This year the EBU BroadThinking Conference was sounding like a holistic swirl, a milestone in the trend of technology to define sets that are greater than the sum of their parts, through creative evolution. « Where Broadcast Meets BroadBand », you get some interesting fusion effect occurring and diluting the traditional boundaries of the screens, with the handheld devices being part of the big screen experience or extending it rather than trying to scalp it, in an environment where all the devices converge towards a restricted set of standards rather than tracing their own line.
While we by default think that standardization kills creativity, events like BroadThinking show that it’s the opposite: if we gather energies to solve common problems together, we can both come up with a more evolved solution and concentrate on what’s important past the pixel grid: the user experience, so consistent across screens that you forget there’s more than one screen involved.
Content companies including Viacom and HBO have met with folks from Comcast, Qwilt and others to discuss transparent caching as a way to solve the problem of online video.
Live streaming every phase of every sporting event of the Olympics is a big task. This year NBC expanded their targeted devices to include iOS, Android and Windows smartphones, PCs, Macs, and tablets. The combination of the increased number of live feeds and the increased number of targeted devices creates a complex live video workflow requiring coordination between a number of technologies and partners.
Transparent caching specialist Qwilt has introduced Qwilt Live Stream Cache, a software solution that enhances the company's QB-Series Video Fabric Controllers. The solution replaces the existing unicast model, where each viewer has a dedicated HTTP session, and replaces it with a shared stream model. Qwilt Live Stream Cache is able to identify popular live streams on its own, then store those streams to the controller's FastCache. This dedicated storage area has been optimized to deliver live streams quickly. Next, the Qwilt Live Stream Cache creates a local live video transmission point for each area, letting a large group of viewers share a single video stream.
Akamai has been providing a number of clues about how the company intends to dramatically increase the performance of the Internet for video streaming to support Ultra HD and ultimately match the scale and quality of broadcast TV. One big clue could be found on the Qualcomm stand at International CES 2014 when that company’s subsidiary, Qualcomm Atheros, was demonstrating its IPQ home gateway. Among other things this included a proof-of-concept client software from Akamai that is designed to optimize the delivery and pre-positioning of content like video and software.
The client software is not a product yet but Akamai is certainly talking as if it will be. Kris Alexander, Chief Strategist, Connected Devices & Gaming at Akamai, says, “The demo offers a glimpse into the future of the Akamai platform as we explore ways to move beyond the edge and onto devices of many types – not only gateways but game consoles, set-top-boxes, Blu-ray players, connected TVs and more.”
Almost lost in the sizeable Qualcomm booth in Central Hall of the 2014 International CES show is one of the more interesting demos of the year. Working together, Qualcomm, Elemental, and Akamai are showing a proof of concept of how 4K content can be encoded with HEVC to MPEG-DASH, and streamed to a big screen TV in the home.
The demo shows a vision of the near future using new and emergent technology for 4K streaming, says Kurt Michel, Akamai’s director of product marketing for media.
The video workflow goes like this: Elemental took 4K master files and encoded them at 4K MPEG-DASH using HEVC, outputting 30fps versions at 10-, 15-, and 20Mbps. Those renditions were uploaded to Akamai’s cloud-based storage network, where it’s streamed to the Qualcomm booth. The adaptive video is received by a tablet running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 processor, which supports HEVC decoding in DASH. That image is then mirrored to a big-screen TV.
The Elemental and Akamai parts of the demo are production services available today. The exciting part is how the three players have been brought together to demonstrate HEVC and DASH 4K streaming. It might be a first.
ACCESS has been presenting a vision of how Pay TV operators can start to marry their broadcast/VOD infrastructure with multiscreen/OTT delivery infrastructure and treat them as a shared resource to optimize the delivery of content to multiple devices around the home, including televisions. It uses its Netfront Living Connect DLNA stack and client software to provide a central view of what each device is capable of and what is currently happening on that device to then manage whole-home resources.
Content can be distributed using the new DLNA Commercial Video Profile-2 (CVP-2), which was developed with the cooperation of service providers to enable more secure playback of their content across multiscreen devices. It also gives them more control over the user interface on different devices. CVP-2 leverages HTML5 Remote User Interfaces (RUIs) and HTTP Adaptive Delivery and Authentication on top of the DTCP-IP-based link layer protection, which was already available. ACCESS is actually demonstrating NetFront Living Connect with CVP-2 at the DLNA Members meeting in Hawaii today (Thursday October 10).
In this new architecture, DLNA acts as an abstraction layer. Not only does it provide a unified view of activity across diverse devices, it also means platform operators can avoid writing native apps for each DLNA-enabled device. You still need a software client to reach them but not the unique applications development work. “DLNA is a way to overcome device fragmentation,” says Larbey at Alcatel-Lucent.
The next-generation of CDN needs to give service providers much greater control over bandwidth priorities in the home, Alcatel-Lucent believes. If there are multiple devices competing for bandwidth, you need to be able to say that a connected television needs priority for streaming and that a smartphone should be given a lower bitrate stream, for example.
“Service providers need a way to control the quality that is delivered to every screen and that is not possible today with adaptive bitrate streaming,” Mestric explains. “So in the CDN we will include a session manager that makes the CDN aware of all the different devices and session requests so that if you start to watch video on an iPhone and there is no congestion in the access network you will get the highest bitrate possible, but if someone else in the family turns on a connected TV device the service provider can then limit the bitrate profiles that can be accessed by the iPhone, for instance.”
Mestric points out that session prioritization could be useful if there is contention on mobile networks. Then a content provider could prioritize a premium subscriber over a basic subscriber so they get the higher bitrate if there is no chance to provide them both with the best possible experience.
Nicolas Weil's insight:
Interesting approach fro priviledging premium subscribers/contents, and a new competitor for Seawell Networks Spectrum which is delivering this kind of features for a long time now...
Broadpeak today launched umbrellaCDN™, an innovative solution that offers content providers and pay-TV operators complete control over the allocation of video content to multiple CDNs. Utilizing umbrellaCDN, users can select the best CDN for live or VOD content at all times — according to various criteria — enabling them to provide the best possible quality of experience for end-users at the best possible cost.
Content providers can create parameter-based rules according to a wide range of criteria, including end-user geo-location, end-user ISP, type of content (e.g., live or VOD, pay or free, premium or trailer), and time of day or day of the week. Rules are managed through three distinct modes: quality of service, where the chosen CDN is the one that offers the best quality in a given region; load balancing, whereby sessions are divided between several CDNs; and quotas, with a maximum number of sessions allocated to each CDN.
Broadpeak’s nanoCDN solution will be launched commercially early this year, giving telcos and cable operators the opportunity to reduce bandwidth consumption and simultaneously increase the QoE for customers watching live streaming video on multiscreen devices. This product has the potential to change the economics of streaming but until now there have been only limited details available about how it works and what it can achieve. Broadpeak has just started releasing more details.
Mistserver is a open-source multimedia streaming server developed by DDVTech a company based in Netherlands. This server will support some technologies : HLS, HDS, Smooth Streaming, RTMP, …
For the moment, HDS, RTMP and progressive download are available. You can push too livestream via RMTP. The company have two others solutions : MistSteward, MistCenter.
DDVTech positions his solution in a competitive market with some actors : Adobe Media Server, Wowza, Red5, Apache, …
All video services are the same in two important aspects. Even with a small number of concurrent viewers the load becomes substantial, and the users may abandon the service in case of faulty video delivery. The issues with video delivery are often relating to high load and suboptimal use of resources. To address such challenges in our projects, we used a special video load balancer module. In this post, we are going to provide you with details on the balancer and building of efficient video platform by optimal load distribution.
Get an advance peek at the online video trends that will shape 2013 and how you can capitalize on the disruption to come.
You will learn: • What service providers can do to profit from the rise of OTT video • How the migration to longer-form video content will effect OTT providers and existing Pay TV operators • How the combination of CDNs and Transparent Caching can be a dynamic duo for service providers
PeerApp, Limelight Networks and EdgeCast Networks jointly formed the open Content Service Extension initiative last year to enable an open-standards environment through which broadband operators can work collaboratively with Internet content providers and web applications to deliver services in a manner that efficiently utilizes network infrastructure and maximizes subscriber Quality of Experience (QoE). The CSE architecture allows CDNs and content service providers to extend their business logic and delivery footprint deeply into operator networks, through invocation of network functions and capabilities deployed and controlled by the operator. It also establishes a mechanism through which operators can be fairly compensated for the role their infrastructure and network capabilities play in service delivery. In addition to participating in this demonstration, Sandvine will also be formally joining the Content Service Extension initiative.
The demonstration features managed delivery of 4K video content from Limelight's global CDN footprint into the home, triggering operator caching and network Quality of Service (QoS) extension services in a trusted and controlled fashion. The operator-side implementation of the CSE service architecture includes PeerApp's UltraBand cache and CSE controller platforms as well as Sandvine's Service Delivery Engine (SDE).
As we reported previously, the Broadpeak solution introduces very lightweight clients into the home router/gateway and these intercept the unicast stream requests made by a tablet or smartphone to an origin server. The client looks for a multicast stream of the linear content instead. The platform operator works with a content owner to make the most popular channels available in multicast, perhaps during peak times or for popular shows or live sports, or even 24/7. The nanoCDN client receives this multicast stream instead, then converts it to unicast ABR (adaptive bit rate) inside the home so it can be watched on the multiscreen devices without any changes to their apps.
By replacing multiple unicast streams with a single multicast stream in the broadband network, nanoCDN reduces the bandwidth demands for linear/live video. nanoCDN is pioneering because of the way it harnesses multicast within a CDN environment and because it makes in-home devices an extension of the CDN.
Adobe, NBCU, Elemental, Deltatre, LiveU, and more are readying streaming platforms that will deliver coverage to desktops and mobile devices around the globe.
Four years ago according to the IOC there was a defining moment in Olympic broadcasting history. Vancouver was the first Winter Games to be fully embraced on digital media platforms where digital coverage accounted for around half of the overall broadcast output.
Globally, on official rights-holding broadcasters’ internet and mobile platforms, there were more than 265 million video views and in excess of 1.2 billion page views during the games. There were also approximately 6,000 hours of 2010 coverage on mobile phone platforms.
Digital coverage from Sochi will surpass this, with many more broadcasters drawing on the clear consumer demand from London 2012 for any time, any device viewing.
The IOC places such draconian restraints on rights holders and anyone working for them to report involvement in the Olympics, which extends to technology contractors, that it's tricky to unearth details on this story. With that caveat, here are some of the large-scale video streaming activities set to go live from Sochi at the end of this week.
4K streaming, mobile broadcasting for the crowd, generalized delinearization, worldwide video events…
OTT delivery is just multiplying the challenges, as customers’ expectations are raising each day in terms of video fast-start, instant channel switching, lack of buffer and high frame size/rate – on all devices in all network conditions. To answer those challenges, OTT delivery answer today is basically more unicast sessions, more servers, more peering – and less and less guarantee of satisfying end-user experience as long as there is no specific end-to-end paid agreement to guarantee that the path will be provisioned from the origin server up to the video device. Even in this ideal scheme, the device might still suffer from poor wireless conditions which jeopardize the experience. So, how do we deal with all this stack of potential problems: do we stick to the aging receipts, rely blindly on Moore’s law and perpetuate a hopeless CDN weapons race? Or do we try to find smarter ways to make the OTT growth reach a sustainable delivery model ?
Avec le passage au full HD et bientôt à la 4K de a diffusion OTT, le modèle de distribution unicast montre ses limites. La course à l’armement des CDNs dans le déploiement de baies de serveurs et la multiplication des points de peering n’est pas scalable à l’infini, et pourtant le traffic vidéo ne cesse d’augmenter de manière exponentielle, y compris – et surtout – sur les terminaux mobiles. La recherche de modèles de distribution OTT complémentaires avec le multicast est donc une priorité pour continuer d’assurer la qualité de l’expérience utilisateur et optimiser les coûts de diffusion. Les regards se tournent de plus en plus vers le transport multicast qui a fait le succès de l’IPTV, ainsi que le Peer-to-Peer qui, malgré sa réputation sulfureuse, a déjà fait ses preuves pour la diffusion de chaines live OTT à très grande échelle.
Pour tout savoir du multicast et du P2P, et apprendre des retours d’expérience et de recherche des membres de la Squad qui travaillent sur ces systèmes hybrides, OVFSquad organisait le 23 janvier 2014 une soirée spéciale de présentations (aka « Conférensquad ») dont voici le compte-rendu et les présentations.
Quiptel, a five-year-old start-up company, claims it has an online media platform that improves the user experience of streaming audio and video while making more efficient use of available network bandwidth. It is a bold claim, which acting chief executive Richard Baker tested at a low key launch in a London hotel.
The patented technology appears to be based on using multiple logical network routes and a network overlay that intelligently manages traffic to optimise use of available access network bandwidth.
The result, Quiptel claims, is that more of the available network capacity is used to deliver sound and pictures, while operators can serve more customers with equivalent infrastructure.
MPEG DASH is hot news. Widely anticipated to become the 'de facto' delivery standard, this session is part presentation -- to bring you up to speed on what MPEG DASH is -- and part opportunity to ask questions of one of the instigators of the standard.
Nicolas Weil's insight:
Interesting speach by Alex Zambelli on Microsoft DASH roadmap, from the 26th minute. Development track to confirm at IBC... 2013...
Because content delivery networks (CDNs) are at the heart of next-generation IP video infrastructure, they are the logical place to add personalization. With the right approach, service providers can take advantage of the CDN replication model while delivering personalized content. At the same time, they can ensure the network scales to achieve quality expectations.
There are many good reasons to personalize content, including :
- Targeted ads
- Emergency alerts
- Blackouts
- Quality adjustments
To take control of the delivery mechanism, service providers must build a server-side version of the client-based adaptive streaming concept. Introducing two new components will bring more intelligence and processing power into the CDN to improve overall HTTP behavior and performance:
A session manager retrieves the contextual information needed to customize the content and tell the cache in the CDN which changes to apply to the content.A video processor in the cache generates the new content to be sent to end users based on the original content and the information delivered by the session manager.
In a real deployment scenario, playback should be as robust as possible in the face of server-side problems. As our architecture stands today, playback can suffer from two problems regardless of the amount of backend redundancy that is deployed. Those problems are liveness, where a packager advertises a stale view of live, and dropout, where a packager has gaps in its fragment list.
HDS/HLS fail-over is the server side solution to solve the live-ness and dropout problems in HDS/HLS respectively.
This article describes a basic failover setup with redundant packagers and Varnish as a reverse proxy. The article further provides users a step-by-step guide to writing a basic varnish configuration script to configure Varnish for the failover solution.
Netflix Open Connect, the single purpose video content delivery network launched last year, is now delivering the majority of Netflix international traffic and is growing at a rapid pace in the domestic market.
Netflix Open Connect is now widely deployed around the world, serving the vast majority of Netflix video in Europe, Canada and Latin America, and a growing proportion in the US, where Netflix has over 25 million streaming members.
Now available through Open Connect partners, Netflix Super HD is the highest quality video format offered by Netflix, providing an even better picture on 1080p HDTVs.
In the US, Netflix is also for the first time offering a small number of titles streaming in 3D through Open Connect partners.
Chelsio Communications, a leading provider of 10Gb Ethernet Unified Wire Adapters, ASICs and Unified Storage software solutions, today announced a media streaming enhancement to its T4 Unified Wire adapters targeted at high performance content delivery applications. The Chelsio StreamEngin adds video segmentation offload and per-stream rate limiting functionality to the TCP and UDP offload capabilities of the T4 Unified Wire adapters to significantly reduce CPU utilization, increase video and content delivery capacity and improve service quality.
-- Video Segmentation Offload -- Tailored for video content, the StreamEngine segmentation offload technology moves the processing required to packetize video data and control its transmission rate from the server to the network adapter. Video Segmentation Offload (VSO) increases performance and dramatically reduces CPU overhead, allowing significantly higher capacity using the same server hardware. Without VSO support, video server software needs to packetize payload into frames, process each frame individually through the network stack and schedule individual frame transmission, resulting in millions of system calls and packet traversal through all protocol layers in the operating system to the network adapter.
-- Rate Shaping -- Rate Shaping within the StreamEngine allows Content Delivery Networks/Video On Demand providers to avoid receive buffer overflows, smooth out network traffic, and enforce Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Without dedicated hardware-based rate shaping or limiting support, the video server must perform rate limiting in software, a CPU intensive task that can be prohibitive at 10Gb and higher rates.
Octoshape, an industry leader in cloud-based streaming technology, has developed an integrated technology showcase with Juniper Networks to provide a foundation for Broadband TV with the scale, quality and cost efficiency of broadcast TV. The showcase is being hosted from Juniper Networks New Jersey-based OpenLab, the Junos® Center for Innovation, which facilitates a collaborative environment for Juniper’s customers, partners and academia to learn about and develop new network integrated software applications.
The showcase integrates Octoshape’s Infinite HD-M Federated Multicast platform with Juniper Networks® MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers for both Native Multicast, and Automatic Multicast Tunneling (AMT). The HD-M solution for high definition Internet video has been in production since April 2012, and now utilizes the first commercially available AMT relay from Juniper.
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