This time it's personal

Broadcast

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/this-time-its-personal/5115278.article

Broadcasters and content owners are learning from the likes of Amazon and Netflix by overhauling their platforms to better engage viewers with content suggestions based on data and algorithm.

BBC iPlayer is widely credited with kick-starting the online video habit in the UK, but a decade after launch, it is set for a major revamp to keep pace with over-the-top (OTT) competitors Amazon Prime and Netflix, which have made greater strides in using data to personalise the experience of using their platforms.
“The first generation of catch-up services were based around the assumption that viewers knew what was on a particular broad caster’s channels, and an assumption that the broadcaster could communicate this to you through traditional channel advertising.
“The need to provide insight into what you wanted to watch was considered minimal,” says Thomas Williams (below), chief executive of Ostmodern, which designed and built the BBC Store platform.

The seismic shift in user behaviour towards going straight to digital means aiding discovery is now a much higher priority for OTT platforms. Göran Appelquist, chief technology officer of delivery-over-IP systems provider Edgeware, says that making content easily available on-demand is one of the big draws of OTT.
“Letting users find exactly what they want, whenever they want it has become crucial to content owners since it’s the best way of engaging audiences and, most importantly, keeping them using your service,” he says.
Personalisation is often associated with recommendations, for which Netflix first cracked the code. By some estimates, more than 50% of viewing on the platform is based on recommendations.
“They’re so good at it that they don’t even bother to show users their entire catalogue,” says Iddo Shai (below), director of product at opensource video platform Kaltura.
“But personalisation goes much deeper than that. For example, Netfix and iTunes users see a personalised homepage and personalised push notifications about new content based on shows watched in the past.”

Targeted marketing has also made great strides and will soon work in unison with recommendations, predicts Shai.
The tracking of users will begin long before they sign up to an OTT service (using cookies that track users’ browsing history on all devices, as well as credit card purchases) and will continue even if they decide to cancel their subscription.
“In between, personalisation will help to keep them using the service for as long as possible and to increase their spend,” says Shai.
Social media chatter can also be used to determine the context of a person’s discussions around trending TV or films.
Many of Kaltura’s customers encourage users to sign in with their Facebook account. The system then shows the user a dynamic activity feed, which includes real-time updates on what their friends watched and liked.
The key to all of this is data aggregation: the more, the better.
Gathering profiles can be done anonymously by relying on cookies, but results will be better with user registration. Here, the video player constantly communicates to the host platform what the user is doing.
Every action, or click stream, is noted and aggregated. For example: the user is browsing; adding a movie to their favourites list; playing a video or choosing a different one.
“This behaviour can be analysed to find patterns and improve the discovery experience for individual viewers, but also of the service as a whole,” says Shai.
In some cases, additional components like a data management system will offer the OTT operator third-party data that can be purchased from companies like eXelate (now Nielsen), Bluekai (now Oracle) and Lotame.
These companies aggregate information about users from the likes of websites and credit card companies and index it into segments that are relevant to marketers.
Content providers and product owners often have to balance user behaviour against a need to push and promote valuable content that defines their brand.
“Personalisation has historically surfaced all content equally without accounting for the commercial, brand or editorial value of the content,” says Williams.
“By augmenting personalisation with content owner needs, it is possible to imagine a product where users get heavily targeted content that satisfies both themselves and the business need.”
Not only will the usefulness of data vary in quality and interpretation, but “sharing data is only as good as the commercial agreements the parties are bound by”, says Alex Drosin, North America president of multiscreen video technology provider Massive.

“Everyone is eager to optimise data to increase subscription levels but the reality is that this is limited to how much they can gather.”
Netflix and Amazon hold another advantage over broadcasters whose online service isn’t their primary product or output: their own delivery network.
“This means they can analyse everything that’s delivered to each user,” says Appelquist.
“Whereas, a supplementary online service with fewer users is more likely to be renting space on a third-party delivery network to deliver its content, so doesn’t have access to those numbers.”
Edgeware suggests broadcasters build their own content delivery network. It illustrates a business case to show that implementing one becomes worthwhile when an average 250,000 users watch content on a service for a minimum of an hour a day.
BBC iPlayer has almost 8 million users watching for an average of 30 minutes a day – or just shy of 4 million who watch for an hour.
“The BBC has the amount of requests for content that would justify building its own network,” says Appelquist.

“It will have complete access to the analytics of its users, letting it compete with the likes of Netflix.”
Recommendation engines are built using machine-learning algorithms, which process raw actions forwarded by the client application on a user’s device and are based on past behaviour.
The next stage is to use cognitive computing to examine the same click stream, but to divine user intent ahead of the next action – ideally leading to serving more relevant content and ads.
ContentWise chief technology officer Pancrazio Auteri calls this research “in-session predictions” or “intent-based recommendation”.
ContentWise is also helping clients, including Sky, experiment with voice-based discovery via digital assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
“Users don’t like to have a single choice imposed, nor to have to scroll or browse too much choice, so with voice commands, we return a small number of options,” says Auteri.
Typical commands are requests about a specific team, channel, celebrity or news topic. AT&T-owned DirecTV has integrated voice control from Alexa but this does not necessarily mean an Amazon takeover.
“They are using Alexa just as the interface while retaining the existing logic of content recommendations based on their library from the ContentWise platform,” says Auteri.
As virtual assistants are fine-tuned through analysis of natural language, accents and conversations, operators will turn to voice as the de facto interface between human and service.
Pietro Berkes, principal data scientist at digital security and media solutions firm Kudelski Group, says that virtual assistants will understand viewers’ preferences and respond to vocal commands, enabling content discovery from multiple sources.
He says: “As traditional media becomes increasingly connected, AI will enable content providers to interact with end users. AI assistants will help consumers select personalised camera angles for sport events and they will deliver automatic summaries of the latest news and missed TV shows.”
Some think personalisation is about context, predictable desires and suggestion as much as it is about algorithms.
“We are all wired differently and even if you can afford to build the world’s most amazing personalisation engine, you can still get it seriously wrong – for example, by serving ads that are not relevant,” says Joe Foster, chief executive of multiscreen VoD platform provider Easel TV.
Personalising the experience could be as simple as the consumer promoting menus, changing available skins and other settings to tailor the experience themselves, he suggests.
“It doesn’t have to be all about algorithms.”

Technology providers

Easel TV

• Customers: Virgin Media; 4OD

Suggested TV, Easel’s cloud-based software- as-a-service, boasts a range of tools for user management, content management and promotional activity.
“Our background and experience in digital television has enabled us to build a ‘televisual experience’ and evolve it to provide an optimised user experience for each individual screen,” says chief executive Joe Foster.
The Suggested TV platform can distribute a mixture of Subscription (SVoD) and Transactional (TVoD) video on demand content separately, or within the same service.
Electronic Sell Through (EST) is currently being developed into the platform.

Kaltura

• Customers: HBO; TMZ

Kaltura’s unified back-end for video, business rules and household management is unique in providing a “full picture” about the user journey, according to director of product Iddo Shai.
“For example, we usually authenticate each user at the beginning of the video session,” he explains.
“Then the app offers them the option to continue watching a show from where they left off [even if it was watched on a different device]. If the user is looking for something new, we can show recommendations.
“If the user samples three movies before settling on one, we can track it.”

Ostmodern

• Customers: ITV; BFI

Ostmodern’s Skylark product comprises an enterprise-level CMS, an API, which organises content, and a suite of connectors that integrate with internal and third-party systems.
It handles scheduling, ingest and data, providing editorial teams with the ability to curate recommendations while offering a considerable degree of personalisation.
“Editors can be informed of trends and behaviours within Skylark to understand what content they should be pushing and where,” says chief executive Thomas Williams.
“While this often requires manual creation, a CMS should understand user behaviours to help editors make more informed decisions.”
Recommendations presented to the user can be augmented with editorial weighting of content to ensure that valuable content gets the correct exposure.
“Editors can still curate and build views of products with content groups they require, but add personalisation on top of these views to enable the surfacing of the most relevant content in this group.”

Massive

• Customers: Channel 5; Sony Pictures

Typical approaches to user interface design are “rigid”, says North America president Alex Drosin, lacking the flexibility to change if, for example, the commercial goal changes.
“The app should be able to update special offers, discounts or different price points in real time and without going offline,” he says. Massive’s Axis technology allows broadcasters to do just that.
The cloud-based platform enables the delivery of video apps across devices, with a common user interface.
“You can tweak or completely update the look and feel of apps, by the minute, and without requiring users to install updates,” says Drosin.

Contentwise

• Customers: Telefonica; Sky

ContentWise provides software building blocks for marketing and editorial teams to configure according to business goals or editorial style.
A typical home page for an OTT service might include six themed carousels.
Clients can tailor each of these for different users based on user-defined preferences and analysis of consumption habits. Someone who likes sport or animation, for example, will be shown relevant content.
“We can populate the screen based on general content themes and have this change dynamically based on device, location or time of day – which might suggest another user – or around a breaking news topic.
“You can even create a neighbourhood- based context,” says chief technology officer Pancrazio Auteri.

Edgeware

• Customers: PCCW (China); KPN

Edgeware offers broadcasters and content owners a mechanism for distributing TV over their own content delivery network (CDN) instead of hiring capacity on a third-party CDN.
It has three layers: content control, network services and delivery. The former two are run in the cloud and the latter on Edgeware servers, which enables caching, repackaging, pause and play functions, ad insertion and encryption.
“With the right infrastructure, broadcasters can also take advantage of user analytics to fi ne-tune services,” says chief technology officer Göran Appelquist.
“This means they can monitor things like band width consumption, bitrate per session and session quality. It also lets them monitor IP network changes – if a user goes from wi-fi to 4G, for example – to gauge on what device and where their content is being watched.”

TV App Agency

• Customers: Blockbuster; Wuakitv

“Offering the capability of content tagged as ‘already watched’, even on a different platform, is key to being able to optimise the user experience,” says TV App Agency co-founder and director Bruno Pereira.
Its TVA 360 analytics product does this by aggregating personal data to create groups for targeting.
“We can then target users more efficiently. We use that data to create dynamic playlists in the TVA aggregator, based on device, region and so on,” he explains.
“The OTT personalisation challenge is how to float between devices that offer one-to-one personalisation, such as mobiles and smart TVs.”

The State of Mobile Video 2017

StreamingMedia Europe

Mobile video traffic keeps rising at a rapid rate, leaving operators struggling to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, the U.K. is falling behind on broadband connectivity.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-State-of-Mobile-Video-2017-116710.aspx

When the president and CEO of cable giant Libery Global declares mobile to be “strategically critical,” as Mike Fries did in November, then you know the pendulum has tipped decisively. Many would argue that the writing had been on the wall for years.
The seventh edition of Ericsson ConsumerLab's annual 'TV & Media' report underscored the enormous and rapid shift in TV and video viewing behavior toward mobility. According to the report, mobile video traffic is forecast to grow by around 50 percent annually through 2022 to account for nearly 75 percent of all mobile data traffic.
People are watching more content than ever before, but the proportion of viewing on fixed screens and viewing on mobile and portable screens is moving toward an equal split.
Ericsson said that the ratio between viewing on fixed screens (such as TVs and desktops) and mobile screens closed to 60:40 this year—compared with almost 70:30 in 2010.
The average viewing time on mobile devices has grown by more than 200 hours a year since 2012, driving overall TV and video viewing up by an additional 1.5 hours a week. The surge in mobile viewing is offset by a decline in fixed screen viewing of 2.5 hours a week, though the overall appetite for TV and video is not waning.
The weekly share of time spent watching TV and video on mobile devices grew by 85 percent from 2010 to 2016, while on fixed screens it has gone down by 14 percent over the same period.
“What is really happening is there is an addition because mobile viewing is done on top of everything else,” notes Anders Erlandsson, senior advisor, consumer insights, Ericsson ConsumerLab. “So people are doing more viewing than they have ever done before.”
Mobile data traffic continues to grow, driven both by increased smartphone subscriptions and a continued increase in average data volume per subscription, fueled primarily by more viewing of video content. In Q3 2016, data traffic grew around 10 percent quarter on quarter and 50 percent year on year. Social networking is the second biggest data traffic type after video; it’s forecast to grow by 39 percent annually over the coming 6 years.
The report forecast that in 2022, there will be 8.9 billion mobile subscriptions, of which 90 percent will be for mobile broadband. At this point in time, there will be 6.1 billion unique subscribers.
Cisco backed these trends up in its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI). It suggests that three-fourths of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2020. Mobile video will increase by a factor of 11 between 2015 and 2020, accounting for 75 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period.
The Middle East and Africa will have the strongest mobile data traffic growth of any region, with a 71 percent compound annual growth rate. This region will be followed by Asia Pacific at 54 percent and Central and Eastern Europe at 52 percent.
Mobile networks carried fewer than 10 gigabytes per month in 2000, and less than 1 petabyte per month in 2005. By contrast, within the next 5 years, monthly global mobile data traffic will be 30.6 exabytes by 2020 (one exabyte is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes, and 1,000 petabytes). The number of mobile-connected devices per capita will reach 1.5 by 2020.
This clear and unstoppable shift in consumer behavior isn’t lost on pay TV broadcasters, which have been launching SVOD over-the-top (OTT) bundles left, right, and center.
That said, Google warned that mobile’s disruptive impact was being underestimated by broadcasters. Speaking at IBC, Benjamin Faes, managing director of partner business solutions at Google, says, “Mobile is the biggest revolution broadcasters have faced—it is happening now, and we still do not see a huge, pressing desire to take advantage of this revolution among the broadcast industry.”
Perhaps the stat that concerned Fries most of all is that a third of Millennials aged 16–24 find portable screens more important for video consumption than their home TVs, according to Ericsson.
Liberty, the owner of Virgin Media in the U.K., is pursuing a quad-play bundle in every market and wants to more than double its mobile base from 15 percent to 40 percent of its 17 million broadband subscribers by 2022.
Liberty needs to compete with Sky which, perhaps more significantly than its launch into 4K this year, made video playback on mobile possible for the first time. A Sky Q app allows subscribers to watch on-demand and live streamed content regardless of the device in or out of the home. Features include a pause and playback of content on different devices.
Virgin Media addressed this by unveiling its own branded “TellyTablet,” intended to allow portable TV around the home. A revamped app permits recordings and live TV to be paused and continued room to room on a new V6 set-top box or on a mobile device.
Not to be outdone, BT is launching a new BT TV app (due summer 2017) with options to manage recordings and stream live and on-demand programs. YouView, the hybrid DTT and broadband TV service of which BT is a shareholder with the BBC and broadband provider TalkTalk, also has multiroom viewing under development after re-engineering its infrastructure to run over Amazon Web Services (AWS).

LTE Conflict and Competition

In November, Virgin Media launched its first 4G/ LTE tariffs, the last major U.K. network to offer high-speed mobile internet plans.
However, all major operators faced criticism from members of Parliament who believe rural areas of the country continue to exist in a mobile broadband blackspot.
EE lit up its 4G network in 2012 and has pledged to deliver 4G to 95 percent of the U.K. landmass by 2020; Vodafone and O2 launched LTE a year later (the latter claims to have achieved 93 percent outdoor coverage). Despite this, many services, such as 300Mbps speeds, are in the most profitable urban areas.
The Broadband Infrastructure Group (BIG) wants mobile users in rural areas to be able to roam across different mobile networks depending on which has the best signal, but industry body Mobile UK opposed the plan, claiming it is not only technically difficult to accomplish in a localized way, but is a significant disincentive to competitive network investment.
The BIG is also unconvinced the four major operators will meet a legally binding target to extend 2G coverage to 90 percent of the U.K.’s landmass by 2017. The latest estimates suggest that 28 percent of all rural areas in the U.K. remain without coverage.
Operator O2 ended the year with its future uncertain after European Commission competition officials in May decreed that Hutchison (owner of the Three network) could not proceed with a £10.3 billion takeover.
The reason given by Brussels was that the merger would reduce choice and ultimately be unable to compete effectively with BT-owned EE and Vodafone as the U.K. market becomes increasingly converged.
Hutchison had hoped to create the biggest mobile operator in the market, able to compete better with BT and Vodafone.
The move leaves Telefónica, O2’s Spanish owner, looking at floating a minority stake in the network, which has 10 million 4G customers.
In an attempt to halt BT/EE’s increasing dominance in the local market, regulator Ofcom blocked the company from bidding for more spectrum in the 2.3GHz band, which could be used to boost existing 4G capability.
BT currently holds 45 percent of the U.K.’s usable mobile spectrum, while Vodafone has 28 percent, compared with 15 percent for O2 and 12 percent for Three. At the same time, Ofcom granted BT permission to bid for a chunk of the 3.4GHz band—considered critical for the rollout of 5G services across Europe—when it comes up for auction in 2017.
Three has called for BT/EE to be completely stopped from bidding for the sale of the spectrum. The watchdog, however, says the spectrum for 5G was not “immediately useable” and that it is “important that operators are given an opportunity to acquire this spectrum so they are able to consider early development of 5G services,” according to a report in London business daily City A.M. Ofcom has set reserve prices of £1 million for a 5MHz block in the 3.4GHz band.

U.K. Plays Broadband Catch-Up

Acutely aware of the importance of connectivity for the digital economy post-Brexit, in November the government pledged to spend more than £1 billion over the next 5 years to deliver broadband speeds up to 1Gbps to 2 million more homes and businesses.
Britain already has one of the most comprehensive digital networks among developed world economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), but it also ranks as one of the most expensive for consumers and businesses to use.
At the same time, Britain is falling behind on the rollout of full fiber, and only 2 percent of premises have access to it. By contrast, Turkey already has double the U.K.’s coverage, while Latvia boasts 20 percent. More businesses are connected in Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany than the U.K., according to OECD figures.
“We’re already on the back foot,” comments Ewan Taylor-Gibson, broadband expert at uSwitch.com. “The U.K. has fallen far behind most EU countries, where ultrafast-capable fiber-to-the-home services are common, and, meanwhile, the take-up of existing fiber services is still fairly low.
“Superfast fiber broadband is available to 90 percent of the U.K., yet 20 of the U.K.’s 42 biggest cities are registering actual average speeds of below 24Mbps. And 3 in 10 broadband users register actual speeds of less than 5Mbps, while just 10 percent log speeds of above 50Mbps.”
Full fiber-to-the-property (FTTP) is already offered by some independent providers such as Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, and B4RN, but to a few thousand customers. In October, BT completed a European first trial of an FTTP technology that it claimed can deliver 40Gbps and 10Gbps connections on the same fiber cable. Virgin Media is also bringing these speeds to 2 million homes.
BT has pledged £6 billion to connect 12 million homes to at least 300Mbps by 2020 mostly using “G.fast”—a technology that speeds up copper cables, rather than using FTTP.
The U.K. government is also offering local authorities the chance to bid for a slice of a £740 million fund to trial 5G networks, linking them to the fiber-optic rollout to provide greater wireless capacity.
Speaking in October at the Broadband World Forum, Matt Hancock, minister of state for digital and culture, said the U.K. had (alongside the U.S.) led the world when it came to the installation of a fixed and mobile network, but he admitted the U.K.’s rollout of 3G and 4G “should have happened sooner.”
“By 2020, the volume of global internet traffic is expected to be 95 times its volume in 2005. In the U.K., fixed internet traffic is set to double every 2 years,” said Hancock at the Broadband World Forum. “We need the digital infrastructure that can support this; providing ubiquitous coverage so no one is left out, and with sufficient capacity to ensure data can flow at the volume, speed and reliability required to meet the demands of modern life.”

5G Gains Momentum

4G traffic exceeded 3G traffic for the first time in 2015 (according to Cisco) and continued its upward trajectory in 2016, when 4G represented more than half of total mobile traffic.
By 2020, 4G will account for 40.5 percent of connections, but 72 percent of total traffic. By then, a 4G connection will generate 3.3 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connection. We can expect three-fourths of the world’s mobile data traffic to be video by 2020 too.
LTE networks can’t cope. “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. Using it means we won’t need to talk about bandwidth constraints for the foreseeable future.”
5G will raise the bar by providing data rates of tens of megabits per second for tens of thousands of people. In addition to handling high bandwidth applications, the Internet of Things, and billions of video-enabled devices, it will—according to Ericsson—“drive seamless, borderless coverage, allowing media companies to go beyond the geographical restrictions of fiber and become true global players.”
While the broad parameters are agreed upon, standards aren’t expected before 2020. That won’t stop operators from launching “prestandard” 5G networks. Indeed, Ericsson forecasts that there will be 550 million 5G subscriptions by 2022.
Last year, South Korea claimed it would lead the world in 5G, making it a destination for business investment and digital businesses. In September, China asked telecom providers to bid to install 5G networks in major cities after a yearlong trial.
Europe’s governments formed the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the hope it will reinforce the European industry’s ability to compete on the global stage. Launched by the European Commission, the PPP has assorted manufacturers, telcos, service providers, small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), and researchers on board.
Separately, telcos including BT, Nokia, Hutchison, Telefónica, Orange, Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom signed a manifesto pledging to launch a 5G network in every country within the EU by 2020.
There are so many claims being made for 5G—from live 4K virtual reality to coordinating self-driving cars— they can’t all be true from Day 1.
“5G is an aspiration,” says George Robertson, chief technologist at U.K. digital TV promoter DTG in an interview with Streaming Media in August, “Probably what will happen is that LTE will dovetail into 5G. There won’t be an overnight switch on.”
“The rollout of 2G, 3G, and 4G took 10–15 years, which is the time frame for 5G,” adds Peter Siebert, executive director of European digital TV consortium DVB.
Partly this is because 5G is complex to deliver. Most research is concentrating on Massive MIMO (multiple input, multiple output), a technology that uses antennas located at both the transmitter and receiver and incorporated into wireless standards including 802.11ac (Wi-Fi), HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE. Massive MIMO scales up to hundreds or even thousands of antennas and terminals and boosts efficiency by focusing the signal into a more precise set of layers. Vodafone UK claimed the first in Europe in the 2.6GHz TDD band.
The PPP calculates that “very dense deployments” of antennas will be necessary if the billions of wireless devices are to be linked worldwide. The DVB’s Siebert suggests this means a base station every 150 meters, plus the investment in backhauling on top putting the question of the business case firmly on the agenda.
This article was published in the Spring 2017 European edition of Streaming Media magazine. 

Europe primed for remote live and video ref production

Sports Video Group Europe

http://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/europe-primed-for-remote-live-and-video-ref-production/

Remote live event production is taking off in Europe in a big way this year with the installation of remote capability by at least two service providers for coverage of European soccer leagues for the start of the 2017-18 season. Furthermore, remote video referring for soccer is a step closer with IP systems being introduced in Germany, Italy and France.

Two major applications of remote production are being implemented to launch later this year. Whilst SVG Europe cannot reveal the broadcast service providers involved, we understand that soccer league stadiums in two countries are being connected by 10-50GigE fibre lines for a full IP-based sports production. Matches will be produced live from a central production hub.

Such a move has already happened to a degree in the UK where ITN Productions remote produces highlight clips of the Football League for Channel 5.

A number of all-IP tests have been conducted in the past couple of years, not least by UEFA during one of last summer’s EURO quarter-final matches. This trial carried signals in realtime over 600km from Bordeaux to Paris by Barco Silex and VIDI, with all the processing and switching done in Aperi Corporation software.

“The software element is important,” explains Joop Janssen, CEO at Aperi. “Since sports events are one night or one weekend, then a software base means you have the ability remote produce for that game reducing the cost of operating a link.”

Naturally, latency is a key concern, but Janssen claims round trips can be done in milliseconds with “visually lossless” codecs like VC-2 compressing 4K signals 4:1 to 3Gbit/s. Other codecs including 4k TICO and 4K JPEG 2000 also work with Aperi’s open platform which supports the AIMS video over IP standards approach.

Janssen quotes savings of 50 percent of would traditionally be done with hardware SDI-baseband equipment.

“The aim is to do everything in software via an IP domain management system. If you can do everything you need to do without data centre change behaviour or hardware and only pay for the software – then that’s virtualisation.”

Increased flexibility

Among the other editorial benefits are flexibility in adjusting the firepower thrown at an event. “The narrative of a football league unfolds week to week yet the so-called main games are decided and scheduled weeks in advance,” he says. “With an IP infrastructure editorial teams can decide to offer more 4K camera coverage or more slo-motion units, for example, at any game whose stadium is on their circuit. With IP you don’t need one cable per camera you can have multiple cameras on the same cable. You are able to configure and upgrade your remote production in stadia and studio on the fly.”

The OB trucks assigned to the game will be stripped down. With production and video processing all happening centrally all that needs to be made available at the venue are cameras. It means more space in the truck for presenters and presentation options.

“The transition will take time but what will happen for sure is that more of the video, audio and graphical processing – all the heavy equipment – will be located centrally.”

Not only do you create a lot more operational flexibility but the editorial quality goes up, he claims. “Maybe the production team is in a more luxurious OB van at the stadium to create a ‘wow’ factor for the game but they will operate only user interfaces and control surfaces connected to kit either at a production hub or even in a data centre.”

If you believe Janssen then an all-IP all-software remote production is just a matter of pressing go. Why, then, are so few broadcasters and OB suppliers prepared to commit to invest in an end-to-end IP chain?

Janssen pins the blame on vendors who have yet to integrate IP fully into their hardware – or company culture.

“Most production switchers have IP connectivity but the processing is still in the SDI domain. You need a step change. Bigger vendors lack virtualisation software typically because the technical knowledge to introduce this is thin on the ground. I’ve worked for a few (Thomson Grass Valley, EVS, Vitec) and I know there are tensions there, particularly to introduce this rapidly and inside a budget.”

He adds: “You do need a lot of expertise in the IP space and network knowledge to this which Aperi brings to the table.”

At the beginning of the year, Gearhouse Broadcast became the UK’s partner/distributor of Aperi’s live IP media function virtualization product.

“To get the best out of today’s live production environment, companies must be able to instantly spin up (and down) services, pay as they go, instantaneously accommodate changing formats and standards and leverage the benefits of data center operations/third-party hosting if needed. It’s really that simple,” said Janssen. “The IP solutions that most vendors offer are IP-bolstered SDI hardware which will only benefit customers temporarily. With Aperi’s platform, we’re enabling the industry to completely future-proof itself.”

Aperi, which is US-based, has built its platform on instant reprogrammable FPGA-acceleration technology, which it says is recognized as the best way to deliver software-based virtualization. It’s the same concept used by cloud provides like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure which have rolled out high computational services based on the same technology in their data centres.

Remote video refereeing

Since the International FA Board (IFAB) approved two years of live trials of video technology to aid referees last September, a number of European leagues have stepped forward to put it into action.  These are thought to be in France, Italy and Germany.

It will be a central video referral system again using IP feeds and isolated from the broadcast network. It will scale to accommodate eight matches concurrently, whereby the fifth or perhaps sixth official per game will sit at a central location reviewing multiple angles, including in slo-motion, of select incidents.

According to IFAB, the video officials will only be called on in four defined “game-changing” scenarios: when a goal has been scored, penalty decisions, sendings off, and possible cases of mistaken identity.

The match official will then be free either to take the advice of the video technician or analyse the incident himself via an iPad-type device on the halfway line.

It is likely that each county will go at its own pace rather than introduce video refs in one ‘big bang’.

Remote live event production is taking off in Europe in a big way this year with the installation of remote capability by at least two service providers for coverage of European soccer leagues for the start of the 2017-18 season. Furthermore, remote video referring for soccer is a step closer with IP systems being introduced in Germany, Italy and France.

Two major applications of remote production are being implemented to launch later this year. Whilst SVG Europe cannot reveal the broadcast service providers involved, we understand that soccer league stadiums in two countries are being connected by 10-50GigE fibre lines for a full IP-based sports production. Matches will be produced live from a central production hub.

Such a move has already happened to a degree in the UK where ITN Productions remote produces highlight clips of the Football League for Channel 5.

A number of all-IP tests have been conducted in the past couple of years, not least by UEFA during one of last summer’s EURO quarter-final matches. This trial carried signals in realtime over 600km from Bordeaux to Paris by Barco Silex and VIDI, with all the processing and switching done in Aperi Corporation software.

“The software element is important,” explains Joop Janssen, CEO at Aperi. “Since sports events are one night or one weekend, then a software base means you have the ability remote produce for that game reducing the cost of operating a link.”

Naturally, latency is a key concern, but Janssen claims round trips can be done in milliseconds with “visually lossless” codecs like VC-2 compressing 4K signals 4:1 to 3Gbit/s. Other codecs including 4k TICO and 4K JPEG 2000 also work with Aperi’s open platform which supports the AIMS video over IP standards approach.

Janssen quotes savings of 50 percent of would traditionally be done with hardware SDI-baseband equipment.

“The aim is to do everything in software via an IP domain management system. If you can do everything you need to do without data centre change behaviour or hardware and only pay for the software – then that’s virtualisation.”

Increased flexibility

Among the other editorial benefits are flexibility in adjusting the firepower thrown at an event. “The narrative of a football league unfolds week to week yet the so-called main games are decided and scheduled weeks in advance,” he says. “With an IP infrastructure editorial teams can decide to offer more 4K camera coverage or more slo-motion units, for example, at any game whose stadium is on their circuit. With IP you don’t need one cable per camera you can have multiple cameras on the same cable. You are able to configure and upgrade your remote production in stadia and studio on the fly.”

The OB trucks assigned to the game will be stripped down. With production and video processing all happening centrally all that needs to be made available at the venue are cameras. It means more space in the truck for presenters and presentation options.

“The transition will take time but what will happen for sure is that more of the video, audio and graphical processing – all the heavy equipment – will be located centrally.”

Not only do you create a lot more operational flexibility but the editorial quality goes up, he claims. “Maybe the production team is in a more luxurious OB van at the stadium to create a ‘wow’ factor for the game but they will operate only user interfaces and control surfaces connected to kit either at a production hub or even in a data centre.”

If you believe Janssen then an all-IP all-software remote production is just a matter of pressing go. Why, then, are so few broadcasters and OB suppliers prepared to commit to invest in an end-to-end IP chain?

Janssen pins the blame on vendors who have yet to integrate IP fully into their hardware – or company culture.

“Most production switchers have IP connectivity but the processing is still in the SDI domain. You need a step change. Bigger vendors lack virtualisation software typically because the technical knowledge to introduce this is thin on the ground. I’ve worked for a few (Thomson Grass Valley, EVS, Vitec) and I know there are tensions there, particularly to introduce this rapidly and inside a budget.”

He adds: “You do need a lot of expertise in the IP space and network knowledge to this which Aperi brings to the table.”

At the beginning of the year, Gearhouse Broadcast became the UK’s partner/distributor of Aperi’s live IP media function virtualization product.

“To get the best out of today’s live production environment, companies must be able to instantly spin up (and down) services, pay as they go, instantaneously accommodate changing formats and standards and leverage the benefits of data center operations/third-party hosting if needed. It’s really that simple,” said Janssen. “The IP solutions that most vendors offer are IP-bolstered SDI hardware which will only benefit customers temporarily. With Aperi’s platform, we’re enabling the industry to completely future-proof itself.”

Aperi, which is US-based, has built its platform on instant reprogrammable FPGA-acceleration technology, which it says is recognized as the best way to deliver software-based virtualization. It’s the same concept used by cloud provides like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure which have rolled out high computational services based on the same technology in their data centres.

Remote video refereeing

Since the International FA Board (IFAB) approved two years of live trials of video technology to aid referees last September, a number of European leagues have stepped forward to put it into action.  These are thought to be in France, Italy and Germany.

It will be a central video referral system again using IP feeds and isolated from the broadcast network. It will scale to accommodate eight matches concurrently, whereby the fifth or perhaps sixth official per game will sit at a central location reviewing multiple angles, including in slo-motion, of select incidents.

According to IFAB, the video officials will only be called on in four defined “game-changing” scenarios: when a goal has been scored, penalty decisions, sendings off, and possible cases of mistaken identity.

The match official will then be free either to take the advice of the video technician or analyse the incident himself via an iPad-type device on the halfway line.

It is likely that each county will go at its own pace rather than introduce video refs in one ‘big bang’.

IPTV Companies Poised to Win the Pay TV Battle

Streaming Media

Launching direct-to-consumer video services is increasingly easy, but gaining a mass audience requires getting access, warns IHS Markit.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Streaming-Forum-IPTV-Comp

Cable IPTV companies are in a better long-term position to capitalize on the convergence of home entertainment and pay TV than are pure direct-to-home (DTH) players. That information came from market research company IHS Markit speaking at today's Streaming Forum conference in London.

“This is a battle for subscribers, but it will be won by those who gain control over access,” said Jonathan Broughton, senior analyst for IHS Markit. “Content is the gateway to that access.”

Where DTH players are largely focused on owning content and selling video, cable IPTV providers own infrastructure and sell access to it rather than making money purely from pay TV.

That means a company like BT should not be underestimated in its bid to topple Sky as the number one video provider in the UK. BT, Broughton suggested, makes more money from gateway access than it does pay TV.

“When we think of disruption we think of Netflix as a business coming at an existing market from a different angle. But, big companies can sometimes do that too. There’s a reason Netflix is not available on Sky, which is a legacy of angry negotiations going on between them, and a reason why Netflix is available on BT. The BT platform largely exists to sell broadband access with some tentpole (mainly sports) titles.”

Even though it is increasingly easy to go direct-to-consumers, pay TV is the gateway to the mainstream for OTT providers, Broughton said.

“It’s where most consumption occurs and where consumers spend most money. If you want to grow your business in the next few years then getting to the main screen in the front room is essential.”

The lines between distribution, operation, and channel are increasingly blurred. 

“A decade ago the market was a whole lot simpler with only two distribution media outside of TV: DVD and cinema. DVD was lucrative, predictable, and had one format," Broughton said.

By contrast, in 2017 consumers have many more options. Cinema is still the first window, but with the number of connected devices multiplied four or five times since 2006, distribution windows are shorter. IHS showed that disc sales (now in multiple formats) still retain the number two slot after cinema in most markets, although sales are declining. 

“In 2006, the PC was the main gateway for connected media," Broughton said. "In 2016, digital media adapters (small STBs or dongles with in-built Wi-Fi and HDMI ports) have taken off. There are over two smartphones in the average household and each household also has a tablet. The STB is only just being connected.”

The analyst predicted that by 2020 the PC and tablet will be “a bit less significant,” smartphone penetration will plateau, and the most significant devices will be digital media adapters and connected STBs.

“By 2020, the variety of distribution options will be a sizeable consideration for developers,” Broughton said. “If you want to reach all of the desirable pay TV subscribers who are consuming most and spending most on home entertainment then you need to be on the STB along with two or three other devices and you will pretty much cover them all.”

Transactional spend has dropped off a cliff, declining from $16 billion to just over $6 billion in a decade. The reasons are apparent: Consumers are increasingly interested in consuming content on-demand, with SVOD revenues ramped up accordingly.

“We see the second screen SVOD market becoming saturated in the next few years,” Broughton said. “That doesn’t mean growth will stop entirely, but to maintain strong growth new audience need to be reached on primary devices not secondary devices.”

One quarter of all viewing in the U.K. is made in a nonlinear fashion, mostly by time-shifted DVRs, the use of which peaked in 2013 at 43 minutes per day in the U.K. Video-on-demand (VOD) options are growing in popularity, now averaging 20 minutes per person per day split 50/50 between long- and short-form video.

“We see a trend led by Facebook and YouTube to move into longer-form media which tends to be more sticky with consumers,” Broughton said.

Cable operators are suffering across Europe (apart from Spain where Telefonica has released an aggressive series of incentives) as a result of “encroachment” due to increased competition rather than cord-cutting.

“In the U.S., competition is more limited and the consumer proposition of less value than in Europe, where triple and quad play bundles are a lot cheaper,” Broughton said.

Nonetheless, nontraditional video companies like Amazon Prime and Netflix are ranking among the top three video providers in each of the major five European countries. In the U.K., for instance, Netflix has knocked Virgin Media from second place, only trailing Sky.

The silver lining for cable companies is the strong performance of broadband sales in almost all Western European markets, bar Ireland.

IHS also shared figures for ultra-high definition (UHD) video penetration in Europe. The area is still small, hovering at around 7 percent of households in the major markets. By the end of the decade, though, IHS expects it to rise to 27.6 percent in Western Europe, still lagging the 40 percent penetration in the U.S at which point “UHD stops being a niche product and becomes a proper premium format.”

However, erroneous marketing claims—such as offering upscaled HD as true UHD—are damaging UHD's reputation with consumers.

“It’s important to protect the consumer perception for the good of the whole industry,” Broughton warned. “Compression in delivery is one aspect, but another is a big loss of detail in VFX-heavy features. Often, these are rendered in 2K so when the file gets out of production it is no longer in the [4K+] resolution it was filmed in.”

BT Brings OTT and Broadcast Together

Streaming Media

The war between over-the-top and broadcast video is over, and both sides won. BT explains the strategy and challenges of creating a multi-screen experience.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Streaming-Forum-Keynote-BT-Brings-OTT-and-Broadcast-Together-116642.aspx

The broadcast and OTT worlds are colliding at pace across the globe, and if any company can be said to be the epitome of this it is U.K. telco BT.

“It is much better to think of OTT and broadcast holistically,” said Dr. Mike Rizzo, head of IPTV Solutions for BT TV and BT Sport, in today's opening keynote address at Streaming Forum 2017 in London.

“This applies at the back-end in terms of sharing technology as much as at the customer presentation level, and results in more cost-efficient overall delivery and much better customer experience.

“OTT and traditional STB are coming together and it doesn’t make sense to see them as two different things,” he said.

Rizzo admitted, though, that OTT—typified by Netflix—had been seen as a threat by BT and other telcos in previous years.

“Here was a company with very low upfront costs, no networks cost, playing the net neutrality card and the real kicker was that if there was a problem with the service it was the ISP and operator who got the blame,” Rizzo said.  “If you are playing in both camps, as BT does, you can’t push the customer back to the network operator because we are the network.”

While there was tension between OTT and broadcast, Rizzo claimed this is no longer the case at BT.

“We realised that adopting an approach which pitted broadcast against OTT was not conducive to the customer experience, so we set about bringing the two together.”

It wasn’t obvious, though, what an OTT service provided by a telco should look like.

BT built its strategy around four tenants:

• Multi network—meaning BT (and, by extension, any telco) should be “network aware” and able to do things differently for the consumer by exerting some control over a third-party network or partnering with an operator
• Multi-screen—which includes looking to deliver to fixed devices like connected TVs and game consoles, as well as mobile devices
• Multi retail—by making certain advanced features available to selected customers (Rizzo pointed out that BT resells Netflix and Netflix is paid through BT’s billing system, so the relationship is between OTT and pay TV is blurring here, too.)
• First and second screen—there should be no differentiation since, as far as a customer is concerned, they only bought on service (“You need an OTT offer that is consistent and seamless with second screen as it is with the STB,” Rizzo said.)

BT put this philosophy into action in the summer of 2013 when it launched the BT Sport app across iOS, Android, and desktop.

The only hiccup, Rizzo admitted, was a failure to correctly forecast the volume of uptake around sports (particularly soccer) events.

“In the run-up to a game we’d see a sudden massive spike of people logging in (via authentication protocol BT ID). While the cloud really worked in terms of scale and elasticity, the on-premises authentication was a bottleneck that gave us grief," Rizzo said. "We addressed this by adding vertical capacity on the premises side but it will be an area we will continue to watch closely as we grow because it may happen again.”

After landing the rights to show a raft of UEFA Champions League and Europa League games for the 2015 season, BT took another leap forward.

“We needed more channels to cover 350 matches a season, 12 of them on certain match days being concurrent.”

BT launched BT Sport Europe (now BT Sport 3), a number of "pop-up" channels, and introduced the world’s first live UHD channel.

Arguably the highlight was a revamped interactive service which was not limited to OTT. Since BT couldn’t cover 12 matches simultaneously over traditional IPTV multicast to a set-top box, it used the OTT player to show all the available games. Working with digital specialists Deltatre, BT enhanced the player with interactive features including a timeline of events, line-ups, tactics, text commentary, and a user-selectable multicam view.

“This was about taking full advantage of direct connectivity with the customer when working in a pure OTT environment," Rizzo said.

BT transitioned the same interactive presentation (minus multi-cam) to customers with a set-top box via the connected Red Button. BT accomplished this with an HTML5 layer running in a browser on top of the broadcast video.

Feedback was positive and showed audiences for UEFA matches rising 45 percent year-on-year between August 2015 and March 2016.

“We learned several key lessons from this work,” Rizzo explained. “Using cloud, we were quickly able to add in the interactive features and launch new channels. We were able to launch confidently because we had already engaged with groups of customers prior to launch in the development process.”

Rizzo emphasized that it pays to take a holistic view of the customer experience.

“We don’t see OTT as one and broadcast as another. We looked at them together including sharing assets like using the same source of data for events for feeding timeline and stats for both applications.”

Rizzo also stressed the importance of user-centric navigation.

“The user doesn’t care about channels—they care about matches. Or, to put it another way, they care about content. The experience should reflect that.”

BT’s approach suggests that OTT technology can be used in broadcast workflows. “Don’t pigeonhole technology,” Rizzo said. “The idea that HTML5 is just an OTT tech is no longer the case.”

The telco is now in the process of extending these platform ideas to its wider TV proposition.

BT has begun rolling out a next-generation customer experience (CX) on STBs (including YouView, the digital terrestrial television (DTT) service it shares with other UK broadcasters including the BBC), to be followed by a TV app in July. The CX is built on a carousel model, surfacing additional rental and electronic sell-through content.

“In the process of building this we continue to apply learnings from sport,” Rizzo explained. “For example, customers have a range of different viewing options, but at the end of the day it’s all content so if you’re going to recommend content it doesn’t matter if it's broadcast or on-demand. The carousel will contain references to programming on live TV as well as on-demand."

The CX is also designed to offer a seamless experience across all devices, with the navigation structure fed to all devices simultaneously including the STB.

The back-end solutions also share resources. They are API-driven which, Rizzo said, helps deliver a consistent experience across devices and lowers operational costs. BT also relies on a common head-end for encoding and packaging for all platforms.

“We are starting to look at multicast and conversion," Rizzo said. "At the moment, pure unicast is OTT-only, but we could deliver more efficiently by converting to ABR at the network edge and unicast from there.

“We don’t have multi-cam on the STB today, but there’s no reason not to do it. We could have PiP with one stream from traditional broadcast and another coming over the net delivered by ABR.”

Like many telcos, BT is starting from a legacy platform which is challenging to evolve and sluggish with experimentation. BT has started moving toward micro-services which, over time, will replace what Rizzo dubbed the legacy “monolith.”

“Embrace cloud where appropriate to be able to spin up an environment at any time and for continuous, agile delivery,” Rizzo urged.

“We’re starting to do more A/B testing showing some customers certain features and seeing how their responses compare with those that don’t get the features.

“It is surprising how much common technology can be reused across the traditional broadcast and OTT world,” Rizzo said. “This includes using HTML5 code across STB and other devices, a common format for content protection based on DASH (with HLS for Apple) and common VOD workflows.”

Other services that gain from convergence include Restart TV and Network PVR (“It makes no sense to operate them as separate services whether it’s carried over OTT or not.”), and social TV (where a live TV clip could be shared on a user’s social media).

Further down the line, the boundaries will blur to be non-existent for concepts like object-based broadcasting where components of the broadcast stream—graphics, audio—would be transmitted separately and turned on or off according to the end-users' screen device or context.

BT is part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 2-IMMERSE project examining object-based broadcasting, and has trialed the concept around statistically-laden motorsport MotoGP.

Rizzo revealed one feature BT is prototyping is the ability to "throw" a stream from a multicast view on a second screen to the main screen. The key challenge here is matching latency so the OTT and broadcast feeds, as well as all metadata about objects, are synchronous.

With the EU about to legislate the ability for customers to "carry" their video subscriptions across boundaries within the European Union, Rizzo said BT was prepared.

“We use Akamai and Limelight CDNs to deliver video so we could easily open up the current geo-restrictions on content rights to the whole of Europe if we need to. The plan is we will do that, but we need to work through the exact legal ruling. We think initially this will only be of benefit to our customers who are resident in the U.K. (and who wish to stream content when in rest of Europe).”

TVPlayer Plans International Expansion

Streaming Media

The online video aggregator is fielding an offer from a European telco while preparing to launch a global SVOD service from a European broadcaster.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Streaming-Forum-TVPlayer-Plans-an-International-Expansion-116661.aspx

Just as YouTube unveils its live OTT service, U.K.-based live video streamer TVPlayer has announced plans to expand internationally.

“We’ve had an offer to partner with a telco in Europe,” co-founder Dan Finch told the Streaming Forum audience in today's keynote address. “We have the platform and content rights, and a telco is the right partner because they already have an existing customer base but may not have a TV platform. For us, an extension of the service is fairly straightforward.”
Finch also revealed that Simplestream—a provider of live streaming and live-to-VOD services, and the parent company from which TVPlayer de-merged last year—is about to launch a global subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service for a “large broadcaster” combining 10 linear channels and a 3,000-hour video-on-demand library.
The TVPlayer platform provides access to 100 live-streamed channels from the U.K.’s major terrestrial broadcasters alongside channels from CNN, Dave, and Quest. It also offers a premium tier of 30-plus channels for £4.99 (U.S. $6.15) per month that includes Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Eurosport, and MTV.
The freemium approach “is the future of TV delivery, as far as we’re concerned,” said Finch, who views it as complementary to SVOD services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.
“We don’t want to aggregate movies and, currently, Netflix or Amazon Prime don’t do live TV,” he said.
Since launching in 2012, TVPlayer has amassed over one million active users, targeting mobile and millennial viewers. Finch described the service as “pay TV, but a skinny one… a mini-pay TV platform.”
Finch did not reveal how many viewers are signed to the premium option, but said about 80 percent of consumers who trial it become paying customers. “Our job is to maintain that conversation rate," Finch said. "Millennial audiences love free content and are not happy to pay for it. On the other hand, content like [MTV reality series] Geordie Shore does resonate with Millennial audiences.”
Earlier this year, TVPlayer signed a three-year deal with content aggregator Frequency to offer 150 on-demand channels including those from BuzzFeed, Machinima, and Ted Talks. The on-demand channels will be added to the service by late March. Another 10 linear channels joined the online platform last month as part of the Frequency deal.
Finch described pitching the idea to broadcasters “as just another platform for broadcasters to carry their channels on,” and the basic business model is a “funnel” for free-to-air (FTA) channels. “The aim is to get as many people into that funnel and then there’s a chance to sign them up as paying customer.”
In actuality, TVPlayer operates a number of business models. Aside from the premium service, some broadcaster channels have ad-sharing arrangements and others pay a carriage fee. It also offers digital ad sales and analytics services.
“We have unique visibility into the viewing habits of the audience for FTA broadcasters,” Finch said.
When U.K. ratings agency Barb reported late last year that The X Factor, Fremantle Media’s show airing on primetime Saturday night ITV, was being heavily beaten by BBC show Strictly Come Dancing (9.6 million versus 8.1 million) “We saw the opposite.” Perhaps because The X Factor attracts a younger audience TVPlayer stats for the same period showed the talent contest with a 44 percent share of viewing against Strictly’s 16 percent.
Later this year, TVPlayer will be incorporated into Project Dovetail, Barb’s attempt to merge digital and linear viewing metrics. “It will mean there’s no reason why any broadcaster would not want to be on our platform.”
TVPlayer is available on web browsers, iOS and Android mobile devices, Samsung connected TVs, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV devices.
The technology stack behind TVPlayer is Media Manager, a modular cloud-based suite of components developed by Simpletream.
Finch, who is Simplestream’s commercial director, explained the original concept: “It was essentially, if Sky can put their channels online, then why can’t anyone?”
When the start-up first approached broadcasters in 2012 the reaction was, “’We don’t have the rights to do online video streaming and if we did we’d do it ourselves or with Sky before going with you,’” Finch said.
Four years on and Simplestream has 35 employees based in Piccadilly and recently secured a £5 million (U.S $6.4 million) investment in TVPlayer, led by A+E Networks.
Among its clients is QVC, for which it manages 130,000 on-demand videos; Box Nation’s OTT offer; and Sony, for whom it launched kids' channels on YouView. Other clients include Discovery, Scripps, and Sky Bet.
As part of the A+E Networks deal Simplestream took the Blaze channel over-the-top last year. “That’s a good example of a FTA channel broadcast which made the brave decision to go completely OTT,” Finch said.  “We worked with them on the whole playout function and to launch across multiple devices.”
As media assets are delivered to the broadcaster’s playout centre, Media Manager uploads a copy each to AWS. “We receive all the programming, not the commercials, so there’s the opportunity to insert ads throughout the whole content. The system is set up so that broadcasters can cherry-pick the elements that are relevant to their business.”
Media Manager is built to handle 4K UHD. Finch promises some channels will launch on TVPlayer soon.
“Over the last five years, OTT services have become part of society,” Finch said. “Brave broadcasters are embracing OTT since it offers a return path of data that traditional DTH [direct-to-home] methods of transmission do not. If you own the customer you can curate content that is more relevant and for the first time in history broadcasters can understand who is watching to help shape their marketing and content acquisition strategy.”