Welcome to High Dynamic Range television

Welcome to High
Dynamic Range television
September 2015
AMC/Sundance Q&A
Cloud playout
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IP production
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Expect More. AMOS Satellites.
Meet us at
More Coverage. More Throughput. More Services.
Across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia.
IBC
September 11-15, 2015
Amsterdam
Hall 1, Booth C.65
Spacecom’s AMOS satellite constellation, consisting of AMOS-2 and AMOS-3 co-located at 4°W,
AMOS-4 at 65°E and AMOS-5 at 17°E provides high-quality broadcast and communications
services across Europe, Africa, Russia, Asia and the Middle East.
With the upcoming launch of AMOS-6, Spacecom is expanding its coverage over
Europe and Africa. The result: greater capacity, high-throughput Ka multibeam
capabilities and affordable end-to-end satellite services. Spacecom. Expect More.
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E X P E C T
M O R E
AMC/Sundance Q&A
Cloud playout
IBC preview
IP production
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Contents
30 Online piracy
A new way of thinking about connected revenue
security
Welcome to High
Dynamic Range television
September 2015
cover.indd 1
19/08/2015 12:33:55
36 Data corner
With the first 4k channels launching in Europe,
an assessment of early services and the future
12 COVER STORY - HDR special
High Dynamic Range really will take TV up a
level but it is not without challenges. Our special
focus also features insight from DTG and DVB
20 Set-top box evolution
STBs are downsizing but not yet down and out
26 Q&A: AMC/Sundance
Bruce Tuchman of AMC Networks/Sundance
Channel on Millennial viewing habits, UHD,
direct-to-consumer OTT and other hot topics
29 Opinion
The economics of online distribution don’t quite
add up yet, argues DVB’s Phil Laven
40 IP production
It has its pros and cons, which broadcasters
would do well to start preparing for
44 Smart home
How is the market evolving and what role can
ZigBee play?
50 Cloud playout
Regular contributors
Adrian Pennington, Philip Hunter,
David Adams, Stephen Cousins,
Anna Tobin
Circulation
Joel Whitefoot
Making some proper inroads but not yet ready
for all aspects of playout functions
Accounts
Marilou Tait, Lynta Kamaray
54 Recommendations/analytics
Editorial
tel +44(0)20 7562 2401
[email protected]
View the results of our survey, highlighting the
value they hold for payTV operators
58 IBC 2015 preview
Some of the highlights worth discovering on the
show floor and the conference tracks
Editor’s report:
The industry loves talking up new technologies, so will High Dynamic Range live up to the
hype? Seeing is believing as they say, and HDR really does have the ‘wow’ factor that will
take television to a higher level. Together with wider colour gamut, HDR is not so much 50
shades of grey as 1,024 shades of colour. Already standardised for UHD Blu-ray, HDR is
now going through a standardisation process in the broadcast industry (via SMPTE,
MPEG, DVB, ATSC, ARIB and ITU-R) for traditional broadcast and IP delivery. Having seen a BBC
demo, the difference in images is extremely noticeable and once the standards are resolved it may well be
the catalyst for accelerating 4k/Ultra HD. But like any new technology there are hurdles, with the DTG
warning about mixed messages to consumers with HDR and UHD. To this end, the group aim to run an
HDR plugfest as soon as possible, while DVB’s David Wood’ urges you to make your mind up about the
would-be standards out there. This and much more in our HDR special from p12 on. Goran Nastic, editor
2015
Commercial
John Woods, Hammad Uddin
Design and production
Matt Mills (Manager)
Jason Tucker
Matleena Lilja-Pelling
A closer look at SVoD customers
10 Analyst corner
Editor
Goran Nastic
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September 2015
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News
Netflix starts its Japan odyssey
Netflix will look to crack the
Japanese market, starting on 2
September with a three-tier structure
and partnership with mobile operator
SoftBank.
The basic plan offers single-stream
standard definition for YEN650
($5.40) plus tax per month; a twostream HD package is a monthly
YEN950 plus tax; and a premium
plan of four-stream 4k ultra-HD,
family plan is ¥1,450 plus tax.
Moreover, SoftBank will
exclusively offer a fully integrated
Netflix experience, including billing.
It may also be involved in local
content. The Netflix Japan service
will roll out with a selection of
Japanese TV series and films, as well
as original content like Marco Polo.
SoftBank users will be able to sign
up for Netflix through different ways,
with Netflix’s monthly fee added to
their bill. The telco will begin preinstalling the Netflix app on its
smartphones for sale after October.
However, nScreen Media analyst
Colin Dixon warns of a ‘long, tough’
for Netflix in the country.
While broadband penetration
stands at over 70% and the Japanese
enjoy watching video on smaller
devices, they are reluctant to pay for
television service, and are happy to
exist on a large diet of traditional free
broadcast TV. Indeed, Tokyo’s FTA
TV networks are set to launch their
own service this October, one of
many to rival Netflix.
“With many SVOD services in
market and more launching in
advance of Netflix arrival, it could be
the company’s longest haul to
meaningful revenue yet. It looks like
it could take a very long time to
build to a meaningful market and
revenue shares,” said Dixon.
Netflix is also reportedly set to
enter the Indian market in 2016.
Meanwhile, its Australian service
has accumulated a market leading
1.6m users in the country, and is
now in 8% of households. It
launched down under in March
since but already has 900,000
paying customers and a further
700,000 who are still on free trials,
according to Citi Research analyst
Justin Diddams.
news in brief
Restart option for Sky Movies
Sky is rolling out its third
software update to its Sky+
platform this year, including
Watch From Start. Reacting to
Web and traditional competitors,
Sky has upped the pace of
development on its Sky+ platform
and is now rolling out software
updates every three to four
months. The latest, Watch From
Start, allows Sky Movies
customers to watch a film from
the start even if they missed the
beginning of the programme. This
is enabled through a click of the
green button which then starts
downloading the film from the on
demand library. Watch from Start
was inspired by some “very
similar” technology that was
popular at Sky Italia, Sky said.
News
news in brief
Telefonica embarks on major
IP transformation project
Alcatel-Lucent will deliver its IP
routing technology as part of
Telefónica’s three-year ‘Fusión
Red IP’ global transformation
project. The project, which is
expected to get underway in the
coming months in Murcia, will
replace older routers within
Telefonica’s network, using IP
routing to perform core routing
and layer two and three edge
routing functions and act as a
broadband network gateway for
the provision of residential
services. The move is due to the
growing consumption of data and
video by the telco’s customers,
with Telefónica now servicing
1.9m payTV users and the
Movistar TV service has been
expanded to included Canal+
services and the introduction of
catch-up TV.
US payTV subs down, but
ARPU up
Total subscribers among US
operators declined at the highest
rate seen so far but at least
revenue per consumer grew.
Strategy Analytics indicates that
the top operators saw subscriber
losses of 479,000. Digital
platforms were not immune from
the decline, as digital TV
subscriptions fell by 62,000. The
subscriber losses in the second
quarter were across all payTV
platforms, including cable,
satellite, and IPTV. While
subscriber numbers have been on
a downward spiral for many
years, ARPU has almost
consistently been on an upward
trajectory. Dish Network’s video
ARPU increased by 2.5% quarterover-quarter and 4.5% over-year.
Similar increases were reported
by DirecTV, Charter, and Time
Warner Cable.
06
September 2015
First losses for Dutch cable as YouSee
reacts to viewing habits transformed by
streaming
The number of cable broadband
connections in The Netherlands fell
during the second quarter of 2015,
its first ever drop, as a result of
telco fibre deployments.
Broadband via cable connections
fell by 0.3%, for the first time since
cable broadband was introduced in
the country, leading to a drop in
cable’s market share to just over
46%, according to the latest
research from Telecompaper.
There were 7.026 million mass
market connections, growing by
0.3% during the quarter, driven by
fibre broadband connections,
which increased by almost 5.5%
during the quarter to more than
12%of the market.
Ziggo, the largest cable operator
in the Netherlands, reported a net
loss of about 11,000 broadband
customers during the second quarter
to end June 2015 with 46.3% of the
broadband market, down by 0.3%.
The cablenet is still the largest
broadband provider.
KPN had a market share of 40.4%,
after gaining 0.3% during the quarter.
The operator added 31,000
broadband customers during the
second quarter, driven by growth in
fibre connections.
• Danish cable operator YouSee,
meanwhile, is expanding its online
TV service, providing it to Basic
package customers. This means they
can watch television on their PC,
mobile handset or tablet, as well as
on their traditional TV set. As seen
by the first story, European cable
operators are trying to adjust to
changing times and many are
bleeding broadband and, especially,
TV customers.
The company said it is no longer
feasible to operate as a traditional
TV provider now that streaming has
transformed viewing habits. As a
result, it claims to be launching
Denmark’s largest entertainment
universe, offering all its new TV
customers who have broadband with
access to some 1,400 ‘C More’ films.
There is also the option for them to
bolt on HBO Nordic free for the first
three months.
YouSee said viewers aged three to
12 years old watch 25% less linear
TV than they did in 2013. It added
that mobile devices accounted for
60% of YouSee’s on-demand viewing
in June 2015.
Es’hailSat to open teleport in Doha
Qatar satellite company hands
contract for a new teleport in Doha
that will handle a whole range of
services.
A dedicated 50,000 m2 site
north of Doha has been chosen as
the location for the facility, which
will provide satellite control and
communications support and
capacity management. It will also
offer a wide range of teleport
services such as uplink, downlink,
contribution, multiplexing,
encoding, playout and
broadcasting, tailored for business
partners.
The high-tech teleport, to be
built by Promer Qatar Contracting
Company, will also provide back-up
studios for TV channels and serve
as a disaster-recovery facility for
broadcasters. The site will be
connected with the key media
www.csimagazine.com
broadcasters in Qatar by means of a
redundant, dedicated fibre optic link.
Design for the new teleport is
expected to be ready by Q1 2016 and
the site build and project completed
by Q1 2017.
Es’hailSat currently broadcasts
premium content for news and sports
channels such as Al Jazeera and
beIN SPORTS. It has Es’hail 1 and
Es’hail 2 satellites scheduled for
launch in Q4 2016.
E
E
FR
TRAPPED
CONTENT
Memorable moments are fleeting for viewers —
until you deliver them time after time. Then
they become the foundation of enduring
audience loyalty.
The reality is somewhat less romantic when it
comes to distributing your content – distributors
simply want what they believe will generate the
most revenue. But this doesn’t mean the content
they pass on has no value.
When you work with Piksel you can free this
trapped content from the constraints of the
traditional television model. Our cloud platform
gives you consistent, broadcast-grade availability
and the freedom to monetize all of your content
via new online channels that you control.
You also never have to worry about quality
degradation—Piksel’s global support team
ensure your assets are always available,
adding continuous value to your brand.
Talk to us at IBC 15. Stand 14.C34.
PIKSEL.COM
STRATEGIC SERVICES | PROFESSIONAL SERVICES | ONLINE VIDEO TECHNOLOGIES | MANAGED SERVICES
News
news in brief
Virgin Media in outdoor and
in-home WiFi offensive
Virgin Media is planning to
install WiFi hotspots in its streetside cabinets for outdoor internet
and also introduce shared
HomeSpot services. The cable
operator, part of Liberty Global,
will provide subscribers with
internet access outside the home
at no extra charge. As part of a
major WiFi expansion, it will also
open up home routers for sharing
bandwidth, allowing customers to
use each other’s wireless
networks when they are in range.
Other Liberty units including
Ziggo and Telentr already do this,
boasting millions of so-called
HomeSpots.
GSMA: Demand for broadcasting capacity
overestimated in MEA
The mobile industry association
has called for UHF spectrum in
the Arab States to be co-allocated
for broadcast TV and mobile, as
the region is set for some of the
strongest mobile data traffic
growth globally.
In a new report, the GSM
Association finds that terrestrial
digital TV broadcasting in the
Arab States does not need an
exclusive allocation of the UHF
spectrum band (470-694MHz),
and that a significant amount
could also be used for mobile
broadband, “unlocking socioeconomic benefits”.
The report calls on Arab
Spectrum Management Group
Turner looks to cloud with
iStreamPlanet investment
Turner Broadcasting System has
acquired a majority stake in
iStreamPlanet, which delivers
large-scale, live event streaming,
TV Everywhere network
simulcasts and OTT
multiplatform solutions. Turner
said it will leverage the
technology to deliver its OTT
programming, shift its core
technology infrastructure to the
cloud and develop new products
and services for existing and new
businesses.
Inmarsat-5 F3 launch set
Inmarsat has confirmed its third
Global Xpress satellite will
launch at the end of this month,
giving it full global coverage. The
Inmarsat-5 F3 (I-5 F3) will cover
the Pacific Ocean Region and
will, together with Inmarsat-5 F1
and Inmarsat-5 F2, create the
“world’s first globally available,
high-speed mobile broadband
service, delivered through a single
provider”, the UK company said.
08
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
(ASMG) countries to agree on a
co-primary allocation for broadcast
and mobile in the UHF spectrum
band at the ITU World
Radiocommunication Conference
(WRC-15) in November 2015. The
20th ASMG regional preparatory
meeting for WRC-15, meanwhile, will
take place in Rabat, Morocco, 22-27
August 2015.
GSMA argues a joint position
among the ASMG member states
in favour of a co-primary allocation
in the UHF spectrum for broadcast
and mobile at WRC-15 (World
Radio Communication conference)
would foster the option to roll
out low-cost mobile broadband
services in the future, especially
in underserved areas.
If action is not taken now, it will
make it more difficult for regulators
to release additional spectrum from
the UHF band for mobile until as
late as 2030 or beyond, it said.
Furthermore, the report finds that
demand for broadcasting capacity in
the region has been overestimated in
previous policy decisions.
Viewership of terrestrial television
in many Arab countries is low, with
consumers choosing to watch
television over satellite, cable and,
increasingly, IPTV. According to the
study, all UHF spectrum above
582MHz may potentially be released
for other services, including mobile
broadband, while still supporting all
current and projected terrestrial TV
requirements in the region.
The study indicates that the
number of multiplexes needed to
carry the existing number of
television channels varies between
one and four, and it is likely that
three multiplexes would be able to
accommodate all countries, with two
multiplexes sufficient to
accommodate at least 13 of
the 18 countries in the region,
supporting the release of
spectrum from broadcasting.
“Efficient placement of terrestrial
broadcasting in the UHF band would
free spectrum across the Arab States
even if all existing TV channels
continue to be broadcast over digital
terrestrial television. This would not
only allow television broadcasting
more than a sufficient allocation of
the spectrum resource, but would
also free up spectrum to allow
mobile broadband to grow and
thrive,” said John Giusti, Deputy
Chief Regulatory Officer, GSMA.
To access the report, visit http://
www.gsma.com/spectrum/terrestrialbroadcasting-and-spectrum-use-in-thearab-states
News
PayTV moving towards software coding
A survey of US and European
operators and their key suppliers
shows the pay TV industry grappling
with and embracing the best-practices
of Web companies. Among others,
this is resulting in more frequent
software release cycles.
PayTV at Webs speeds is an
increasingly common phrase in
the television industry and results
from a survey by Dublin-based S3
Group reveal companies moving
towards more nimble, softwareoriented operations, including
DevOps, Agile, and Continuous
Deployment. This trend is pushing
operators to realign their software
lifecycle tools and organisational
structure to balance the need for
speed and stability.”
“Unlike yesteryear, pay TV
providers’ reliability and innovation
is no longer driven by the physical
plant, but rather by software code,”
said John Maguire, Chief Strategy
Officer, TV Technology of S3 Group.
“Video service providers are striving
to shorten innovation cycles, test and
launch services faster, and make
updates more frequently.”
Some key findings of the TV
Platforms 2015 Report:
• 41% of respondents ranked
service availability (ensuring services
are properly configured and stable
for end users) as their top priority,
32% rated speed as the top priority,
and 27% cited efficiency as their
top priority;
• 50% are deploying multiscreen
TV software releases more frequently
in 2015, than during the same period
in 2014;
• Of those deploying software
more frequently, 46% are increasing
their number of software releases by
more than 20% compared to 2014,
39% are increasing output between
11-20%, and 15% are increasing
output by 10% or less;
• 78% cited automated testing
as having contributed to accelerating
software development timelines,
63% cited the move to agile
development practices, 35% cited
automated deployment, 35% cited
version control, and 21% cited
configuration management;
• Older waterfall methodology
still represents 32% of the
methodology, whereas agile
represents 18%, hybrid 43%, and
7% is continuous development.
•Historically, pay TV video
service providers’ software release
cycles ranged from one to four
releases annually. However, in
2014, 26% made more than one
release per month on average –
ranging from 13 to more than 50
releases annually. An additional
30% of operators made between
five to 12 releases annually.
•25% said a software change or
new feature can be deployed in less
than one week, once it has been
tested and approved, but 67%
said it could take up to a month
or more.
• When asked to rank the
key challenges to pay TV
software release cycle times,
the volume of requirements
and the quality (clarity) of the
requirements were noted as the
two toughest obstacles.
•End-device playback and headend playout issues ranked as the
top impediments to QoE (Quality
of Experience) at 24% each,
network distribution issues ranked
19%, and in-home network issues
ranked 14%.
TV advertising set to grow to $224bn
TV advertising revenue growth is
expected to continue through to 2020,
meanwhile, despite long
term fears of cannibalisation,
says new research.
The $174 billion generated by TV
advertising in 2014 is expected to
increase to $224 billion in 2020,
testifying to the medium’s enduring
strength at a time when it is being
challenged on multiple fronts,
according to Ovum.
Regionally, the Middle East &
Africa will grow strongest at a CAGR
of 10.4% to reach revenues of $11
billion by the end of the decade.
Latin America will generate revenues
of $26 billion in 2020.
But even in mature markets will
witness some growth: North America
at 2.4% to reach $80 billion revenues,
Western Europe up 2.7% to $34
billion, Asia Pacific up 5.8% to $66
billion, and Eastern Europe up 2.7%
to $8 billion.
Ovum believes that the next five
years are crucial in determining the
future of the broadcast TV
advertising value chain as digital
media, online viewing and pay TV
continue to evolve and intertwine.
The research firm reckons that
TV’s reputation as the go-to
medium for delivering mass
audience awareness will continue
throughout the forecast period,
despite the determination of
digital media to cannibalize TV
advertising budgets.
news in brief
HDR point of view
Without a standard, it is very
hard for the production,
broadcast and hardware
companies to ensure
compatibility across the entire
chain from lens to screen,
according to Futuresource. The
analyst firm said the lack of
standardisation of HDR leaves
the potential for a rapidly growing
installed base of 4K sets to miss
out in the future on the
advantages of forthcoming HDR
content. HDR is present in only
the premium 4K sets currently on
the market. The industry is
working to ensure that such sets
should at least be able to render
such content in 4K resolution,
even if without the benefit of
HDR. Whilst HDR could also be
introduced into HD sets,
Futuresource anticipates that
vendors will restrict its use to 4K
sets, leaving HD sets as a much
cheaper, but clearly lower-end,
alternative, adds Futuresource.
Gesture sensing control UIs
With emerging virtual reality
games, smartwatches and other
applications entering the market,
shipments of gesture sensing
control user interfaces are poised
to grow 10% year over year, to
reach 1.8 billion units in 2015.
Gesture sensing control will fill
an industry need gap, according
to IHS, and will be
complementary to touch-screen
technology, depending on
specific applications.
March 2016 for BBC3 online
BBC Three is moving fully online
on 1 March 2016. Before then,
there will be increased online
activity around the release of new
content. There will also be dual
running of the linear channel and
the BBC Three website.
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
9
Analyst corner
Ultra HD TV: the beginning
of a long term play
The ownership of UHD TVs is
now growing rapidly. By the end of
2015 we expect more than 40
million UHD TVs to have been
sold worldwide. After the Chinese
market took an early lead we are
now seeing sales pick up strongly
in both North America and
Europe. 4% of US homes will own
a UHD TV by the end of this year,
and that will rise to 45% by 2020. The equivalent
figures in Western Europe are 2% and 36%.
Consumer awareness of UHD is also growing.
At the beginning of 2015, our survey of 6,000 US
and European consumers found that nearly two
thirds were aware of the term “Ultra HD”. What
is most encouraging is that consumer feedback is
very positive: nearly half of those who have seen
UHD or 4K content are extremely impressed, and
most of the rest are somewhat impressed. These
are very high ratings for any new technology.
Apart from broadcasters and TV
manufacturers, UHD and 4K are also receiving
support from OTT players like Netflix and
Amazon, who were in fact among the first
providers of 4K programming. While their actual
4K audience figures are likely to be quite low,
these competitors have provided an important
stimulus to early market awareness of 4K as well
as seeding the ecosystem around production and
distribution of 4K content.
In spite of all this activity, these are still early
days for UHD. While the big boys prepare their
launch plans, we may continue to see service
introductions from players who are less familiar
in the television world. As an example,
Vodafone’s Portuguese TV service has recently
introduced the FunBox 4K Ultra HD channel to
customers of its fibre IPTV Net Voz service.
All in all, ultra HD is likely to remain a
premium offer for some time, and most operators
will be offering a mix of HD and UHD services
for many years to come.
With the first 4k channels launching in Europe, David
Mercer assesses early services and technology future
A
ugust 2nd 2015 saw the
launch of Europe’s first
major ultra HD TV
service. The source was
perhaps unexpected:
BT’s IPTV platform,
rather than one of the
leading pay TV operators like Sky or Canal Plus. It
also featured a live sports event rather than prerecorded movie or TV content, which might have
been a more obvious choice and a less substantial
investment. BT certainly made waves by choosing
high profile English football on which to base its
pioneering role in the next generation of TV
technology. Its new BT Sport Ultra HD service will
initially broadcast weekly football games as well as
other events such as Moto GP.
According to BT’s own customer forums the
first UHD broadcast had mixed results. Some
viewers expressed strong satisfaction with the
picture quality, but others had difficulties
verifying the compatibility of their 4K TV with
BT’s UHD service. Other discussions concerned
the required bandwidth: there seemed be a variety
of messages coming from BT regarding the
required minimum broadband speed, with some
customers claiming they had been able to receive
UHD with 33Mbps, while others were refused
even if they had 40Mbps or more. Unfortunately
at the same time as a tiny number of customers
were enjoying the new UHD channel, many
customers of the regular BT Sports service were
unable to watch the game because of a server
outage lasting four or five hours.
In spite of these teething problems, BT has set
a benchmark which other broadcasters will
eventually have to match or exceed. BT’s service
broadcasts sports in 50fps, but is currently lacking
in other UHD enhancements such as high
dynamic range and a wider colour gamut. These
will no doubt be added in due course, although
BT, as well as other UHD broadcasters, will be
treading carefully to ensure that more advanced
broadcasts remain compatible with as many as
possible of the 4K TVs which have been sold
to date.
David Mercer is VP, Principal
Analyst Digital Consumer
Practice, at Strategy Analytics
10 September 2015
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HDR special
D
o you remember those innocent
days, a decade or so ago, when
everyone was excited about
HD? One problem that afflicts
the video technology industry
(and the technology industry in
general) is its susceptibility to
hype. If, ten years ago, someone had upgraded
from an ageing CRT TV to a decent flat screen HD
model, they would certainly have noticed the
difference. However, if they had paid a lot of money
to upgrade to a 4k TV at some point during the
last six months, they might – depending on how
and when they watched the TV and the services
they were able to receive through it – have been a
little underwhelmed. Just 4k is better than HD, but
it’s not that much better.
So consumers are bound to be a little bit
cautious about any hype they see over the next
few years around 4k/UHD. But if it incorporates
High Dynamic Range (HDR), well, here is a
technology that really could live up to at least
some of the hype.
HDR increases luminosity. It is largely a
function of contrast: with Standard Dynamic
Range (SDR) TV pictures there are choices to be
made about the level of detail the viewer will see
in dark tones or in lighter areas. With HDR you
can have both, providing a greater level of detail
and a broader range of brightness. The cameras
used to create HDR content are capable of 15 or
more ‘stops’ – light-gathering settings – compared
to around seven in most TV cameras today.
Colours and brightness
and contrast, oh my!
High Dynamic Range promises a greater level
of detail in both dark tones and lighter areas, as
well as a broader range of brightness. Combined
with wider colour gamut, it will take TV to a higher
level. Dave Adams and Goran Nastic report
12
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
It’s all about the ‘nits’
While the average TV today has a brightness
range of around 100 candela per square metre
(known as nits), HDR displays could offer 1,000
nits, 1,500 nits or more. That’s still far less bright
than some things you might see in real life, but
the increased luminosity will still mean a far more
realistic picture. The difference is immediately
apparent when looking at images of water, or of
clouds, for example. There are also some obvious
ways in which HDR could enhance specific types
of programming like sports: it means you can
actually see a flying golf ball against the sky; or
watch a football match in a stadium half in and
half out of bright sunlight without experiencing
that clunky moment when the camera has to jump
through five or six stops as the play moves in or
out of light or shade.
HDR can be combined with a wider colour
HDR special
gamut, which dramatically increases the range of
visible colours. HDTV is based on an 8-bit
system, meaning there are up to 256 shades of
each colour available (in theory – in practice
around 220, for historical technical reasons). But
with HDR, a 10-bit system allows an increase in
the colour gamut to 1,024 shades of each colour.
Combine increased luminosity and richer colour
with the greater resolution 4k can provide and
you should have a damn good UHD picture.
The 4EVER-2 project, which brings together
nine French industrial and academic research
partners, including public broadcaster France
Télévisions and Orange, aims to demonstrate the
benefits of introducing HDR, High Frame Rate
(HFR) and Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) as the
basis of a ‘High Fidelity’ TV picture. This would
form part of what DVB Project defines as UHD
‘Phase 2’.
Nearly 70 per cent of UHD TVs will support
new technologies like high dynamic range, wider
colour gamut, high frame rates, and immersive
audio by 2020, according to ABI Research. ABI
said resolution might be the easiest element to
communicate to consumers but the enhancements
will provide the most compelling case to seek
higher-end devices and pay for premium content
above and beyond full HD.
Moving along, in chaotic fashion
But there are a few challenges to overcome before
this becomes a mass market proposition. The
industry is moving towards the next generation of
display technology in a characteristically chaotic
fashion. Some TV and CE manufacturers are
“The worry there
is what do the
advertisers do? If
they want to create
an impact they may
put a really bright
advert in front of
the viewer.” Sky
Image courtesy of Dolby Vision
moving quickly. So are some OTT service
providers, because they can use proprietary
technology to stream UHD/4k/HDR content to
anyone with a TV capable of displaying it. In
June, Amazon started using HDR for original
content on its Prime Instant Video service.
Netflix is rolling HDR video too.
Operators and broadcasters are trying to work
out how to upgrade networks and consumer
equipment; and find the necessary bandwidth and
network capacity to enable HDR services. They
also need to ensure backwards compatibility with
existing technologies within their networks and
consumers’ homes – ideally without having to
implement a dual-layer system, which would
effectively entail sending all the data twice.
Ultimately, their prospects of being able to roll
out services that all their subscribers can actually
watch depend upon the development of technical
standards. Without these, content owners and
anyone else encoding video would need to
support multiple standards to allow HDR-capable
content to be played on the many, many different
types of CE devices in use.
Technology vendors are trying to influence the
development of industry-wide definitions and
standards. Sean McCarthy, engineering fellow at
Arris, says his company’s priority is to ensure that
HDR is delivered within UHD. “HDR should be
part of the larger UHD story,” he says. “What
we’re trying to do with UHD is not make
incremental improvements on HD, but instead to
help TV get to the next stage. HDR, if done right,
can be very compelling.”
Ericsson likes to use the term ‘HDR plus’ to
describe the combination of HDR, wide colour
gamut and 10-bit signalling it believes is needed,
according to Matthew Goldman, senior vice-
president for TV compression technology.
Goldman also points out that the HDR
technologies his company is working with would
not add a great deal to bandwidth requirements
for broadcasters and operators: between zero and
20 per cent, quite possibly towards the lower end
of that range. He also emphasises the extent to
which a single layer HDR solution can be used to
improve picture quality for viewers who don’t have
4k or UHD.
Technicolor also has a new HDR single layer
solution, which is compatible with MPEG and
HEVC standards, offers more efficient
compression; and is backwards-compatible with
SDR displays. It allows broadcasters, pay TV
operators or OTT players to encode and deliver
HDR content in a single stream, playable on
HDR TVs and older TVs. Technicolor has also
demonstrated a UHD High Frame Rate HDR set
top box, the 4Kp60.
“We are at one of those tipping points,” claims
Mark Turner, vice-president, partnership relations
and business development, at Technicolor. “All
the top TV manufacturers have got at least their
flagship top of the range products for HDR.
Momentum is coming from OTT companies: if
you have the Samsung TV in the US and you
watch Amazon you can get HDR right now.
“HDR also gets creatives excited, because it
gives them a lot more colour and nuance to play
with,” he continues. “That’s part of the reason
why we’re seeing a lot of shows being created
more quickly with HDR than you saw when 4k
first came along.”
Content owners are starting to remaster older
content for HDR-compatible UHD Blu-Ray.
“UHD Blu-Ray should be launching this fall; the
studios know we’re talking about something that
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
13
is good enough to be worth buying again,” says
Turner. Warner Bros has announced that a
number of its movies will be remastered with
HDR in 2015, then available for streaming to TVs
compatible with Dolby HDR technology.
A question of standards, and metadata
But any mainstream TV industry shift towards
HDR will be delayed as technical standards are
agreed. Arris is one of the companies working
with the MPEG community to settle differences
between technologies developing in this area.
“How you create that HDR data chain is a
question that’s going to get a lot more attention,”
says Sean McCarthy, engineering fellow at Arris.
“It’s not as interesting as the pretty colours and
stuff, but it is important.”
The SMPTE will publish a Study Group report
on the current state of the HDR ecosystem for
content mastering and broadcast shortly. It has
already published two HDR standards related to
content mastering: ST-2084, for the Electrical
Optical Transfer Function (EOTF); and ST-2086,
to define static metadata. SMPTE is now working
on a standard for dynamic metadata needed to
support SDR and HDR content at the same time.
There is also significant work on standardised
technology underway by the ITU; by broadcasters
including the BBC and Japanese broadcaster
NHK; and by Dolby, which is working most
closely with the Hollywood studios. The UHD
Alliance is also working on its definition of UHD,
which will include HDR requirements.
The BBC and NHK are working to merge their
HDR technology proposals into a joint proposal
to put before the ITU. The BBC has created its
own HDR production system, the Hybrid Log
Gamma. Andrew Cotton, principal technologist,
BBC Research and Development, says the
organisation started working in this area about
two years ago. It has had to work within certain
constraints: any new system needed to be
compatible with existing SDR infrastructure,
would need to create only minimal disruption on
existing workflows and operational practices; and
would need to be metadata-free (as this can create
problems when working with two pieces of
content from different sources). The BBC will
need to overcome network capacity and spectrum
availability issues, likely to affect most other
broadcasters, but in addition, because it is a
public service broadcaster, it seeks to offer
improvements to all its license payers.
CSI has seen a demonstration of the BBC
system and it is impressive: in brightness, richness
of colour and contrast leaves the SDR versions of
the same content looking dark and bland. The
system is actually capable of using a remarkable
17 stops, meaning, as Tim Borer, lead engineer,
BBC Research and Development, puts it: “There’s
plenty of headroom there to allow technology to
improve. It is a long term technology”. Borer and
Cotton have, incidentally, been awarded the
IBC2015 Conference Prize for their paper,
‘A display independent high dynamic range
television system’.
Image courtesy of Dolby Vision
14
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
20 Century Fox SDR v HDR. Image courtesy of Ateme
HDR special
Strategic hurdles
The key problem for broadcasters to overcome,
says William Cooper, founder and chief executive
of the consultancy informitv, is getting 10-bit
signals to consumers. With production equipment
working in 10-bits, he says, there is more precision
to represent tones and colours, but this is
generally reduced to 8-bits for transmission. “Of
course, a lot of consumer equipment is still only
designed for 8-bit signals,” he adds. “But there is
more that could be done in production to
preserve image quality and deliver improved
pictures to viewers with existing receivers.”
Broadcasters face significant practical and
financial challenges if they want to roll out HDRenabled services, says Peter White, CEO and
co-founder, Rethink Technology Research. Cable
operators may find it particularly difficult,
expensive and time-consuming to make the
necessary changes, he suggests. He also highlights
the backlog in demand for satellite capacity; and
the challenges telcos face in enabling the most
bandwidth-hungry UHD services through
expensive network upgrades.
Compression will also be an issue. As Thierry
Fautier, VP Video Strategy at Harmonic, explains,
there are multiple ways to transmit HDR: in a
non-compatible way to legacy TV sets, as
proposed by SMPTE 2084 (mandatory for UHD
Blu-ray); with a base layer that is compatible with
legacy TV sets, as proposed by Dolby Vision; with
a single layer compatible with legacy TV sets
HDR special
Image courtesy of Dolby Vision
through the addition of an external decoder
device, as proposed by several companies in the
MPEG Fast Track initiative; and with a hybrid log
gamma scheme that is natively compatible with
legacy TV sets, as proposed by BBC.
Under all of these approaches, the encoder will
receive metadata from the HDR grading units and
will have to carry it to the decoder. “As long as
the signalling is standard, UHD live or file-based
encoding is possible for all options, although a
single layer is preferred from a complexity and
workflow perspective,” says Fautier.
While the basic compressed stream for most
HDR standards will be similar, there will be many
differences, according to Mark Horchler,
marketing manager EMEA, at Elemental.
Horchler notes the actual metadata being used,
the way metadata is transferred into and out of an
encoder has yet to be standardised and some
pieces of the workflow and data transfer will
remain proprietary, meaning that some
modification of the video stream will be needed
and also that multiple different formats will need
to be supported. This will be difficult for
(especially hardware-based) encoders which are
inflexible, argues Horchler.
End-to-end thinking
“Development efforts to various HDR standards
will be challenging and supporting multiple HDR
standards could force delays along the entire
content chain, impeding progress from content
providers to consumers until things coalesce,”
adds Horchler.
Ericsson, in fact, has argued that end-to-end
thinking is needed across the whole value chain,
concerned that the HDR ecosystem is not fully
understood and that current trials don’t take the
entire chain into account. However, things are
expected to progress over the next couple of years.
“In 2017, 2018, we believe you will be able to
deliver an end to end service,” says Goldman.
“We need to work together as an industry in order
to achieve those dates. But we also really need to
change the consumer’s perspective, so that they
know UHD means more than 4k.”
White agrees: “HDR is being seen by many TV
manufacturers as something that they will
introduce after 4k,” claims White. “That’s the
wrong approach, but the TV manufacturers hold a
lot of sway. In the US, manufacturers are selling
‘4k’ devices that are not UHD. The fight to
differentiate among those players is pushing ‘4k’
rather than UHD, in the same way that they tried
to push 3D when no-one was ready for it.
“So you’ve got 4k in the US but no increase in
Sky cautions on HDR in UHD
The pan-European broadcaster has warned
that the advent of high dynamic range in ultra
HD broadcasts will have an impact on adverts
and programmes that needs to be considered
now and that it may have to be approached in
a similar way to audio loudness.
According to Chris Johns, Sky’s chief
engineer, while HDR stands to deliver better
quality the danger is that screens become so
bright as to ruin the consumer experience.
“The worry there is what do the advertisers
do? If they want to create an impact they may
put a really bright advert in front of the
viewer. Human visual response means your
eyes shut down, and you shouldn’t expect very
bright search lights to shine into your eyes for
long periods of time,” said Johns.
The limited number of TV sets available
also means that testing what the brightness
levels should be is at a very early stage and
Johns argued that standards in this space
could mirror that of audio loudness to prevent
large contrasts with colour in the same way
that audio has a habit of fluctuating with
adverts in particular.
“In the way we do loudness for audio in ads
we may have to look at trying to define a
similar theme for brightness within adverts or
even programmes as well to make sure it’s not
peak level but it’s the average level,” he said.
Johns stressed that much more work is
needed on this front and pointed to
discussions taking place in the EBU and
working groups within the DVB.
the amount of frames or in the colour gamut.
That’s all back to front and everybody knows it,
but nobody seems to be able to do anything about
it,” White adds.
Will the consumers go for HDR? “The problem
is, it’s hard to explain this stuff,” says Turner at
Technicolor. “But when people see HDR there’s
no doubt that they like it. At a retail level, we
think these things will sell themselves and create
competition among the CE companies to do
better. If you have an HDR display in the middle
of a bank of non-HDR TVs all the ones around
it will look dull and flat. As an industry we can
work out how we’re going to tell this end to
end story.”
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
15
HDR special
Better and brighter pixels
with brightness levels of displays
varying from 400 NITs to over
1,000 NITs and giving dramatically
different experiences for the viewer.
Currently, the clearest
proposition is the BDA, with Ultra
HD Blu-rays reportedly launching
before the end of the year. The
HDMI specification was updated
to 2.0a, to deliver the metadata to
the displays to enable SMPTE 2084 presentation.
This suggests that if the display supports HDMI
2.0a, it should decode and display HDR content
correctly. However, the message to consumers is
far from clear. On top of this, the uncertainty
about a different broadcast standard which
may or may not be able to be represented on
these displays.
After 4k, High Dynamic Range (HDR) looks set to be the
next step on the road to truly Ultra HD, but the standards
are far from being highly defined, says Simon Gauntlett
F
or a long time now, people
have said Ultra HD is not just
about more pixels, but better,
brighter and faster pixels.
High Dynamic Range (HDR)
is the current hot favourite to
deliver these “better and
brighter pixels”.
It promises to deliver brighter images, while
maintaining the details in the deep blacks, so that
a camera placed near a window on a sunny day
will see details both inside and outside the room,
instead of dark shadows or a block of bright light.
It also introduces extra levels of detail into both
day- and night-time scenes that add realism.
This allows us to move on from a system
designed and restricted by the Cathode Ray Tube
(CRT) and utilise the capabilities that cameras
and displays have had for several years.
It sounds simple: HDR capability can
increasingly be found in cameras and displays so
all we need is a standard to deliver content from
one end to the other. As is so often the case, the
S-word is where it becomes more challenging.
Dolby has been the most vocal for a number of
years on this issue and has helped deliver the
SMPTE 2084 standard, implemented in its own
Dolby Vision system. This SMPTE standard has
been adopted by the Blu-ray Disc Association and
there are a number of optional variants included
in the specification.
However, prominent broadcasters NHK and
BBC have expressed concerns that this standard
is not ideal for the workflow of live television or
where a single broadcast version needs to deliver
acceptable quality on both HDR and Standard
Dynamic Range (SDR) displays, minimising the
additional bandwidth. This is a different challenge
to on-demand content or packaged media, where
different versions can be created to optimise the
quality for both SDR and HDR, and selected for
playback appropriately.
NHK and BBC have created the BBC/NHK
Hybrid Log-Gamma HDR solution to try and
solve this issue (see page xx for more on this). It
is one of a number of options being considered by
the ITU for standardisation, but even then it then
needs to be implemented into televisions.
Which brings us around to the consumer
messaging: TVs are already being marketed as
supporting HDR, but which standards are they
supporting? How ‘High’ is the dynamic range,
The Sony X94C 4k HDR TV
HDR plugfests
The DTG UK UHD Forum has been discussing
this and other UHD topics since September 2013.
We have a Retailer Information Taskgroup
which is looking at clarifying messages to retailers
and ultimately consumers. The DTG 4k/UHD
Plugfests continue to reveal what happens when
you actually plug content and displays together,
and we plan to run an HDR plugfest as soon as
feasible with early displays and content encoded
with different standards.
Our 4k display, HDMI and HDCP plugfests
have already delivered valuable information to
DTG members on the state of the Ultra HD
marketplace ahead of the launch of BT’s Ultra
HD channel this summer, with other platforms
expected to follow. The DTG is also home to the
UK’s first Ultra HD testing zoo, hosting a range
of 4k products currently on the market.
Simon Gauntlett is the
chief technology officer
at the DTG. There is more
on this at www.dtg.org.uk and
if you’re interested in getting
involved, please contact Simon Gauntlett at
[email protected]
16
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
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HDR special
Colour grading bay with Technicolor content
It is likely that you will be shown side-by-side
screens of images with and without HDR. Your
eyes will light up with glee because you can
clearly see the difference. But remember that, in
the home, there will be no side-by-side
comparison, so try to judge the image quality on
its absolute merits.
A look inside the ‘transfer function’
The story of HDR, at least for the author, goes
back to the final agreement being reached on the
ITU UHDTV Recommendation BT.2020 in 2012.
In the finalisation process, prompted by Dolby,
the United States asked for a note to be added
Casting a light on high dynamic range
As the industry tries to decide on a common HDR standard,
the DVB’s David Wood encourages you to compare candidate
HDR systems and outlines a technology roadmap
I
saying, in summary, that
in future we could add a
new ‘transfer function’, if
everyone agrees to it, to
take account of the fact
n a past age, I was tasked to introduce new
technology to an esteemed group of
looking through.
This feature is thought to be particularly
that TV sets will
increasingly have higher screen brightnesses.
A step further on, HDR is now potentially a
Directors General. The Chair of the group
always began: “We need to see it working –
it doesn’t help you just telling us about it”.
valuable for UHDTV, though there are some who
believe it can be used for HDTV as well. One of
the main strengths of HDR-TV is that the effects
separate recommendation to UHDTV, but which
can be coupled with it.
Many are the companies who have studied
Then followed the two regular questions:
“By how much would it increase our
audience size?” And then: “How much would it
are visible close-to or far-from the TV screen. The
value of the additional spatial resolution of
UHDTV decreases the further the viewer is from
HDR-TV systems by now, and many are the
meetings that have been held. You can find HDRTV discussions in the ITU-R, ITU-T/MPEG,
all cost?”
the TV set. At four times the screen height (4H)
SMPTE, and beyond.
To understand what High Dynamic Range
(HDR) is worth, and what it will do, you do need
to see it in action. Take every opportunity you can
to do so. Our industry is in the throes of trying to
decide on the best technical parameter values for
an HDR system for broadcasting. It is a tough
task and, at the time of writing, the result is not
easily predictable.
As an introduction, we use the term High
Dynamic Range (acronym now usually HDR-TV)
to describe processing systems in production and
display that can make better use of the higher TV
screen brightness that will come with future sets.
The idea is to try to arrange the displayed image
so that we can see more detail in dark areas of the
image and light highlights are brighter, sharper
and clearer. Some call this more ‘sparkle’. The
pictures appear to have more detail. For me, it is
as if someone has cleaned the window I am
or more from the screen, the resolution of a
UHDTV image does not look much different to
the resolution of an HDTV image. By adding
HDR we give the UHDTV image more ‘oomph’
when viewers sit at the kinds of screen distance
they prefer – say 4-5H. In short, UHDTV
becomes more saleable when HDR is added. This
is why the search is pursued so energetically.
Some also argue that if applied to HDTV it would
lift HDTV image quality to be difficult to
distinguish from UHDTV.
You will find a number of versions of HDR
from different proponents. Take them all in.
Ask difficult questions. Remember that, as is
often the case with TV image processing systems,
the effect of the system on image quality will
depend, to a degree, on the type of scene content
you are watching. Different types of scenes have
different ‘criticalities’.
The ‘transfer functions’ in question are the
curves of either the relationship (equation)
between the light going into the camera and the
volts coming out of the camera (this is technically
18
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
“MPEG are hoping
to agree a standard
and to do so by
autumn 2016. If so,
it may be possible
for a system to be in
use in 2017.”
HDR special
called the Opto Electronic Transfer Function or
OETF) or the relationship (equation) between the
volts going into the display and the light coming
out (The Electro Optical Transfer Function or
EOTF). These equations need to be built into
equipment that captures and displays images.
If the normal peak TV screen brightness rises
from, say, about 200 candela/sq metre to, say,
2,000 candelas/sq metre in five years’ time, the
pictures produced today may still be watchable,
but the transfer curve used to make the
programme today will not do justice to the new
TV sets. To achieve that we will need to match
better the range from blackest black to whitest
white of the new TV screen – that is, we will need
to increase the contrast range, and change the
shape of the curve. The job then is to find the
best way to do so. As a note, sets and systems that
cater for TV sets with today’s screen brightness
are termed Standard Dynamic Range (SDR).
You may ask if, for a high brightness display,
we could just make the SDR image sit up in
But there is a school of thought that, though
possible, such a system could be difficult to
manage in practice, and this is one of the main
differences of opinion in current debate.
Several organisations have suggested that a
simpler system is needed. The basic idea here is
to choose a transfer function curve that goes
some way toward being a PQ curve, but retains at
least partly the shape of an SDR curve. In this
way, the transfer characteristic becomes ‘fit and
forget’. It can be used by either SDR or HDR sets.
This is called a ‘Log Gamma’ curve. Its
proponents argue that it will be easier in practice
to use than a PQ curve plus metadata, particularly
in the ‘thick’ of a live programme. On the other
hand, the PQ proponents argue that it would be
entirely manageable to use in programme
production.
A third group of companies believe that what
the world needs is both approaches, with the log
gamma being the system to use for live
programmes, and the PQ system being used for
brightness until it reaches the peak brightness of
the new TV screen – this would be possible but
the results would not be as good as they could be.
We could also use a process of ‘tone mapping’ to
spread out the SDR range to HDR, but once
again the result would not be optimal.
The transfer curves are implemented by
digitally quantized signals. Our eye/visual cortex
is not equally sensitive to changes in light levels in
the range from black to white. The ‘best’ solution
(where screens are of similar brightness) would be
a transfer curve for which the ‘noticeable
differences’ in image luminance per quantization
step are uniform to our eyes throughout the range
of quantized steps from black to white. This
non-real time production. It has to be said that
the PQ and Log Gamma proponents believe their
system is the only one you would ever need. Clear
enough?
Some months ago, the MPEG/ITU-T group
that developed the HEVC compression system
called for results about the benefits of HDR-TV
systems. Independent quality evaluations were
made of half a dozen different systems. There
were differences in quality between the systems –
but overall they encouraged the belief that such
systems can bring substantial benefits. HEVC
10-bit encoding of the PQ and Log gamma signals
is possible in principle already, but it may be
possible to improve the quality somewhat. MPEG
of the OOTF (the opto-optical transfer function).
This is the ‘light-to-light’ scene-to-home transfer
function. It is the concatenation of the OETF and
the EOTF. Could it be possible for the world to
agree on a single OOTF, and within this, allow
different application cases? Listen for more
discussion about a common OOTF.
To a degree, all the systems have the ‘same
destination’. By analogy, everyone agrees that they
want to travel by road from Brussels to Geneva,
but some think it’s better to go via Basel and
some via Dijon.
The prize of international agreement on an
HDR system could be considerable for many
parts of the industry. Now it’s your turn to look
would mean we were using the luminance signal
as efficiently as we can. This is termed a
are hoping to agree a standard and to do so by
autumn 2016. If so, it may be possible for a
into the candidates in more detail, understand
how they work and what the implications and
‘perceptual quantizer’ (or PQ).
system to be in use in 2017. One thing we don’t
know yet is whether the MPEG/ITU-T work will
costs of using them could be. There is a bit more.
When you look into the candidate systems you’ll
PQ vs Log Gamma curves
But, as with most things in life, there are practical
result in a unique standard or in multiple systems
as a ‘tool kit’.
find other differences between them, such as the
maximum luminance of the TV set anticipated, or
constraints. Whatever transfer curve is used for
programme making, it will be necessary to have
an image for broadcast that can also be seen
reasonably well on a SDR screen. This can be
achieved with a PQ system by converting the PQ
HDR curve to a ‘compatible SDR curve plus
metadata’, which tells the high brightness display
how to reconstruct the HDR curve from the
compatible SDR curve it receives. The metadata
can be different for each image frame if needed.
The ITU-R hoped to have a Recommendation
on HDR by now, but this has not proved possible.
The system proponents are (as yet) unwilling to
give up or modify their candidate systems, and
some are unwilling to accept a recommendation
that includes more than one (their) option.
the transfer function being arranged in one or
two layers - but don’t get disheartened. Good
hunting - and keep watching for DVB
developments.
Single OOTF: The final destination?
But one new point of discussion in the ITU-R that
may make agreement more possible is the concept
David Wood
Chair, DVB-UHDTV
Commercial Module
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
19
HDR special
Colour grading bay with Technicolor content
It is likely that you will be shown side-by-side
screens of images with and without HDR. Your
eyes will light up with glee because you can
clearly see the difference. But remember that, in
the home, there will be no side-by-side
comparison, so try to judge the image quality on
its absolute merits.
A look inside the ‘transfer function’
The story of HDR, at least for the author, goes
back to the final agreement being reached on the
ITU UHDTV Recommendation BT.2020 in 2012.
In the finalisation process, prompted by Dolby,
the United States asked for a note to be added
Casting a light on high dynamic range
saying, in summary, that
in future we could add a
new ‘transfer function’, if
everyone agrees to it, to
take account of the fact
that TV sets will
increasingly have higher screen brightnesses.
A step further on, HDR is now potentially a
separate recommendation to UHDTV, but which
can be coupled with it.
Many are the companies who have studied
HDR-TV systems by now, and many are the
meetings that have been held. You can find HDRTV discussions in the ITU-R, ITU-T/MPEG,
SMPTE, and beyond.
The ‘transfer functions’ in question are the
curves of either the relationship (equation)
between the light going into the camera and the
volts coming out of the camera (this is technically
As the industry tries to decide on a common HDR standard,
the EBU’s David Wood encourages you to compare candidate
HDR systems and outlines a technology roadmap
I
n a past age, I was tasked to introduce new
technology to an esteemed group of
Directors General. The Chair of the group
always began: “We need to see it working –
it doesn’t help you just telling us about it”.
Then followed the two regular questions:
“By how much would it increase our
audience size?” And then: “How much would it
all cost?”
To understand what High Dynamic Range
(HDR) is worth, and what it will do, you do need
to see it in action. Take every opportunity you can
to do so. Our industry is in the throes of trying to
decide on the best technical parameter values for
an HDR system for broadcasting. It is a tough
task and, at the time of writing, the result is not
easily predictable.
As an introduction, we use the term High
Dynamic Range (acronym now usually HDR-TV)
to describe processing systems in production and
display that can make better use of the higher TV
screen brightness that will come with future sets.
The idea is to try to arrange the displayed image
so that we can see more detail in dark areas of the
image and light highlights are brighter, sharper
and clearer. Some call this more ‘sparkle’. The
pictures appear to have more detail. For me, it is
as if someone has cleaned the window I am
18
September 2015
looking through.
This feature is thought to be particularly
valuable for UHDTV, though there are some who
believe it can be used for HDTV as well. One of
the main strengths of HDR-TV is that the effects
are visible close-to or far-from the TV screen. The
value of the additional spatial resolution of
UHDTV decreases the further the viewer is from
the TV set. At four times the screen height (4H)
or more from the screen, the resolution of a
UHDTV image does not look much different to
the resolution of an HDTV image. By adding
HDR we give the UHDTV image more ‘oomph’
when viewers sit at the kinds of screen distance
they prefer – say 4-5H. In short, UHDTV
becomes more saleable when HDR is added. This
is why the search is pursued so energetically.
Some also argue that if applied to HDTV it would
lift HDTV image quality to be difficult to
distinguish from UHDTV.
You will find a number of versions of HDR
from different proponents. Take them all in.
Ask difficult questions. Remember that, as is
often the case with TV image processing systems,
the effect of the system on image quality will
depend, to a degree, on the type of scene content
you are watching. Different types of scenes have
different ‘criticalities’.
www.csimagazine.com
“MPEG are hoping
to agree a standard
and to do so by
autumn 2016. If so,
it may be possible
for a system to be in
use in 2017.”
HDR special
called the Opto Electronic Transfer Function or
OETF) or the relationship (equation) between the
volts going into the display and the light coming
out (The Electro Optical Transfer Function or
EOTF). These equations need to be built into
equipment that captures and displays images.
If the normal peak TV screen brightness rises
from, say, about 200 candela/sq metre to, say,
2,000 candelas/sq metre in five years’ time, the
pictures produced today may still be watchable,
but the transfer curve used to make the
programme today will not do justice to the new
TV sets. To achieve that we will need to match
better the range from blackest black to whitest
white of the new TV screen – that is, we will need
to increase the contrast range, and change the
shape of the curve. The job then is to find the
best way to do so. As a note, sets and systems that
cater for TV sets with today’s screen brightness
are termed Standard Dynamic Range (SDR).
You may ask if, for a high brightness display,
we could just make the SDR image sit up in
brightness until it reaches the peak brightness of
the new TV screen – this would be possible but
the results would not be as good as they could be.
We could also use a process of ‘tone mapping’ to
spread out the SDR range to HDR, but once
again the result would not be optimal.
The transfer curves are implemented by
digitally quantized signals. Our eye/visual cortex
is not equally sensitive to changes in light levels in
the range from black to white. The ‘best’ solution
(where screens are of similar brightness) would be
a transfer curve for which the ‘noticeable
differences’ in image luminance per quantization
step are uniform to our eyes throughout the range
of quantized steps from black to white. This
would mean we were using the luminance signal
as efficiently as we can. This is termed a
‘perceptual quantizer’ (or PQ).
PQ vs Log Gamma curves
But, as with most things in life, there are practical
constraints. Whatever transfer curve is used for
programme making, it will be necessary to have
an image for broadcast that can also be seen
reasonably well on a SDR screen. This can be
achieved with a PQ system by converting the PQ
HDR curve to a ‘compatible SDR curve plus
metadata’, which tells the high brightness display
how to reconstruct the HDR curve from the
compatible SDR curve it receives. The metadata
can be different for each image frame if needed.
But there is a school of thought that, though
possible, such a system could be difficult to
manage in practice, and this is one of the main
differences of opinion in current debate.
Several organisations have suggested that a
simpler system is needed. The basic idea here is
to choose a transfer function curve that goes
some way toward being a PQ curve, but retains at
least partly the shape of an SDR curve. In this
way, the transfer characteristic becomes ‘fit and
forget’. It can be used by either SDR or HDR sets.
This is called a ‘Log Gamma’ curve. Its
proponents argue that it will be easier in practice
to use than a PQ curve plus metadata, particularly
in the ‘thick’ of a live programme. On the other
hand, the PQ proponents argue that it would be
entirely manageable to use in programme
production.
A third group of companies believe that what
the world needs is both approaches, with the log
gamma being the system to use for live
programmes, and the PQ system being used for
non-real time production. It has to be said that
the PQ and Log Gamma proponents believe their
system is the only one you would ever need. Clear
enough?
Some months ago, the MPEG/ITU-T group
that developed the HEVC compression system
called for results about the benefits of HDR-TV
systems. Independent quality evaluations were
made of half a dozen different systems. There
were differences in quality between the systems –
but overall they encouraged the belief that such
systems can bring substantial benefits. HEVC
10-bit encoding of the PQ and Log gamma signals
is possible in principle already, but it may be
possible to improve the quality somewhat. MPEG
are hoping to agree a standard and to do so by
autumn 2016. If so, it may be possible for a
system to be in use in 2017. One thing we don’t
know yet is whether the MPEG/ITU-T work will
result in a unique standard or in multiple systems
as a ‘tool kit’.
The ITU-R hoped to have a Recommendation
on HDR by now, but this has not proved possible.
The system proponents are (as yet) unwilling to
give up or modify their candidate systems, and
some are unwilling to accept a recommendation
that includes more than one (their) option.
Single OOTF: The final destination?
But one new point of discussion in the ITU-R that
may make agreement more possible is the concept
of the OOTF (the opto-optical transfer function).
This is the ‘light-to-light’ scene-to-home transfer
function. It is the concatenation of the OETF and
the EOTF. Could it be possible for the world to
agree on a single OOTF, and within this, allow
different application cases? Listen for more
discussion about a common OOTF.
To a degree, all the systems have the ‘same
destination’. By analogy, everyone agrees that they
want to travel by road from Brussels to Geneva,
but some think it’s better to go via Basel and
some via Dijon.
The prize of international agreement on an
HDR system could be considerable for many
parts of the industry. Now it’s your turn to look
into the candidates in more detail, understand
how they work and what the implications and
costs of using them could be. There is a bit more.
When you look into the candidate systems you’ll
find other differences between them, such as the
maximum luminance of the TV set anticipated, or
the transfer function being arranged in one or
two layers - but don’t get disheartened. Good
hunting - and keep watching for DVB
developments.
David Wood
Deputy Director, EBU
Technology and Development
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
19
www.csimagazine.com
Focus sponsored by:
STBs blend into the cloud
STB evolution
T
hese are bitter sweet times
for the set top box (STB)
industry. On the one hand
the golden age associated
with the fat home DVR has
gone but at the same time
attempts by some cloud
technology vendors and even Telcos to reduce
the box to little more than a broadband router
have clearly failed for now. There was much
fanfare a year or two ago over Deutsche Telekom’s
virtual STB initiative with the aim of taking both
DVR and UI functions into the cloud for its IPTV
Entertain service but that appears to have been
postponed for now.
But while the UI may remain on the box, other
functions are being shed to the cloud, most
notably storage and in future more are likely to
follow, although opinions differ over the extent
and pace of change. There is broad agreement
that industry trends such as faster and more
ubiquitous broadband, virtualization capabilities
enabling use of commodity hardware and of
course demand for multiscreen delivery both in
and outside the home, all encourage devolution of
functions involved with video access or delivery.
But naturally for vendors, perspectives are shaded
by their strategies and technology portfolios, with
those specialising in cloud or online delivery such
as Seattle based Comcast subsidiary thePlatform
taking the hard line.
“The efficient economics, as well as the
flexibility to address new business requirements,
make a cloud-based pay TV system a much better
proposition than packing this functionality into a
set-top box,” said Marty Roberts, co-CEO of
thePlatform. “The processing power of the cloud
make guide management, search and discovery,
22
September 2015
Set tops downsized but
not yet out
Philip Hunter predicts a golden autumn ahead for
set tops
and conditional access and viewing entitlements a
“no brainer” to move to the cloud.”
Roberts concedes that presenting the guide,
decrypting the video stream, and rendering the
video stream will continue to be handled by the
in-home device. Some of the more ambitious
projects like Deutsche Telekom’s intended also to
move the UI to the cloud. But the reality for many
IPTV and OTT operators in areas where
broadband speeds are still too low or variable is
that they will continue for some time to rely on
hybrid set tops to enable premium channels to be
delivered over a traditional broadcast medium,
such as cable, satellite or more often digital
terrestrial. It is only when super-fast broadband is
widely available throughout at least the leading
markets that set tops will face a further period of
decline, according to Peter Cox, marketing
director of multiscreen IPTV platform provider
Perception TV.
“Hybrid will continue to be strong where the
broadband capacity is not capable of supporting
primary viewing,” said Cox. “The Telco market
likes to own its customers and control the viewing
experience, which is why they have preferred this
medium to date. It also locks in a subscriber with
technology that needs to be subsidised, installed
and managed so the ROI for the operator is also
extended. But once network PVR and Connected
TV are fully established, this will be the catalyst
for wholesale change.”
When this happens Cox sees it as inevitable
that content storage and conditional access will
migrate to the cloud. However this migration may
not proceed quite as originally anticipated in the
case of storage because of the copyright issues
surrounding network based personal recordings of
premium content and also the continuing rise of
time shifted viewing, according to Jack Wetherill,
Senior Market Analyst at Futuresource
Consulting.
But either way the STB is likely to become
slimmer.
www.csimagazine.com
“The need for consumers to record
programmes is clearly being undermined by the
availability of catch-up services so the requirement
for an integrated hard disk drive is the most
obvious feature that is under scrutiny, not least
because of the potential cost savings,” said
Wetherill. “Copyright issues though make this a
tricky area if operators want consumers to be able
to make recordings in the cloud.”
Apart from copyright, concerns over privacy
may also act as a counter weight retaining at least
some storage in the home.
“There’s no doubt the set-top box is evolving
into becoming more of a media server acting as
the home hub for distributing live and recorded
content to a range of devices around the home.
The ability to access recorded content from a
hard drive or via the cloud is naturally a key
function of the device. But there are a number of
issues to resolve particularly around content rights
with cloud-based recording, which suggests PVRenabled home gateways will remain a key element
in the many operators’ offerings,” says Donald
McGarva, Amino CEO.
This is also something French broadband and
pay TV software vendor SoftAtHome has been
betting on with its NAS (Network Attached
Storage) feature for its CloudAtHome platform.
As the name suggests this combines the home
network with the cloud, the argument being that
some consumers will want to keep personal or
sensitive content at home while using the cloud to
record off the TV service in a hybrid
arrangement.
SoftAtHome’s angle on the STB is that it will
increasingly be implemented on commodity
hardware but with continuing innovation of the
software for service differentiation to enable
operators to compete in the broader digital home
incorporating the Internet of Things. But
according to John, Maguire, Chief Strategy
Officer at S3 Group, an Irish provider of pay TV
software and services, home gateway functions
STB evolution
will remain distinct from those associated with
the traditional STB.
“I think we need to differentiate between the
role of the Home Gateway and that of the set
top,” said Maguire. “Although in some
deployments these functions are combined for the
primary landing point into the home as we saw
with for example Liberty Global’s Horizon
solution, there are still two very different
functions involved. We see Home Gateways
continuing to play a vital role as the initial landing
point for services into and out of the home. But
with the rise in consumption of content outside
the home and efficiencies in cloud transcoding
and just-in-time packaging, we don’t believe that
transcoding of content in the home gateway will
become a common capability. However content
caching, conditional access to DRM bridging and
home-wide capabilities like home automation and
home security are features that we do expect to
see more often in gateways.”
This means STBs will continue to shrink,
Maguire reckoned, but will survive in a stripped
down form such as the dongle. “We don’t see
HDMI dongles as a threat to STBs but rather as
the next generation implementations of a STB,”
Maguire continued. “It is the natural continuation
of a trend towards smaller STBs that has been
on-going for some time and is simply accelerated
through greater system integration of features on
the client side and migration of increasing
amounts of functionality to the cloud.”
Amino’s McGarva agrees: “We are seeing the
growth in HDMI dongles as a solution –
particularly for “second TVs” in the early phase.
But there are a number of hurdles to overcome in
terms of form factor, high quality wireless
connectivity and power management that perhaps
explains their limited traction as an operator class
device.”
The trend towards more cloud delivery
associated with smaller lower margin STB
products in the home has dictated some of the
recent mergers and acquisitions among the major
players. Cisco with its growing focus on software
decided to exit the STB hardware market by
selling its business to Technicolor for $600
million, almost a decade after it entered with high
hopes by paying over 10 times more, $6.9 billion,
for Scientific Atlanta. It is true that Cisco retains
remnants of that original acquisition but the
Technicolor sale still represents a significant
write-down, reflecting the shrinking margins in
the STB business. Only the largest players can still
succeed on economies of scale but even they have
been hedging their bets, with Arris for example
acquiring cloud TV company Active Video.
Other players such as Cambridge, UK, based
IPTV platform vendor Amino TV have been
spreading their wings by expanding into cloud and
hybrid products through acquisition. Firstly in
May 2015 Amino announced it had acquired
Booxmedia, a Finish cloud TV platform provider,
enabling the company to expand into OTT and
multiscreen TV. Then in August 2015 Amino
completed the acquisition of Entone, based in
California, to gain a position in hybrid TV and
connected home products. These complementary
moves enable Amino to play both in its traditional
IPTV arena and in hybrid, as well as TV
Everywhere services for pay TV operators in all
categories.
Amino see growing importance in cloud
delivery, particularly in terms of “TV everywhere”
deployments.
“It’s the key driver behind our recent
acquisition of cloud TV platform provider
Booxmedia who bring a raft of new skills to our
business in terms of creating new solutions that
meet operator demands for high quality
entertainment that works seamlessly across
multiple devices both in and outside the home,”
says McGarva. “Essentially, we see “the cloud” as
complementary to the in-home device rather than
a replacement and certainly that’s the feedback
we receive from operators when shaping their
future pay-TV strategies.”
Going forward, Amino sees a growing
opportunity in IoT – specifically around enabling
IPTV devices to offer wider home monitoring and
control functionality. “Our Home Reach solution
uses a simple USB dongle that can be retro-fitted
by the consumer to existing installed set-top boxes
and offer the operator a new value added service
almost immediately. With cameras, movement
and door sensors – and a tablet and smartphone
app - consumers can self-install and operators
move quickly to deploy services with long term
recurring revenues.
The move also confirms that the set-top box
market has a future beyond commodity hardware
in the surrounding software for media distribution
both in the home and to connected devices
outside.
Source: Irdeto
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
23
Q&A: AMC/ Sundance
Q &A
Don’t fear the changing times
Goran Nastic speaks to Bruce Tuchman, president of AMC Global
and Sundance Channel Global, about how to stay relevant in a rapidly
transforming media industry, and the role of technology in meeting the
changing needs of audiences
Bruce Tuchman
thousands of films alone are submitted to the
Sundance festival for competition. Then you look
at major studio theatrical releases and there’s
usually no more than 100 a year, so it’s a huge
wealth of material that is not otherwise getting
exposed in many countries and where the
channels are dominated by Hollywood.
So it’s an incredible amount of compelling
content that really fits the modern younger
viewers who want to see something a little
different and are too media savvy to watch the
same formulaic content. That’s what we’re doing
with Sundance: finding great independent films,
creating high quality channels and complementing
it with original first-run TV productions that fit
the ‘slow burn’ indie criteria. As the media
landscape becomes more sophisticated and
continues to change we’ll grow even more.
Goran Nastic: To begin with, I gather
Sundance is in the process of further
expansion internationally?
Bruce Tuchman: Several years ago we didn’t have
an international presence and Sundance blazed
the trail. There’s so many things going on I want
to bring everyone back to where we started and
how well we’re doing with it. The channel
Sundance is now in around 80 countries and
it’s really fitting a niche that people are really
enjoying around the world.
Sundance and independent films are
synonymous; there is no other brand that has that
association and equity. We have a network and
resources to go to all film festivals, talk to indie
producers and acquire things worldwide. The
proposition we’re bringing to consumers is this
idea of independence. It’s amazing, typically
26 September 2015
Does this sophistication create new, unique
challenges?
The essence of the consumer experience is we’re
here to provide the customer what they want and
to understand how to create programming to
appeal to them so they want more. That’s the
whole essence of entertainment and being in this
business. You have to care about what the viewer
wants and we’re fanatically concerned about that
and it comes through in the success of our shows.
It’s about understanding the consumer and getting
more of them to watch.
Is this how the new Fear the Walking Dead
‘side-quel’ or companion series was born?
The Walking Dead is an enormous phenomenon
and there’s such a groundswell for knowing more
about the story and going earlier in the story. The
interest is obvious. It’s a creative process and way
of executing television that has I think hit a real
cultural nerve so we’re trying to satisfy that desire
www.csimagazine.com
to see more.
Television’s changed a lot over the last several
years. We at AMC were not doing dramas ten
years ago, but now we are and the way people are
consuming is changing by the minute. You have to
remember, the old model was people were doing
26 shows a year of a given series. Our series are
high quality, with fewer episodes so there is more
room on that basis alone for another companion
series. But there is more room regardless of
episodes because this is a popular concept thanks
to our producers and creative executives.
I gather it is set for a simultaneous release
globally?
Virtually everywhere - everywhere around the
world we have an AMC channel we will debut
Fear the Walking Dead at the same exact time it
is on in the US. If that time happens not to be a
primetime viewing slot, it will then show again the
next night in primetime. We want to make sure
it’s available to everyone at that moment
depending on how they want to consume, whether
live or DVR. Technology now allows us to bring
to literally 120+ countries programming at the
same time all over the world when it comes out.
It’s a really exciting thing to us.
“Every platform
creates awareness and
buzz and a new
audience that have
‘caught the virus’ if
you will.”
Q&A: AMC/ Sundance
Do you think this is also a good way of
helping overcome new forms of streaming
and online piracy?
There’s no place in our minds for pirates to
siphon off the value chain. We work very closely
with our payTV partners all over the world, and
want them to get it right away as soon as we have
it, before pirates or anyone else gets it. In this
way, it will help to reduce that and we’ll do
everything we can working with our partners to
try to really curb this endemic piracy you see in a
lot of places.
And how do you respond to the shift towards
on-demand and bingeing forms of viewing?
I think it’s probably the most important factor
that has created the global opportunity for us.
That advance in technology has changed the game
and allowed for so many quality series out there.
Binge viewing requires everyone to up their game.
The level of sophistication and talent and
expertise that has to come into producing a series
that will be watched by someone at their leisure,
having conversations at the watercooler at work
or critiquing on social media, this has forced
people to either up their game or just struggle in
their business.
We are lucky to be the beneficiary of these
trends and we see enormous viewership continue
even after first live premiere. Every platform
creates awareness and buzz and a new audience
that have caught the virus if you will. We count
on these trends as things that have fuelled our
value, especially in the last five to seven years.
There is growing belief that the linear model
will disappear ten or so years from now.
How do you see it?
I don’t think the model goes away. There’s very
rare instance of any forms of media going away.
There’s always the concern when new forms of
media emerge, like the impact of TV on movie
theatres. There will be linear but obviously it’s
shifting but the most prominent characteristic is
time shifted viewing off of linear, then you have
over the top technologies that are eroding the
clarity when you have one or two gatekeepers only
who can bring material into the home. Those
dynamics will reshape the experience but won’t
destroy it and I think we’re all learning to shift
and shape with it so I think things will be
gradually transformed but I don’t see linear
ending and I don’t see linear ending especially
when you have event programming like ours.
People want to see it the minute it comes out.
Buchman on…
Binge viewing:
“Binge viewing requires everyone to
up their game.”
Technology:
“Technology now allows us to bring
to literally 120+ countries
programming at the same time all
over the world when it comes out.”
Future of linear:
“Whatever the mutating forms of
transmission or distribution are,
we’ll all have to figure it out.”
Ultra HD:
“The technical quality requires the
story quality to grow exponentially.”
That underpins the huge value of linear, as does
live sports. It’s not the kind of things you want to
wait to binge. Although being able to record and
watch later has really helped our linear channels.
The premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, a
companion series to the hit Walking Dead
zombie drama, aired on August 23
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
27
Q&A: AMC/ Sundance
Q &A
there’s no question about that, but we’re in the
right place. We could probably be in no better
place than any content producer right now.
Do you think about 2nd screening at all or
place emphasis on that to cater for younger
audiences?
We have a lot of that, for example a story sync
app that is a live 2nd screen companion to a lot of
our series but I have to say there’s no gimmickry
or trickery around our creative process because if
you do that it just comes off that way. We’re here
to do great stories and what flows from that
naturally may be different from Walking Dead or
Mad Men but what’s in common is ‘don’t be
simple, be genuine’ - follow a great story and
empower a great story teller. Success follows that
and audiences cling to that and stay with you
wherever you take them and vice versa.
New martial arts drana Into the Badlands is
scheduled to air on AMC in November
There is also a fear that Millennial
viewers will grow up differently to
pervious generations and end up always
being ‘cord-nevers’ who don’t take up a
payTV subscription. Is this something that
worries you?
Like a lot of people, we spend a lot of time
thinking about that and anticipating what that
could mean. As it develops it may mean trouble
for some and not others. Our brands, our content
were like Elvis coming into Comic-Con, although
that’s probably the wrong metaphor for a show
attended by young Millenials who are absolutely
crazy about our stuff.
Whatever the mutating forms of transmission
or distribution are we’ll all have to figure it out,
28 September 2015
Will ultra HD help you tell better stories or
are the costs too prohibitive for what could
be another gimmick?
I’ve seen ultra HD displays, they’re beautiful. It
isn’t yet a significant format in terms of number
of hours of content that’s on TV but you get to a
point of quality and that is a point of departure.
Because if you think about a show like Mad Men
the exquisite details that so many people talk
about how beautifully everything is rendered, that
may not have been possible in an SD world. There
was a time in the analogue world where all you
“Things will be
gradually transformed
but I don’t see linear
ending. Being able to
record and watch later
has really helped our
linear channels.”
www.csimagazine.com
No direct-to-consumer plans for
Sundance
“We’ve done things like that with other
brands and gone direct-to-consumer, it’s an
interesting space. But we also have incredibly
supportive payTV distributors and partners in
our markets and tend to work with them. We
do TVE and VoD types of experiences with
them and try to embrace all the new
technologies that’s within their hands and
they are developing and deploying.
At this point, we don’t want to have to
choose any one means and sometimes if
you’re not careful you make that mistake.
We’re trying to embrace all the technologies
while keeping the economics of the business
and those who have invested in building
infrastructure and it’s working well for us.
We don’t have a major OTT play singularly
with Sundance with any market. We’ll see
how markets develop but I’m happy with the
client base we have and they’re all geared to
adapting to changes in the business.”
needed was cardboard set, which won’t cut it in
HD. Not only has the technical quality grown
exponentially but the technical quality requires
the story quality to grow exponentially because
you can see person’s face, you can see great
editing techniques, plush surroundings …
everything has to step up to that level. Technology
has really driven quality of programming, both
from a visual standpoint to this substantive point
of the story and what’s in it. So I don’t doubt that
quality innovations of the future will again
encourage us to continue to up our game and
meet those challenges, whether it’s 4k or
whatever. The cycle is endless.
It sounds like you don’t miss the simple days
of television…
Everyone likes simplicity. It’s easy to come to
work and not have problems or challenges, but
we’re thriving in this environment. For us, these
are good times.
Opinion
The economics of online distribution
Philip Laven of the DVB argues that broadcasters need to
find a better balance in costs of running and distributing
streaming services as online viewing continues to grow
I
n the analogue era, most broadcasters
spent less than 10% of their income on
analogue TV transmission networks.
Although it is true that digital TV
transmission is much cheaper than
analogue TV transmission, the introduction
of digital TV services actually increased the
costs for broadcasters. This is because they had to
pay for two networks (analogue and digital)
operating in parallel throughout the simulcast
period. Of course, cost savings were achieved when
the analogue TV services were eventually
withdrawn. However, many broadcasters used the
opportunity to launch new digital TV services –
even so their total delivery costs today are probably
no more than in the analogue era.
Over the last few years, more and more
broadcasters have made their TV and radio
content available via the Internet. In addition to
streaming of live content, broadcasters also offer
“SVT’s online services
deliver about 3% of
the viewing at a cost
of 15% of their total
distribution bill.”
on-demand or “catch-up” services. Interestingly,
about 90% of online viewing time is spent
watching catch-up TV, compared with only about
10% of the time watching live TV.
Although these services were initially designed
for computers, they are now also consumed on a
wide range of devices including smart-phones,
tablets, games machines and connected TVs. A
few years ago, people seemed content to watch
postage-stamp size video clips on their computer
displays, but consumer expectations of picture
quality are now changing dramatically because
viewers want to watch on-demand TV on their
tablets or, indeed, on their large-screen TVs.
This growing demand presents a completely
new problem for broadcasters. Broadcast services
are “one-to-many” services in which the costs of
transmission are not dependent on the number of
viewers. The success of broadcasting has been
based on the fact that the high cost of broadcast
delivery (and programme production) is shared
amongst millions of consumers. Economists call
this a public good because the marginal cost of
extra viewers is zero. On the other hand, the
economics of “one-to-one” services such as online
TV distribution are completely different: the cost
of delivery is proportional to the number of
viewers.
We are so used to the notion that “the Internet
is free” that most people do not understand why
delivering TV via the Internet can be very
expensive for broadcasters. In reality, broadcasters
have to operate “server farms”
sending separate streams of
data to each individual device.
Even worse, broadcasters have
to tailor these streams to the
requirements of the particular device that are you
using. Consequently, broadcasters need to support
hundreds of variants of device types and operating
systems. This burden of providing these “bespoke”
services is likely to grow substantially in the next
few years.
In addition to the capital and operating costs
of such servers, broadcasters typically have to pay
licence fees for the streaming software (usually
charged on the maximum number of simultaneous
users). Of course, broadcasters could pay Content
Delivery Networks (CDNs) to perform all of
these tasks, but the overall result is the same:
when the audience for catch-up TV is small, the
delivery costs are small – but the delivery costs
become huge when there are millions of users!
Very few broadcasters release information
about the usage of their online services, but the
BBC is a notable exception. Each month, the
BBC publishes detailed statistics about the use of
its iPlayer radio and TV services. Despite this
commendable openness, it is not easy to find
information about the BBC’s costs of running the
iPlayer service. However, a report prepared for the
BBC Trust in 2013 indicated that the iPlayer
delivered about 2% of BBC’s TV viewing but cost
about 12% of the BBC’s total distribution bill. The
Swedish broadcaster SVT has released similar
figures: their online services deliver about 3% of
the viewing at a cost of 15% of their total
distribution bill.
This striking imbalance in costs is likely to
become a big problem for broadcasters because
online viewing is certain to increase and, as noted
above, the online distribution costs are
proportional to the amount of online viewing.
Broadcasters know fairly accurately how much
they will have to pay for their broadcast
distribution networks over the next 5 years, but
they do not know how much they will have to
spend on online distribution.
It seems to me that broadcasters are destined
to spend more and more money on distribution.
Regrettably, this means that broadcasters will
have less money to spend on content creation
(which is their primary purpose).
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
29
SECURING
THE CONNECTED FUTURE
The world of video is becoming more connected. And nextgeneration video service providers are delivering new connected
services based on software and IP technologies.
Now imagine a globally interconnected revenue security platform. A cloudbased engine that can optimize system performance, proactively
detect threats and decrease operational costs.
Discover how Verimatrix is defining the future of pay-TV revenue security.
www.verimatrix.com/verspective
Visit us at IBC 2015
RAI Amsterdam • Booth # 4.A59
www.csimagazine.com
Focus sponsored by:
Tackling new forms of piracy
Fighting piracy
The never-ending battle
New live streaming apps and a host of other avenues are
creating new piracy headaches for the industry, discovers
David Adams
T
here are two fundamental
problems that face the TV
and entertainment industries
as they try to tackle content
piracy. First, in the internet
age, piracy is relatively, easy,
cost-effective and ultimately
profitable, compared to the cost and effort entailed
in piracy in years gone by. Second, it’s just too
tempting for consumers. An awful lot of people
are prepared to break the law to watch content
without paying for it.
Perhaps the most spectacular example was seen
when the fifth season of Game of Thrones
reached its finale at the start of June. Some 1.5
million illegal downloads were made across the
globe in the first eight hours after a pirated copy
of the episode became available. Earlier in the
year, before the fifth season began, there had been
a surge in illegal downloads of the show, with
around 116,000 per day during the three months
leading up to the start of the fifth season in April
2015, according to Irdeto.
Irdeto has also produced an international
league table for all illegal downloads in the first
two quarters of 2015, which shows a top three of
Spain (just over 21 million, with a monthly
average of just over 3.5 million), Brazil (just over
20 million) and France (on 14.9 million, just
ahead of the US, see table, opposite).
New live streaming apps for mobile and tablet
are also creating new opportunities for piracy.
Periscope and Meerkat have attracted most
attention and are causing particular concern to
the rights holders for sports content. Periscope
runs on Twitter and allows users to replay content
24 hours later.
Governments and law enforcement agencies are
working alongside content creators and rights
holders to stop piracy, but this is a never-ending
battle. “There are always going to be attempts to
circumvent the paywall,” says Steve Christian,
senior vice-president at security specialist
Verimatrix. “The traditional STB security threats
32
September 2015
haven’t gone away either.” He believes such
threats will multiply as more UHD/4K content
becomes available via pay TV.
Multiscreen services are also increasing
opportunities for piracy. “You can have the
strongest security in the world on device family A,
but if device family B is like a Swiss cheese the
pirates will use that,” says Christian.
Illegal streaming services are also now easier to
use, says Harrie Tholen, senior vice-president at
NexGuard. He points to Popcorn Time, which
keeps popping up in different forms across
Europe: “It’s a very friendly user interface, which
means that piracy is not just for geeks anymore.”
The quality of illegal streaming has improved
too, adds David Leporini, executive vice-president
for security at Viaccess-Orca. This is even true of
peer to peer streaming services. “We have seen
streams up to 5-6MBps, which represents
something you can really enjoy, in terms of
quality,” he notes. It is even possible in some
cases – although this rarely sounds like a
convincing excuse – that some consumers will
think a high quality pirated source of content is
actually legitimate.
Some new entries in the illegal downloads
league table, including India and the Philippines,
may indicate broadband spreading more too
“You can have the
strongest security in
the world on device
family A, but if device
family B is like a
Swiss cheese the
pirates will use that.”
www.csimagazine.com
quickly for law
enforcement or
piracy detection
measures employed
by broadcasters,
operators or rights
holders to keep
up, says Rory
O’Connor, vice-
president, services, at Irdeto.
But Irdeto’s statistics suggest that law
enforcement operations can have an impact.
Germany has fallen out
of the top 20 in the illegal download league,
perhaps because it has introduced new anti-piracy
laws and the threat of punitive fines, suggests
O’Connor. He believes a similar fall out of
the download table is likely to follow for
Australia (currently eighth in the table),
following the passage of new legislation that
will allow piracy websites to be blocked at ISP
level there.
O’Connor believes that more sophisticated
attempts to stop advertising-funded illegal live
streaming services are having an impact on their
reliability and quality, leading more consumers to
seek out legitimate services where possible. But
he also highlights healthy sales online of devices
designed to stream illegal content, sometimes
purchased with a ‘subscription’ to high quality
pirate sources of content. Irdeto is working with
other industry stakeholders including ISPs and
organisations such as the English football Premier
League to investigate the best ways to render such
devices ineffective.
One of the most important technical measures
for fighting piracy is watermarking-based
automated detection and takedown of services.
“It’s very important for operators to have a
watermarking strategy, not only to fight piracy,
but also to ensure they can purchase content
rights in the first place,” says O’Connor. “Any
operator thinking of moving to 4K or UHD
should definitely have a watermarking strategy.”
This can be complemented by disabling
of PayPal accounts, depriving pirates of
advertising or subscriber revenue. Other antipiracy measures include the work vendors
including Verimatrix are doing to protect STBs.
“We are combating that with deeper integration
into hardware chipsets,” says Christian. “This is
going to become more relevant when UHD
content gets distributed.”
Fighting piracy
Fighting with technology and new
business models
Content owners are enlisting the help of
organisations such as the Federation Against
Copyright Theft (FACT) in the UK, which acts
on behalf of members including global and UK
film distributors, broadcasters and sports rights
owners. “Once upon a time it was all about
criminal prosecutions, but the world has
changed,” says Kieron Sharp, director-general at
FACT. “Piracy has gone away from being about
physical products into the world of the internet.
That makes criminal prosecutions and civil
litigation quite complex.
“It’s essentially about using technology to chase
down people who are using technology to commit
crime. We have all the skills needed, in terms of
the evidence we get from our investigations on the
internet; and skills for forensic investigations if
something is seized. We’re still very keen on
criminal prosecution as an effective way of
dealing with these offences. The outcome is
usually prison.” In July the UK government
proposed an increase in the maximum jail term
for online piracy from two to ten years. A
consultation on the proposals ran until the end
of August; further announcements may follow
before the end of the year.
Better consumer education may help too.
The UK government launched a new anti-piracy
initiative this summer, Creative Content UK
(CCUK), starting with a public anti-piracy
campaign aimed at persuading people to use
legitimate sources of content that provide a
superior service to the pirates. But such
campaigns are not exactly a new idea.
What does often make a difference, suggests
Nick Fitzgerald, CEO at media delivery company
TV2U, is making it easier to access legitimate
content. TV2U is working with the Chinese
government on anti-piracy initiatives: stopping
illegal access to content from overseas and
unauthorised redistribution of Chinese-made
content. Fitzgerald believes these initiatives
could help to open markets across south-east
Asia, long regarded as being dangerously
susceptible to piracy, to more content from
sources including Hollywood.
“One reason why there’s piracy in Asia is that
you can’t get the content legitimately,” he says. “If
content is more readily available than there’s less
chance of piracy. And it’s about making it available at an affordable price. A more realistic view of
the world from content owners would help.”
One change content owners have made, in
response to international consumer demand for
premium movie and TV content that was
obviously feeding piracy, is shorter gaps between
content being released in one market and its
release elsewhere: sometimes the gap is now a
matter of days, hours, or less, rather than months
as in the past. The spread of cheap OTT services
like Netflix across the globe may also be helping.
Could content owners take more effective
collective action to combat piracy? “There’s a fair
degree of coordination already,” suggests Sharp at
FACTS. “I think we could be better coordinated,
but it’s quite tricky for the Hollywood studios. For
them to work together goes completely against
their business model in the US, where there are
such strong competition laws.” He believes more
could be done to tackle the problem by other
stakeholders in the industry, such as ISPs and
technology providers.
What could also help, he suggests, would be
security and anti-piracy measures being considered at an earlier stage in product or platform
development within the technology and entertainment industries. “When you set up a new platform
to distribute entertainment content peoples’ first
concern is how to make that new product work
financially,” he points out. “Perhaps piracy should
be one of the first things on their minds when
they do that – but it usually isn’t.”
TOP 20 COUNTRIES FOR ILLEGAL DOWNLOADS
Spain accounted for the most downloads across all countries, with Breaking Bad as the most popular title during the coverage window.
Game of Thrones was the most common title for the countries below largely due to the premiere of its fifth season which aired in this period.
COUNTRY
Spain
Brazil
France
United States
Russian Federation
Italy
Canada
Australia
United Kingdom
Netherlands
India
Greece
Argentina
Israel
Philippines
China
Saudi Arabia
Belgium
Poland
Sweden
TOTAL DOWNLOADS
21,018,933
20,336,371
14,919,105
14,630,250
13,883,781
12,405,963
11,011,931
10,745,935
9,008,305
8,128,191
6,564,158
5,716,381
4,478,811
4,290,066
4,198,726
4,186,183
3,716,679
3,698,498
3,191,705
3,015,641
MEAN DLs PER MONTH
MOST POPULAR TITLE
Breaking Bad
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Interstellar
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones
3,503,156
3,389,395
2,486,518
2,438,375
2,313,964
2,067,661
1,835,322
1,790,989
1,501,384
1,354,699
1,094,026
952,730
746,469
715,011
699,788
697,697
619,447
616,416
531,951
502,607
Source: Irdeto
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
33
Connected security
The Software-Empowered Video
Operator: Connecting the Dots
P
By Steve Christian, SVP of Marketing, Verimatrix
ay-TV is in the midst of a
metamorphosis as it begins
to transition from as a set of
standalone network
deployments to a world of
globally interconnected
solutions. As with all
transitions, this evolution brings new threats and
challenges, but also offers a range of new
opportunities.
The increased risk profile of globalized content
and consumer-owned devices opens new service
and revenue opportunities for service providers.
The prospect of pay-TV transitioning from a
highly controlled and closed environment to a
globally interconnected security infrastructure
presents opportunities for OPEX reduction, more
proactive threat management and unprecedented
visibility to optimize system performance. This
proactive connected security management model
logically extends into a wide range of other
emerging digital service environments, such as
smart homes and connected cars.
Security is traditionally viewed as an ongoing
race between attackers and defenders in the
deployment of digital services—ranging from
online banking to pay-TV, but including many
more domains such as e-commerce, cloud storage
or medical applications. As our lives get more
connected, the challenge of security is becoming
increasingly global with crossover from one
domain to another.
Pay-TV security, which is an excellent example
of this kind of crossover, is now being adapted to
the meet the needs of the new, more globally
connected architecture of service delivery. In this
new environment, advanced security approaches
are being developed to address the evolving threat
or risk level presented by more open architectures.
Greater connectivity brings the promise of
many more engaging services. But it also
potentially paints a much larger target for wouldbe attackers for the community of devices and for
the business as a whole. Operators that address
this issue with the right mix of realism and
34
September 2015
reassurance will gain goodwill and trust from their
customers. And the more progressive operators
have the potential to glean some key advantages
as the connected paradigm looks beyond video to
other device-centric applications.
Imagine globally interconnected revenue
security
Well-known usage scenarios illustrate the need for
globally interconnected security in our multinetwork, multi-screen, TV-Everywhere world.
Subscribers expect to be able to pick up an
on-demand video session while travelling on a
train, where it was left off several days ago on the
living room TV. Operators can effectively leverage
the opportunity of ever-cheaper cloud-based
software and IP infrastructure to address the
growth of security complexity while containing
operational cost.
As a complement to their own support
requirements, operators should be able to
outsource the security management of system
and client device integrity in order to concentrate
on their core value proposition. This will also
lower the cost of entry for new comers. Global
visibility of the threat development will help to
increase operators’ system integrity as they can
benefit from the expertise of world leading
authorities, learn lessons of others in near realtime and profit from centralized cost-effective
security monitoring.
In the never-ending battle to add more value,
leading IP-based service providers around the
world have independently entered the video
delivery market. They need to become trusted
partners for the ever-wary content providers and
rights owners. Even if a service provider only
operates in a single market, in this connected
future they can be seen as part of the global
community of providers if their security system
leverages a global infrastructure.
Emerging business and technical
challenges/opportunities for managing
rights
www.csimagazine.com
In today’s
competitive payTV market
operators’
competitive
advantage stems
from their ability
to constantly
delight customers
— with the best content and services of course,
but also with the overall user experience.
Speeding up all aspects of customer support is
a critical contribution to reaching this goal.
But it also extends to all aspects of the user
interface and the subscriber’s interaction with
the rights management system that enables or
limits content access.
Security is actually becoming the consumers’
ally, as well as that of the operator. Security had
been seen in a negative light in prior generations
of media delivery systems, with many users seeing
digital rights management (DRM) as a limitation.
Technical progress, transparency of operation and
harmonized rights management have made much
progress in changing that perception. When
coupled with the necessity for the consumer and
the operator to protect device integrity and
private data about usage, security can at last
become what it was supposed to be, a responsive
system for managing rights in the digital age. It’s
something that makes both users’ lives and
operators’ roles easier.
To achieve these goals a connected security
platform must provide many different features
including:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
device integrity;
secure communication between devices;
content protection;
privacy (protection of user data);
anonymization of device data;
analytics opt-out; and
support for local regulations, etc.
Consumers often hear about a cool new series
through word of mouth or social media. The
security system must make it easy for a subscriber
to access and play that content, securing the
revenue as seamlessly as possible behind the
scenes. Social media sharing of content is a
growing driver for content demand, and here
again security systems must strive to make this
legitimate and easy. Connected security systems
Connected security
may offer significant advantages here in federating
authentication.
Extending beyond pay-TV
New market segments feature connected networks
and devices. Interconnected security is therefore
becoming more of an imperative there too. This
new connected security approach will lead to
wider opportunities for businesses within the payTV domain and potentially in applications far
beyond the space.
In the enterprise segment, machine-to-machine
(M2M) communications that enable wireless
communications between machines from different
parties have emerged as a new driver for
efficiency. But risks can be directly linked to
benefits—and to revenue, as the data exchange can
affect critical aspects such as order and resource
management, trouble ticketing, provisioning and,
most importantly, billing.
As we have seen, home security can only really
take off if users are reassured that their home
systems cannot be tampered with from afar.
Energy management can also be a scary
proposition if the reliability of meter readings is
open to questioning — or, in the worst case,
furnace settings can be illegitimately accessed.
Car infotainment must ensure user privacy, but
on-board systems can pose a life and death risk if
a connected automobile were to use erroneous
data for determining weather conditions.
This greater connectivity also raises the privacy
challenges of collecting and maintaining data
about services and client activity. The variety of
devices adds another area of complexity. For the
industry, the positive aspect is that privacy is
becoming a positive business driver for security
platforms as end-users are becoming more aware
of the risks and demand solutions.
The level of security provided in each case
must be adapted in response to changes to the
“Car infotainment
must ensure user
privacy, but on-board
systems can pose
a life and death
risk if a connected
automobile were to
use erroneous data
for determining
weather conditions.”
threat level. This can be difficult as risks and
threats are constantly evolving. The critical mass
to attract malicious intent changes as fast as new
technology emerges in our connected lives.
Whether for pay-TV, mobile banking, ecommerce,
blogging or simply reading email, connected
security infrastructure provides means to adapt to
evolving threats and technology.
A new way of thinking about connected
revenue security
Previously isolated security deployments in the
pay-TV world will start to become more
connected, eventually within a global management
infrastructure. This is both a response to
increasingly global threat patterns, and a way to
help optimize the deployment of software centric
security infrastructures.
Software-empowered vendors and operators
that take full advantage of this transition will start
to realize a number of specific benefits.
• Proactive support for individual operators.
Operators will have access to a greater range
and depth of support and management options
that will expand the umbrella of security
coverage for their services.
The improvements are most likely to be found
in proactive alert handling, routine system
performance tune-ups, and a standardized
infrastructure for the distribution and
installation of appropriate updates to system
components and applications.
• Aggregated visibility into global threats. The
threat models from piracy are becoming more
globally significant and moving faster.
Collectively, operators can better leverage
cloud-based, aggregated information gathering
on system threats and attack patterns.
Associated benefits would include continuous
monitoring of activity patterns and systematic
operator-to-operator cooperative responses to
any attempted breach. The potential exists for a
more offensive approach to security situations
through both electronic and physical resources.
• Centralized hub for big data. The ability to
aggregate transactional data opens up the
potential for new value to be uncovered for
operators through the application of big data
analytics. A connected cloud resource provides
the ideal hub to gather and analyze system and
subscriber behavior to help drive competitive
improvements. Immediate opportunities
include improvements in personalized user
experiences, optimising ad revenue, improving
visibility and service levels.
A new way of thinking about security is emerging
as a fundamental property of interconnected
systems. Interconnectedness can even be
leveraged to maintain and enhance the security
of the individual systems.
Connected devices ranging from the
automobile to the thermostat are entering our
daily lives. As the associated services have a
growing impact, so connected device security
and the data they gather become an increasingly
critical question. The new approach to connected
security may start with the infrastructure of
pay-television, but is likely to lead to wider
opportunities for businesses in related
applications and markets — and potentially far
beyond these spaces.
For more information on the opportunities and
challenges facing pay-TV operators today, please
download our new e-book The Software-Empowered
Video Operator: Connecting the Dots at
www.verimatrix.com/swempowered3
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
35
Data corner
Meet the Content Connoisseurs
Guy Bisson of Ampere Research says SVoD
homes are more likely to churn from all of their
in-home service providers
36
September 2015
reflection of the changing consumer behaviour
that is more prevalent among people who are
attracted to SVOD services.
Traditional pay TV, it seems, needs to do better
when it comes to addressing the specific needs of
this key sub-group, which favour less mainstream
content types. The programme mix and offer of
SVOD rivals would be a good place to start.
Net adds: OTT vs. pay TV subscriptions in Western Europe
5
4
4
m
3
3
2
2
1
Pay TV subscriptions
Q4 2015 (f)
Q3 2015 (f)
Q2 2015
Q1 2015
Q4 2014
Q3 2014
Q2 2014
Q1 2014
Q4 2013
Q3 2013
Q2 2013
Q1 2013
Q4 2012
Q3 2012
Q2 2012
Q1 2012
0
Q4 2011
Source: Ampere Analysis
1
OTT subscriptions
S ource: A mpere A naly sis
Considering churning from pay TV in next 6 months
Content Connoisseurs with SVOD
SVOD customers
Source: Ampere Analysis
N
ew subscriptions to OTT
Subscription VoD (SVOD)
services are now outstripping
traditional pay TV in
Western Europe, a trend that
was first seen in North
America in mid-2009. While
our research indicates that this is in no-way a death
knell for traditional pay TV (SVOD is increasingly
seen as part of the wider pay TV mix in the modern
home rather than a platform replacement), there
are some indicators that an increasingly large
segment of the customer base is beginning to think
in terms of replacing both broadcast TV and
traditional pay TV with OTT alternatives.
Our consumer segmentation has identified a
sub-group of customers who make up the largest
single group among SVOD customers: the
Content Connoisseurs. More likely to be male,
time poor and highly connected, these consumers
watch loads of video online and very little
broadcast TV. More than a third of all SVOD
customers across ten countries surveyed fall into
this group.
The crunch, though, is that when asked about
propensity to churn, 30% of Content
Connoisseurs say they are considering churning
from their pay TV service in the next six months
compared to 23% for the average person. For
Content Connoisseurs who also take SVOD, the
proportion rises to 43%.
What’s even more worrying for traditional
entertainment providers is that SVOD homes are
more likely to churn from all of their in-home
service providers, both for entertainment and
communications services. They show a higher
propensity to move from their pay TV, broadband,
fixed line and mobile provider.
That’s particularly concerning because much of
the on-going growth that traditional cable and pay
TV providers are now experiencing is coming
from bundling additional communications
services. Of course, there is no particular reason
why having Netflix or another SVOD service
should make you more dissatisfied with your
mobile or broadband provider, it’s simply a
• WWE will launch its D2C service in new
markets and on new devices this year. The
wrestling-focused content owner launched its
multi-screen streaming service in February 2014
and had 1.3m paying OTT subscribers around the
world as of March. Speaking at the Futuresource
summit, ‘New content horizons’, George Barrios,
chief strategy officer & CFO of WWE, said the
company is planning entry into India, China,
Germany, Italy, Malaysia and Thailand. “I can’t
over emphasise the power D2C gives you. Now
it’s our decision where and how we launch; it’s
transformative economics for us,” said Barrios.
www.csimagazine.com
Average
0
10
20
30
% of customers
40
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advertorial
By Andrew Wajs, CTO, Irdeto
How Operators can Home in on Platform Security
C
onnected devices are now a staple part of everyday life
for many of us. With more and more devices and even
appliances around the home becoming connectivity
enabled, the connected home is swiftly becoming a reality.
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises connected convenience
at consumer’s fingertips – from adjusting your home heating
when you land back at the airport, to checking your home
security remotely if the alarm goes off while you’re out.
Convenience is crucial for today’s ‘always on’ consumer,
but so too is security. Unfortunately the truth is that in the
current world of IoT an innocent device like a Set-top Box
(STB), webcam or thermostats could be used by hackers
against you. The key to guarding against this is security of the
home platform, and the good news is that operators have the
power to take action. After all, consumers depend on their
operator to be the trusted party and remove any privacy or
security implications.
Knowing the risks
Cybercrime is big business and the impact is far reaching – a
number of the world’s biggest global brands have been hit by
cyber-attacks in recent years and the threat continues to grow.
At the end of 2014, American retailer, Target’s Q4 profits
plummeted by 46% as a result of an attack, and the Home
Depot confirmed that hackers exposed USD 56 million of
credit and debit card transactions during its months-long
security breach.
Cybercrime has also evolved in recent years and with tools
of the trade for sale and botnets for rent by the hour; today’s
cybercrime can be described as “Hacking as a Service”.
This threat is compounded by the increasing proliferation
of connected devices throughout the home. In essence, the
attack surface is much bigger; making platform security
paramount. Any device connected to the Internet containing
an operating system can be comprised; providing a backdoor
for cybercrime, and Gartner forecasts that IoT will witness a
30-fold increase growing to 26 billion units by 2020.
The challenge for operators in home networks and
platforms used to be two-fold – how to both enable the full
range of TV services on secondary screens in the home while
also getting the content onto un-managed consumer devices
in a user-friendly and secure way. However, IoT adds another
level to this challenge which goes beyond just the secure
delivery of content across multiple screens.
The fact is that operators with their large number of IP
connected STBs and gateways are vulnerable to attack. By
hacking the STB, for example, cyber criminals can obtain
sensitive information including user’s credentials, viewing
history and billing details. If the STB is used as a gateway to
other connected devices, much more could be obtained. Even
a ransom threat to an operator, threatening a malware attack
that disables the operation of the STB or shuts down the
gateways would have far reaching consequences. The service
outage alone could cost the operators millions and the effect
on the brand could be more devastating, even resulting in a
loss of trust.
The opportunity for operators
In tandem with these enhanced security risks, operators also
face the threat of increased competition and the challenge of
consumer demand for better experiences, functionality and
services. They are however, well-placed to provide the
seamlessly secure experience required by consumers, they
just need to implement systems that provide protection,
intelligence and control for IP connected devices and the home
network – protecting their customers, while allowing them to
introduce new interactive services securely.
The technology must be able to respond to devices, be able
to lock them down, monitor traffic and device behaviour. It
needs to be able to isolate the home security elements from
other internet components making sure that weaknesses are
identified. However, due to the speed at which cyber-attacks
are evolving, it is not sufficient to just protect devices from
known threats. Instead there is a need to be more dynamic,
providing real-time updates and awareness of threats, which
subsequently protects devices and the network from zero day
vulnerabilities. Such a complete solution allows operators to
be the trusted brand and to add value to their end users.
Consumers want their lives to be made simpler and more
secure at the same time and, however the IoT landscape
develops, the certainty is that consumers will continue to
expose more of their lives to connected devices both in and out
of the home. Operators have a real opportunity to combine
state of the art technology with proactive service capitalising
on and extending the trust they have already established with
their customers.
Q&A
Q &A
Towards a zero CapEx multi-screen
Dr Neale Foster (left)
CSI talks to Dr Neale Foster, COO and VP of global sales at Access, about
multi-screen, cloud TV and zero-cost set-top boxes
CSI: Five years ago, costs, DRM,
monetisation and rights were among the
challenges to deploying multi-screen. To
what extent have these issues been
overcome today?
Dr Neale Foster: It’s a constantly changing and
dynamic multi-screen world now. There’s such a
plethora of different devices, form factors and
platforms. So there have to be solutions to solve
those. Things have changed and the fragmentation
is getting worse. There’s more things, problems
and challenges to solve. The technology is in the
process of evolving and we brought out our
product Twine deliberately to solve some of these
multi-screen challenges.
The market will continue to evolve over the
next five years so there’s a lot of continuing
problems to solve which is good for the industry
in some ways; change is good and it’s a
fascinating time for that reason.
Speaking of fragmentation and openness,
38
September 2015
everyone talks about the cloud these days.
To what extent can the cloud help solve
these?
The cloud is here to stay and it’s a major part of
the fabric of technological and consumer life now.
From a consumer’s point of view they want
everything to work, be secure and not to fail.
From a vendor point of view, we want to be able
to provide solutions that enable that. We have a
very well known browser but with our Twine
multi-screen solution, solving some of the
challenges there where consumers have all this
personal content, they have to get it coordinated
between all these devices. Apple has its own
iCloud type solution, as do most hardware
vendors, but when it comes to operators they have
to put in place similar end-to-end systems to
deliver that cloud solution. So one thing that
we’ve done is make a product that enables them
to do this from the cloud.
One of the biggest operator requests is for this
zero-CapEx set-top box (STB), it’s a major drive
www.csimagazine.com
to reduce the cost. Set top boxes are a huge cost
of the network for a payTV operator. Twine is
ideally suited to that because it is coming from
the headend and the cloud to deliver the content
and aggregate all the consumer’s own content,
operators’ protected content. As a result, we’ve
done multiple integrations with CRM and DRM
systems. All these different platforms and OSS/
billing systems, we’ve done a lot of integrations
with those so we can actually help with this drive
to reducing the cost of the CPE.
So maybe you can give us a little bit more
detail about Twine, what it is, how it works
and how it’s different?
One of the main things is it can be seen as a plugin to an existing environment, for operators that
want to extend their platforms, so we’ve taken a
slightly different approach. We’re not just creating
another platform for the sake of another platform.
We’re lucky that Access is a 32-yeard old
company, has 1.5 billion deployments globally
Q&A
“We have some very
good algorithms and
analytics tool that can
help the operator see
what the consumers
are doing.”
with household names like Sony, Samsung and
Nintendo and we have customers and integrations
and platforms end-to-end with a whole variety of
different industry components. Some of the more
recent ones we have announced over the last year
include Verimatrix and Zenterio. It means we can
provide solutions that are pre integrated and as
these end to end middleware and ecosystems that
need integration elements we can plug into that
and allow the operator to control and manage all
content across devices.
To put it in a simple users point of view, if you
are using content with your smartphone and want
access on a tablet or laptop the payTV operator
can provide the system to provide that. At the
moment, it’s not an easy solution: they can
provide broadcast type channels and VoD but
when it comes to all the other content a
subscriber has the operators we are aware of want
the consumer to be using the payTV operators’
delivery of that rather than a device
manufacturer’s way of doing that because they
want to keep control and enable the consumer to
do that in their environment and user interface
(UI). We recently announced a Tier 1 operator
has actually put together with Twine a technique
for delivering content – all the types – with a
single UI and API so they can manage that
independently of different networks.
Does any part of Twine software reside in
the client or is it all headend based?
Most of it is in the headened. That’s the beauty of
the solution, it can deal with any form factor or
type of device. If the operator wants to make a
more interesting value proposition they can put a
piece of it on the client device but there’s no
mandatory requirement for that, the whole thing
can reside on the network in the cloud. It’s a very
powerful solution. One of the classic examples
we’re getting a lot at the moment is operators
want to be able to see if consumers are actually
doing anything; are they watching certain content
or services? They can use it as a churn reducer.
They have a display monitoring the actions and
can ‘attack’ customers with a nice marketing
campaign and show them the benefit of the
service. So it’s a positive way of looking after your
consumers and see if they are responding to
evolve their service. We have some very good
algorithms and analytics tool that can help the
operator see what the consumers are doing.
How will the Twine product evolve?
It’s constantly evolving space, but the most
important bit will be operators’ need for analytics.
In a traditional multicast and DVB channel
delivery they didn’t know in great detail what the
subscribers were actually doing, hence the
Nielsen/BARB subsets to analyse that, but with IP
you know a lot more. This whole cloud
methodology allows an awful lot of understanding
of analytics, obviously very careful of data
protection rules, but as long as it’s managed
carefully you can still analyse groupings and
understand what the behaviour is very quickly.
And you can therefore make intelligent strategies
of how you get a more compelling service. That’s
an area we are highly focused on and working
with partners that have real-network type
intelligence to analyse the data in a careful way to
see what patterns exist and match the service to
the specific ways people consume TV, binge
viewing being one example.
What will you be showing at IBC this year?
In the multi-screen area, we’ll be showing new
technical features that have been deployed by our
most recent operators that really turn this whole
multi-screen world into a more precise model,
rather than just TV delivery - there’s a lot more
analysis features there. On the browsers side, we
have a lot of the YouTube guidelines; there was
lots of issues that TV makers had when Google
changed the way this was specified so we’ve
announced all the latest support, keeping TVs and
STBs we integrate with happily in line.
And how do you see the overall TV market
and industry evolving? Do you see things
getting better or worse?
The fragmentation and challenges operators have
will accelerate. There’s so much consolidation in
the market, as well as requirement for cost
reduction and extended business models and how
payTV operators keep consumers excited with the
packages they provide. We provide software that
meets that. The market is looking for cost
effective solutions that enable consumers to see
the operators’ brands. Requirements will get
harder and the technological challenges more
precise and both will continue to evolve.
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
39
IP production
Image courtesy of Net Insight
IP live comes to market
for primetime.
“The great bright
future is out there but as
an industry we can’t tell
them how it works with
100 percent confidence,”
says Tim Felstead, head
of product marketing,
Quantel Snell. “In a live environment, when you
have adverts to get to air, people’s jobs and
reputations are on the line. You have to prove to
broadcast engineers that when a director says ‘Go
to Camera 4 now’ that it will happen.”
Mark Hilton, VP Infrastructure Products at
Grass Valley, agrees that there’s an element of
hyperbole about IP but that “it is coming on
quicker than we all thought. and we’re seeing
proof of concepts being commissioned.”
With its own brand of IP-enabled products
from camera, production switchers, servers and
gateways to convert SDI to IP just launching,
Hilton believes small scale IP live production will
be possible just around the corner.
Imagine Communications is even more bullish.
“Live IP has been possible for years. It is not
about IP, it is about whether or not broadcasters
should look at operational changes,” says Brick
Eksten, vp, product strategy.
IC points to the reference site it is building in
The tipping point for IP live investment has been reached
with small scale live IP production around the corner, but will
interoperability hamper adoption, asks Adrian Pennington
I
P networks were never intended for video.
The brittle, time-sensitive nature of video
does not play well with the proven but lossy
nature of IP – even less so on shared and
unmanaged networks like the internet. The
varying delay and constant packet loss of
the internet play havoc with every video
stream traversing it unprotected.
Despite this, the industry is entering a time
where IP will be the video transport technology
of choice. “With the introduction of multiscreen
and personalised content there is a need for more
agile and flexible workflows,” affirms media
transport solutions provider, Net Insight. “This is
driving the adoption of file-based technologies, as
well as flexible transport solutions.”
As bitrates increase and equipment prices
drop, IP-based communication technologies are
pushing more and more dedicated communication/ broadcast systems into retirement.
“There is not a new camera or production
40
September 2015
solution on the market today that does not
support IP,” informs Net Insight. “New and
modernised studios are often completely based on
IP, and file-based workflows naturally use IP to
move files from point A to B.”
Potential production of resolutions up to 8K
(or beyond!) require bandwidths previously
unheard of and remote production further pushes
the need for speed. The ability to scale networks
without a glass ceiling and without spending huge
capex on replacement kit is arguably the most
compelling business argument for the move to IP.
To get there however, broadcasters do have to
make a decision to rip and replace existing copper
wire cabling. The cost and benefits are about to
reach a tipping point but just because COTS is
tried and trusted in almost every other industry,
the broadcast community has reservations about
getting it right. This is especially pertinent of live
production and there are differences of opinion
in the industry about whether IP live is ready
www.csimagazine.com
IP production
New York with Disney/ABC which includes full
live production switching over COTS. Other first
movers include Pac-12 Networks – the broadcast
arm of the conference of 12 west coast
universities – which uses T-VIPS and Nevion
links to transmit talkback, telemetry and
telemetric data to and from sports venues as far
as 2500 km away, apparently with less than a
second delay. ESPN’s Digital Center 2 opened
last year built around a J2K–based Evertz EXEX2 IP routing core with pockets of baseband
workflows. It is capable of routing more than
6,000 HD 1080p streams and as much as 9
TeraBits per second.
“From a master control operational
perspective - hitting buttons on a panel – should
I, as a broadcaster or engineer, expect any
difference from SDI to switching video over IP or
running video processing over software?” poses
Eksten. “The answer is no. Imagine is all about
transparency with IP. We are saying that the
interaction feels the same as it did when audio/
video was run over SDI.”
Quantel’s Felstead is not so sure. “It is much
more difficult to see what is going on in IP. The
control systems don’t exist [but are being
developed]. Where SDI routers were very reliable
with straightforward verification of what was
happening, IP systems are more opaque. This
creates a lack of confidence.”
Quantel Snell’s research indicates that 27 of
industry stakeholders believe IP routers will
replace SDI within a decade. “While [Quantel
Snell] support 2022 we don’t believe it is the
right way to go long term,” says Felstead. “The
industry isn’t able to transpose IP into a live
environment today.”
“Live IP has been
possible for years. It
is not about IP, it is
about whether or not
broadcasters should
look at operational
changes.”
Snell Kahuna family
At face value the Imagine and Quantel Snell
stance appear at odds but in fact they are voicing
very similar concerns. SMPTE 2022-6 is the first
incarnation of realtime video over IP and deemed
solid enough to get the industry moving. It is the
standard on which most manufacturer’s starter IP
kit is based.
SMPTE 2022-6 and beyond
However, 2022 emulates the way base-band is
used and does not have the capability to send
multiple data streams on the same wire. If you
want to freely mix and match different cameras or
audio tracks, a prime advantage that IP offers,
then a new standard is required. This could be
SMPTE 2022-8/9/10 which the standard’s body is
working on. The Video Services Forum, which
has focussed on J2K, has another and there will
likely be demonstrations of both next year.
The move to 4K complicates matters further.
In a live environment do we need fully pristine
uncompressed 4K? Or will a mezzanine format be
good enough? Some form of compression will
have to be good enough in the early stages of 4K
over IP since current 10 GbE connections do not
have the capacity to carry it uncompressed.
Codec contenders include IntoPix’ Tico
alliance backed by Grass Valley; J2K; VC2
(backed by Quantel) and Sony’s Low Latency
Video Codec. London-based V-Nova claims its
codec can deliver 4K picture quality at half
current rates (just 7-8Mbps) with hints that this
could be applied to production.
“One of the great big wins of IP infrastructure
is leveraging the cost savings by using
commodified IT kit,” says Felstead. “To do that
we need to be able to ensure interoperability, but
there is no standard common between enough
manufacturers to ensure this.”
Quantel flags that economics of multiple
proprietary codecs would negate much of IP’s
supposed cost-savings. “When you compare the
efficiency of SDI routers and IT routers in
handling different encoding standards and you
add up the core devices and peripheral devices
you come to the conclusion that the driver is
going to be the edge devices,” says Felstead.
Vendors like Quantel Snell are hedging their bets,
incorporating a variety of IP standards into
switching and routing gear. “If we have lots of
pieces from different manufacturers and every
link has a encode and decode stage with a royalty
fee it will run counter to the very principal of
COTS driving infrastructure costs down.”
Hilton’s concern is that some technologies
require different types of hardware; “The Sony
LLVC needs to be designed into the hardware,
J2K has quite a long latency right now and is
fairly computationally intensive and Tico, while
optimised for this light compression, is not a good
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
41
IP production
enough standard yet.”
Sony played a major role in developing
the original SDI as a universal interface and
is trying to do the same with its own IP
connection. It has the support of a number
of manufacturers but is unlikely to receive
the blessing of rivals like Panasonic.
“For a real successful implementation of
IP it’s very important that one standard is
accepted and adopted to allow interoperability
between systems just as SDI currently
provides,” says Peter IJkhout, CTO, VidiGo.
“At present, several organizations or companies are developing competing protocols and
we have to wait and see how this will progress.
“Adoption will depend on acceptance of
compression in the production chain as well
as unavoidable longer latency compared to
traditional SDI,” he stresses. “Without a welldesigned protocol that can be shared seamlessly
between vendors and equipment there will be
reluctance to invest in IP as SDI replacement.”
Ericsson Broadcast & Media Services, CTO
Steve Plunkett, is more conciliatory. “The
proprietary implementations prove the technical
viability of IP as a transport medium,” he says.
“They are providing real world experience that in
turn feeds into a general body of knowledge of
professional media over IP and they offer short
term solutions to organisations who need to
implement now. However, they are not viable in
the long term. The industry needs scale to reduce
costs and that will not be achieved with closed
vendor specific solutions.”
According to Imagine’s Eksten the major
broadcast kit players are talking 2022 interop
Image courtesy of Nevion
mainly about their own equipment. By contrast,
“We are targeting expansion of our universe of
2022 interop with other companies, which is a
huge step forward required by the industry.”
Overcoming the skills sets issue
In any case, the issue may soon be redundant.
With technologies of 40GbE and 100GbE already
out of the labs (and in place at Disney/ABC) the
velocity of advance in IT should iron out
temporary capacity restrictions though not
necessarily cost.
“SDI routers are based on a price per port
while IP is typically on amount of bandwidth,”
explains Felstead. “If you put video over IP
unconstrained in bandwidth you may have a
problem cost-wise. If you use uncompressed
SD 200Mbps you’ve got less of a
problem
Snell S800 range
but if you use HD, 3G or 4K
bandwidth consumption quickly
becomes an issue.”
More significantly for some is the
human factor. IP requites not just a
change in technology but a change in
the way people do things. “The
required network systems for 4K over
IP are complex and expensive,” says
IJkhout. “Traditional engineers at
broadcasters are very video oriented
and it will take time – and, being honest, often different people - to make
the transition into IP engineering.”
Adam Cox, head of broadcast
42
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
equipment, Futuresource Consulting, agrees: “If
you’ve been working in SDI for 30 years and all of
a sudden it’s based on servers this requires
different skills sets. You can retrain them, but they
will still think like engineers. The lack of skillsets
are a big barrier to IP live.”
Quantel’s pitch is don’t hold off on IP plant
infrastructure but do so with the confidence that
the investment is going to be used for the lifecycle
of the equipment and won’t block you out of
future standards. “We’ve engineered IP interfaces
into live SDI product like Kahuna and Sirius so
we can offer an immediate hybrid approach,” says
Felstead.
IP has already swept through contribution and
distribution and will inevitably become the
defacto signal route for live. The opportunities are
simply too compelling.
“Competition from internet and cable
is intense on broadcasters which have
incredible opportunities to interject advertising
into their programming,” argues Eksten. “That is
not the case in broadcast but it can be and needs
to be.
“IP means not having to CapEx a bunch of
equipment every time you want to launch a
channel but by using virtualised networks and
compute resource to spin-up a channel in hours
rather than month. And then it turns off again as
needs be.
“When you start to see 2022 capability in pure
software, the ability to scale and change network
routers to adapt to new business parameters is just
phenomenal.”
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Smart Home
I
f you’ve ever longed for the day when your
wrist watch can control your fridge, or your
curtains can talk to your TV, then it’s time
to get excited because the era of the Smart
Home could soon be upon us.
Cisco has forecast that by end of this
decade there will be some 50 billion
things with web connections worldwide, among
them cameras, cars, fridges and televisions, and
many experts believe it won’t be long before these
devices can communicate with and control each
other (many already do in M2M scenarios).
According to a recent report by ABI Research,
global revenues for Smart Home automation
systems will be worth an estimated $34 billion by
2020, with the US market alone expected to grow
21% annually between 2015 and 2020.
Major consumer technology brands are
positioning themselves to become market leaders
in the Smart Home sector. Last year, Google
bought out Smart systems manufacturer Nest for
$3.2 billion, and this May unveiled Brillo, a
version of Android OS designed to work in almost
any connected device. It’s rival, Apple, also put
out HomeKit on iOS 8, a developer framework
designed to enable apps to communicate with and
control devices in the home.
Smart Homes is also a major pull for payTV
operators and telcos, which are now moving to
add another service layer to their existing
entertainment offers. Key verticals in the space
include home security monitoring and control,
home energy management, home healthcare and
assisted living for the elderly.
The reality of the integrated Smart Home may
be closer than ever before, but certain challenges
must be overcome before it can gain widespread
market penetration. Consumers continue to
grapple with limited product ranges: for example,
Nest currently only offers a Smart thermostat,
security camera and a fire alarm; high costs,
compared to similar unconnected devices; and a
lack of understanding of what the technology has
to offer. Meanwhile, the development of
conflicting Smart Home standards, protocols and
communication technologies, by a range of
different groups, has made the market confusing
and fragmented.
Ken Morse, CTO of connected devices and
video infrastructure at Cisco, comments: “The
industry is going through a phase of different
Smart Home eco systems being pulled together by
different people, some proprietary, such as what
46
September 2015
Joined up thinking
The concept of the Smart Home has been a
source of wonder in science fiction for decades,
but only now is it gaining real traction as an
array of internet-connected devices, industry
initiatives and consumer interest drive the
market forward. Stephen Cousins reports
Google and Apple are doing, some trying for
standards-based initiatives to drive an open
environment [Cisco recently partnered with ABB
and Bosch on the Mosaiq open Smart Home
venture]. It will take three-to-four years to watch
all of that play out, and to identify the compelling
services the consumer wants to embrace. In five
years’ time we should have a robust and
interoperable space with a clear set of services
with meaningful value.”
PayTV operators and telcos’ presence in the
Smart Home space has, so far, focused on
provision of home security and home automation
services, mainly in the US, and home energy
management, mainly in Europe. AT&T’s popular
Digital Life home security and automation
platform, currently available in over 63 US
markets, enables users to remotely open and lock
doors and windows, monitor CCTV and adjust
indoor temperatures using a Smartphone, tablet,
or PC. A similar service is offered to Comcast’s
broadband subscribers, using Xfinity Home, and
Time Warner Cable’s, using Intelligent Home.
“Many of these operators are looking beyond
their high speed broadband and PayTV offerings
to find opportunities for ARPU growth in the
future … many are now entering the market to
take advantage of the growth created as security
services expand to include Smart Home devices,”
says Brett Sappington, director of research at
market research firm Parks Associates.
This expansion is being driven by an explosion
in the number of Smart internet-connected
appliances on the market. According to figures
from Parks Associates, roughly 80% of new
security system installations have the ability to be
controlled by a mobile device, and 40% of new
thermostats provide remote monitoring and
control capability via a mobile.
www.csimagazine.com
Tom Kerber, director of research on home
controls and energy at Parks, notes: “While lights,
locks, cameras, and thermostats are leading the
way, the list of products that offer connectivity
has grown dramatically. Today you can purchase
a variety of Smart appliances, sprinkler
controllers, ceiling fans, smoke detectors, pet
trackers, plant monitors.”
Interconnected opportunities
Despite this progress, most devices are still
controlled independently, it is only when systems
can fully inter-communicate with each other that
consumers will see the benefits of a true Smart
Home. For example, when approaching the front
door, your Smart watch could unlock it,
deactivate the alarm and, depending on the time
of day, tell your kettle to boil, or tell your fridge to
dispense a cold beer.
One could imagine a situation where IoT
presence sensors, used in the home alarm system
could perform a role in recommending
entertainment content, identifying who is in a
room and providing the best entertainment
options for each person individually or as a group.
The same system could control the home audio
system, using data from sensors to automatically
adjust music to follow the person from room to
room.
Some firms are exploring how interconnected
devices can contribute more to home security,
says Charles Dawes, senior director of
international marketing at Rovi: “Controlling
lights so they dim to the right level for particular
films could also provide that ‘at home’ feeling
when you are not in. It is already possible to link
smoke detectors to each other so that detectors
upstairs sound when those downstairs activate,
but taken to the next level, sensors could be
Image courtesy of GreenPeak
Smart Home
configured to automatically call the emergency
services when you are out of the house.”
Other key vertical applications are home
healthcare provision and assisted living for the
elderly or disabled. Cisco is working with “a
major healthcare company” to examine the
possibility of developing a health at home-type of
service, enabling connectivity to talk to devices
and sensors needed to carry out rudimentary
health checks, and tying in with remote video to
perform consultation sessions in the home.
Standards and protocols hinder
interoperability
But creating a fully interoperable ecosystem where
all devices in the home are able to speak to one
another could pose the biggest challenge for the
Smart Home industry over the coming years as a
vast array of distinct software platforms and
wireless protocols evolve.
Alongside proprietary IoT device control
platforms set up by Google and Apple, platforms
based on open standards have been established by
Samsung, with SmartThings, Qualcomm, with
AllJoyn, mBed with ARM, and Cisco’s Mosaiq.
In addition, an array of distinct Smart Home
wireless protocols has evolved, including ZigBee,
Z-Wave, WiFi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE.
Cees Links, CEO of Greenpeak Technologies,
one of the leaders in the IEEE 802.15.4 and
ZigBee market and provider of RF chips for the
Smart Home, envisions a future where network
technologies are used in combination. Links says
these could coexist in different arrangements
depending on the application. For example, a
motion sensor might connect to a CCTV camera
over the internet using ZigBee, and when it
triggers the camera, video is played over the
internet via WiFi.
Conflict over standards and protocols is, of
course typical of a nascent market, where
different companies position themselves to take
control of a particular segment. In other sectors,
the industry has worked together to ensure such
systems work, such as with WiFi or HomePlug, to
enable consumers to use tools from different
vendors. “As the Smart Home develops further
this is also something that will have to come into
play in order for the concept to move into the
mainstream,” said Rovi’s Dawes.
In this vein several different groups set up to
improve Smart Home interoperability, including
Thread, headed up by Google and Nest, the Open
Interconnect Consortium, led by Intel and
Samsung, and the AllSeen Alliance, formed by
LG, Haier, Sharp, Panasonic, Microsoft,
Qualcomm and Cisco. The goal of all three is to
create interoperability with low energy
consumption.
Looking to the future, the home gateway, or
New levels of security
The challenges of a fragmented market also
raise concerns over security, if integrated
smart homes go mainstream consumers must
be confident that their personal data is
protected and their homes are not susceptible
to attack by hackers.
Stuart Rosove, VP of IoT at media
protection specialist Irdeto comments: “There
are a broad range of threats associated with
the IoT. These can run from cyber-vandalism
disruption, all the way to theft of personal
information such as payment details and cyber
ransom, which is where control of a device is
seized and released on payment. As more
devices, such as cookers and vehicles, become
connected, the potential for destructive action
by malicious parties becomes a more
intimidating prospect and could possibly
amount to physical harm rather than theft or
disruption.”
To prevent security breaches, Irdeto claims
low-level security, as low as at kernel level, is
vital, as well as a holistic view of the home
network covering software/application
security, communication security and antivirus/anti-malware.
“Importantly, these key technologies cannot
work independent of one another, they should
be coordinated or orchestrated in order to
provide optimal device configuration and
policy management,” he argues.
STB, could play a key role in coordinating Smart
Home services, acting as a hub for all related
activity. A recent report from Sandler Research
forecast that the global ZigBee STB market will
grow by 20.89% annually from 2014 to 2019.
ZigBee is also gradually replacing IR
technology in remote controls to enable advanced
gesture, motion, and touch control, whilst
removing line-of-sight limitations.
“PayTV operators are ideally positioned to take
advantage of the Smart Home, as long as they are
innovative and aggressive enough to drive the cost
of products down,” says Greenpeak’s Links. “We
believe there is a very strong undercurrent that
this is going to happen because quality decision
making is based on data and the need to collect
data from the entire home.”
In other words, operators could play a key role
in laying the foundations for this brave new
connected world.
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
47
Expert commentary
What do operators need
to know about ZigBee
How the Remote Control & Set-Top Box
can generate new services and profits. By
Cees Links, Founder & CEO of GreenPeak
Technologies
E
Image courtesy of GreenPeak
veryone is talking about the
Smart Home and the Internet of
Things. The potential is almost
limitless. Today, a typical home
may have between five or ten
connected devices but within a
decade, a Smart Home could
easily have over a hundred different connected
sentrollers in the building - sensors and cameras
tracking and sensing, local and cloud based
controllers to manage the network, and actuators
that can turn on and off the various devices and
appliances, controlling almost every aspect of the
home. This includes home monitoring and
environmental control, entertainment, health
monitoring, energy efficiency, etc. - all the ways
our houses can automatically make our lives more
comfortable and efficient.
Originally developed about a decade ago, the
ZigBee wireless communications protocol has
become very common in cable and web
connected homes worldwide. Comcast, EchoStar,
and many other major operators are putting
ZigBee in almost all their new set-top boxes and
48
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
home gateways. Because they have enabled these
boxes to use ZigBee as the connection between
the box and the remote control, these operators
have essentially opened the door to a diverse
spectrum of new services and devices. Once
ZigBee is in the box – whether it is a standalone
home control box, part of an internet gateway, or
even built into a TV set, ZigBee connectivity
enables a central control point for the new home
cloud.
Why have Operators selected ZigBee for
their Remote Controls?
End users really like it! By using a RF (radio
frequency) based technology like ZigBee,
consumers no longer have to aim and shoot their
remote controls to change channels, raise the
volume, control movies and shows, etc. ZigBee
shares the same range capabilities as WiFi. This
means users don’t need to be within 10 feet or so
of their TV set or set-top box like they have to do
with an IR (infrared) based remote control.
ZigBee transmits through furniture walls, floors,
etc. This means that the set-top box no longer has
to be out in the open. It can be hidden away
inside a cabinet or a closet or even in the next
room.
ZigBee requires a lot less power than IR.
Because of ZigBee’s low power operating
specifications, it is possible to design a remote
control that never needs to have its battery
changed or recharged.
ZigBee is essentially a low-power version of
WiFi. Because it only needs to send few bits of
data every once in a while, it does not require the
bandwidth or the power needed for streaming
video or audio, gaming, voice, etc. In tests, it has
been proven that a small watch type battery can
provide enough power to energize a ZigBee radio
for many years. The real controlling factor is the
actual lifetime of the battery. Assuming the
battery itself lasts, the battery will be able to
power the device’s radio for the lifetime of the
device. This makes the remote control essentially
maintenance free. And this also means no support
calls because of dead batteries in the remote!
Two-way interactivity. ZigBee is a two-way
communication technology – unlike IR which
only goes from the remote to the set-top box or
TV set. This interactivity enables a variety of new
features. One interesting capability is the so-called
“Find Me” button. By pressing a small button on
their set-top box or TV, or even activating it
Expert commentary
“One very interesting
Smart Home
application is what is
known as Family
Lifestyle Monitoring.”
– degradation in the inhabitant’s lifestyle – is it
taking them longer to walk from one room to
another or are they sleeping more than they have
in the past?
online via their smart phone or tablet, users can
make their “lost” remote control start beeping and
flashing, making it a lot easier to find.
ZigBee offers a path to new services and income
possibilities. The two-way interactivity also
provides a variety of interesting opportunities for
the operator. One of the biggest challenges for the
end user is how to program in new equipment
master codes and how to update their system.
Because of the ZigBee remote control’s
interactivity, software updates and device codes
can now be downloaded from the set-top box into
the remote control, thereby eliminating one of the
most common sources for customer complaint
calls and expensive truck rolls.
The two-way interactivity also opens the door
for a wide range of communication, advertising
and service opportunities. The operator could
send out alerts and messages regarding new
programming, new features and new channels. In
case of emergency, alerts could be broadcasted
over the remotes – even if the TV set is not turned
on. The operator could recognize what shows and
commercials the viewer is being exposed to and
then instantaneously send downloadable coupons
and special offers.
One interesting feature, being tested in Japan,
is a buy button that links to the programming that
is being watched. For example, if the customer is
watching a shopping channel, instead of having to
get on the phone or hop on a computing device,
they could simply hit the buy button and instantly
complete the transaction. A similar feature could
be used for instantaneous voting and polling for
reality shows and talent contests.
This interactivity could even include home
security and alerts. An internet connected
doorbell could capture and transmit an image of
whoever is knocking on the front door – giving
the customer the option of answering the door or
ignoring the visitor and continuing to watch their
programming. If there is someone opening a
locked door or breaking into the garage, an alert
could be sent to the remote control – as well as to
the TV screen.
The next step beyond the TV
The ZigBee remote control and set-top box could
easily expand beyond controlling the
entertainment experience and the TV screen.
Home services are a rapidly growing sector and
potential profit center for operators targeting the
Smart Home.
One very interesting Smart Home application
is what is known as Family Lifestyle Monitoring.
By using a small network of sensor devices –
connecting to the internet via the set-top box or
gateway, it is possible to track and monitor the
daily movement of those living at home. Currently
being rolled out in China, this technology is
targeted to the families and care givers who need
the ability to know that their elderly relatives who insist on living independently and do not
want any intrusive cameras watching them or ugly
pendants hanging around the neck, are up,
moving and doing fine. Using just four
inconspicuous sensors in the home, the system is
able to “learn” the daily movements of the
inhabitants and if there is a dramatic change, can
send an alert to the proper person or authority. In
addition, this Senior Lifestyle System is smart
enough to also recognize slow changes and trends
Summary
These new features, enabled by ZigBee in the settop box and in the remote, provide a wide range
of new services and profit centers for operators.
End users enjoy the features and the convenience
of ZigBee. Whether it is for managing the home’s
security and environment, providing better control
of entertainment and services, or even monitoring
our lifestyles to make sure we stay healthy and
safe, the Smart Home is coming. Operators need
to understand the technology and its possibilities
so that they can ride this wave of Smart Home
and IoT excitement to keep existing customers as
well as generate new subscribers.
Cees Links is the founder and CEO of
GreenPeak. Under his responsibility,
the first wireless LANs were developed,
ultimately becoming household
technology integrated into PCs and
notebooks. He also pioneered the development of
access points, home networking routers, and hotspot
base stations.
He was involved in the establishment of the IEEE
802.11 standardization committee and the WiFi
Alliance. And, he was instrumental in establishing
the IEEE 802.15 standardization committee to
become the basis for the ZigBee sense and control
networking.
In 2005 Cees started with GreenPeak
Technologies. GreenPeak is a fabless semiconductor
company and the leader in the ZigBee market with a
rich offering of semiconductor products and software
technologies for Smart Home data communications
and the Internet of Things.
You can contact GreenPeak at greenpeak.com
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
49
Cloud playout
Is cloud-based playout the
future?
storage, editing, branding
and graphics can all be
covered by cloud-based
technology. Advocates of
cloud claim that without
embracing it, traditional
broadcast providers will be
unable to compete with
OTT incumbents.
“The technology stack,
development practices and operational
approaches used in the OTT domain are very
good at delivering flexibility, agility and
innovation in the face of rapidly changing
viewer behaviour,” says Steve Plunkett, CTO,
Broadcast and Media Services, Ericsson. “If we
can embrace that approach, without breaking
the reliability associated with linear TV, then
we can be better placed for the future.” He, like
many in the industry, doesn’t feel that this point
has been reached yet with cloud, but the potential
is perceived.
Cloud is not yet ready for all aspects of playout functionality
but it can’t be ignored any longer, says Anna Tobin
C
loud playout is what everyone in
content provision is talking
about. Probe a little deeper,
however, and you soon discover
that the concept means
different things to different
providers.
“The ‘cloud’ is a wide term,” explains Ben
Gidley, director of multiscreen solutions at Irdeto.
“It has become something of an industry buzzword,
covering everything from on-demand to private
clouds.” To add to the confusion, not all cloud
providers offer the same services and capabilities.
Many are evolving with their market. Cloud use
by traditional broadcasters is very much in its
infancy, some organisations are barely dipping
their toes into the space, whilst others have dived
straight in. BSkyB in the UK, for example, is
using cloud for its OTT and on-demand services,
but doesn’t feel the technology is ready yet to
deliver the quality of service it requires across the
rest of its network.
Disney/ABC in the US, meanwhile, is probably
the largest early adopter. It’s in the process of
moving all of its linear cable channels to the
cloud, while the idea of moving its live broadcasts
to the cloud is on the back burner.
Putting aside rights issues and cultural and
economic barriers, using remote storage in the
cloud, playout can ultimately facilitate total global
connectivity to content on any screen. It means
that content can not only be watched from
anywhere, but also controlled from anywhere. It’s
not perfect yet, but every aspect of playout from
integrated automation, digital asset management,
master control activities, video servers, content
Image courtesy of Ericsson
50
September 2015
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Speed and scale
“What cloud offers that we don’t get in the
traditional broadcast world is scalability and
speed of deployment,” explains Stephen Smith,
CTO cloud at Imagine Communications.
“In a traditional broadcast model if you want to
launch a temporary or transient channel to cover
say the Olympics or a sporting event that is only
going to be occurring for a couple of months, the
capital investment required to put the
infrastructure together to do that and then have it
sit idle, just doesn’t make sense. You are not going
to spend that money so you end up in a scenario
where you don’t do things, because you can’t do
things,” says Smith.
Cloud technologies make all this feasible; and,
because cloud technologies are largely offered on
“I am not aware of
any cloud service
with the elasticity
and bandwidth to
manage a peak
network drawer.”
Cloud playout
NOC image courtesy of Nevion
a leasing basis, companies can easily and rapidly
scale up and down. It’s this flexibility, elasticity
and speed to market that will give those that
employ it a competitive edge.
From a business perspective cloud playout
is particularly attractive to VOD offerings,
specifically in the OTT arena points out Gidley
at Irdeto. “OTT is no longer broadcasting, as
such, and is instead more like many simulcasts.
To deal with this situation, operators must
scale with the peaks and troughs to allow for
changes in demand, something that cloud allows
relatively easily.
“Additionally, cloud playout offers operators a
true global reach without having to physically
invest in hardware and other equipment to offer
broadcast services in different regions.”
The minimal capital investment required is
another of cloud’s biggest draws emphasises K. A.
Srinivasan, co-founder of Amagi. “It eliminates
the need for large, expensive data centres and
huge CAPEX investments in playout
infrastructure. It leverages the power of elastic
computing infrastructure on the cloud, thereby
providing both advanced playout capabilities, as
well as a scalable delivery infrastructure; and, it
enables TV networks to leverage scalable storage
on the cloud to have a centralised media asset
management capability.
“Solutions such as Amagi’s CLOUDPORT go
one step further by eliminating the delivery of
broadcast content through satellite and fibre,
moving the actual playout to the edge - the cable,
satellite, and IPTV headends - and managing
these playouts through a cloud-based management
stack. This provides the best of both worlds —
99.99 per cent guaranteed SLAs at the edge and
centralised management through the cloud.”
Going hybrid
Retaining the best from the old and merging it
with the benefits of the new are what many
players are opting for. As the capital set-up and
running costs of cloud playout are relatively cheap
compared with standard playout it makes it
particularly attractive to newcomers. For existing
broadcasters, however, writing off their tried and
tested hardware systems and moving over to less
stable cloud services requires a significant
investment and could put their QoS at risk. This
is why most traditional broadcasters looking to
adopt cloud are keen to look at hybrid models
that allow them to merge their existing legacy
systems with cloud-based services.
Cloud playout still has teething problems and
downsides, concedes Gidley at Irdeto. “Indeed,
for live OTT and live broadcast, cloud playout can
be an expensive option, with video being in the
broadcast centre, which then needs an uplink to
the cloud, having the potential to dramatically
increase cost, depending on location…
“For live broadcast, cloud playout is not yet the
most efficient method of bringing content to
viewers. There are distinct challenges in reliably
pushing video to cloud providers without pretranscoding, which can lead to delays in content
reaching viewers, which is clearly not acceptable
for live content.”
Currently, a mix of cloud and traditional
infrastructure is necessary to achieve playout
perfection emphasises Pete Elvidge, head of
media management at Globecast, “Pure cloud has
limitations, particularly around quality, of channel
presentation and, quality of service – in particular
recovery time in case of any issues.
“Private infrastructure brings a layer of
reliability, stability and security to cloud
approaches that gives broadcasters the best
balance of quality and cost-efficiency. Using a
pure cloud solution is perceived to be cheaper
than traditional playout, but it often isn’t when
total cost of operation are considered. If a
channel feed is not broadcast securely in the best
quality then you lose air time and customers, so
it’s a false economy.”
Whilst Matt Parker, director of new business
development at Edgeware, foresees cloud services
being able to take on live mass content in the
future, he also believes it is too premature to rely
on currently. “With our customers we use cloud
for certain functions and features that lend
themselves to working effectively in that manor load balancing, session management and viewer
analytics, but the actual last mile playout push all
goes through hardware still.
“At the moment, I am not aware of any cloud
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September 2015
51
Cloud playout
service that could offer the level of elasticity and
bandwidth to manage a peak drawer on the
network. If the streaming fails on the Football
World Cup final, for example, you have a very
serious problem. So for actual raw playout and
guaranteed streaming efficiency and streaming
bandwidth, we still feel that there is a need at this
point for a hardware accelerated layer.”
There can be a mismatch between the highly
deterministic needs of a real-time playout chain
and the best effort cloud model, adds Plunkett at
Ericsson. “This can be mitigated with the right
infrastructure, architecture and software, but it’s
not easy. The cloud also requires IP and software
only components, which today can mean making
compromises on functionality, vendor choice and
interoperability as the industry migration to those
technologies continues. Finally, the economics of
always-on infrastructure, which is often associated
with a playout chain, means that the public cloud
might not offer best value today.
“There is work yet to be completed before we
can truly embrace the cloud and use it to replace
our current broadcast environments. This
includes the switch from SDI to IP, hardware
centric products to software centric products,
different licensing approaches and a clearer vision
of what television in its many forms could and
should look like so that we can build for that
future, rather than simply migrate and then
emulate the old.”
Whilst Srinivasan concedes that cloud-layout is
currently best suited to pre-recorded programming, he is confident that this will change.
“Given the rapid pace with which technology
advances, live TV support on the cloud seems
Imagine’s cloud playout solution is
powering Disney’s move to the cloud
52
September 2015
Sundance Channel Global has regionalised its content in Brazil by using Amagi’s cloudbased technology
imminent in the near future,” he predicts.
New opportunities for targeting
Whilst it’s not yet perfect, cloud playout has huge
potential for creating new business and revenue
opportunities emphasises Smith at Imagine
Communications. One of cloud technologies
revenue boosting strengths, for example, is
enabling targeted customisation.
To truly benefit from such possibilities,
however, broadcasters need to totally rethink their
business models, Smith says. “They need to
realise, for example, that it is better to have one
short commercial targeted to individual
consumers not the broader audience. In scenarios
where somebody has a platform that can deliver
an asset to a specific demographic, for example,
and they can prove that they are delivering it, they
get more money for that spot even though it is
seen by fewer people.” Whilst newcomers may
cotton on to this quickly, the established players
may have a harder time coming around to this
way of thinking.
And, the technology that enables such
pinpointing of advertising also makes it possible
for operators to create very localised content
targeted at specific audiences. This is another
revenue stream just waiting to be tapped and to
succeed the old timers must realise that they can’t
just leave this opportunity to the new players.
Right now the cloud is ideal for channels looking
to test new areas, highlights Elvidge at Globecast.
“It allows them to quickly and cost-effectively
launch into new markets while complying
with local regulations, broadcasting in a local
language or with local subtitles and engaging
with local audiences – without the need for a
long term commitment.”
Cloud is not yet ready to take on every aspect
of playout, but it is becoming an essential tool in
the operation. It can’t be ignored. Those operators
who do not adopt at least some aspects of cloud
www.csimagazine.com
technology with a view to expanding this at a later
stage will find it very difficult to compete in the
future with those that have embraced the best bits
of it from the start. Don’t be complacent, a wait
and see approach won’t work here.
Disney/ABC goes into the cloud
Imagine Communications said the media
industry witnessed a watershed moment when
Disney/ABC decided to transition its global
programming playout, delivery and network
operations to an IP cloud architecture.
Likening it to Dylan going electric, Imagine
noted that Disney may not be the first to
recognise the benefits of cloud-based playout
and delivery, but it is the largest and “most
influential point of light in the media industry
firmament” to commit to IP.
“By leveraging evolving IP and Cloud
technologies, we are able to move beyond
what’s currently possible with traditional
proprietary “Big Iron” broadcast
infrastructures,” said Vince Roberts, executive
vice president, global operations and chief
technology officer, Disney/ABC Television
Group. “Our shared vision and close
collaboration will enable Disney/ABC
Television Group to take a uniquely innovative
approach to the next generation of television
and media distribution platforms.”
The enabler behind Disney’s new playout
and delivery infrastructure is Imagine’s
VersioCloud, an IP-enabled, integrated
playout-in-the-cloud solution. According to a
recent survey conducted by Imagine
Communications, nearly 40 per cent of
respondents say migration to IP is a top
priority for 2015. Nearly as many have placed
moving infrastructure to the cloud near the
top of their to-do lists for the coming year.
eSports
Esports is a net hot property
producer dictates. Mics on
the gamers can pick up
their reactions and
commentary and VTs of
player personalities add to
the programming mix.
Amazon Web Services
hosts Azubu live streams with Akamai as CDN
and and Brightcove as online video platform plus
Brightcove Zencoder to power video playback,
live transcoding and ad insertion on mobile
phones, PCs and tablets.
“We weaponise all of that by taking the core
technology and making sure it’s the right kind of
viewing experience for the e-sports fan by
overlaying the stats, making sure there are ingest
points in places like Brazil so the Brazilian
e-sports scene have the ability to stream; and
enabling live chat through social media to
contextualise play,” says Sharpe.
eSports also affords the opportunity to chat in
realtime with players while they are streaming.
“This potential proximity is another reason for
esports’ popularity,” says Sharpe. “What we have
to do is create a good experience for showcasing
these personalities and build a solid global
programme.”
Live streaming platforms like Twitch are giving
eSports a chance to develop a global presence.
Instead of isolating players in national leagues,
networks are intent on opening access to players
in Brazil, or Korea to Europe and vice versa.
“There is a realtime transparency between
gamers and the fan community which is unique,”
says Sharpe.
Esports primary home will be online but that
hasn’t stopped traditional broadcasters getting
involved. ESPN partnered with Red Bull to
broadcast The International 4 — the annual world
championships of Dota 2 – from Seattle’s
KeyArena on ESPN 3 last year. Red Bull has built
a dedicated studio in LA to promote live event
Esports athletes on par with its other extreme
sport brands.
“A lot of media companies are waking up to
this and working out how they can be part of it,”
says Sharpe.
Disney is one to watch. With live sports
network ESPN and short-form video creator
Maker Studios – which also has the largest
content network on YouTube – it has the
components to tap the global eSports
community.
Adrian Pennington reports on the rising phenomenon of
electronic sports and gaming
E
Azubu Beta
lectronic sports has flown under
the radar, first receiving
attention with massive
multiplayer online games, and
now at the tipping point of mass
entertainment.
The worldwide eSports
audience could reach 153 million by 2016
(SuperData). According to IHS Technology, 2.4
billion hours of eSports video were watched
online in 2014, rising to 6.6 billion in three years
by which time the sport’s global value will exceed
$1 billion (SuperData).
The reason is not hard to fathom. The audience
for e-sports are the millennial generation who
grew up with a joystick in one hand and Facebook
in the other. Marry that with low-delay live
streaming and increasingly sophisticated
promotion by games publishers like Riot and you
have an online content phenomenon.
“Traditional sports moved from amateur to
professional leagues and really took off as a
televised property when groups like IMG allied
with players and sports bodies to create premium
brands licensed rights,” explains Ian Sharpe, CEO
at games streaming network Azubu. “Esports is
growing on a similar trajectory but at a much
more rapid rate. A decade ago the best known
pro-players had limited appeal outside the sport.
Now, they have huge followings which are
beginning to transcend eSports.”
Among the largest networks are Major League
Gaming’s MLG.tv, Electronic Sports League
(ESL.tv - based out of Germany and owned by
Turtle Entertainment) and Twitch.tv for which
Amazon paid nearly $1 billion last year and
records a monthly audience in excess of 100
million. The success of Twitch has forced Google
to launch YouTube Gaming with an emphasis on
streaming live events played out like a traditional
outside broadcast in stadium venues.
There are already instances of piracy of
live streamed feeds. Earlier this year Riot issued
a takedown notice to a restreamer of the feed
of one its popular players (Faker), an issue
which has proved controversial in the gaming
community.
“Rights are very formative right now and not
well codified,” says Sharpe. “It’s a community
driven space and the community has not got its
head around the legalities.”
Native digital content from within the games
are ripe for streaming and come with vast volumes
of pixel-accurate data. Other potential live
gameplay data includes a player’s biometrics and
team interactions, such as eye tracking, brain
states, heart rate, skin response and facial patterns
to give deeper insight into the performance of an
eSports player.
On top of that, multi-camera OB productions
provide close-ups of the gamers (especially their
hand movements); wider positions of the venue’s
spectators watching talent on giant screens.
Moves can be watched in replay if the live show’s
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
53
Survey
Which of the following statements best
reflects your views on recommendations:
Information is power
What role do recommendations and analytics play
in video, and can you do more to tap their value?
%
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
0
10
20
30
40
50
D
ata & analytics is a hot topic,
with the online video industry
waking up to the potential it
offers to all manner of
operations. One UK
broadcaster, Channel 4, even
described data as the new oil
of the digital era.
One aspect revolves around search, discovery
users interests
and recommendations. Linking audiences with
2. Recommendations help me target the right
the content they want to watch or would
content at my users
potentially be interested in watching is hugely
3. Recommendations
allow
me toabout
get more
of users interests
Recommendations
tell me
more
my
lucrative, especially in this connected day and age,
my catalogue seen by my users
and where there is a tsunami of content across
4. Recommendations are generally valuable but don’t
have any specific standout value to my business
disparate platforms (even finding the right
mmendations
help me target the right content at my users
5. Recommendations are worthless to me
content across a single service can be hard work
for consumers: choice can be daunting). And
ns allow me to get more of my catalogue seen by mynobody
users wants lost revenue opportunities.
With this in mind, CSI partnered together
with online video solutions specialist Piksel
but don't have any specific standout value to my business
to gauge our readers’ views of how they see
and use recommendations and analytics in a
Recommendations are worthlessdigital-first
to me age.
Among the respondents, there was a relative
even split between those who currently use some
kind of recommendation technology to those who
What recommendations parameters
don’t (with the rest, perhaps surprisingly, unsure).
would you like to be using?
Of these, 58% currently use some kind of
analytics technology on their video service, 22%
don’t, with a further 20% unsure.
Indeed, the vast majority (almost half) said
14%
that recommendations help with targeting the
28%
right content with the right audience (see chart).
So surfacing content is one very important benefit
21%
here. Recommendations also have value in terms
of finding out about users’ interests and also allow
18%
more of a catalogue to be seen by users (around
19%
18% for both). The rest simply find
recommendations to be generally of value.
Anything an operator can do to help
Localized data, 18%
subscribers get more out of the content they pay
Genre preference data, 19%
Individual data on likes and dislikes, 21%
for will help them build a more immersive
Collect ageing data on time of day, 14%
experience. To this end, a big majority (68%) say
weekend, seasonal
they find recommendations to be of critical value
Context, device data, 28%
to their business, with a quarter unsure and only
1.
54
Recommendations tell me more about my
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
6% seeing no value whatsoever.
Mostly, respondents would like to be able to
use analytics to understand user preference,
something which ties in with earlier responses.
But analytics collection can also fulfil a range of
commercial priorities in the next 12 – 18 months,
including in order of popularity: Churn
Reduction, Content Targeting, Targeting User
Groups, Advertising targeting, Commercial
Package Offerings and content acquisition.
In answer to the question ‘What
recommendations parameters do you currently
use?’, there was once again a clear interest in what
recommendations can reveal about a user’s
interests. This mirrors the feeling shown in Q2.
It is not hard to see why. Finding the right
content to watch continues to be a challenge for
consumers, both online and within pay TV
subscription packages, and consequently anything
that helps broadcasters or service providers do so
would be of great interest to the consumer.
Following closely behind is the importance
given to recommendations based on the device
being used at the time. Operators and content
owners both attach great value to knowing how
consumers behave with different devices and the
context in which they are doing so. If content is
king then certainly context is queen.
Going more granular was of lower interest,
with recommendations based on ‘like/dislike on a
program level’, ‘time/availability of content (e.g.
when it is broadcasted or when it becomes
available in a VoD library)’, and ‘social graph
information (e.g. profiles from Facebook, Twitter,
etc.)’ all scoring lower response levels.
In terms of what recommendations parameters
those taking the survey would like to be using,
28% say they would like ‘Context, device data’.
Again, we hear OTT/payTV operators and
broadcasters talk a lot about the context in which
a device is being used so our survey reaffirms
these assumptions.
Of the rest, individual data on likes and dislikes
came in second at 21%, genre preference data on
19%, localized data at just under 18% and wanting
to collect ageing data on time of day, weekend,
Survey
20 %
15
10
5
0
Churn reduction
Targeting user groups
Feautured & editorial content
Commercial package offerings
Programme acquisition & development
Has using analytics improved your
recommendations targeting? If so, how?
9%
52%
User Preferences
Piksel provides the tools and the insights for
you to master intelligent recommendations
and personalization to address consumer
content discovery.
While data collection is now standard. We
place great emphasis on gathering the right
information, and then transforming that data into
actionable insights using analysis – something
that we call ‘value-based analytics’. It’s the process
of deriving real meaning from data collected to
make search, discovery and recommendations
more intuitive and hyper-personalized than ever.
Better content discovery begins with context.
Only by starting to understand the different
content choices that users make throughout the
day depending on time, location, who they are
with, what device they’re using and so on, can
providers begin to offer tailor-made services for the
individual which drive deeper engagement. This
sets in motion a valuable feedback loop to help
validate strategies and adapt services to changing
demands, ultimately impacting churn and revenues.
See our latest thinking around this new era of
hyper-personalization at piksel.com/insights.
How are you currently using analytics data
to inform your recommendations engine?
Advertising Targeting
usage dominates consumption, it is undeniable
that audience behaviour is changing and the
industry needs to embrace the digital
opportunity. Better recommendations definitely
has tangible results.
The subject of analytics, recommendations,
search and discovery will be one of the key
themes at IBC this year. Connected devices
offer new opportunities for empowered, but
equally they also open greater complexity,
meaning this topic will likely remain prevalent
going into 2016 and beyond.
Content Targeting
seasonal and so on last at 14%.
When asked what is the biggest challenge they
are facing with recommendations, it becomes
clear that finding the right solution that offers all
required functionalities tops the list (with 27%
voting this way). As the market landscape and
consumer habits become more complex so it
seems is the need for a flexible platform that can
respond to changing requirements.
One of the barriers to operators providing
more robust search and recommendations tools
for customers is the increasing complexity of
implementing and managing the solution. With
this in mind, almost 22% thought handling and
ingestion of data was the critical hurdle, while
21% said it was the costs of back-end integration.
Also related to cost, running cost came in at 19%
and, lastly, at 10% were costs related to front-end
integration.
Regarding recommendations in a mobile
environment, there would seem to be a gap in the
market, as the majority (almost one in four) not
currently having the capability implemented in
their video service, although stating it is in the
road map for the next one to three years.
When asked ‘How are you currently using
analytics data to inform your recommendations
engine?’, it was a close call between User
Preferences at 19% and Content Targeting with
18%. Targeting user groups (14%), Advertising
Targeting (12%), Programme acquisition &
development (11.11%), Commercial package
offerings (11%) and Churn reduction (10%) were
all relatively prominent, with ‘Featured & editorial
content’ coming bottom at 4%.
Zeroing in on advertisements, respondents
stressed the importance of targeting. Almost 60%
use analytics to target their ads, compared to 27%
who don’t, with a further 15% proclaiming no
relevance as they don’t do ads.
Happily, 66% of respondents say that using
analytics has improved their recommendations
targeting, while 23% intend to. On the flipside, 9%
don’t collect analytics and only 2% complain of
having ‘too much data to crunch’.
All in all, while data throws a new set of
challenges, it also opens a vast opportunity the
online video industry can tap into. The more
forward-looking broadcasters and media
companies are trying to make data the heart of
their business, partly for the various reasons
explored in this survey. While people, even
younger viewers, still turn to the TV first and TV
2%
yes - significantly
yes - somewhat
23%
we don’t collect analytics
No - we have too much data to crunch
no but we intend to
14%
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
55
2015
Congratulations to this year’s finalists
Awards ceremony, Friday 11 September 2015,
IBC Amsterdam, 6:00PM - 7:15pm Room E102
56
Best digital video processing technology
• ARRIS - ME-7000 Converged Video Compression Platform
• Cisco - Videoscape Virtualized Video Processing
• Elemental Technologies - Unified Linear TV Delivery
• Envivio - Muse Live 4.0
• Harmonic - Electra X advanced media processors
• V-Nova International - PERSEUS by V-Nova
Best monitoring or network management solution
• Cisco - Prime Home
• Conviva – Precision
• Viavi Solutions - Video Service Assurance (VSA)
• Nevion - VideoIPath
• Skyline Communications - DataMiner
• Witbe - OTT End-to-End Monitoring Solution
Best cable or fibre contribution/distribution/transmission
solution
• ARRIS - AgileMax RFoG Optical Distribution
• Cisco - cBR-8 Converged Broadband Router
• Net Insight - The Nimbra OT 100 for 4K video
• Thinklogical - TLX Series 10G KVM and Video Extension
and Matrix Switching System
Best content protection technology
• Ericsson - Digital Rights Management
• Irdeto - Keys & Credentials
• NAGRA - anyCAST CONNECT
• NexGuard - Subscriber-level Forensic Watermarking
of UHD VOD Content
• Verimatrix - VCAS Ultra
Best satellite contribution/distribution/transmission solution
• Ericsson - DVB-S2X Functionality
• Harmonic - Ellipse 3202 contribution encoder
• International Datacasting Corporation - LASER Targeted Ad &
Program Insertion Solution
• SIS - Live DVB/IP share system
Best content-on-demand solution
• Aspera - FASPStream
• Clearleap Multiscreen Platform
• SeaChange International - Rave
• TV2U - TARA TV
• Xstream - OTT SVOD Lightbox by Xstream MediaMaker
Best customer premise technology
• AirTies Wireless Networks - Air 4920
• ARRIS - VIP4000 and VIP5000 Series of Set-Tops
• EchoStar Corporation - 4K Joey
• Humax - Freeview HDR-1800T
• Orange - Orange TV stick
Best interactive TV technology or application
• Applicaster - Live TV Visual Voting
• Freesat - Showcase
• Metrological - Application Platform
• Rovi - Personalized Discovery Solution
• TiVo - Advanced Television Solutions
September 2015
www.csimagazine.com
2015
Best IPTV technology or service
• Ericsson - MediaFirst
• Marvell Semiconductor - ARMADA 1500 PRO 4K
• Vimond Media Solutions - The Vimond Platform
Best mobile TV technology or service
• Conax - GO Live
• Motive Television - BYOD
• Piksel - Voyage
• SPB TV - Mobile TV Solution
Best web TV technology or service
• EchoStar Corporation - Sling TV
• Piksel and Channel 4 - Channel 4 All 4
• UPC Hungary - Online video and TV apps on existing
set-top boxes
Best ultra HD TV technology or project
• Broadcom - BCM7252 Ultra HD Set-top Box
System-on-a-chip (STB SoC)
• Harmonic - Electra X advanced media processor
• Sky Deutschland - F4 meet 4k
• Technicolor - MediaPlay DSI750, The World First 4K UHD
Satellite Set-Top Box Deployment
• Thomson Video Networks - ViBE 4K Ultra HD Encoder
Best TV everywhere/multi-screen video
• ADB - Graphyne TV
• Conax - GO Live
• NAGRA - MediaLive featuring Dynamic Ad Insertion,
Electronic Sell Through and Download to Go
• SPB TV - OTT TV solution for Lebara Play
• Virgin Media - TV Anywhere
Best social TV technology, service or application
• never.no - Story
• Orange - Watch With Twitter
• SeaChange - Timeline
• Vimond Media Solutions – Highlights
Best HbbTV technology or service
• Brightcove - Video Cloud HbbTV Solution
• Sofia Digital - HbbTV Platform
Best data & analytics innovation
• Crystal - Video Metadata Anlayzer (VMA)
• Genius Digital - Frequency and Intensity Test
• IneoQuest Technologies - Audience Measurement Platform
for Adaptive Streaming (AMP ASM)
• S3 Group - StormTest Warning Center
• Tvbeat - Tvbeat
Best cloud/virtualisation innovation
• ActiveVideo - CloudTV StreamCast
• Ericsson - Video Storage and Processing Platform
• Harmonic - VOS software-based, fully virtualized media
processing platform
• Imagine Communications - VersioCloud
• Keepixo - Genova Virtualizable Software
• NAGRA - MediaLive Cloud-Based Multiscreen solution
for the VOO ‘Be tv Go’ OTT service
Best smart home product, technology or service
• ADB - Smart Home Suite
• EchoStar Corporation - SAGE by Hughes
• SoftAtHome - Swisscom Top Speed Media Smart
Home solution
Best IoT product, technology or application
• Arxan Technologies - Expanded application protection
for all major IoT platforms
• Cisco - Connected Life
• EchoStar Corporation - SAGE by Hughes
• Golgi - Golgi
• LogMeIn – Xively
• Piksel - AT&T U-verse Wearables
Find out more: www.csimagazine.com/awards
2015
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
57
Show preview
IBC 2015 preview
an extension to Hall 14.
Introduced for IBC2015 and
reserved for first time IBC
Exhibitors, this new feature of
the IBC Exhibition is your
chance to see new technology
and exhibitors never before seen
at the event.
Even newer at IBC is the
drone zone. As Amazon lobbies
for airspace above the world’s
cities and suburbs (specifically
from 200ft-400ft, exclusively for
autonomous drones that will be
the future of delivery), in the
meantime IBC attendees can see
up close and get to play with
these flying vehicles. So-called
‘large range flying video platforms’, some of
which have never been exhibited before, will be
there from the world’s leading manufacturers in
IBC’s new Feature Area, the IBC Drone Zone.
There is a limit to finding about a drone on an
exhibition stand, so organisers are building a
very large flying cage, in Congress Square in
the centre of the RAI, promising access to the
flight cage to demonstrate products in a real,
outdoor environment.
IBC also addresses Virtual Reality with a VR
primer at the IBC Content Everywhere Europe
Hub, VR storytelling explored at the conference,
multi-cam rigs at the exhibition and hints toward
holograms at the IBC Future Zone. Indeed, the
Future Zone by Hall 8 contains exhibitors with
cutting edge projects and prototypes from the
world’s leading R&D labs and universities. There
are 13 exhibitors on display this year, ranging
from Europe, US, Japan and China.
Finally, this year sees a new hall opening, the
Amtrium building, which leads into Halls 1 and 4
without having to walk through Hall 14.
This year’s show brings you ultra HD, OTT… and drones
I
t’s time once again to dust off your IBC
boots as Europe’s biggest broadcast show
opens its doors from 10-15 September in
Amsterdam’s RAI to over 55,000 attendees
from more than 170 different countries.
With the rapid convergence of
broadcast, IT and telecoms, this year’s
conference theme is ‘The Future of Media in an
Age of Disruption’. Unsurprisingly, a fragmenting
media landscape brought about by the growth in
the consumption of TV and video content on
smartphones, tablets, laptops and other connected
devices sets the stage for this year’s conference.
New faultiness are being crated and over the
course of the week high level execs will reveal how
these shifts are impacting their business from
where they stand and how they aim to reach going
forward. The opening IBC Forum session,
Broadcasting in an Age of Challenge, sees Fran
Unsworth, the first woman to run the BBC World
Service, OSN’s David Butorac, who runs 146 pay
TV channels in the Middle East and North
Africa, and Philip Luff, MD UK and EMEA for
Scripps Networks Interactive share their visions
of new challenges and opportunities.
In the same session will be Thomas Riedl,
Head of Global Android TV Partnerships at
Google, an increasingly more common presence
at these events as the Silicon Valley company
tries to cosy up to broadcasters. Is ‘Android
TV a Game Changer?’ attendees will have the
opportunity to make their mind up.
Meanwhile, Discovery president JB Perrette
58
September 2015
will talk IOC 2022 rights, 4K UHD and global
ambition in Friday’s IBC keynote. Roger J Lynch,
CEO of Sling TV keynotes on Saturday on
‘Over the Top Comes of Age’. Sunday will see
BT TV Managing Director Delia Bushell
discussing how BT sees the future, in ‘Telcos
Tune Into Broadcasting’.
Another timely topic is net neutrality, and
the conference will aim to answer how well
broadcasters, platforms and content owners are
embracing the issues of content rights as the EU
looks towards a Digital Single Market.
UHD master class
The Ultra HD Forum, which now members some
20 companies including founders Dolby
Laboratories, Ericsson, Harmonic, LG
Electronics, NeuLion, and Sony, will conduct a
MasterClass focused on the use of UHD
technologies to deliver the next-gen consumer
experience. It can be found on Friday afternoon
in Rooms G102/G103. The Forum is establishing
guidelines for the implementation of a broad
scope of new UHD technologies including Wide
Colour Gamut (WCG), High Dynamic Range
(HDR), High Frame Rate (HFR) and Next
Generation Audio (NGA), and will show how
UHD can be delivered end-to-end.
New things to see
The mega-trend towards IP and software is
transforming the industry and shining a spotlight
on this activity is the IBC Launch Pad, located in
www.csimagazine.com
4k run returns
If just walking isn’t enough then take part in
the second 4K 4Charity Fun Run at IBC2015.
Join co-founding sponsors Elemental and
Ericsson on Saturday morning, September 12,
in Amstel Park, to run the 4km (or 2.49
miles) with proceeds going to CARE. More
info at http://4k4charity.com/
Business
DirecTory
To advertise contact John Woods
+44 (0)20 7562 2421
[email protected]
ATX Networks designs, manufactures, markets and delivers a broad range of products to
the global cable television industry. Other market verticals served include healthcare,
enterprise, government, broadcast, hospitality, education, stadiums/arenas/casinos, retail,
worship, and telcos.
Corneliusstrasse 22, 60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Tel: +49 171 998 3676
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.atxnetworks.com
ATX Networks is a global manufacturer of digital video solutions including transcoding,
multichannel encoding, content streaming solutions, bulk video transition/gateways, RF
management, RF filters, transmitters/receivers, headend and MDU amplifiers, node
segmentation, node/amp upgrades, monitor/control equipment, pads/EQs, drop amps,
digital voice switches, & connectors.
Cisco is the longstanding market-leading supplier of video entertainment. With more than, 7500
video professionals , Cisco is unique in having the scale, resources and breadth of vision to
deliver differentiated solutions to Service Providers.
See what Videoscape Unity can offer, visit www.cisco.com/go/videoscape.
Cisco, One London Road, Staines, Middlesex TW18 4EX
Tel +44 (0)178 484 8500 Fax +44 (0)178 484 8600
Web: cisco.com/go/videoscape
EchoStar Europe is dedicated to enabling digital entertainment providers to optimise revenues
by delivering added-value connected device solutions, services and applications. Through a
comprehensive product range, including STBs, DVRs, home networking and TV anywhere
technology, our solutions enable the provision of state-of-the-art and cost effective
entertainment services.
Beckside Design Centre, Millennium Business Park, Station Road,
Steeton, Keighley BD20 6QW, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 1535 659000 Fax: +44 1535 659100
Web: www.echostar.com
3400 International Drive, NW, Washington D.C. 20008 USA
Tel: +1 202 944 6800 Fax: +1 202 944 7898
Web: www.intelsat.com
6059 Cornerstone Court West, San Diego, CA 92121-3713, US
Tel: +1-858-677-7800 Fax: +1-858-677-7804
Web: www.verimatrix.com
Headquartered in the UK, EchoStar Europe comprises a number of business units and is
affiliated with EchoStar Technologies, a subsidiary of the publicly traded EchoStar Corporation
(NASDAQ: SATS).
Intelsat is the leading provider of fixed satellite services worldwide. Intelsat supplies video, data
and voice connectivity for leading media and communications companies, Internet Service
Providers and government organizations. Intelsat’s valuable regional video neighborhoods
deliver more television channels than any other system. Intelsat’s terrestrial network of eight
strategically-located teleports and over 36,000 miles of leased fiber complements a global
satellite fleet of more than 50 satellites, covering 99% of the world’s population. Intelsat utilizes
a fully integrated satellite operations model, enabling global delivery from a single platform.
With Intelsat, communications with your customers are closer, by far.
Verimatrix specializes in securing and enhancing revenue for multi-screen digital TV services
for more than 500 operators around the globe. The award-winning and independently audited
Verimatrix Video Content Authority System (VCAS™) and ViewRight® solutions offer an
innovative approach for cable, satellite, terrestrial and IPTV operators to cost-effectively extend
their networks and enable new business models. As the recognized leader in software-based
security solutions for premier service providers, Verimatrix has pioneered the 3-Dimensional
Security approach that offers flexible layers of protection techniques to address evolving
business needs and revenue threats. Maintaining close relationships with major studios,
broadcasters, industry organizations, and its unmatched partner ecosystem enables Verimatrix
to provide a unique perspective on digital TV business issues beyond content security as
operators seek to deliver compelling new services. www.verimatrix.com
www.csimagazine.com
September 2015
59
Move millions to the front row.
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moments that matter.
IntelsatOne Prism is the network delivery and management system you need to give your
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Our actively managed IP-based solutions transform how media companies like yours provide
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To learn what IntelsatOne Prism can do for your media business, meet with Intelsat during
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