connect with audiences, the challenges and solutions
must be explored and faced head on.”
The basic requirements
The secret to ‘broadcast quality’ is actually quite simple;
it involves distributing a single version of a content to all viewers
(one-to-many) and securing enough fixed network resources.
Streaming relies on numerous individual copies of the
content (one-to-one), which are likely to constrain the network during peaks
and cause quality issues such as freezing, decreases in video resolution, and
latency.
“The easiest approach to match streaming quality to
broadcast is to use the same one-to-many delivery principle,” says Sterkers.
“This is especially relevant as popular live events are what ‘over-dimension’
the streaming infrastructure and cause constraints. Since popular live events
are the moments viewers want to see the same content, it makes sense to
distribute a single copy rather than unnecessarily replicating individual
copies over and over.”
However, if you want to switch from multicast to unicast this
becomes a much more complex proposition for the provider.
The challenge remains the same: to ensure provision of an
experience as good as or better than the broadcast experience, meaning the
lowest latency possible, dynamic ad insertion, a smooth experience and good to
excellent visual and audio quality.
“The main challenge is to provide the same level of quality
of experience as before while delivering more personalised content,” affirms
Beaudoin. “Consumers got used to a smooth experience with broadcast and
multicast and expect the experience and the functionalities to remain the same
with unicast.”
Unicast of course would enable providers to give their
end-user complete control over their TV including the possibility to
fast-rewind, fast-backwards, pause, etc).
“With unicast, we can deliver high-quality, personalised
streams to each user by leveraging the heuristics of their device, bandwidth,
and location,” says Jason Friedlander, head of marketing for Edgio (formerly
Limelight Networks). “In many ways, broadcast is becoming inferior to streaming
experience when we talk about quality and personalisation.”
Part of the personalisation and monetisation equation is the
ability to serve targeted ads. Friedlander says targeted ads generate higher
CPMs and provide a better user experience, “so having a platform that has
industry-leading SSAI technology integrated into the core platform, removes
technical headaches that can come from having to find and implement various
vendors.”
The key challenges
The biggest challenge surrounds major live sports when millions of
viewers flock to the streaming service to watch the game simultaneously. The
delivery ecosystem must quicky adjust to the sudden increase in demand without
impacting the user experience.
“The challenge is scalability and dynamic infrastructure resources
allocation,” says Simon. “You may allocate enough infrastructure resources to
offer the most incredible experience ever, but if those resources sit idle
wating for the next mass event, the ROI will never work.
“This means allocating those resources dynamically while the event
is happening, monetising the experience and then moving those resources to
other tasks. Maximising the infrastructure resource utilisation is not simple,
it requires a sophisticated understanding of traffic predictions, demand for
bandwidth, streaming, processing, and content storage. This is where insights
and AI allow the edge of the network to reach peak utilisation for extended
periods of time.”
On the content delivery side, traditional CDNs have
limitations, and service providers are looking at alternative technologies to
improve the streaming experience, including multi-CDN, private CDN, multicast
ABR on ISP network, deep caching (MEC) and Open Caching as specified by
Streaming Video Alliance.
Whatever the chosen technology it must be reliable. It must
be fault tolerant and always available. “An outage or even failure of a
critical feature from ad insertion to the CDN can be catastrophic to a content
owner’s business on any given day, and that is even more amplified when
streaming a significant live event,” says Friedlander.
With many of the obstacles attached to scaling an event that
reaches viewers in their millions already solved, the key challenges now lie in
optimisation. Firstly, media companies need to strike the right balance
when it comes to visual quality. The higher the quality, the more expensive the
bandwidth cost, so the need to ensure the viewer experience is the best it can
be within these constraints is vital.
“The timely delivery of in-stream advertising is also an
area that requires due care and attention,” says Roberts. “When it comes to
live-streamed events, ads need to appear at the right cue points in the right
sequence, so it’s vital that the ad-tech stack can insert the right content
quickly. Technology is not infallible, so it’s important that a team is in
place to resolve any critical issues in real-time.”
Overcoming the issues
According to Ateme, the ability to develop an elastic content
delivery network - which controls where the popular contents are fetched, and
how you can scale up and down when there are peaks - is critical. “You need to
have control over the CDN that can again go up and down depending on the
demand. Having a fixed configuration, a fixed CDN or a rigid approach won’t
allow you to have good performance at scale.”
ABR technologies - including DASH and HLS - and distributed
infrastructure using CDNs are the key ingredients in the recipe to overcome
these hurdles. Smart algorithms enable these technologies to scale fast while
minimising energy consumption and give the content provider full control.
“The key is to use cloud technologies to scale encoders and
packagers so that the video is prepared without compromising quality,” says
Simon. “AI forecasting technologies guarantee that a consumer finds a nearby
server to deliver the stream at the best possible quality.”
Broadpeak talk up the potency of Multicast ABR (mABR) for
permitting one-to-many distribution on the network, down to a device such as a
home gateway or set-top box in the viewer’s home. mABR has been used
successfully by many operators, including in Italy when the Serie A football
games were exclusively available via streaming.
“With one-to-many distribution, the load on the network no
longer increases with the number of viewers, allowing virtually unlimited
quality levels,” explains Sterkers. “For example, streaming live sports to
millions of viewers with an increased 4K resolution is generally considered
unrealistic in one-to-one mode. mABR enables it pretty seamlessly, since only a
single copy is distributed. mABR can solve current scalability issues and may
become an important enabler for future streaming enhancements.”
Harmonic promotes Content Aware Encoding (CAE) to improve
streaming quality of experience. The technology has been deployed by over 100
service providers for more than 10,000 channels in live applications from which
service providers can realise bandwidth savings of up to 40%, the vendor
claims.
To support targeted ads and blackout management, a scalable
playlist manipulator is needed, Harmonic says. When it comes to scalability,
this is a challenge for the complete infrastructure, including CDN delivery,
origin, server-side ad insertion and NPVR recording.
“Cloud-based solutions are a perfect match for extreme
scaling challenges,” says Pellen, pointing to the VOS360 SaaS platform used to
deliver this year’s Super Bowl with a peak of 5.6 million simultaneous
sessions.
“We recognise there are silos between the on-net traffic
managed by a dedicated infrastructure and the off-net traffic managed by
third-party CDNs. In a world where all traffic will be unicast, there is a need
to rationalise delivery networks using the ISP’s private cloud to deliver
content to devices inside the ISP network.”
Pellen also acknowledges that the largest sports events
require geo-redundant cloud and multi-cloud solutions, along with other
redundancy capabilities, such as seamless fail-over, “to ensure viewers don’t
miss a moment.”
Brightcove points to learnings such as its Audience Insights that Roberts says enable businesses
“to create data-driven strategies that can have a remarkable impact on
improving monetisation.
“Beyond this, we believe there are areas of innovation
beyond multi-bitrate streaming. We see an evolution to multi-codec switching,
even mid-stream, enabling a truly seamless viewer experience.”
In June this year Limelight acquired Edgecast from Yahoo and
rebranded as Edgio, retaining over a decades worth of knowledge inside the
company.
“Using these insights, we built a platform that orchestrates
thousands of distinct decisions per second for every viewer that presses play
to deliver high-quality and ultra-personalised streams,” Friedlander says.
“Finding a reliable technology partner that allows you to operationally scale,
means you can innovate and evolve with your audience with only a fraction of
the resources.”
Boxout: Latency, ULL and Tiered Latency
Low latency is now a hygiene issue for a sports OTT
business.
“People expect to receive a stream that is on par with the
broadcast,” reiterates Beaudoin. “The most important is to ensure your service
can achieve low latency, meaning you may need to change your compression system
and/or your CDN system to meet these requirements. In particular, low latency
compression, DASH or HLS packaging, and possibly bitrate, as all of these are
the compression and delivery mechanisms that allow a customer to reach and
power a low latency streaming service.”
Friedlander has a slightly different view. “While latency is
important, our customers care more about monetisation. They want streams
relatively close to broadcast but will not sacrifice quality or monetisation
opportunities. We have had customers experiment with real-time technologies,
like webRTC, but our focus is on HLS and its low latency features.”
Delays in streaming can be frustrating at the best of times.
When an event is available through multiple distribution avenues, such as
traditional Pay TV and online, companies can encounter the “Twitter problem.”
Do individuals learn about the goal, highlight, or winning contestant before
the online stream catches up? In this instance, sub-2 second latency strikes
the right balance between maintaining the monetisation model and ‘syncing’ the
audience to keep everyone in the moment.
“Ultra-low latency is defined as sub-1 second,” says
Roberts. “This is primarily driven by sports betting, where there is a concern
that latency creates an arbitrage opportunity. The tech stack for this is a
little less mature, so monetisation via in-stream advertising isn’t yet
possible - but we may see this evolve soon.”
Unicast delivery can also for tiered latency, to accommodate the
different latency needs for say a live concert or news vs a football match.
Tiered latency delivers broadcast-equivalent latency as well as allowing
services such as adaptive quality and time-shifted viewing.
Synamedia’s Simon explains the use case further. Some viewers chat
while they watch a game, others want to zap from one camera angle to another.
For these use cases, synchronisation is key. This is achieved using HESP, an
innovative packaging technology which offers accurate group synchronisation
with low latency – typically about two seconds.
Some consumers want to bet on the next action in the game. To
prevent cheating from people physically watching the event, we have to
guarantee sub-second glass-to-glass latency. This is possible with WebRTC
technology.
“Each of these technologies - DASH/HLS, HESP, WebRTC - needs the
development of a new pipeline to ingest, process, and distribute the content,”
he says. “The beauty comes when one unique infrastructure implements the
delivery at scale by automatically adjusting the hardware and software
resources to the population’s requirements.”
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