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Untitled-12 1 20/08/2013 15:31:46
Come and visit us at IBC to find out why WOW is the word for Bridge Technologies at IBC 2013. Find us at stand 1.A30
12 Analyst cornerThe ‘content crunch’ is OTT’s main problem going forward. But how big a hurdle is it? Guy Bisson provides the answer based on his new research
14 COVER STORY - 4K/Ultra HD specialOur special focus on 4K starts with a top level view and asks if a mass-market exists for the technology. 4K will also require a new production paradigm and two experts share lessons from early field experiments on p18. GfK analyses its chances of success on p20
22 Carriage disputes in EuropeThe carriage wars between broadcasters and platform
operators in the US are escalating, but also making their way into European markets
25 Android securityAs premium video content proliferates across Android devices, there is a need for greater security. What role can TrustZone play here?
30 Tablet TVHow can service providers take a more integrated approach with second screen services?
35 Conference review: CSI home gateways summitThe day explored the role of the multimedia home gateway in a world moving towards the cloud
40 UK local TVA new wave of local TV services is about to go live across the UK. What impact are they likely to have?
50 IBC previewA look forward to the conference and show floor high-lights of IBC2013
EditorGoran Nastic
Commercial managerTiro Bestonso
Design and productionMatt Mills (Manager)Jason TuckerMatleena Lilja-PellingKeem Chung
Regular contributorsAdrian Pennington, Philip Hunter, David Adams, Stephen Cousins
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Editor’s report:Over-the-top broadband delivery is one of a number of major changes sweeping the TV industry. One manifestation of this is exacerbating tensions between cable and satellite operators and channel owners over retransmission fees, now emerging across Europe (see our feature on p22). While Time Warner Cable and CBS are in the middle of a dispute resulting in a lengthy blackout for subscribers, Netflix seems to go from strength to
strength, receiving 14 Primetime Emmy nominations for its programmes, the first internet content pro-vider to be acknowledged in this way. OTT still faces content hurdles, but this won’t last forever and IHS has crunched the numbers on how many OTT subscribers would be needed to dismantle the market for UK premium movie rights on p12. Elsewhere, our Q&A is with Chello’s Jelmer Kleingeld, who talks VoD on p34. The technology spotlight falls under HbbTV and DASH on p44. Goran Nastic, editor
Contents
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cover.indd 1 20/08/2013 11:36:32
CSI Awards ceremony Friday 13 September
IBC, RAI, Amsterdam6pm-7.30pm, Room E102
CSI Awards shortlist 2013View now
www.csimagazine.com/awards
csi_awards2013ad_v2.indd 1 21/08/2013 16:57:32
news in brief
EBU tackles authentication
The EBU has set up an initiative
that aims to develop an
alternative to proprietary single
sign-on systems, and in the
process make it easier for
broadcasters to provide more
personalised user experiences.
The Cross-Platform
Authentication (CPA) project
group will develop an alternative
to systems such as Facebook and
Yahoo!. The group will develop a
variant of the widely implemented
open standard OAuth 2.0
protocol specifically targeted at
IP-connected media devices. “A
solution to this problem would
unlock the potential for a minor
revolution in the usually
anonymous world of
broadcasting,” the EBU said.
Liberty Global has outlined how
its move to the cloud has resulted
in accelerated time-to-market of
the Horizon TV platform in its
newest market.
Faycal Amrani, managing director
and chief architect, said during CSI’s
multimedia gateway summit that the
Horizon combined gateway and
multi-screen service platform will
move traditional headend functions
such as encoding, transcoding,
encryption and multiplexing to the
cloud within the next year or two
across a series of virtual data centres,
depending on rights issues. This will
create a more virtualised, “scattered
cloud” delivery infrastructure for its
12 European operating companies,
which will improve cost efficiency by
“quite a big number,” said Amrani.
Liberty is testing the technology to
virtualise these features and Amrani
called results so far “very promising.”
“Our goal is to harmonise the
services and solution across our
footprint with agility and we can’t do
it without the cloud. The move to the
cloud is clear,” he added, stressing
that cloud based architectures does
not mean the end of the gateway but
a shift in what is right to do in each.
Liberty has already created a
central back-office to help it
harmonise functions like OSS/BSS,
customer management support,
and applications like interactive
TV, nPVR, UI, search etc as the
cablenet rolls out its next-gen
Horizon brand across Europe. This
centralised location is called the
Pan European Central Head End
(PECHE), which powers Horizon
services in the four markets the
product is commercially available.
Amrani explained how the
launches in the first two markets of
the Netherlands and Switzerland
took 12 months at a time when
PECHE was not yet operational,
compared to just three months
using PECHE for Ireland and
Germany. “So when we talk about
elasticity, agility and service
velocity, we mean it, it’s real.”
Amrani said.
Liberty Global looks to virtualisation
News
CableLabs consolidates globallyR&D body CableLabs has expanded
its reach in Asia-Pacific and Latin
America and taken Cable Europe
Labs into its fold.
In the process, CableLabs has
added 14 new members in the
three regions to its rostra, taking
the total to 51 MSOs who together
serve over 120 million customers
worldwide. The cable industry has
long sought economies of scale to
position it better against the telcos
in particular, which this move
should help achieve.
“As the global market becomes
more competitive, it is critical that
technology standards become
aligned to support and accelerate
the continued innovation necessary
for the cable industry to meet the
future needs of consumers on an
international scale,” the group said,
adding that CableLabs global
alignment of technologies and
strategies will allow technology
suppliers to develop and bring to
market solutions that scale across
cable operators worldwide.
As part of the move, all Cable
Europe Labs activities will
transition to CableLabs, which is
taking over the development and
management of DOCSIS standards
in the region and throughout the
world, and thus becoming the sole
arbiter of the current DOCSIS 3.0
specs and the forthcoming
DOCSIS 3.1 specs.
Cable Labs gains nine new
members in the region (see table).
Other former Cable Europe Labs
members are also expected to join.
CableLabs will also see new
members join from Asia-Pac and
Latin America, including Japan,
Indonesia, China and Argentina.
news in brief
UK TV analytics partnership
formed
Kantar Media has teamed with
Twitter to develop a new suite of
tools to support planning and
analytics for the UK TV industry.
Bringing together social TV data
from Twitter with the audience
research expertise of Kantar, the
companies said the tools will
enable broadcasters to assess
programmes and series, plan
programme promotions more
effectively and assist media
buyers and sellers to integrate
social data more comprehensively
into the TV component of their
media mix. The first of these new
products will be available
commercially to UK broadcasters,
media agencies and the wider
industry in 2014.
News
Com Hem (Sweden)
Get (Norway)
Kabel Deutschland (Germany)
LIWEST (Austria)
Ono (Spain)
Tele Columbus (Germany)
YouSee (Denmark)
Ziggo (Netherlands)
ZON (Portugal)
J:COM (Japan)
PT Link Net (Indonesia)
Topway (Shenzhen, China)
WASU (Hangzhou, China)
Cablevisión (Argentina)
New CableLabs members
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news in brief
New Ukraine DTH platform
Lybid TV, a new Ukrainian pay-
TV platform, has started
commercial operations on the
Eutelsat 36B satellite having
signed a multi-year lease for two
transponders. Lybid TV is
broadcasting up to 50 digital
channels comprising national
Ukrainian channels, including the
premium sport channels Football,
Football +, Sport-1 and Sport-2,
in addition to European and
Russian brands. Until the end of
the year, the platform is available
for a three-year subscription of
$15 for homes equipped with
60cm antennas. The DTH service
is secured by Exset’s conditional
access technology, Exset CAS.
Netlfix local content
Netflix is looking to produce
lower-cost local programming
internationally for the first time,
starting with a comedy series
targeted at Brazil. The online
streaming provider has ordered
scripted comedy A Toca for its
Brazilian service and the
Portuguese-language series
commission represents the
company’s first major project
outside of the US and part of a
new strategy to commission lower
budget scripted programming for
international platforms.Netflix
has previously ordered one-off
stand up comedies for some of its
Latin American services, but this
is the first time it has ordered
local scripted content.
BT Sport signs 1m subs
Over one million homes have
subscribed to BT’s new sports
channels. BT began to accept
orders on May 10, meaning that
million customers for BT Sport
have been added in just three
months, as the telco looks to
break Sky’s market dominance.
08 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
News
EBU: frame rates improve 4K UX
Early 4K tests from the EBU show
that viewers appreciate higher frame
rates much more than increased
resolution.
The tests, designed to gauge the
impact of higher frame rates on the
viewing experience, are taking
place this week at IRT’s facilities in
Munich by the EBU’s Broadcast
Technology Futures (BTF) group,
which is made up of the heads of
the research labs of the BBC, IRT,
RAI and NHK.
Last February, a set of subjective
UHDTV resolution tests conducted
at the EBU revealed that higher
resolutions would not be enough to
create a clearly perceptible difference
compared to HDTV. Significant work
is now under way to investigate other
parameters required to generate a
more immersive experience with
UHDTV.
“In addition to resolution,
technical parameters that are likely
to be crucial include higher dynamic
range, extended colour space and, of
course, the frame rate,” said the
EBU, which wants to discover
whether observers appreciate higher
frame rates and what the upper limit
of frame rates should be (the current
UHDTV standard specified by the
ITU includes only 120 Hz as a
higher frame rate).
To this end, various frame rates up
to 240 Hz with different content
genres are being rated by observers,
using sequences in both
uncompressed form and compressed
with HEVC.
“Early results give a clear
indication that higher frame rates are
appreciated by the observers, to a
significantly greater extent than
increased resolution. This supports
the position that future UHDTV
systems should include higher frame
rates,” the EBU added.
Given the practical limitations for
screen sizes in many homes, it may
well be that higher temporal
resolution could have a more
significant effect than simply
increasing the spatial resolution. On
the other hand, it may be harder to
justify and explain the advantages to
consumers, who generally just want
bigger screens with more pixels.
The detailed results will be
examined in the BTF group and in
the EBU’s Beyond HD strategic
programme and more tests will
follow in the future.
UK UHD Forum Launched The UK UHD Forum has been
launched by the industry association
for digital television in the UK, The
Digital TV Group.
Chris Jones Chief Engineer,
Broadcast Strategy at BskyB and
Andy Quested, the BBC’s Head of
Technology for BBC HD and
UHDTV, Co-Chair the group that
will work hand-in-hand with FAME
and other European standard
organisations and ‘co-ordinate UK
requirements to build a knowledge
base for the future interoperability
of Ultra HD’
Broadcasters and the Digital
Production Partnership will also
work with the DTG to discover
whether or not there is a need for a
UK Ultra HD profile. DTG hope this
will build on the success of the HD
forum.
Although 4KTV displays are
already on sale in the UK, it is
believed that the displays of the
future will go much further, bringing
a sense of exceptional immersion and
depth through advances in colour,
frame rate and dynamic range, as
defined in the ITU’s
Recommendation for UHD. It is also
considered important to avoid
confusion that many customers
experience of ‘HD Ready’, and it is
therefore vital that the technology
step-change demanded by UHD is
understood prior to any introduction
of an ‘Ultra-HD Ready’ logo.
In launching the UK UHD-Forum,
the DTG is bringing together all
relevant stakeholders to work towards
the managed delivery of
interoperable Ultra-HD services,
networks and devices.”
• Spanish satellite operator
Hispasat, meanwhile, plans to launch
a new ultra HD channel, Hispasat
4K, which will be available to the
industry as a testing ground, similar
to initiatives from rivals Eutelsat and
SES.
Hispasat has already tested 4K
transmissions in Brazil, Spain and
several European countries and said
it is cutting deals with technology
partners to promote the technology
between producers and users.
Orange has tested UHD signals during the French Open tennis tournament
news in brief
KIT becomes Piksel
KIT digital is preparing to exit
bankruptcy and will re-launch at
IBC under a new name, Piksel.
KIT said the reorganisation plan
will be confirmed by the US
Bankruptcy Court for the
Southern District of New York
after the company filed for
voluntary bankruptcy protection
three months ago to cleanse itself
of “legacy issues”, including
financial, legal and regulatory
matters. KIT digital will officially
rebrand on August 29, focusing
on software applications,
partnerships, and professional
and managed services.
KT to deploy HTML5 service
Korean telco KT is planning to
launch an HTML5-based IPTV
multi-screen service. The service,
called Olleh TV Smart, will be
accessible from both set-top boxes
and connected devices such as
PCs, smartphones, and tablets.
With the shift to the HTML5
open interface, KT will introduce
an app that supplements live
streamed baseball games with
statistics about the players, and
they will be able to instantly
re-play key moments of the game.
KT will launch additional features
including HTML5-based
interactive education, cloud
games, ‘Cloud DVD’ and private
broadcasting services in coming
months. Alticast provides the
middleware for KT’s system.
Carrier ID survey
The Satellite Interference
Reduction Group (IRG) and
Newtec are undertaking an
industry survey to find out what
the industry thinks when it comes
to satellite interference and
Carrier ID. The survey is
available at surveymonkey.com/s/
StopInterference2013
10 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
News
Eutelsat to acquire Satmex Eutelsat has agreed to fully acquire
Satélites Mexicanos for $1.14
billion as it looks to become a major
satellite player in the Latin
American markets.
This acquisition, together with
the recently ordered Eutelsat 65
West A satellite, gives Eutelsat
significant entry across a region
that is experiencing high growth in
television, telecoms and digital
media.
“With Satmex’s strategic orbital
slots, state of the art fleet and
upcoming satellites, Eutelsat is
gaining a robust platform from
which to access the significant
opportunities in this region,” said
Eutelsat CEO Michel de Rosen.
Based in Mexico, Satmex
operates three satellites at 113.0°
West (Satmex 6), 114.9° West
(Satmex 5) and 116.8° West
(Satmex 8) that cover 90% of the
population of the Americas. The
company operates in C and Ku-bands
and was granted Ka-band rights in
2012. The operator is targeting an
increased contribution from video
through its positions at 113.0° West
and 116.8° West including through
the recently launched Satmex 8
satellite.
The launch of Satmex 8 in March
added 21 incremental 36 MHz-
equivalent transponders to its fleet,
of which 12 have already been
contracted. The company has
committed to acquire two electric
propulsion satellites (Satmex 7 and
9) that will become operational in
2015 and 2016 to more than double
its total in-orbit capacity.
Satmex has an estimated market
share of 11% in Latin America where
it enjoys a strong franchise in
corporate data networks and cellular
backhaul.
In 2012, Satmex’s FSS business
generated revenues of $111.8 million
and $89.1 million in adjusted
EBITDA, on top of a backlog of
$242 million. Satmex also owns and
operates Alterna TV, a provider of
Hispanic television programming to
the US market. The transaction is
expected to close by the end of 2013,
subject to government and regulatory
approvals and other customary
conditions.
AOL to acquire Adap.TV Internet giant AOL is taking a
bigger step into online video
advertising with the acquisition of
Adap.TV, in a deal worth around
$405 million.
California-based Adap.TV brings
the only complete global
programmatic video technology
stack for publishers and advertisers
across all screens, as well as a
unified yield management platform
for advertisers and publishers for
planning, targeting, adserving
and measurement.
Adap.TV allows brands to target
to a specific audience (so called
programmatic advertising) and AOL
expects the combination to create a
powerful cross-screen solution for
brands, agencies and publishers.
The combination will give AOL an
end-to-end solution and video stack
for publishers and advertisers – from
premium original production, to
content aggregation and syndication
platforms, video CMS technology,
and now a leading programmatic
video platform.
Last year, Adap.tv supported more
than 26,000 global ad campaigns,
which ran on approximately 9,500
websites and was used by many top
brand advertisers.
Adap.tv will operate independently
as part of AOL’s video organisation
and be included as part of the
overall solution offered by AOL
Networks to its publisher and
advertiser partners.
Start-up touts MPEG-2 gainsEuclid Discoveries is promising to
boost MPEG-2 compression by
10-30% thanks to EuclidVision
technology, a software module that
can be installed in legacy MPEG-2
set top boxes, which the company is
pitching at cable MSOs.
Test results, measured by BD rate
and visual comparisons, have shown
compression gains of between
10-30% for high motion, HD videos,
according to the company. When
EuclidVision determines that the
complexity of the video has exceeded
the conventional encoder’s
capabilities, it applies additional
modelling information to those
regions to generate better
predictions. An H.264 compliant
EuclidVision software module is
expected before the end of the year.
news in brief
ZigBee takes off in STBs
Almost a third of set-top boxes
shipped globally in 2018 will
integrate support for ZigBee
RF4CE technology, according to
ABI Research. A total of 30% of
STBs will feature ZigBee by that
date, up from just 3% in 2011.
ABI believes the technology is
also set to allow STBs to become
the centre piece of automated
homes. The standard currently
serves as a replacement for IR in
remote controls. Operators such
as Comcast, Pace, EchoStar and
Swisscom have already
incorporated it in their STBs.
Android gains on 9” tablets
Over 34m tablets shipped in Q2
2013, a 43% YoY increase,
according to Canalys, which said
that tablets now account for 31%
of worldwide PC shipments.
Apple’s market share dropped to
43%. The chasing pack of
Samsung, Amazon, Lenovo and
Acer each grew annually by over
200%, driven by increasing
demand for small-screen tablets
available for less than $150.
Canalys estimates that 68% of
tablets shipped in Q2 had a
screen size smaller than 9”.
Connected devices impact
secondary sets
The TV set in the living room
retains its importance, according
to Ofcom, which found that 91%
of all viewing is on the main TV
set, up from 88% in 2002. Live
TV accounted for 90% of all
viewing in 2012, with the average
viewer watching just over four
hours of TV a day - 15 minutes
more than in 2008. However,
there were 41% of households
with only one TV set in 2012
compared with 35% in 2002,
while only 52% of 5-15 year olds
had a TV in their bedroom.
News
1bn payTV homes by 2018 Global pay TV households will reach
the one billion mark by 2018, up from
772 million in 2012 and 814 million
in 2013, according to Digital TV
Research.
The Asia Pacific region will
contribute 59% of the global total by
that time. China will have the most
pay TV subs, at 313 million by end-
2018, followed by 158 million in
India and 107 million in the US.
These three countries will account
for 58% of global pay TV households
by 2018.
Pay TV penetration (analog and
digital combined) reached 53.6% of
TV households by end-2012, and will
rise to 55.7% by end-2013 and 63.1%
by 2018. Penetration at end-2018 will
range from 86% in North America to
29% in the Middle East and Africa.
Pay TV penetration will remain
highest in the Netherlands, at 99.5%
by end-2018.
Of the 667 million digital TV
homes to be added between 2012
and 2018, 240 million will come
from digital cable to take its total to
513 million. Primary FTA DTT
[homes taking DTT but not
subscribing to cable, DTH or IPTV]
will acquire an additional 225 million
– bringing its total to 363 million.
Pay DTT will add 7 million to total
16 million.
Pay IPTV will increase by 98
million to 167 million, with pay DTH
up 73 million to 251 million and
FTA DTH up 31 million to 143
million.
There were still 652 million
analogue TV households by end-
2012 but this total will fall by 104
million in 2013 alone, with only
127 million remaining by 2018
when analogue penetration will
stand at only 8.0% (77 million
analogue terrestrial homes and 49
million analogue cable).
Netflix not cannibalising linear TVNetflix households watch as much
traditional TV as homes that do not
take up the service, according to new
data from TiVo Research and
Analytics.
In a recent survey of nearly 10,000
subscribers, TiVo found there was no
significant difference in the amount
of traditional TV viewing between
Netflix and non-Netflix households.
Of the survey respondents 57%
stated that they subscribe to Netflix
and 18% had watched House of
Cards. Half also reported they
subscribe to Amazon Prime and
18% to Hulu Plus, while 8%
subscribe to all three over the top
services.
Netflix households also are
heavier viewers of other premium
dramas: households who reported
viewing House of Cards watched
85% more HBO than non-Netflix
households.
“Our data show that Netflix is
not currently a substitute for
traditional television, but offers a
way for TV lovers to watch more of
the kinds of programs they love,”
said TRA.
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 11
Source: Netflix
China 312.9India 158.0USA 106.8Russia 32.3Brazil 30.5 Japan 27.0Germany 23.1Mexico 19.0 South Korea 16.9UK 16.3
Netherlands 100Denmark 97Belgium 96Hong Kong 96South Korea 95Sweden 92Norway 91Puerto Rico 91Singapore 89Estonia 87
Households (million) Penetration (%)
Top 10 pay TV cuntries at end - 2018
Acliché to start: content
is king. A truth for
seconds: good content is
very expensive. And now
a look to the future: as
television evolves
increasingly towards IP
and OTT delivery, the ‘content crunch’ represents
the biggest obstacle to change.
I’ve noted in past analysis some of the
technical cost issues around scaling large-volume
unicast OTT delivery of television content (see
CSI Jan-Feb issue), but the real road-block is
economic. It is the entrenched economics of the
content business, that of rights sales and channel
carriage agreements.
So just how big an obstacle is this? On the
technical side, we can model CDN costs and,
from an engineering perspective, address certain
scaling issues through a combination of unicast
and multicast technology and, in the near-term,
through hybrid broadcast/IP technologies. But the
content value chain is very different from the
technical one. It doesn’t evolve on a Moore’s Law-
like timeline. The economic model for movie and
entertainment content has remained essentially
the same since the inception of TV.
The UK market for movie and entertainment
content within the pay TV subscription window is
worth an estimated £650m in terms of annual
rights spend. When channel carriage income for
the main content owners is added, this jumps to
€1.3bn. That, represents about 22% of the total
value of the UK pay TV market and is the size of
the roadblock that will have to be dismantled
before there can be a sea-change in the way
content is delivered.
Content owners have long talked of direct-to-
consumer propositions, cutting out the
middleman represented by pay TV operators and
channels and taking home all of the subscription
spoils their content generates. For a long time this
has been little more than a fantasy, as believable
as the plot-lines of many a Hollywood blockbuster.
But OTT is a potential game-changer in that it
brings together the potential of an open network
while removing the onus on a single closed-
network hardware solution for delivery of
premium TV.
To date, content owners have taken little
more than baby steps towards this full
disintermediation. To offer their content
direct would mean an end to lucrative,
usually exclusive, deals with pay TV partners.
Taken to its logical conclusion, not only
would it mean an end to licensing
relationships with premium channel
customers, but it would also devalue the
entire linear TV channel proposition by
shifting all of the value traditionally placed
on this segment into the OTT delivery
platform.
There are other issues. What price
point could be charged? How do you value
output from a single content provider?
A price point of £5 for all of the output
of a major producer like Disney or Discovery
may sound reasonable, but add in a few more
content owners at this level
and the price soon exceeds
the monthly cost of a high-
end pay TV subscription
today.
Dismantling the content value chain
By modelling out realistic price-points based on
the monthly ARPU that a UK pay TV subscriber
can support it becomes clear that between 1.3m
and 4.3m direct OTT subscribers would be
needed to dismantle the market for UK premium
movie rights, although a realistic mid-point would
suggest it could be done with as few as 2.7m
customers. Counting income from studio-owned
UK channels and those of non-studio majors like
Discovery would mean rights owners would have
to find between 2.7m and 8.6m direct OTT
customers to make back the revenue they would
lose from existing relationships and channel
carriage agreements, this time with a mid-point
around 5.4m customers.
Some major players that are more heavily
entrenched in the UK market with both channels
and rights deals would need even more. Smaller
content owners too would also face an onerous
task. Although they have less money to make
back, the price they would be able to charge for a
single-source content offer would also be far less.
The one thing that emerges perhaps more
clearly than anything else from this exercise is
that the current aggregation model based around
branded channels and a strong branded platform
to aggregate and sell those channels is a highly
efficient one. But in the rapidly evolving
world that is OTT delivery, it is no longer
iron-clad.
OTT’s content crunchAs TV evolves increasingly towards IP, the content crunch, not technology, is OTT’s biggest obstacle
Guy Bisson is research director, television, at IHS Screen Digest. In this regular column, he gives CSI readers exclusive insight from the
company’s new channel strategies service
Analyst corner
12 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
UK: Relative importance of carriage income, major content providers (2012)
Car
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ight
s
Source: IHS
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omes
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Untitled-4 1 21/08/2013 14:04:25
While
UltraHD is
expected to
dominate
discussion
at IBC2013
and other
industry forums, there are question marks being
set against the sanity of pushing beyond 2K so
quickly. After all, what’s wrong with HD anyway?
“It may have four times the resolution of high-
definition television, but is it four times better?”
asks Informitv consultant William Cooper, who is
chairing a session on the topic at IBC. “Is there
any evidence of consumer demand or willingness
to pay for further improvements in sound and
picture quality? Can people actually see or hear
the difference and is it really relevant to the
average viewer? Can broadcasters afford to go
beyond HD to 4K formats?” he continues.
His is far from the only voice sounding an
antidote to the prevailing UltraHD hyperbole.
While broadcasters including SES, Sky, Netflix,
Eutelsat, the BBC and NHK are pressing ahead
with test broadcasts in order to stimulate and
measure demand, with the aim of launching
commercially across 2014 and 2015, there is also
caution. Most broadcasters are wary of getting
bitten, as ESPN, Foxtel and others appear to have
done with their soon-to-be-defunct 3D channels,
by leaping wholesale into a format that has next
to no consumer base.
“The jury is still out,” admits Andrew Jordan,
SVP, International Operations & Technology, at
Comcast-owned NBCUniversal. “The question for
us is under what circumstances is it most
appropriate. Like any big shift in the industry we
have to understand its relevance. If everyone had
jumped in with both feet and bought 3D sets the
world would now look very different.”
A more natural
progression than 3D
While NBCU’s approach is
cautious, there are good
reasons to suggest that
Ultra-HD will not whither
on the vine as 3D appears
to have done. HD to Ultra-
HD would seem to
represent a more natural technology progression,
and an easier consumer proposition, than the
necessity of wearing glasses.
With elements of the 4K broadcast equipment
market already becoming commoditised,
momentum is building in support of the first
UltraHD broadcasts (defined as Level 1 by
the ITU with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 -
exactly 2x vertical and 2x horizontal compared to
1920x1080; as with HD, the aspect ratio is 16:9).
However, a number of key issues still have
questions hanging over them, a basic one being
that TV manufacturers need to persuade
consumers to upgrade to a higher resolution set
(Sony’s 55-inch 4K Bravia is £5,000; a Seiki
model costs around £1,000), at a time when the
benefits of HD are only just going mainstream.
“60% of the world’s market has yet to transition
from SD while others are prioritising multi-
platform distribution,” notes consultant Graham
Sharp. “4K to the home is being driven by set
manufacturers trying to boost their refresh cycle.”
West European sales peaked at 51m HD
sets in 2010 followed by a 4% decline in 2011
and 12% last year. Analysts Futuresource predicts
a similar slide in 2013. All this in a market where
three quarters of homes contain HD screens but
only half currently receive HD broadcasts.
“The single most important reason [for the
push to 4K] is that TV manufacturers are losing
money on TVs,” comments Jack Wetherill, senior
market analyst at Futuresource. “They need to
find a compelling reason for consumers to buy
new more expensive sets.”
Nonetheless, Ericsson’s 2012 ConsumerLab
TV report highlighted a willingness among
14 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
4K jigsaw aligns for the bigger pictureDiscussion about ultra-HDTV has advanced beyond whether it’s possible, toward practical considerations about how home viewers will actually receive the experience, but broadcasters are understandably cautious, reports Adrian Pennington
A demonstration of Cisco’s Project Fresco
consumers to pay for ‘extreme quality’ as part of
their overall TV and video service. “There are
some who suspect the industry is simply pushing
this technology just to sell more TVs but I think
that’s unfair,” suggests Carl Furgusson, Ericsson’s
head of business development, TV compression.
“The introduction of UltraHD and the consumer
benefits mirror the introduction of HD; there are
a number of people who are reluctant to embrace
the technology but equally, there are a similar
number who want it now.”
While there are those who believe 4K will
sideline 3D because it offers a more immediate
visual upgrade achieved without the need for
glasses, there are others who think higher
resolution panels are beneficial to 3DTV.
So autostereo displays could give 3DTV
renewed impetus.
“UltraHD screens will give a much higher
resolution for passive-glasses 3D viewing,
effectively doubling the number of vertical lines to
a full 1,000 lines per eye,“ says Chris Johns, chief
engineer, broadcast strategy, BSkyB. “The utopia
is glasses-free 3D. UltraHD can lend itself to that
because it’s increasing the number of fields of
view that 4K screens can display.”
Stakeholders in the format’s future are calling
for the industry to unite and ensure it gets out of
the starting blocks in a standardised not
piecemeal manner and before it hits public
consiousness.
“We must be patient and not rush to be first,
because if we get it wrong it may be the end of it,”
stresses Stephan Heimbecker, head of innovation
and standards, product and operations, Sky
Deutchland, which is thought to be preparing to
announce a UltraHD service at Berlin’s IFA.
“Let’s do it right.”
Not confusing the consumer is the UK’s
Digital TV Group’s concern. “We still have
enough time to do the strategic planning, to
learn all the lessons from HD such as avoiding
confusion with an UltraHD marque,” says the
industry body’s CEO, Richard Lindsay-Davies.
“We must be careful to manage the step change so
that the specifications are right, that the value is
right for the consumer, with the right timing and
appropriate communication.”
With the first UltraHD services odds-on to be
launched by payTV companies, Sky Deutschland,
BSkyB and Fox Sports among others are testing
production workflows to home delivery.
“With HD we went through a two-year test
period, with 3D it was 18 months,” explains
Johns. “We are still at that early phase so that
when we are able to deliver a beyond HD viewing
experience we can deliver a high quality one.”
Much of the testing surrounds what the
attributes of a next generation TV service might
actually be, with the feeling that resolution alone
is not sufficient to convince the market of the
need to upgrade.
“Something beyond HD might have no
interlace, more resolution, finer pixels... but what
else is there?” questions Johns. “It has to deliver a
new viewing experience. It has to be something
consumers want to have.”
Aside from a wide portfolio of content, (a
lesson learned from 3D channel’s padded
schedule), a key requirement is improved motion
portrayal and higher dynamic range. “Greater
colorimetry is a nice to have but will only
enhance the experience of certain sequences of
certain programmes (general views in travel
shows, for example),” says Johns.
“We also need to think about audio, perhaps
in terms of new object-based technology which
manipulates sound according to the environment
you are sitting in. In addition, and very
importantly, it needs to be cost effective from
cameras to compression.”
Live production challenges
Discussion among broadcasters is also focused on
the presentation of 4K on increasingly large home
screens, reckoned to be of the order of 60-inches
for UltraHD visual benefits to be experienced. At
the optimal viewing distance from the screen,
around 60 degrees of the viewer’s field of view
will be filled with the TV image. By comparison,
today’s viewing typically fills around 30 degrees of
the field of view.
“Does the production grammar have to
change?” asks Heimbecker. “At screen sizes above
55-inchs at an average 2.7 metres viewing
distance, then conventional close-ups would
appear larger than lifesize which could be
discomforting to people. Perhaps we need to use
head to hip shots for a less disturbing experience.”
The larger screen real estate could also be used
to split coverage of programming. A football
match, for example, could be covered in the lower
half of the screen from a single wide view of the
field of play, with other windows showing a
traditional director’s cut, viewer choice of angle,
another match or advertising.
In 4K tests broadcasters have made of fast-
paced action it is apparent that the Level 1 spec
needs to accommodate at least 50fps and ideally
60 even 120 frame rates to overcome motion blur,
a startling artefact replayed at four times HD
resolution.
“UltraHD TV needs a higher frame rate yet CE
manufacturers are producing 30hz-only sets when
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 15
4K special
“The jury is still out. The question for us is under what circumstances is it most appropriate.” NBCUniversal
A Samsung UHD demo from this year’s Anga show
the current standard goes up to 120fps,” says
BBC lead research engineer Richard Salmon who
is involved in standardisation initiatives through
SMPTE and DVB. This will change when HDMI
2.0 is released to support displays at 50/60p,
though this is not expected until next spring.
Live 4K production remains a challenge and is
at least 18 months away from readiness. Sony is
pushing hardest, testing an array of equipment
including its single 35mm sensor F5/F55 cameras
rather than traditional 2/3-inch broadcast optics,
at June’s Confederations Cup with a view to
convincing FIFA of greenlighting 4K capture
during next year’s World Cup. That decision also
rests on FIFA selling the rights, though at the
very least the final is thought likely to be captured
4K for posterity.
“Most 4K live production tests are outputting
four HD tiled feeds [QuadHD] for backhaul to a
studio or limited large screen experiences,” says
Ericsson’s Furgusson. “You are looking at
80-110Mb/s in Quad HD, equivalent to 20Mb/s
per HD panel at 422 10bit sampling. To do true
4K broadcast, rather than just playing with the
technology, we need 4K-capable mixers, real-time
edit suites, graphics and logo overlay and these
aren’t ready to go in 2013.”
4K content
UltraHD as an origination format for recorded
programming does have advantages, the chief
among them being to hold a master copy in
higher resolution as future proofing.
A Blu-Ray task force has been established to
revise the current spec to accommodate 4K, while
Netflix, Discovery 3Net and BSkyB (both with
3D / 4K documentaries) are among those
building a 4K library. Netflix’ original drama
House of Cards was acquired 5K on Red Epics
in readiness for when the OTT powerhouse
launches into 4K VoD (pre-canned and pre-
encoded movie and drama content), a plan that
chief product officer Neil Hunt hinted at earlier
this year.
Better standards and format conversion are
also beneficial from 4K source material: Deriving
1080i at 25Hz or 29.97Hz can be done with high
quality, starting with a UltraHD Level 1 master.
720P or 50 / 59.94hz (2x frame rate of HD) can
likewise be derived from higher quality source.
HD content can also be extracted by electronic
pan/zooms either in near-live replay (as has been
used live on air by CBS Sports during its 2013
Superbowl coverage) or to reframe in post. The
former has potential to reduce operator cost in
the field by needing fewer camera-ops.
Increased storage and editing power
requirements plus lack of a business model for
delivery in 4K are however causing film and TV
producers to hesitate and post produce at 2K.
“Artistically, 4K can enhance the storytelling
(by providing a higher sample of dynamic range
and detail before post and VFX) but producers
have to weigh how much 4K is going to add value
to their production today by giving the movie
another life in 5-10 years,” says Axel Ericson,
founder of facility Digital Arts which houses New
York’s first 4K lab.
Lack of content is an impediment to operator
UltraHD launches. Sony is trying to seed the
market with its own 4K Media Player. Essentially
a server bundled with a dozen 4K features [Sony
Pictures-produced The Amazing Spiderman, Total
Recall (2012) and catalogue titles scanned from
35mm such as Taxi Driver] as well as some
additional TV and short-form video. Fresh
content will become available via Sony’s Video
Unlimited 4K content service [US only], slated to
debut in the autumn and costing $7.99 per rental
title or $29.99 download to own.
Supplementing – not replacing - HD
This is a short-term measure ahead of 4K to home
services for which HEVC will be fundamental to
ensuring deployment on a large scale, cost-
effectively. “Finding the extra bandwidth required
to dedicate the transmission path to the home is a
daunting prospect as UltraHD will supplement,
not replace, HD for many years,” says Fergusson.
16 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
“We must be patient and not rush to be first. Let’s do it right.” Sky Deutschland
Over Satellite Over Telco Satellite, Cable, Terrestrial, Telco
IPTV
MPG - 4 AVC 2160p30 10 - 30 Mbps
2160p60 80 - 105Mbps 200 - 320 Mbps 12 - 39 Mbps
HEVC 2160p30 7 - 21 Mbps
(Liner 1st Generation) 2160p60 8 - 27 Mbps
HEVC 2160p30 5 - 15 Mbps
(Linear 2nd Generation) 2160p60 56 - 73 Mbps 200-320 Mbps 6 - 20 Mbps
Equivalent to today’s HDTV
at... 1080i30 / 720p60 20 Mbps MPEG - 4 Hi422 8bit 80 Mbps MPEG - 4 Hi422 10 bit 5-12 Mbps MPEG - 4
120 Mbps JPEG - 200 9-16 Mbps MPEG - 2
Contribution / Backhaul Distribution / DTH Delivery
Datarates for the 4K UHDTV through the end to end chain
Source: Ericsson
With a framerates at least 50Hz (100,120,
150fps may be necessary) the baseband data
rate is therefore at least 8x conventional HD, or
approximately 12Gbps. By comparison, current
MPEG4 AVC HD delivery to the home by
satellite is in the order of 5-12Mbs (at the higher
end of that range in Europe).
HEVC of course has the capability to achieve
a 50% bitrate reduction over MPEG-4 AVC but
requires 10x the processing power to fully exploit
the toolset. The first generation of ‘live products’
in 2015/2016 will likely only provide a 20-25%
gain, reckons Furgusson. “It will take the second
generation HEVC UltraHD realtime encoders to
achieve 6-20Mbps bitrates cost effectively.”
That’s not the only hurdle. Enabling new
decoding devices integrated into TVs, STBs, and
consoles are also required and not available
until NAB 2014 at the earliest. “We won’t see
HM 10 60p reference chipsets with the full HEVC
toolset [from manufacturers like STMicro and
Broadcom] integrated into a device before the end
of 2014,” says Furgusson. “My prediction is for
World Cup Brazil we will see 4K big screen public
show events but not 4K to the home in any
significant way.”
A mass-market for UHD?
All the major TV brands will have 4K TVs on
retail by Christmas with Futuresource predicting
that 8,000 of them will ship in Europe this year –
but that’s out of 38m total set sales. By 2020 half
of 50+inch sets sold will be 4K-ready, but that’s a
long time to wait for a viable commercial
business. “4K is here to stay and a natural
progression from HD,” concludes Wetherill. “4K
is a premium technology for years to come.”
Imagining what we may all be watching in our
homes by 2021, Andy Quested, BBC technology
chief for HD and 3D predicts: “My TV is agile. It
can do 300fps and will switch framerates
automatically depending on content. It has at
least 4000 lines, has extended dynamic range and
it’s a 21.9 aspect ratio. It displays stereo 3D
without glasses and it includes object-orientated
audio rendering sound according to the space
around me.”
Where will TV manufacturers go then?
Whole wall screens or holographic devices,
naturally. According to Cisco, within the next five
years advances in display technology will make
science fiction reality, with screens that are
unobtrusive, frameless, ambient and UltraHD. Its
OLED-based project Fresco is on show at IBC’s
Future Zone. Developments such as these will
help overcome the mass-market questions arising
around UHD.
As HBO’s retiring CTO Bob Zitter noted
earlier this year, even in the US only about
25-30% of homes have space for a TV large
enough for viewers to discern the difference
between regular HD and 4K. He said that
broadcasters would not have an incentive to
migrate from HD to 4K if less than a third of the
market could be addressed with the technology.
He did, however, point out that ultra HD could
take off if new technologies such as wall-panel
TV or OLED-based flexible wallpaper
screens emerged.
This is also Sony’s argument when it comes to
questions about mass market economics of 4K.
Andrew Kydd, programme manager of future
business innovation at Sony Europe, argued that
sets are generally getting bigger in the home as
prices come down, so people are generally
acquiring larger screens.
This mass-market potential will remain an open
question but in the
The two ends of the broadcast
chain - cameras and TV sets -
have started supporting 4K/
ultra HD. But UHDTV
support has not yet been
announced for many other
devices, such as switchers,
encoders, and set-top boxes. Moreover, the post-
production workflow requires adaptation to higher
bit rates, processing, and storage capacities.
Therefore, the first challenge in deploying UHDTV
is in baseband: How do we acquire, transport, and
display uncompressed video?
Assuming a 4:2:2 10-bit pixel format, about 12
Gbits/sec are needed to transport uncompressed
UHDTV video and audio. Currently, there is no
established standard to handle that much data
between professional equipment or between set-
top boxes and TV sets. Therefore, the limited
number of available UHDTV devices work around
this bottleneck by aggregating multiple available
links like 3G Serial Digital Interface (3G-SDI) or
HDMI in proprietary ways. At IBC2012, some
providers promoted different technologies, such
as dual-link 3G over Bayonet Neill–Concelman
(BNC) connector, Thunderbolt, and DisplayPort.
In parallel, standardisation bodies are actively
involved in the specification of new transport
interfaces with higher capacities. Thus, the HDMI
forum is working on a new specification for
release at the end of 2013.
Although many UHDTV devices, such as TV
sets, video projectors, and professional monitors,
and cameras were made available in 2012, and
despite the ITU recommendation, no established
standard accurately defines what UHD means in
the context of broadcast TV. There is still great
uncertainty about various parts of the broadcast
chain, including video compression and delivery.
Video compression of this new format is yet to be
demonstrated on current
broadcast delivery
infrastructures, and little is
known about the required
bandwidth that could be
envisioned for live
applications.
Beyond technology:
UHDTV aesthetic skills
UHD is synonymous of a new shape, leaving HD
screen size (42” on average) to welcome a new
reference size: 84”. This must affect the way of
filming. Three topics, relative to filming skills, are
particularly explored.
First, a UHD natural close-up is able to bring
the definition of a 50X magnification microscope.
It could offer a different, slightly more intimate
meaning, where every detail of the character face
would be seen. Figure 1 shows how sharply a
UHDTV 50p screenshot enhances the impression
of realness. A standard close-up in HD can be
frightening in UHD.
Second, a UHDTV background is difficult to
ignore, even if the focus choice helps one’s eyes
concentrate on the foreground. The numerous
details multiply the constraints. With such a large
screen, combined with a reduction of the viewer’s
distance, UHDTV calls for large shots that allow
the eyes to circulate. If a cinema crew knows
unfocused backgrounds help concentrate the
viewers’ attention on the actors, in television this
constitutes a difficult task as TV lenses facilitate a
large field of depth as shown on Figure 2, on the
next page. Dealing with distracting background
items that may show up under these
circumstances can prove problematic.
Third, large camera movements are prohibited.
Enlarged UHDTV picture size and definition
bring a large amount of information to viewers’
eyes and brain. Camera movement naturally
accelerates this information stream. Comparing
HD and UHDTV, considering a necessary 45°
panning movement in HD, a larger shot is
preferred in UHDTV limited to a 10° panning
movement to keep the dynamic impression
UHDTV capture: early experiencesAteme’s Jérôme Vieron and Matthieu Parmentier of France Télévisions dissect the technology challenges associated with 4K and outline some of the early experiments undertaken in this space to evaluate future workflows, specifically work on adapting filming methods and materials
18 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
Figure 1: Close-ups have to be rethought in UHD
without overloading the information stream.
These three examples are the beginning of a
new way of shooting for UHDTV.
During post-production, apart from the
workflow adaptation to higher bit rates,
processing, and storage capacities, UHDTV
definition of up to 60 frames/sec considerably
enlarges the editing field.
A higher resolution involves a new rhythm - a
new way of telling stories. It is obvious that there
is much to see in a UHDTV picture. At this time,
and until audiences become accustomed to giant
TVs and such, an immersive viewing angle,
UHDTV stories should remain smoother. The
first consequence is that to digest all the meaning
of a shot, the edit should be slower. A single shot
that lasts five seconds in HD could last about ten
or 15 sec in UHDTV. But this does not mean that
all movies will run twice as long. Rather, if the
filmmakers need three different axis or shot
values in HD, they should restrain themselves to
only one of those values in UHDTV.
In addition, less work will apply to editing, and
more work will apply while shooting. The camera
position, focal, and field depth shape a large part
of every shot meaning. With more information in
the picture, fewer shots, and fewer edit cuts, the
future UHDTV content should probably look like
today’s Super 35 productions.
UHDTV field capture
To study both UHD signals and the HEVC
potentials for delivering UHDTV signals, field
captures were and will be performed as part of
the 4EVER consortium. Figure 3 provides
thumbnails of the UHDTV content considered in
the current study.
Since 2008, Orange Labs and France
Télévisions have been involved in many projects
to map out the future of TV. In 2011, Orange
Labs began its study of UHD signals at the
French Tennis Open, produced by France
Télévisions. In 2012,
ATEME and six other
partners, setup the 4EVER
project, covering the entire
production and delivery
chain. This three-year
collaborative research and
development project aims
at exploring, developing,
and promoting an
enhanced, quality TV
experience.
From this first UHDTV
capture at the French
Tennis Open, where a Red
Epic camera was used by
Orange Labs (Fig. 3 (a), the
consortium conducted several other shooting
sessions. In spring 2012, France Télévisions
started a specific study of the overall UHDTV
workflow, with the production of a short
programme Le Chien Couché à Ses Pieds, directed
by Christel Delahaye and shot in the conditions
of a regular TV project (Fig. 3 (b) and (c)) with a
Red Epic camera. During the summer of 2012,
Orange Labs and 4EVER partners used the Sony
F65 camera for a specific shooting of stress
contents at the Brest 2012 historical sailing event
(Fig. 3 (d)). This was done after a deep study of
this camera’s potential during a shooting session
in Paris (Fig. 3 (e)). Finally, the JVC GY-HMQ10
camcorder was used in Nantes (Fig. 3 (f)) and
Brest (Fig. 3 (i)) to explore its spatial and
temporal definition skills.
In addition, UHDTV scanned film sequences
provided by SVT, namely, Crowdrun and Ducks
(Fig. 3 (g) and (h), respectively) were added to
the UHDTV content test set.
Conclusion
Enhancing the sense of realness, the viewing
comfort and creating an immersive experience,
such is the quest of any incumbent broadcaster
like France Télévisions looking to embrace the
future of television. In this context, UHDTV and
in particular 4KTV is considered as the next
natural step after HD and 3D.
After introducing why broadcasting a 4K signal
would bring television in a new dimension,
multiplying the amount of information and
emotions, we outlined a 4K format that would fit
realistic expectations for the broadcast television
industry. The challenges to implement this format
are far from negligible.
As an early attempt to figure this future, we
have encountered the 4K reality in television
world, dealing with different camera concepts
for capture, slightly huge files and bitrates,
thinking to new skills to film and edit these
contents. These first experiences lead us to a
completely new dimension, with the promises
of enhanced information and emotions. These
efforts have to be followed by a complete study
of the overall production chain to bring 4K
to the audience.
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 19
This is an excerpt from a paper written by Jérôme Vieron, advanced research manager at ATEME, and Matthieu Parmentier, project manager of R&D at public broadcaster France Télévisions
Studio 4K content
Filmmakers have been shooting movies on
35mm film, for more than 80 years. Despite
the physical misalignment between 35mm film
and video structure, its effective resolution is
considered at least equivalent to 4K (DCI).
Hence, films are increasingly scanned, post-
produced, and archived at 4K resolution. In
addition, new masters related to restoration
work or commercial distributionare often
created at this resolution. Digital filmmaking
has also moved to shooting at 4K, and even
some Hollywood filmmakers are moving
beyond 4K and high frame rate. Thus, there is
already sufficient 4K content for studios to
release in UHDTV format.Figure 2: Distracting background items can show up shooting in 4K
Figure 3: Thumbnails of UHDTV content used in the study
At the Consumer
Electronics Show
(CES) 2013, major
TV manufacturers
announced their
intentions for the future
of the industry through
a series of product roadmaps detailing the growth
of 4K technology. This growth is aligned with a
trend of increasing screen sizes – that is, with 50”
screens being the minimum size. With only 50
such TVs sold in the UK this year, we’re evidently
still in the early stages of this process. However,
despite a number of undetermined factors, there
are a few ways of assessing the likelihood of
success for this new-screen technology.
1. The comparison against 3D and Smart TV.
GfK’s global study into TV usage in 2012 showed
that fewer than 50% of TV owners were utilising
Smart TV and 3D. A combination of the effort
required to engage with these TVs and a wider
media focus on augmenting the viewing
experience via the second screen (rather than
dominating the living room as in years gone by)
are likely reasons. 4K TV is the next upgrade
from HD, a continuation in the improvement of
picture quality and screen size, rather than a
disruptive element in current behaviour patterns
and thus bears little comparison with 3D or
Smart TV in terms of likely uptake and usage –
in fact, the main benefit of 4K (and HD) is the
experience rather than how it’s used.
2. The willingness of broadcasters and content
providers to support it. If we accept that the
difference in viewing experience between HD/4K
and 3D is significant enough that comparisons
between the two are somewhat invalid, any notion
that recent high-profile withdrawals from the 3D
market by ESPN and the BBC are likely to impact
on future investment on 4K are far from like-for-
like. Regardless, broadcasters are progressing
with test broadcasts in order to stimulate and
measure demand, with the aim of launching
commercially across 2014 and 2015. On top
of this, it is also likely that Xbox ONE and
PlayStation 4 will both support 4K broadcasting,
particularly taking into account Microsoft’s desire
to dominate the living room. This level of support,
in tandem with the ability of 4K to upscale HD
broadcasts, appears comparable to the way in
which HD grew organically, gradually pervading
the viewing experience rather than rapidly
intruding upon it in the manner of 3D, and
as a result easier for broadcasters to adopt a
patient strategy.
3. The current market trajectory. In the year to
May 2013 the proportion of 40”+ TVs sold moved
to 60% (up 9%-points from December 2011).
Despite a slower
replacement cycle (pan-
European TV value sales
fell by €7 billion between 2010 and 2011), this is
a likely indication that the next round of TV
buying will show a similar level of upgrading to
that seen between 2007 and 2010 when flat
screen and HD purchasing really came to the fore.
Whilst high value 4K sets may still remain niche -
Deloitte estimates that around half of sets this
year will retail at $10,000 - the likelihood is that
we will quickly see a combination of Chinese
manufacturers entering the market at a sub-$3,000
price point and gradual reductions from the
bigger players. Whilst markets are currently
experiencing a slump in overall TV sales, the fact
that 4K offers genuine improvement in both
picture quality and screen size, aligned with
consumer-sensitive pricing, means that
manufacturers are ably positioning themselves to
maximise the value of the next significant round
of upgrading.
So what does this mean?
The TV market is well set for the introduction 4K
technology, with the average screen size on the
rise and a clear message from consumers that
non-invasive innovation will drive sales (rather
than disruption in the form of 3D, Smart TV,
etc). However, the extent to which this technology
is strong enough to re-ignite the market is far
more complex.
It is more likely that, rather than an explosion
of interest and sales, the growth of 4K will be as
gradual as flat screens (six years between launch
in 1996 and first sign of volumes sales in 2002)
and HD, with market forces determining that
consumers move over to the technology, rather
than any rush or demand in the same way we
might see for the launch of a new games console
or smartphone.
What 4K can do is provide more forceful
reasons to upgrade at a time when the
replacement cycle has stagnated and a coherent
platform around which manufacturers can
market the continuing move to larger form-factor
sets.
4K TV–The next 3D or HD?GfK’s Phil McCann analyses ultra HD’s chances of success
20 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
Jan 05 - Dec 05 Jan 06 - Dec 06 Jan 07 - Dec 07 Jan 08 - Dec 08 Jan 09 - Dec 09 Jan 10 - Dec 10 Jan 11 - Dec 11 Jan 12 - Dec 12 Jan 13 - Dec 13
The 7 Billion Euro Drop
8.18
8.18
24.18
24.18
27.60
27.60
31.19
31.19
30.53
30.53
31.8032.20
32.20
22.43
36.1
29.1
11.2
- 1.2- 2.2
- 11.5- 12.4
- 17.6
22.43
SALES BIL. EUR +/- %PYSALES BIL. EUR +/- %PY
- 4.028.96
28.96
31.80
Phil McCann is research manager at GfK
E-mail: [email protected] • Website: www.amos-spacecom.com
Take Center Stage with the AMOS Satellites
IBCSeptember 13-17, 2013AmsterdamHall 1, Booth C65
Meet us at
Spacecom, operator of the AMOS-2 and AMOS-3 satellites co-located at 4°W and AMOS-5 locatedat 17°E, provides high-quality satcom services in Europe, the Middle East, the U.S. East Coast and Africa.
The launch of AMOS-4 in 2013 to a new orbital location at 65°E, with coverage over Russia andSoutheast Asia, and the launch of AMOS-6 at 4°W in 2015 with coverage over Europe and theMiddle East, will further enhance Spacecom’s position as a multi-regional satellite operator.
We deliver comprehensive solutions for Direct-to-Home (DTH) operators, TV broadcasters,broadband Internet service providers, governments, and international corporations.
Untitled-1 1 20/08/2013 09:25:55
The seismic changes in
distribution and content
models sweeping through
broadcasting and pay TV are
spilling over into disputes
about carriage fees. In some
cases arrangements that have
been stable for years stoking little controversy
have become contentious, occasionally leading
to channels being dropped from leading pay
TV platforms.
For example, Belgian incumbent telco
Belgacom decided in February 2013 to cease
carrying the channels of German broadcasters
ARD and ZDF over its IPTV service, saying that
they had been demanding too much money for
the rights to retransmit their content. Instead
Belgacom negotiated deals with other German
broadcasters to satisfy that niche in its market.
“We have added RTL, ProSieben and Sat1 to our
offer in order to continue to offer the most
watched German channels to our customers,” says
Belgacom’s VP content acquisition and
sponsoring, Stéphanie Rockmann.
While declining to reveal commercial details,
Rockmann confirmed that Belgacom was
currently negotiating with other broadcasters that
supply the more than 200 channels it distributes,
highlighting that these had to be kept confidential
to avoid misunderstandings. It is a highly sensitive
area, largely because there are no agreed models
or formulae for assessing the
relationship between the values of
content to a pay TV operator on the
one hand, and the value of the
distribution to the content owner on the
other. For this reason money can
change hands in either direction, with
sometimes the operator paying as
Belgacom had been doing to ARD and
ZDF and in other cases the broadcaster
or rights owner paying the distributor.
“The issue of who pays and how
much varies a lot country-by-country,” says Peter
Litman, media consultant specialising in content
distribution rights. “The leverage on either side
varies dramatically depending on the particulars
in place in the country in question, especially the
regulatory scheme in place and the level of the
competition in the distribution market.”
Naturally the balance of power also shifts over
time, both within countries and for individual
players in the market, be they content owners,
Shifting balance of powerThe structural changes afflicting TV are causing major tremors along its distribution faultlines, resulting in carriage fee disputes that have spilt from the US into Europe. Philip Hunter reports
22 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
broadcasters or pay TV operators. In some cases
this can lead to a reverse where one party that
originally received money ends up paying the
other. The most significant case of that is the US
market as a whole, where leading network
operators providing TV shows now receive
carriage fees from cable operators.
“In the US, originally the cable programme
services paid the cable operators for carriage,”
says Litman. “That was the model from the US
broadcast business in which the networks paid
stations for carrying their programmes and
national advertisements.”
But, as Litman points out, this was founded on
the business assumption that support from
advertisers would be sufficient to fund attractive
programming. This turned out not to be the case.
“What resulted was that viewership of cable
channels was modest and advertiser support for
them was even more modest and so the then-
nascent cable channels did not appear to have a
path to profitability. Instead of letting the cable
channels close up shop, the cable operators
agreed to pay licence fees, on a per-subscriber-
basis, to the channels they thought were worthy.”
This subscriber based carriage fee model
proved relatively durable with mostly only minor
skirmishes until 2012, when a rash of disputes
broke out. One of the biggest was between media
giant Viacom and the world’s largest satellite TV
provider DirecTV. This dispute affected around
20 million of DirecTV’s satellite TV subscribers,
with Viacom networks including Comedy Central,
MTV, Nickelodeon, and Spike all going off-air.
This dispute was resolved in July 2012, but its
ramifications rumble on and the case is widely
regarded as a turning point in the relationship
between operators and rights holders. It was
deemed to be the first significant case where the
distributor won the public relations war.
Previously subscribers tended to blame their
operator in the event programmes they want to
watch were not available, with the result that
blackouts tended to cause some churn away to
rival services.
European carriage wars
The Viacom/DirecTV case may have had an
impact in Germany where a number of carriage
disputes were smoldering, and where like the US
cable operators have been paying broadcasters for
rights. As it happened though while the dispute
between DirecTV and Viacom was ongoing, RTL
struck a landmark deal with Kabel Deutschland,
the country’s largest cable operator, over HD
content. Under this arrangement reached in June
2012, RTL receives a share of the additional fees
cable operator Kabel Deutschland collects from
customers for the HD version of the commercial
channels, offsetting some of the carriage fees.
Kabel Deutschland said that replicated an existing
arrangement it had with commercial broadcaster
proSiebensat.1.
This was a case perhaps of a broadcaster
flexing its muscles, but in the wake of the
DirecTV/Viacom case, Belgacom seems to have
taken a tougher line in its stance against RTL.
Generally, though, tensions seem to be simmering
down in Germany, partly because the amounts
involved in carriage fees there are relatively small.
But in a few cases elsewhere long standing
arrangements that appeared stable because they
were underwritten by the regulator, have been
called onto question. One somewhat unique
example concerns the BBC’s transmission over
BSkyB’s DTH platform in the UK, which has
been governed by Ofcom regulation. Under the
deal, the BBC along with the other public services
broadcasters ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 paid
Sky a diminishing amount of money designed to
compensate the operator for the costs incurred
transmitting the content.
Currently the BBC pays £5 million a year as its
lion’s share of the £9.5 million total paid by the
four. Two years ago the BBC paid £10 million, so
it has been halved and will continue to decline as
Sky recoups its historical investment in
infrastructure. Yet under pressure to cut costs the
corporation has come to the belief that money is
flowing the wrong way and has threatened to
impose carriage fees in return.
Both sides have a case. Sky argues that the
BBC benefits greatly from the investment it has
made in its platform and that in effect it is
providing a utility service that should be paid for,
like electricity. “Public service broadcasters
(PSBs) benefit from the billions of pounds we’ve
invested in our TV platform, and the technical
services we provide them,” argues Rob Webster,
director of Sky’s Commercial Group. “Thanks to
Sky’s investment, they reach 40% of their
audiences via our platform and use our
technology to customise channels and services for
the benefit of their viewers.”
Webster emphasises that Sky’s situation is
different from cable operator Virgin Media’s in
that its platform is open and subject to regulation
on that basis, such that it still delivers BBC
channels to households with satellite dishes even
if their subscription to the pay TV programming
such as sports content has lapsed. “This is about
cost recovery,” says Webster. “As an open and
regulated platform, we can’t recoup these costs
through our customers’ subscriptions as the
public service channels are not part of Sky’s pay
TV package. This is different from cable TV,
which is a closed platform, which effectively
means that the PSBs are then retailed to
customers.”
The BBC declined to comment now while the
dispute is ongoing but its case is that while Sky
has indeed incurred costs retransmitting its
content no account has been taken of the value of
its content in making the platform more attractive
and “stickier”. The BBC believes the arrangement
should be more like others such as that between
RTL and Kabel Deutschland, where both costs
and content value are taken into account.
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 23
“This subscriber based carriage fee model proved relatively durable with mostly only minor skirmishes until 2012, when a rash of disputes broke out.”
“In the wake of the DirecTV/Viacom case, Belgacom seems to have taken a tougher line in its stance against RTL.”
The BBC’s dispute with Sky also had a
political dimension looming much larger than
in other disputes, partly because of recent events
surrounding Sky’s part-owner News Corp. Sky
and the BBC are also competitors as providers of
programming and holders of rights and this has
coloured the recent dispute. Then the government
weighed in, with Ed Vaizey, the culture minister,
earlier this year calling on BSkyB to scrap
charging public service broadcasters and hinting
at possible regulatory action in the absence of a
deal between the parties.
Litman’s view is that Sky will end up worse if
the dispute escalates to the extent that the BBC
pulled its channels from the Sky platform. “In the
US the only channels that pay for distribution are
those with very low appeal programming, notably
home shopping,” Litman notes. “If the BBC
refused to pay Sky, I don’t think there is another
programme provider with similarly attractive
content that would like the opportunity to pay
Sky for carriage similar to its expiring BBC
deal. The fact that the other distributors do not
pay to carry the BBC’s channels strongly suggests
that a no-fee arrangement would be better for Sky
than not carrying the BBC channels on a long-
term basis.”
Litman did admit though that Sky was in an
unusually strong position with around two thirds
of UK pay TV subscribers. “That certainly
strengthens Sky’s hand at the negotiating table,”
Litman agrees. “To the extent that Sky customers
have no similar pay TV substitute, that is they
are not in a place where cable service is available
or attractive, then Sky’s hand is strengthened
enormously. Still, I have a hard time seeing how
Sky’s leverage would force the BBC to pay for
its carriage.”
It is questionable though whether the BBC
would go so far as to pull content from Sky,
because that would compromise its position as
the country’s leading public service broadcaster
reliant on the licence fee for most of its income.
Although Sky subscribers could access BBC
content over the air they would have to invest in a
Freeview receiver on top of their dish. It could be
that the corporation would end up getting blamed
by Sky customers unhappy at having to pay a
licence fee and still not able access the content
over their first choice platform. Against this
background there looks like being a certain
amount of bluff calling on both sides.
The future of free-to-air TV
The other big elephant in the room is online
distribution and this is also having an impact on
the carriage issue and continued survival of FTA
(free-to-air) services. While FTA over digital
terrestrial is growing in some countries such as
the UK, where it is restricting further overall
growth in pay TV, in some markets it is under
threat not just from mobile operators angling to
take over the spectrum but also from online
distribution.
Germany is again in the spotlight here, with
RTL also at the head of this controversy after
announcing its attention to withdraw from DTT
transmission in Germany. This partly reflects
Germany’s historically low DTT penetration with
only around 6% of homes receiving TV this way,
but also the growing belief there that by the time
long term DTT licences currently being
negotiated come into force the internet will have
taken over for video distribution. This sentiment
is stronger in Germany than in most leading TV
markets, with MABB, the local media authority
of the country’s federal states of Berlin and
Brandenburg, first stating the previously
unthinkable in January 2013 - that the internet
would become the most suitable TV distribution
platform for the country and endorsing RTL’s
decision to exit from DTT.
MABB also argued that while another major
public broadcaster ARD had earlier committed
to second generation DVB-T2, it was already
streaming its full 24-hour channels via the internet
at sufficient quality for large TV screens, at least
for those subscribers with adequately fast
broadband connections.
Consumers, of course, do not care how
their content comes but they should be more
concerned over the possibility that FTA
distribution as they know it may cease to exist.
Current friction over carriage rights may just be
symptoms of the longer term structural changes
across the broadcast spectrum.
24 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
When
looking at
smartphone
and tablet
devices,
recent
market data
suggests that Android-based products have rapidly
achieved a significant lead in sheer numbers - as
much as a 53% market share, which is significantly
more than Apple. With more than 1.5 million
Android-based devices activated every day, the
prominent role of these devices as second screen
video clients is growing rapidly. Amongst the issues
to be addressed is that the security of services to
these devices and the associated applications has
become of paramount concern to content owners.
The Android application landscape has been
rightly criticized as one that is riven with
fragmented versions and inconsistent
implementations. While recent versions of
Android do offer some baseline security for video
services, the premium device implementations
desperately need to be augmented with the latest
security techniques to provide the robust revenue
security for video services that content owners
today demand.
Many revenue security techniques try to isolate
the security regime from Android’s inherent
weaknesses, including its open environment,
proneness to jailbreaking, and varying
manufacturing standards. If security-related
services are isolated, they can run and perform
independent of whether the operating system
(OS) has been jailbroken as they are running
outside of the OS.
For example, on ARM-based mobile devices,
ARM’s TrustZone technology provides a
mechanism to utilise chipset security features with
a Trusted OS software layer to run trusted
services, such as digital rights management
(DRM), outside of the main operating system.
This combination of hardware and software
security technologies is referred to as a Trusted
Execution Environment (TEE), which is
standardized within GlobalPlatform, an
organization specializing in chip security and
secure application deployment technologies.
While such an approach has been well received,
in the past there have been many obstacles
surrounding its widespread adoption.
In addition to being perceived as very
fragmented, TrustZone also previously required
that secured applications be preloaded when the
phone or device was being built. This obviously
presented many challenges as chip vendors and
device manufacturers are not inclined to preload
third-party software.
Expanding access to TrustZone
Recently, however, standardization efforts within
GlobalPlatform related to TrustZone and TEEs
have made several improvements that will likely
increase its integration into Android-based phones
and devices and reduce fragmentation. In fact,
there is currently an initiative to implement
TrustZone across multiple chipsets and multiple
devices.
There are two sets of interfaces that need to be
standardised for TrustZone to become a universal
environment, making the choice of a chipset and
a device completely transparent, at least from a
security point of view. The first one that needs to
be standardised is the connection between an
application running in the regular untrusted
spaces, and the Trusted Application executing in
the trusted space. This allows an implementation
of applications that use the TrustZone’s trusted
services to be portable across different
implementations of TrustZone.
The second interface is between the Trusted
Application and the cryptographic services
provided by the SoC’s TEE implementation.
When this is achieved, developers of trusted
services can implement a Trusted Application
once and let it run on any compliant chipset. A
TEE must include both of these in order to
eliminate fragmentation between different
TrustZone implementations. These two sets of
interfaces are referred to as TEE Client APIs and
TEE Internal APIs within GlobalPlatform and the
Towards a more secure AndroidPetr Peterka, CTO of Verimatrix, explores TrustZone’s role in securing Android-based devices amid growing premium video usage
26 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
Sponsored feature
specifications have already been published for
implementers.
Another recent enhancement includes making
Trusted Applications downloadable, which allows
consumers to download them only if and when
they actually need it. The main benefit is in
eliminating the need for device makers to decide
what applications to preload during
manufacturing. Such a decision is becoming
impractical considering the millions of
applications that may take advantage of
TrustZone. This goes beyond streaming premium
content because security and privacy is important
also for banking, e-commerce, healthcare and
many other application types.
Trustonic, the joint venture between ARM,
Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient is the leading
provider of not just the TEE software but also end
to end trust management to allow Trusted
Application deployment in this new downloadable
model. While it may take some time for the
solution to achieve critical mass, its
‘downloadability’ and portability certainly make it
an effective solution.
Barriers to success
Despite the positive progress discussed above,
widescale adoption of TrustZone and TEEs is not
without challenges. The Trust Model, which
includes provisioning of chips with unique
identifiers and cryptographic keys, mechanisms
for signing and provisioning Trusted Applications
originating from many different sources, and
authentication of service providers, quickly
becomes very complex. With so many parties
involved in the trust chain, it may be easy for the
TrustZone ecosystem to become very expensive.
Previously, security assets were loaded directly
into service providers’ set-top boxes (STBs).
These are single purpose devices typically
leased to the subscriber. Now, the retail model
prevails, and devices that are pre-provisioned with
a single key cannot be assigned to a specific
service provider. GlobalPlatform’s current TEE
standardization efforts attempt to solve this issue
by supporting a hierarchy of Trusted Service
Managers (TSM). Each device may have multiple
instances of security containers managed by a
number of TSMs provisioning Trusted
Applications for download, and there are costs
associated with taking this sort of approach.
Having several different parties involved in
securing TrustZone applications may hinder it
from developing the competitive pricing structure
it needs to become widely adopted. If the
ecosystem is not set up with a reasonable pricing
model, the whole initiative could collapse.
Consider for example, the cost of a security key
versus the cost of an application. Previously, in
the leased model, there was only one or a small
number of keys, and they were located in the STB.
The cost of such device keys and certificates was
in the range of several pennies (eg, for DTCP
certificates). In the retail model, a large scale of
possible adoption of TrustZone and hundreds of
millions of Trusted Applications may allow a
business model where the price of application-
related keys will decrease while still covering the
cost associated with running TSM services.
The volume is obviously quite different now as
there are millions of tablets and smartphones, all
of which are downloading multiple applications.
Finding the right business model and the right
ratio between the key costs and the application
costs - and making the ecosystem affordable - will
go a long way in helping TrustZone become
successful.
GlobalPlatform’s standardization efforts also
attempts to solve the business model problem by
being agnostic and ensuring that the
specifications and the architecture for TEE
accessibility and application deployment are
available on a royalty free basis. While this does
not guarantee success it could be the best
approach to allow a fair business model to be
established in different industries in the rapidly
growing mobile ecosystem.
Taking a complete approach to revenue
security
Our sense, however, is that TrustZone is in fact
going in the right direction by offering a real-time,
downloadable solution that is portable across
many different devices and chipsets.
When used as part of a layered security regime,
TrustZone can help ensure that Android-based
devices are effectively secured, enhancing revenue
security for the operator, and ensuring that
subscribers have access to the content they want,
when they want it.
When combined with a highly reliable
multimedia streaming player, a robust DRM
system that has been properly architected to
combine hardware-based device cryptographic
identity, solid authentication and key management
protocol implemented as a Trusted Application,
and a secure video path with output protection
enabled by TrustZone, the resulting content
streaming service will be able to protect and
deliver the best content Hollywood has to offer to
millions of Android-based devices. These devices
are not limited to smartphones and tablets and
will include HDMI dongles, multimedia and
multi-source STBs, connected TVs, etc.
TrustZone technology is still a moving target
and it will take some time before it is fully
supported by a majority of devices. In the
meantime, additional techniques such as software
obfuscation, application integrity, anti-debugging
and anti-tampering, whitebox cryptography and
other software-based techniques are used to bridge
the current gap.
Such an ecosystem that combines advanced
security technology, rich content offering and a
scalable business model will benefit content
owners, service operators and most importantly
consumers seeking premium content.
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 27
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Join us for
Visit us at IBC 2013 • Booth #4.A55
base.indd 1 20/08/2013 09:49:17
Appointments
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 29
Ins and outsWelcome to the latest in a new series that will track executive changes taking place in the industry
Harris Broadcast has appointed Charlie Vogt as CEO. The 25-year IT and communications veteran joins Harris following nine years as president and CEO of VoIP specialist GenBand where he oversaw six acquisitions, as well as CEO of an IP switching company. Harris believes he is the right man to be in
charge as the broadcasting industry is embarking on a significant transformation from digital to IP. Vogt replaces Harris Morris, who
parted ways with the company after only six months in the job.
Charlie Vogt, Harris Broadcast
Middle East satellite operator Al Yah Satellite Communications has named Masood M. Sharif Mahmood as its new CEO. Mahmood has been promoted to the role having previously held the post of deputy CEO since June 2012. He previously worked within Mubadala for several years, as well as roles in
investment management and business development. Tareq Abdel Raheem Al Hosani will join the Board of Directors and will continue
to play a role in the organisation’s strategic direction, which includes the rollout of the YahClick satellite broadband
Masood Sharif Mahmood, YahSat
Delia Bushell has become the chief commercial officer at Italian payTV operator Sky Italia. Bushell was before that the service provider’s chief strategy & commercial initiatives officer since 2012 and previously she spent 12 years at BSkyB in the UK and Ireland, where she covered various positions. Under her new
mandate, she will lead the Marketing & Sales department. She started her career in BSkyB in 1999 as member of Sky Ventures and then
became head of Business Development.
Delia Bushell, Sky Italia
Gustavo Lopez has joined under the newly created position of vice president of global distribution and business development for Latin America to support Sundance Channel’s expansion across the region ahead of its upcoming launch. The news follows the agreement with DIRECTV Latin America to launch
Sundance Channel in September across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Based in Miami, Lopez will
oversee the distribution of Sundance Channel throughout Latin America. Prior to joining, he was VP and regional counsel for
Gustavo Lopez, AMC/Sundance Channel Global
Fredrik Tumegård has been appointed as the new CEO of Net Insight, succeeding Fredrik Trägårdh who left the media transport company after seven years as CEO. Tumegård holds the position as VP Northern Europe at NEC and will assume the role at Net Insight at the latest on October 1 2013. He has a broad
experience from the telecoms industry and has worked in various executive positions at TeliaSonera International Carrier and Huawei
Technologies. Anders Persson, executive VP, maintains the position as CEO until Fredrik Tumegård assumes his new
Fredrik Tumegård, Net Insight
nangu.TV, a platform provider for IPTV and OTT services, has appointed Jakub Kabourek as CEO. Prior to joining nangu, Kabourek was CEO and a board member of Visual Unity. He has also held the positions of CEO and board member at KIT Digital Czech and Visual Connection. He has a track record in
the telecoms and broadcast media technology markets combining his knowledge of telco, IT, media and software development. This
announcement follows nangu’s recent expansion, which has seen the company invest in key sales and product management
Jakub Kabourek, nangu.TV
Gavin Patterson will succeed Ian Livingston as chief executive of BT Group. Patterson has served as chief executive of BT Retail and as a BT Board member since 2008, having joined the company as a senior executive four years prior to that. Livingston has agreed to take up a role in government as Minister of
State for Trade and Investment. He will continue as chief executive of BT until he steps down from his post and from BT’s Board in
September.
Gavin Patterson, BT
Markus Fritz joined Eutelsat in June as director of commercial development and marketing, reporting to Jean-Francois Leprince-Ringuet, the group’s chief commercial officer. In this role, Markus is responsible for further developing Eutelsat’s commercial strategy internationally and developing strategic marketing
partnerships with customers to strengthen Eutelsat’s competitive advantage globally. Markus comes to Eutelsat with over 20 years of
international experience in the satellite, ICT and consumer electronics industries, including over ten years at SES Astra.
Markus Fritz, Eutelsat
Despite the preference for
lean-back experiences
there is growing evidence
of an appetite for second
screen or companion
device interaction. In the
UK, 70% of people
regularly use a mobile device while watching TV,
with 41% doing so every day, according to
Ofcom’s most recent study of UK broadcast
media audiences.
More than half (54%) said they used the
internet at the same time as watching TV. In the
US, figures from Nielsen show that 46% of
smartphone owners and 43% of tablet owners use
their devices as second screens while watching TV
every day.
But how can a broadcaster, or a pay TV
provider without their own network, turn
that to their advantage? After all, there are
many other industry players, from telcos to
app developers, smart TV and other technology
providers all chasing a slice of second
screen revenue.
“It’s important to understand the relationship
between the two screens,” says Albert Lai, CTO,
media and broadcast solutions at Brightcove.
“Dual-screen apps redefine second screen: the
handheld device orchestrates the entire lean-back
video experience, using the television to render
video programming, but allowing social,
advertising interaction, discovery and engagement
on the handheld device.
“The best experiences will be those in which
each device plays an equally important role,
serving different but interrelated purposes.
Apple’s AirPlay protocol and the Miracast
standard have opened the door to these kinds of
experiences.” It is believed
these types of technologies
could enable new kinds of
viewer interactivity and
engagement, including
additional content, gaming,
social network activity,
marketing and T-commerce.
But anyone seeking some degree of control or
influence over those interactions needs to ensure
the viewer is looking at their platform. One
obvious answer is to tie these technologies into
the EPG. Digital entertainment specialist Rovi is
helping operators and broadcasters build second
screen services to complement their existing
services. Its technology is being used to power a
new iPad application, TotalGuide xD, launched in
July by Canadian operator Eastlink. This
combines navigation with access to Eastlink’s
remote DVR service, allowing viewers to
personalise TV guides and schedule recordings
from iPads, wherever they are.
There is some debate as to whether a service
operator is in a better or worse position than a
non-operator broadcaster to take advantage of
second screen capabilities. Many operators are at
an early stage of second screen experimentation,
says Simon Leadlay, product manager at Pace.
“They’re not taking an integrated or synchronised
approach: the strategy has just been ‘we’ve got to
get something into the hands of the consumer,”
he says.
He is more excited about forthcoming
developments: “We’re talking to operators about
an approach that allows control over the TV,
search and discovery on the second screen then
playback on the main screen, or moving content
from the main screen to the second screen. We
see operators as the primary aggregators of all
entertainment in the home. If that operator is also
a pay TV operator they can access DVR
recordings too. Broadcasters’ companion apps
have been very content-focused. But those services
only allow access to that broadcaster’s content, so
will be weaker than a service offering an umbrella
view over all the broadcasters.”
Tablet TV
30 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
Taking companion apps to the next level
Are service providers is in a better position to take advantage of second screen capabilities and how can they take a more integrated approach, ask David Adams
2nd screen: the first step
Bypassing the ‘app graveyard’
Technology companies of various kinds are also
keen to work in this space. Capablue is working
with set top box manufacturers to develop
integrated second screen solutions. Alan Wolk,
global lead analyst at KIT Digital, reports that
smart TV manufacturers would like to sidestep
the set-top box and get viewers to interact with the
TV directly from the second screen. Technology
giants like Apple and Microsoft are hovering in
the background.
And then there are the third party app
providers, like Zeebox. “Broadcasters know
people are already engaging around their shows
through Twitter, Facebook and services like
Zeebox,” says Anthony Rose, Zeebox co-founder
and CTO. “They know they need to create
exciting second screen formats. The advantage
they have is high levels of control over the
content. The problem is that the show is only on
for one hour a week. And what happens when the
season ends?” He refers to the ‘app graveyard’ in
the US: the huge number of out of date apps for
US TV shows.
Many US broadcasters have concluded that
building apps for every show is not a sustainable
approach, says Rose. He would argue you can’t
even apply the model to TV channels, because
there are so many. His answer, naturally, is
Zeebox. “There are hundreds of people who work
for TV channels using our tools to enhance their
shows with games, sharing functions, voting and
playing; and social models they can brand,
customise and monetise – all zero technical
development,” he says. Zeebox is also developing
synchronised second screen advertising, marketing
and T-commerce propositions that could be used
by broadcasters.
Many broadcasters are already working with
the second screen. Some ventures have persuaded
impressive numbers of viewers to interact, as in
the case of the gameshow ‘Weet Ik Veel’ in the
Netherlands. Service providers like Rovi have
developed propositions for second screen
advertising. “We work with advertisers and media
buyers, then we build creative for different
platforms; and then we have the analytics on the
back end to show what people did within the
advertising experience,” says Charles Dawes,
global strategic account director at Rovi.
He is intrigued by emerging business models:
“Many catch-up TV services can now be accessed
through multiple devices using business models
funded by advertising, but some broadcasters are
saying ‘if you subscribe you can watch the content
without advertising’.”
Yet it would be a mistake to base a whole
strategy on black and white commercial factors,
says Claire McHugh, CEO of the Irish TV app
provider Axonista. “This is actually about how we
tell stories across these devices,” she says. “You
have to create additional fun stuff to get the
viewer to watch the ads, because people don’t like
being monetised or engaged, but they do like to
be entertained.”
If a broadcaster can do that they can take
advantage of technologies like KIT Digital’s
Ad Locker, which consumers can use to store
away adverts they have seen in which they
were interested, to interact with the additional
content at a later stage, maybe even going on to
make a purchase.
One common goal across many second screen
propositions is to increase personalisation. “We
want to provide a personalised TV experience to
each member of a household using their personal
devices,” says Ido Wiesenberg, vice-president for
business development and co-founder of Tvinci.
“Then they can use that smaller device to
communicate to the big screen: ‘This is me; I
want you to show me content relevant to me’.”
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 31
Tablet TV
“Many US broadcasters have concluded that building apps for every show is not a sustainable approach.”
“This is actually about how we tell stories across these devices, because people don’t like being monetised or engaged, but they do like to be entertained.”
KDDI’s UI on an iPad
Effective personalised TV
But while attempts to develop a truly effective
personalised recommendation engine for
TV continue, no-one’s quite managed it yet.
And debate continues as to how best to tie
personalisation and other interactive elements
of these services into social networks.
At present, while there certainly seems to be a
lot happening in this space – it will, for example,
be fascinating to monitor the progress of Channel
4’s new 4Now second screen app in the UK –
many propositions are still finding it hard to gain
critical mass. Many broadcasters, operators and
content creators remain reluctant to commit large
scale resources. Content rights issues also remain
a source of strife in many markets.
Some operators and broadcasters will also need
to overcome technology barriers. Much will rest
on the management and exploitation of metadata.
“The richer the metadata the better the
experience,” says Dawes, flying the flag for Rovi
technology that can link video, music, and games
metadata. “If you start with a movie, that will
have a soundtrack, so you can discover the
musical content separately and people can link to
iTunes,” he explains.
Many operators will also need to improve their
infrastructures, says Duncan Potter, CMO at
SeaWell Networks. “What a lot of operators have
done when OTT services came along is rushed
out a parallel infrastructure to their walled garden
that gives them no extra benefit because it is
based on cacheing, so you lose the individual,
personal experience,” he says.
Networking providers like SeaWell can help
operators to add a new layer of intelligence across
the delivery infrastructure already built, focusing
on session control and management. “Then you
can start thinking about personalised ad
insertion,” says Potter. “And if I can insert
alternative content I can start to rethink the
concept of a channel.”
When and where someone is viewing content
and the device they’re using are also important
factors to consider, says Rovi’s Dawes. For
example, in households with children “unless you
live in Silicon Valley” a tablet is still more likely to
be a shared, not a personal device.
What will be the long-term effects of a growth
in second screen services? “On multiple devices,
with personal TV, I believe our children will have
a totally different way to consume TV,” says
Tvinci’s Wiesenberg. “It will all be about watching
what I want, when I want.”
The next steps
So what steps should broadcasters and pay TV
operators be taking to develop second screen
services that will deliver the best results in this
new world?
“First, clearly define who the second screen
app is going to serve,” says Steve Plunkett, CTO
at Red Bee Media. “It will most likely be a
composite of different needs so the challenge
is to make sure they can be accommodated in a
compelling consumer proposition.” Only then, he
says should you try to pick the best technologies
for the task in hand, basing the choice on the
viewing patterns a service provider wants to
support or promote, the devices they want to
include [and] the demographic they want to
reach.
“There will be competition between
broadcasters and operators,” Tom Cape, CEO of
Capablue. “I think you can look at second screen
on three levels: apps for the programme brand,
the broadcast or the operator. There’s a place for
all three. It will be a bit of a bunfight, but
ultimately the customer will decide.”
Axonista’s McHugh anticipates more
broadcasters hiring people specifically to create
content for the second screen, but she also warns
against getting too carried away too soon. “The
average end user is still probably my auntie, say,
who probably doesn’t have a smartphone,” she
points out. “It may sometimes feel like things
are moving very fast, but they’re actually moving
very slowly.
“But broadcasters are in a sweet spot, because
they know how to create compelling content and
they can influence the people they sell their
content to. I would say to the broadcaster:
concentrate on the content. There are very good
technical developers out there, so you don’t have
to build all of this yourself. They will let you
concentrate on doing what you do well.”
Tablet TV
32 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
58
45
5055
44
30
64
56
7569
73
80
68 72 71 71
19
1510
2320
12
24 24
Digital device penetration by country (% of adults owning/using)
Smartphone
UK FRA GER ITA USA JPN ESP AUS
Laptop/Netbook computer Tablet computer
IHS Electronics & Media / Events
The Future of Digital Media Distribution 201326 September 2013 | Kings Place, London
Confirmed SpeakersIan Blaine, CEO, thePlatform and Senior Vice President, Converged Products, Comcast
Anna-Mariya Treneva, Chief New Media Officer (Director of Digital), CTC Media
Richard Firminger, General Manager, EMEA, Flurry
Amelia Gammon, CCO, Saffron Digital
Michael Hirsh, Executive Chairman, DHXMedia
Ben Keen, Chief Analyst and Senior Director, IHS
Andrew Moore, General Manager, SpotXChange
Helge Hoibraaten, CEO, Vimond
Niels Rosenquist, CEO, Janys Analytics
Dan’l Hewitt, General Manager, VICE Europe
Sorosh Tavakoli, Founder & CEO, Videoplaza
Oleg Tumanov, CEO, IVI
Paul Benunn, CCO, Somethin Else
Myles Dyer, Youtube Marketing Jedi, Channelflip
And many more…
Sponsor Media Partners
Register now / Further information
Early Bird - £275+VAT (expires Friday, 30 August)
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Reasons to attend:• Meet and network with more than 300 industry executives
from 130 companies in 15 countries
• Join senior executive keynote speakers, highly engaging fireside chats and inspiring panel sessions
• Examine market opportunities, business strategies and the outlook for the future of digital media
• Subsequent access to speaker presentations and conference videos
• Maximise your networking opportunities at the evening drinks reception
What is on the agenda:
• The role of original content in driving online video
• The next generation of video advertising
• Business models revisited – what works?
• Building audiences on connected devices
For sponsorship opportunities contact: Bob Perez at [email protected]
media business school
logotipo mbs 1 color
base.indd 1 20/08/2013 09:58:55
GN: Tell us a little about
Chello DMC for those
that might not be familiar
with the company.
JK: Chello DMC has
been in the business for
more than ten years. It
started off as a couple of
linear playout channels
and now we run more
than 100 on the linear
side, a full DTH
platform that serves 20 million clients and we’re
doing all the VoD operations for our largest
client, LGI, as well as eight other clients. What
started as a purely broadcast driven company has
now become what I like to call the ‘DHL of
media’ – we promise that wherever you want your
files delivered and in what language, version and
format, we will guarantee this delivery.
GN: How did this process come about?
JK: We have facilities in Amsterdam, Budapest,
Barcelona, Miami and Buenos Aires. The route
strength is that we are on the mainland which has
a couple of advantages, primarily that we are very
used to the multi-lingual approach. As an
example, we have a feed that has more than 20
languages added to it. All that multi-territory
expertise is what we grew up with. Only when we
know we can deliver end-to-end do we ramp up.
So we take growth and the pace of growth
seriously because it is quality partners that we are
serving. Clients like Fox and Disney trust us with
complex matters like multi-platform.
GN: In terms of digital media delivery, this has
been talked about for years but things still seem to
be moving pretty slowly...
JK: The complexity we see is a vast amount of
data you need to transfer. Going back to the DHL
package analogy, we have a large and growing
amount of data going out of our building every
day. Why we do that well is because we’ve been
digital for a decade now. The reason why 80% of
media transfers are still taking place by tape is
something that we from our side don’t really
understand because there are so many more cost
effective ways to do that. I do think however that
VoD and connected devices are triggering
companies to rethink to rethink and speed up on
digitalisation. The industry is facing an interesting
time in this sense: if you’re not digitised you’ll
probably miss out on VoD.
GN: But even with VoD, broadcasters and cable
complain about standardisation, fragmentation and
other issues. Can you help with this?
JK: In our Amsterdam office there are 30
nationalities with many languages spoken so that
complexity of specification has always been there
for us. We serve 45 languages from our facility
and we don’t care about different specs and
languages. I don’t think the specification race will
end – yes, we might have less of them – but I
think the industry is still learning so much
technically and we just live with that. We do
understand our studio clients get fed up with that,
which is why we say ‘let us take that care of that
part’. Serving UPC, the biggest cable operator in
Europe, we have learned how we can use our
ability to version different items. We see ourselves
as the hub in between content delivery.
GN: Studies show that 90%+ of viewing is still
linear and that this won’t drop below 80% for the
foreseeable future. Are some companies wrong to
focus too much on VoD?
JK: It will always be a case of one and another.
We multiply the value of that content. Whichever
way consumers use that media we can deliver,
whether it’s on-demand or over-the-top, or SD or
HD. We are able to provision the media for
multiple platforms and this generally increases the
reach of eyeballs. We let our clients do the maths
as to whether they think that’s the right way to go.
GN: Are there any technologies coming up to make
yours and everyone else’s lives easier?
JK: There are many and it’s mainly called the
internet. We can give remote access to a client to
control content. There is also more tracking and
tracing type of software. Technology helps us in a
big way; it helps make it more transparent. Cloud
is a vivid theme in the industry but eventually you
have to have your media picked up and delivered
somewhere. Regardless of whether your control
over that media is in the cloud, your media has to
move from one side to another, and that’s where
the internet helps.
GN: Where do you see yourselves in 12 months?
JK: We’d like to have a bigger VoD business and
we think we can deliver that. We have some
interesting developments lined up for IBC this
year. With our clients we don’t see a massive shift
to go OTTm but cutting it down to its essence, it’s
just another stream for us and we don’t care what
device it’s delivered to. It’s another way you can
multiply the value of your content. It’s a question
to individual content owners in individual
countries as to whether they want to launch that
type of service.
GN: Finally, how do your clients see 4K TV?
JK: Like with OTT, we want to be able to offer it
as just another flavour of a version of that same
content. But it’s up to our clients whether they
can make a business out of it but we haven’t heard
a huge thrill from content providers so far and
they haven’t spoken to us about it. Technology
wise it’s brilliant but everyone in the industry is
trying to find a way to monetise it now.
Q&AQ&A
34 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
Ch
ello
’s J
elm
er K
lein
gel
d
From its traditional broadcast roots, Chello DMC has evolved into a self-proclaimed digital courier focused on VoD and multi-platform, as VP Jelmer Kleingeld tells CSI editor Goran Nastic
The DHL of media
TechnologyConference2013
Multimedia Home Gateways conference review
Platinum Sponsor Media PartnersGold Sponsors Research Partners
More and more
operators are
embracing the
concept of
multimedia home
gateways (MHG)
to take greater
control of the digital connected home. At the same
time, a growing number of service providers are
also embracing various elements of the cloud in an
effort to speed service deployment while reducing
associated costs. So how do the two fit together?
And how do operators choose between nPVR and
local storage, remote UI or resident EPG, and
broadband or broadcast?
Against this backdrop, CSI held its second
event dedicated to multimedia home gateways,
which took place at the British Film Institute
(BFI) on London’s Southbank. The one-day
conference was chaired by Paul Robinson of
Creative Media Partners, and sponsored by
Cisco, Nagra, ADB and Access.
Tom Morrod gave some background on IHS
Screen Digest’s gateway research. The
proliferation of IP devices that consume video has
resulted in TV becoming much more complex and
fragmented. These barriers and options provide a
good context to what gateways are and why they
make sense, according to Morrod.
At its crudest description, gateways serve as an
entry and exit point of the home network. All
data inward or outward must first pass through
and communicate with the gateway. They can
handle unicast and broadcast traffic (or OTT
and managed distribution) distribution,
transcoding, CA-DRM termination and other
advanced functions.
This approach allows operators to maintain an
established business case, ie bundled content
controlled by an aggregator. It also allows control
without having to manage every single device in
the home or be under the mercy of consumer
electronics cycles. “You just have to have some
general purpose mechanism like HTML5 that
allow you to bridge that gap to the screen without
having to fully rely on rendering and other
technical elements inside CE devices which can
be very varied. With the gateway, we can allow for
consumer behaviours which we know are already
happening but we can’t allow through pure
unmanaged means,” said Morrod.
It’s early days but Screen Digest estimates there
are 13 operators globally that have deployed
MHGs inside the home. These include Comcast,
DirecTV, EchoStar in the US, Norway’s Get,
French-based Numericable and pan-European
cablenet UPC, all of who deploy a maximum of
one MHG per home that then serves thin-clients
and other connected devices. MHGs are also
holding up the STB market in Europe and North
America and account for the majority of revenues,
Morrod added. Moreover, they have huge
opportunities to provide high margins due to their
ARPU generating potential that comes with the
extra services they enable.
Cisco looks to the cloud
Yves Padrines, VP and general manager, Service
Provider Video Group at Cisco, talked mainly
about the cloud and how this ultimately ties in
with MHGs. Managing this explosion of devices
will clearly lead to cloud-based platforms, he
argued, which will also open new business
models.
“The question is how much do we put server
side and how much functionality do we reside in
the MHG versus the cloud,” he asked.
36 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
A gateway to the cloudWhat role gateways have in a world moving towards the cloud was a key theme assessed during CSI’s home gateways conference
Gold SponsorsPlatinum Sponsor
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 37
DLNA is a good technology and Cisco uses
half a dozen or so DLNA stacks, but it won’t be
enough for a multi-screen experience. “It has to be
managed in a more centralised way and this needs
to be orchestrated by a superior, overarching
entity which we believe will reside in the cloud,”
said Padrines. This will also allow for more
flexible silos and much more rapid service
deployment across these silos for quicker time-to-
market, he said.
PayTV operators upgrading platforms once or
twice a year is no longer good enough in light of
the greater competition they face from OTT and
new market entrants, according to Padrines.
Cisco believes in all forms of cloud, be it
public, private, hybrid or an emerging community
model, and there is room for each version,
depending on migration scenarios. “It’s a
fascinating journey to a whole new set of
technologies,” said Padrines.
The cloud is a way of removing device-side
complexity and, in Padrine’s words, how Cisco
can “move lines of software back from the clients
and into the cloud.” To this end, Cisco has
experimented with reducing the middleware
complexity of the STB or gateway and Padrines
mentioned that the positive results had taken an
originally sceptical team by surprise. The promise
of the cloud also includes new areas of Big Data
and analytics but there is a real need to educate
the industry better as to the advantages and
disadvantages of the cloud, he argued.
“It’s important to remove the fluffy messages
around the cloud and really get into the
technology to understand why it’s efficient. Not
everything works better, there are caveats and
many ways to get it completely wrong,” said
Padrines.
There are three things that can go badly wrong,
according to Padrines, namely security/privacy,
performance and scalability. The elastic property
of the cloud, on the other hand, ties in well with
TV’s peaky nature which Cisco is working
towards and preparing as a future solution.
So what about the gateway? As a termination
point for CA the MHG is essential, and it can
be looked as the most advanced edge of the
cloud in the home where things like caching and
storage can be managed, not just PVR, in addition
to services related to home automation, which
Cisco believes will converge around the same
device and which can be seen as a mini-IP
headend inside the home.
Liberty’s PECHE
Liberty Global continued the cloud/gateway
theme, with a keynote given by Faycal Amrani,
managing director and chief architect of Liberty,
now the world’s largest cable company following
its recent acquisition of Virgin Media.
Amrani noted that the operator’s well-
publicised Horizon TV combined gateway and
multi-screen service platform will move traditional
headend functions such as encoding, transcoding,
encryption and multiplexing to the cloud within
the next year or two across a series of virtual data
centres, despite much resistance from headend
vendors and broadcasters. This will create a more
virtualised, “scattered cloud” delivery
infrastructure for its 12 European operating
companies, which will improve cost efficiency by
“quite a big number,” stressed Amrani, who like
other operators wants to see CPE costs go down.
“So far it seems very promising. From an
operational proof-of-concept to reality, we are
probably talking about 18-24 months for this
to happen,” said Amrani, who added that
Liberty was testing the technology to virtualise
these features.
“It is not so much the location that is
important; it is more about whether you own
that infrastructure or not. The aim is to perform
the video processing in the
best and most cost efficient
way. Our goal is to
harmonise the services and
solution across our
footprint with agility and
we can’t do it without the cloud. The move to the
cloud is clear,” he added. To this end, in the cloud
versus STB debate, Amrani and Liberty see room
for both in a hybrid model, where each opens a
new set of services and opportunities.
Liberty has already created a central back-
office to help it harmonise functions like OSS/
BSS, customer management support, and
applications like interactive TV, nPVR, UI, search
and recommendation as the cablenet rolls out its
next-generation Horizon brand across Europe.
This centralised location is called the Pan
European Central Head End (PECHE), which
powers Horizon services in the currently four
available markets.
Demonstrating the accelerated deployment
time enabled by PECHE, Amrani noted that the
launches in the first two markets of the
Netherlands and Switzerland took 12 months
when PECHE was not yet operational. The next
two markets by comparison, Ireland and
Germany, took only three months. “So when we
talk about elasticity, agility and service velocity,
we mean it, it’s real,” Amrani said. “Cloud based
architectures does not mean the end of the
gateway. It means a shift in what is right to do in
the cloud versus the gateway,” he added.
Gateways vs Cloud
In the first panel of the day, ADB, Pace,
Simplestream, Samsung and Vodafone weighed in
with their thoughts on the topical cloud vs STB
debate, looking at cost implications, transcoding
and other issues.
“For us, 95% is about the software and how we
make this manageable on a daily basis and get
things to work together. To make things simple
and ‘just work’ takes an awful lot of lines of
code,” said Paul Bristow, VP of strategy at ADB.
Pace chief technical engineer Darren Fawcett
noted that ultimately broadcasters are very
mindful of the user experience, making MHGs as
a de facto standard of providing services around
the home by the company’s customer base, who
are all moving down this route. “As you extend
coverage into devices you don’t control you need
to repurpose the content. The ability to extend
The Pace DMC7000
Gold SponsorsPlatinum Sponsor
to new devices you don’t control, a good reliable
way to do that is to transcode the content at the
edge of network, through a device such as a
managed gateway.”
Bristow agreed, pointing out that multi-room
and multi-screen deployments cannot rely solely
on the cloud, especially in households with four
or more screens. “Many people can get an 8Mpbs
payTV service but that slows down at peak time
when people watch TV. OK there’s ABRS but if
you’re paying for a service that deteriorates at
peak time quality diminishes you won’t be a
happy customer. So you need to take a step back.
We live in a real world where you have to deal
with realities and not many have 100Mbps fibre
to the home,” he said.
Guilhem Poussot, head of connected devices at
Vodafone, echoed these sentiments, noting that
while the operator was looking to migrate services
to the cloud it has to do this carefully because of
these practical considerations. “The cloud is very
attractive for all of us, but we have to serve
customers and make sure they receive service
quality they pay for. In Europe there’s still huge
variety of access technologies and that’s difficult
to manage. We need to be careful of migrating
everything to the cloud, which is fantastic, but
also finding the right economic balance.”
Poussot gave storage as an example, where
storing content in the cloud is cheaper than giving
the right hardware to all customers, but at the
same time this has to be balanced against the cost
of upgrading networks.
In reply to the ROI question, Vassilis Seferidis,
director of European business development at
Samsung, which was the first Horizon box
supplier, described MHGs as a platform for
delivering a plethora of new revenue generating
services. “The cost and timeframe for Horizon is
much longer than simple zappers, but you
anticipate new service, some of which that you
might not even foresee, to recover that
investment,” he said.
Like Ziggo and a growing number of other
operators, Vodafone is also reviewing cloud UIs,
which it sees as a very attractive way of reducing
fragmentation of smart TVs and other connected
devices in the home. HTML5 plays a big role
here, but as Bristow noted a browser cannot
replace what a gateway or even simple STB can
do in terms of UX control, which is why there is a
good future for both STBs and MHGs.
The key message from the panel was that cloud
and MHGs are almost complimentary and not a
case of either-or. “It’s only at the beginning but
the more cloud you have the more gateways you
have,” concluded Poussot.
Companion devices and apps
The next panel looked at the hot topic of
companion devices and what role, if any, gateways
can play here.
“You have a brand, an advertiser who wants to
interact with the channel, and then you have the
channel and the operator. All of those will play a
part in how they make the value chain work. The
business model will change but it’s a massive
market and commercial opportunity and I don’t
think people truly understand that yet,” said Tony
Henderson, TV and entertainment lead for the
UK at Microsoft, adding that cooperation is
necessary as no one company is best positioned
to dominate alone.
Shazam does on average 10m recognitions
every day and a lot of users are tagging TV which
the company uses to give an enhanced 2nd screen
experience around programmes with add-on
information. Shazam doesn’t try to be an EPG or
a way to control the STB but primarily sees itself
as an engagement tool via the 2nd screen. It
ingests audio from some 150 channels so users
know they will get data back if they do a call to
action on the TV, according to Iain Dendle,
director of business development for Europe
at Shazam.
So how do operators and broadcasters add
value in this space and prevent viewers being
cannibalised by competing devices? Search and
discovery is one way, according to the panellists,
as well as delivery, recording, storage and
reminders. The point is that there needs to be
enough value to add through that app around
what’s going on with the show, perhaps some
commerce elements, social communications,
voting and participation. Broadcasters can prevent
users from finding information via IMDB through
more holistic business models. As ever, 2nd
screens activities are an opportunity and a threat
depending on how media companies react.
Technology focus
Liberty, Home Gateway Initiative (HGI), Intel,
Nagra and Screen Digest analysed the various
flavours of MHG and the many technology
decisions that have to be made.
Industry association HGI has set out common
requirements for MHGs in various areas, one of
them being software modularity to allow
applications to be installed on gateways, as well as
test programmes for manufacturers. The body is
now working on smart home architectures for
MHGs, looking at different wireless interfaces
and an API abstraction layer for instance,
according to Duncan Bees, chief technology and
chief business officer at HGI.
On the media side, the HGI is looking at the
role of the MHG as it evolves, as an enabler for
multi-screen, content bridging, PVR, time shifting
and other functions. The gateway is still a fluid
work in development.
Liberty also eventually sees gateways – whether
headed or headless (ie with or without HDMI
interface) - as an enabler for the smart home.
Amrani favours an MHG that acts as an IP
headend in the home, providing services such as
multimedia, broadband, as well as utility services
like metering, security and health.
In terms of transcoding and how much
transcoding functionality might be needed in the
hardware (compared to the cloud), there isn’t a
one-size-fits-all answer, according to Intel’s
38 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
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www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 39
Richard Crossley, with the individual operator’s
strategy and cost consideration among the many
factors that will influence the final decision.
“When we talk to customers about next-gen
silicon we take these into account,” he said.
As Nandini Iyer, senior product manager at
Nagra, explained, the industry is familiar with the
concept of gateways, whether residential, Docsis
or broadband. What changes with MHGs is they
go beyond service delivery and become service
assurance platforms managing the complexity out
there, she argued. “The MHG makes sure that all
of this works together in a way that users don’t
need to be tech geeks to figure out. It’s positioned
between the managed and unmanaged network of
the chaotic home where the operator owns some
of the pieces but not all of them.”
So, in Iyer’s eyes, this is a good opportunity to
make SA, content discovery and conjunction of
services meaningful for the end user. Morrod
agreed: “We can define the MHG as whatever we
want to but what’s more important is at what
point is that definition meaningful in terms of
new business models or technology capabilities.”
“The gateway is a gateway to new business,”
said Amrani, where the MHG becomes the last
mile intelligence in the home
The panel also tackled challenges around CA
termination, DRM bridging and home
networking. Even with 802.11n and MIMO there
are limitations, with Amrani pointing out that
40-50% of Liberty’s call centre calls are related to
WiFi.
Towards a smarter home
Home networking and the smart home were
the main topics under the microscope in
the afternoon.
“We all know the home network will be a
hybrid one,” said John Egan, president of the
Home Grid Forum, seeing a future where wireless
and a variety of wireline technologies co-exist.
Indeed, the G.hn standard that the Forum has
helped promote features an abstraction layer for
all wireline methods and there plans to include it
for wireless too (much as exists in the emerging
IEEE1905.1 standard). G.hn serves improves the
experience of the user and also reduces the
complexity of the gateway, Egan argued.
Telefonica and BT are among G.hn board
members, and Egan expects a lot of public
announcements coming over the next few months
with regards to operator trials and deployments.
“Ultra HD will eat up existing home networks
and people will need to be ready for change.
All roads lead to Rome when it comes to the
gateway,” said Egan.
Edmund Barrett, product manager at gas and
electricity supplier RWE, which rolled out its
smart home product in the German market
almost three years ago, at a time when it faced
challenges around introducing people to the mart
home concept. “We wanted something to control
heating and identified a gap in the market both in
terms of price and what kind of functionality
we’re looking for,” he said.
RWE supplies customers with a central unit
that connects to the router via an Ethernet link
which then connects wirelessly to switches,
sensors, heating controls and fire alarms around
the house using a proprietary wireless protocol.
The company can perform OTA updates to all
the devices to increase their lifespan. Customers
decide how they bundle and create profiles.
It’s about convenience and the company’s
system can support additional functionality such
as smart metering in the future that allows
customers to take action around setting budgets
or device control beyond mere observation.
Linking these to the smart grid is also a future
plan, as is making the system appropriate for
other countries.
Beyond energy, Barrett explained how RWE
is looking to expand to new verticals in safety
and security, and assisted living. RWE is also
looking at strategic partnerships to develop
software SDKs and device kits so in the future
it’s not reliant on its own work but to companies
who have that expertise to enrich the smart
home environment.
In the final panel, Cees Links, founder and
CEO, GreenPeak, a supplier of ZigBee-based
sensor control networks, pointed out that in the
US only California and Texas have a reasonable
penetration of smart metres. Other countries have
started to develop their own flavour of ZigBee or
communications variants in 2.4Gh or 900Mhz
bands. Links hopes momentum will pick up but
claims that for security and privacy reasons the
technology has become very complex. Another
reason is that energy companies have been slow to
drive it because they want consumer to use as
much energy as possible but this is now changing,
he argued.
Smart meters are only available in new builds
in Germany. “We need to address the wider
market but people don’t necessarily want to pay
extra for a smart meter/intelligent socket, which is
a hurdle” said Barrett.
It was agreed that proprietary solutions that
don’t meet all the needs is also hindering the
success of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the
energy management subset of that. Too many
protocols are limiting volumes and therefore
prices. No one solution will likely win out but
more interoperability is needed to extend
availability and unify the overall offering in some
ways. The good news is various drivers, including
government, regulatory and environmental, are
emerging that are creating user demand for the
smart home market to finally kick off.
Panellists also agreed the gateway would be
the right place to also put information about the
aspects of the smart home, reducing the number
of interfaces and simplifying the user experience.
So a number of hurdles to be overcome before
this becomes mass market, something CSI will
pick up on again next year. We would like to
thank all our sponsors and media partners that
made this event possible and look forward to
seeing all attendees in 2014.
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Over the next two years
a host of local TV
services will go live
across the UK, starting
with a launch in Grimsby
this November. At the
end of March, 19
licences were awarded by regulator Ofcom for
companies to operate local television in the UK
using digital terrestrial television (DTT)
frequencies. Winning bidders, which comprise
independent entities and those run by more familiar
broadcast and publishing firms, were granted
L-DTPS licences for a 12 year period, with a
stipulation for producing original content.
Local stations will have access to shared
infrastructure and a £25 million grant courtesy
of a funding agreement with the BBC. They will
also have the luxury of a prominent position on
the Freeview EPG, as high up as channel 8 on the
country’s DTT free-to-air (FTA) platform that is
currently in 11 homes as the main-set television
and of almost 20 including secondary sets.
But UK local TV has seen a chequered past,
with stations such as Channel One and Channel
M operating in London and Manchester
respectively folding due to the inability to find a
sustainable business model. So what’s different
this time, and can the new batch of licensees
expect a similar fate?
According to Ed Hall, chief executive at
Comux, the company in charge of running the
network that connects all the transmitter sites, the
digital switcher (DSO) that was completed last
year offers a fresh and a favourable set of
conditions ripe for these services to flourish.
“Local TV has been tried in individual towns and
cities in poor analogue frequencies when it was
difficult to retune television. It was always
challenging to make a sixth work.”
With the onset of digital, the national
awareness and value to advertisers is very
different, Hall argues. He believes that the
advertising and sponsorship opportunities,
on top of the funding support, lower the costs and
create the right mix for success.
“Media is being bought in more complex
ways, the more you can identify and measure
targeted audiences the better. It’s always been a
challenge for television but this should help and
we are delivering the urban audiences that have
significant value and interest for advertisers,”
says Hall.
Hall pointed out during the recent launch of
the local TV ‘manifesto’ that local licensees have
control of their channels from content creation to
transmission as well as full access to the
technology needed to manage the chain, thereby
pooling resources. This is particularly important
to help the smallest licensees who might not be
able to run their operations otherwise, he added.
Local TV
40 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
UK local TV gets another shotAs a new wave of local TV services is about to go live across the UK, Goran Nastic assesses what the future holds in this space
“It’s a community-owned business if you like.”
Some like Your TV (see table, above) will share
overheads and resources by being part of a larger
network. All licensees, moreover, can share
content, for example, through a common
presenter or graphics package, as the content is
delivered centrally from Birmingham, according
to Hall.
As IHS Screen Digest put it in a research
note, “Regional channels have a few advantages
over national, as they can tailor content and
advertising to a select audience and pay less
than the average in transmission costs per
capita reached. New stations will also be able
to exploit some opportunities like time sensitive
local advertising.”
But the analysts also warned that the system
has its drawbacks; primarily that targeted local
channels – even those with a high proportionate
local audience share – come with limited ad
revenues and impressions.
While local TV will compete for ad revenues
with local radio and newspapers (the existing
media affiliations should help here), Hall also
sees the upcoming targeted advertising service
from Sky acting as a booster for local TV, proving
there is a demand from advertisers for local TV
advertising, rather than providing a competitive
challenge.
For its part, Sky sees the AdSmart initiative
creating an opportunity for the broadcaster and
its advertisers to use TV in a truly regional way.
“What we are eventually looking to do is to take it
to the point where it might be hyper local,” said
Jamie West, director of AdSmart & Commercial
Development at Sky Media, which is looking to
rollout the first addressable advertising projects
by the end of the summer.
From local to OTT
Local TV has 9Mbs of capacity in all locations
and an additional capacity equivalent to two SD
or one HD channels available in ten million
Freeview homes under so-called City-based
streams. Meanwhile, a further 23 locations will be
up for grabs over the next year and Ofcom expects
to begin the licensing process for phase two
locations in the autumn.
But potentially the most interesting part
here is the connected TV option, which Comux is
actively exploring. Hall pointed out that the
company is looking at how it can make all local
TV services available via the Red Button or online
streaming irrespective of location. So London-
based people may want to watch local content
where they are from, for example.
Over the past few years, a host of over-the-top
services have sprung across the world providing
niche content and targeting expat communities
across the world, and Comux, together with the
UK’s local TV operators, wants to tap into this
trend, which in itself opens up a new set of
advertising opportunities.
This is also where Virgin Media’s Ian
Mecklenburgh, the cable operator’s director of
consumer platforms, sees the most promising
potential for local TV. “We can deliver local TV
but it will vary massively in its production quality.
So one of the issues we have is that a lot of those
guys somehow feel they deserve this high EPG
slot,” Mecklenburgh said at a recent BBC R&D
breakfast event.
Virgin, on the other hand, believes that app-
based IP delivery is a much better option where
their content is available nationally. “It’s much
more network economically efficient for us,” he
said, adding that Sky has the same issue (the
DTH operator has offered channel 117on its EPG
for local TV).
“Most people understand the economics
of a national IP-based platform and what that
could do, whereas a lot of these guys are very
driven around a local franchise. But a lot of
people will be interested in what’s happening
who don’t live there probably. So this is an
opportunity to say, here’s a platform that can
give you national distribution.”
Discussions between the cablenet and local TV
channels are ongoing with agreements reached
with only a handful of these stations, according
to Mecklenburgh.
The issue mirrors the wider debate seen across
the industry, namely is TV about an era that is
based on EPGs and spectrum scarcity or is it an
internet view of the world? While the long-term
future for DTT spectrum and FTA broadcasting
looking increasingly murky, it seems that local TV
will be coming to an app near you sooner rather
than later.
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 41
Local TV
TABLE: Local TV licence awards
Location Winning operator Households (000s)
London London Live 3,200
Birmingham City TV 1,200
Manchester YourTV Manchester 1,200
Leeds Made in Leeds 1,100
Newcastle Made in Tyne and Wear 1,000
Liverpool Bay TV Liverpool 880
Glasgow GTV 750
Edinburgh ETV 610
Cardiff Made in Cardiff 500
Southampton That’s Solent 460
Bristol Made in Bristol 380
Preston YouTV Blackpool & Preston 350
Nottingham Notts TV 313
Grimsby Lincolnshire Living 270
Belfast NVTV 260
Sheffield Sheffield Local Television 193
Norwich Mustard TV 155
Brighton & Hove Latest TV 151
Oxford That’s Oxford 108
Swansea No bids 116
Plymouth No bids 94
Source: Ofcom
The demands on the broadcast
spectrum have never been
greater, and with the
economic value of spectrum
use increasing to over £50bn
in the UK this year, the
stakes have never been higher.
The latest 4G mobile signals now use the 800
MHz space cleared by digital switchover, and the
planned launch of five new BBC HD services in
the 600MHz band early next year, the delicate
power-play between broadcasters and mobile
operators for airwaves is on.
With WRC-15 on the horizon, the expectation
is for yet more clearance. At WRC-12 it was
indicated that the 700MHz band, now reserved
for broadcast, could be allocated for co-primary
use of mobile and broadcasting as soon as 2018.
Spectrum is a finite resource and while the
well-resourced mobile network operators are
looking for access to ever more capacity, in
response to the exponential demand for mobile
video, we also need to recognise that digital
terrestrial television (DTT) is here to stay.
Let’s not forget that around 40 million people
in the UK watch DTT, primarily Freeview,
whether on main TV sets or supporting devices,
and nine out of ten of the top watched shows are
delivered by aerial. There’s no question that DTT
performs a vital public service, giving almost
universal access to affordable news and
information and underpinning the creative
industries in the UK.
And it’s evolving. Now digital switchover in the
UK has been completed, Ofcom has awarded
extra spectrum in the 600 MHz band to the BBC
for five new HD channels by early 2014, with
potentially a further five more regional HD
services being planned. Add to that the chain of
19 new local TV channels set to broadcast on
Freeview channel 8 and you start to see a
platform in demand.
The debate around spectrum use to support
future mobile growth is well underway at national,
European and international levels, with regulators,
manufacturers, broadcasters and producers all
exploring how mobile and DTT can coexist.
One key question is how much capacity will
mobile data need? The problem is that it appears
to be growing faster than most experts have
predicted. According to Cisco, global mobile data
traffic grew 70% reaching 885 petabytes per
month at the end of 2012, up from 520 petabytes
per month at the end of 2011. That growth is
nearly 12 times the size of the entire global
Internet in 2000.
And most interesting to broadcasters is that
mobile video traffic accounted for over 50% of
this total by end-2012, with no indication that this
is slowing down. Cisco forecasts that mobile video
will grow at a CAGR of 75% between 2012 and
2017, the highest growth rate of any mobile
application category that it forecasts.
The pressure from mobile video is only set to
grow and there will simply never be enough
capacity on the broadcast spectrum to
accommodate this growth.
The need for co-existence
The DTG believes that the time has come to bring
the spectrum power struggle to an end, with both
sides acknowledging that DTT and mobile data
networks are here to stay. It is time for
broadcasters and mobile operators to start to
work together in an eco- rather and ego- system
for the benefit of both sides.
The spectrum requirements to support
terrestrial television have to be balanced with the
mobile operators drive to innovate and meet
consumer need, and this will only be achieved
with true collaboration.
The relationship between television and the
internet has been compared to that of a love-
affair, starting with mutual
infatuation, each seeing the future in
each other’s eyes. This swiftly ran
into difficulties with each side unsure
of how to live together, but in the end, TV and the
internet have flourished into a proper partnership.
The same applies to mobile and broadcast.
This true collaboration is working in the UK
already. The DTG is leading discussions with the
mobile industry through its filter testing for 4G
coexistence with DTT in 800 MHz band, through
our support of the Wireless Test & Innovation
Centre (WIC). The WIC is at the forefront of
innovation and testing of coexistence between
DTT, short range devices and white space devices.
Another example is DTG’s relationship with
the 5G Innovation Centre, which is at the
forefront of research currently underway to ensure
the UK is central to the development of the next
gen of mobile network standards. The timing is
critical, laying the foundations of an essential
partnership for the future.
Without this true collaboration beginning now,
at both a national and European level, the risk of
misallocating spectrum are great and irreversible.
Only by entering a proper partnership, with each
side working together with a real understanding
the needs of the other, will we succeed.
Richard Lindsay-Davies, DTG Director General,
will be chairing an IBC conference panel on this
subject, titled ‘Money from Thin Air? The Future of
Broadcast Spectrum’, Sept 15, 10am, The Forum.
It’s time for eco, not ego, systems when it comes to spectrum access
Guest column
42 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
Simon Gauntlett is technology director at the DTG, the industry association for DTV in the UK. This is the latest in a line of regular guest columns to
provide CSI readers with updates on the DTG’s initiatives and activities.
A delicate power play
Untitled-9 1 20/08/2013 14:36:02
The rate of change and
development in the area of
broadband video shows no
signs of slowing. With this
change comes all of the
accompanying growing pains,
such as new devices,
platforms, and formats, which only serve to
frustrate any attempts at standardisation.
However, from the midst of the ruckus has
arisen MPEG-DASH.
While the debate rages on about whether and
how DASH represents a solution, the European
Broadcasting Union has embraced it for its hybrid
internet TV (HbbTV) platform.
DASH provides many benefits over the current
crop of protocols in use or being proposed for
ABR or multiscreen delivery. Following are the
key elements proposed (for a complete list see the
DASH Industry Forum website):
• Independent, stable international standard.
• Common encryption – one-time encryption
and packaging of content allowing
simultaneous use of multiple DRM
technologies.
• Templated manifests – Compact manifest for
fast start-up, as well as avoiding manifest
download with every segment.
• Industry convergence for streaming delivery.
While some of these are clearly more important
or more achievable in the short term, the key
challenge is widespread adoption. Here is a
shortlist of what has to happen:
1. First and foremost, there must be broad
player support across the majority of likely
end devices. This was accelerated by the
participation of all the
major players such as
Microsoft, Adobe,
Apple and Qualcomm
in the development of the standard. In addition,
the standard itself was developed to represent
a superset of the existing deployed formats. This
obviously has to be balanced with the fact that
Apple alone has been reticent to provide further
deployment commitments.
2. There must be significant education of DASH’s
benefits to accelerate the re-examination of
existing investment in proprietary solutions. To
this end, the DASH Industry Forum was founded
out of the original DASH Promoters Group. This
group of over 70 members has been very active in
providing DASH-AVC/264, as well as the
associated test cases, test vectors, conformance
software and reference client software.
3. There must be further adoption or mandating
of MPEG-DASH by additional standards-setting
bodies and organisations to require the
deployment of DASH. As mentioned above,
DASH adoption as an integral part of the HbbTV
1.5 hybrid Internet TV platform is a fundamental
step in this direction, and therefore worthy of
further study.
MPEG-DASH meets HbbTV
MPEG DASH is a highly logical choice for
HbbTV 1.5. It provides an independent stable
standard that has had participation of all major
vendors and has an active Industry Forum
continuing to drive it. DASH provides a solid and
standards-based answer to a significant challenge.
To understand DASH’s role here, we must first
understand HbbTV.
The challenge of implementing HbbTV
broadband services
The broadcast element of HbbTV is very well
understood and extensively deployed. However,
the key difficulty lies in extending the broadband
service portion to a hybrid broadband / broadcast
device, such as a STB or connected TV
(“terminal”). Multiple protocols, security issues,
and the ability to take advantage of unicast’s
personalized nature with capabilities such as
targeted ad insertion, make the goal of HbbTV
both appealing and problematic.
Technology corner
44 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
The future of multi-screenDelivering on the promise of MPEG-DASH and HbbTV. By Duncan Potter
Diagram 1: HbbTV Showing Hybrid Delivery Model
HbbTV delivery model
HbbTV supports two distinct content delivery
channels:
1. Traditional OTA DVB Broadcast (multicast)
a. Linear Broadcast Content, Application Data
and Signalling
2. IP delivery based on HTTP (unicast)
a. Linear HTTP Content, Non-linear HTTP
Content, and Application Data. In an HbbTV
network this would be based on MPEG
DASH* (ISO/IEC 23009-1) and ISO BMFF
Common Encryption (ISO/IEC 23001-7)
HbbTV deployment challenges
For organisations looking to implement HbbTV
1.5 there are a series of requirements that provide
significant challenges:
• Extending linear broadcast content delivery to
the HbbTV terminal via Broadband
• Implementing on-demand (VoD, Catch-up,
Rewind, etc.) on the HbbTV Terminal
• Providing secure per-content or per-session
encryption and DRM
• Providing content personalisation and fully
managed Quality of Experience at session
initiation or dynamically at any time during
the session
• Per-session targeted ad or alternate content
insertion
• Full support for the HbbTV 1.5 specification
In addition to these requirements, there are
additional capabilities that are also needed to
provide a compelling and differentiated service:
• Providing live, on-demand, rewind and catch-up
services to any Second Screen
• Delivery support to any connected device:
game console, tablet, smart-phone, etc. whether
or not it supports a direct MPEG DASH player
capability
An example: Issues of targeted ad/
alternate content insertion
Of the requirements mentioned above, few if any
bring as much incremental revenue opportunity,
or as many challenges (and cause as much
controversy) as targeted ad insertion.
Few organisations can ignore the huge scope
for additional services that being able to deliver
targeted ads and alternate content brings.
Looking further than parity with today’s existing
ad model, the possibility of alternate content
insertion on a fully customized per session basis
brings a tantalising view of the future of live
television, where channels based on an archaic
frequency derived model become obsolete and
video content becomes truly individualized.
However, as with all exciting visions, there
are a few ‘minor details’ to be understood and
dealt with.
Manifest manipulation alone doesn’t
always work
One major example of this is the range of issues
associated with manifest manipulation.
The manifest is primarily a “playlist” that
provides the player with the list of upcoming
assets that are available for download. It is an
XML file. This has led to many assumptions
being made that inserting ad or alternate content
would be a matter of simply “manipulating” or
writing the entry into the manifest file at the
appropriate place to tell the player to play
additional or targeted content with no need for
any change the actual video fragments.
To make the situation more complicated, this
model actually can be made to work with Apple
HLS and most IOS devices. Unfortunately, as
with all seemingly simple answers, it doesn’t work
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 45
Technology corner
Graph 1: Showing Cost Comparison for Edge Repackaging and Edge Ad Insertion vs Head End Packaging Only Option with No Ad Insertion
for anything outside that community of devices –
even HLS on Android devices does not support
“discontinuity” to allow this type of
manipulation. This means that the player must
support “discontinuous” video fragments with
different timing and encoding characteristics.
Unfortunately ISO BMFF based protocols
such as MPEG DASH AVC.264 do not
support discontinuity.
Both alternative models of client side insertion
and “pre-writing” of manifests (the creation
of custom manifests written at the time of
encoding or head-end packaging) have massive
limitations in terms of scalability, security, and
quality control.
A true solution is provided when the manifest
is manipulated in real time, and in line with
actual fragment delivery to ensure that the time
stamps and critical container information are
manipulated in line with the custom manifest for
that client.
HbbTV broadband deployment for
operators
Once the deployment requirements (of which
there are clearly many more than the main
requirements listed above) are understood, it
becomes clear that today’s cache based CDN
models require many more services closer to the
edge of the network to be able to meet both the
delivery as well as the cost requirements.
In effect this demands a new intelligent video
delivery control layer to be implemented within
the network that provides services to the Back
Office Support Systems, Ad Insertion Systems,
and Policy Servers, while implementing a full
session management approach to ensure QoE,
effective operational monitoring and management
and further session management at the edge of
the network.
Increasingly, a range of video delivery services
is becoming available at the edge of the network.
- Dynamic repackaging of ABR formats (e.g.
HLS, Smooth Streaming, HDS and MPEG
DASH)
- Support for full session management
- Quality of Experience management
- Policy Enforcement
- In-network targeted ad and alternate
content insertion.
As it becomes possible to deploy these advanced
services at the edge of the network, the inevitable
questions of cost and supportability become
paramount.
Reducing cost while adding new services
and revenue opportunities
In a recent case study, a leading cable operator in
North America implemented an open source
based CDN shared the details of their
implementation. Their experience demonstrated
the potential to build a highly compelling business
case for distribution of some of this traditionally
“head end” or data center based services. In their
model, by implementing format repackaging, the
hardware and centralised packager cost savings
alone reduced CAPEX by a stunning 44%.
The reduction in OPEX resulting from far
higher network backhaul, cache optimisation and
the all important individual session management
and analysis for the operations staff is NOT
calculated within these savings. Nor is the fact
that when one calculates the ability to provide
targeted ad insertion, the cost is still LESS than
the cost of the original packager and server
hardware needed to support the open source
based cache network.
Looking forward to new models of
network deployment
This does not mean adopting an entirely
decentralised model, but closer examination of
future looking models such as Software Defined
Networking (SDN) show a similar approach
whereby centralised intelligence leverages highly
distributed agents providing critical underlying
services for optimized application delivery.
Summary
There are many challenges in bringing MPEG
DASH and HbbTV together while continuing to
exploit revenue opportunities and further
optimize costly distribution infrastructure.
However, by rethinking a few key assumptions
around protocol and manifest manipulation, a
picture begins to emerge of a highly optimized,
distributed infrastructure that enjoys lowered
distribution costs without sacrificing quality.
In fact, a fully session based management
system for ABR promises a significant increase
in functionality for service providers, by giving
them control over each individual stream as
it is delivered.
Providers who adopt these new methods
and incorporate them with MPEG-DASH and
HbbTV will reap the profits inherent in quality
control, per-session analytics, and truly targeted
advertising.
Duncan Potter is CMO at SeaWell Networks
46 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
Technology corner
Diagram 2: HbbTV Delivery Network Showing Session Delivery Controller Deployment (labelled SeaWell Spectrum)
Pay TV operators around
the world are expanding
their services to additional
devices. There are clear
reasons for this: mobile
video views grew 300%
in 2012, accounting for
10.4% of video starts compared with 3% in 2011.
According to Adobe, tablets were a key driver of
this growth.
In the past, proximity has traditionally been
seen as the key to maintaining a high quality
experience for video viewers. That was the idea
behind CDNs: store Internet content as close as
possible to the end-user and eliminate upstream
congestion issues. The advantages of local caching
continue to hold true, but the complexities
associated with multiscreen content delivery
allow for benefits from using a somewhat more
centralised approach as well.
The attention being given to cloud computing
in the enterprise world is near deafening at the
moment, but it’s also having an impact on pay TV
operators. Managing and manipulating video in
the cloud not only simplifies some requirements,
but could even influence the model for
multiscreen monetisation.
Monetising multi-screen
For operators that find it difficult to charge a flat
fee for multiscreen video, it may be worthwhile
exploring specific use cases that would drive
willingness to pay. In-home viewing is a difficult
scenario to monetise given that customers have
access to the content in their homes via a paid
service already. That leaves only two scenarios:
via devices connected to a cellular network when
the consumer is outdoors; or “placeshifting,” using
a Wi-Fi or fixed-line connection to view content
when outside the home (for example, on a
business trip to another city).
The first use case lends itself to mobile
consumption, and this is growing rapidly. But
the mobile phone is poorly suited to TV video
streams and so requires the video to be resized
and delivered at a lower bit-rate. Mobile
networks are also more bandwidth constrained
than fixed-line and so the consumer experience
can often be affected. Operators therefore need
to invest in a substantial video adaptation and
manipulation eco-system to deliver a paid service
to mobile devices.
That brings us to the placeshifting scenario.
According to our recently conducted survey of
US online consumers, 62.4% were “very” to
“somewhat” interested in viewing shows from their
pay TV service or DVR via a web-connected PC
anywhere in the world, and interest had remained
largely consistent when compared with the
previous year.
For business travellers in particular, stuck
in a hotel room after a full day’s work, viewing
unfamiliar programming in a foreign language
is not an attractive option. Convincing these
relatively high-income professionals to pay a small
transaction fee or subscription premium to access
their favourite and familiar TV shows via a laptop
or tablet should be a viable proposition.
The set-top vs the cloud
There are two main approaches to offering
placeshifting.
Launched in 2005, the Slingbox is an in-home
set-top box that connects to the DVR/set-top to
access TV content and can “sling” it to a web-
connected PC anywhere in the world. At its
launch, placeshifting was an extremely
controversial issue within the TV industry,
with broadcasters arguing it was illegal since
it subverted local market exclusivity deals.
However, device-based placeshifting continues
to exist. Sling Media is now a part of US satellite
company EchoStar, and several other pay TV
providers have since licensed the technology.
Various models of Slingboxes are also available at
electronics retailers in 20 countries.
Though widely available, the device-based
approach has its constraints. It requires users to
remotely access the in-home set-top box rather
than an optimised media server, has no built-in
redundancy, relies on a relatively
narrow upstream path and is
constrained by the box’s transcoding
and other content optimisation and
multiscreen delivery capabilities. All of these
video preparation and delivery requirements can
now be effectively managed via a cloud-based
service. In addition, moving this capability into
the network and integrating it into a broader
content delivery architecture could greatly improve
service reliability and the subscriber experience,
both for fixed-line and mobile delivery.
Cloud-based video delivery also fits into a
broader set of initiatives from operators to leverage
the cloud. They are looking for ways to speed up
activation of new services and cloud based
services can often be upgraded and adapted more
quickly, since the platform is housed on servers in
comparatively central locations and is independent
of the end-user’s device. Often it allows operators
to use standards-based technologies which can
further simplify development and deployment.
Lastly, some DVR technology vendors have an
extensive suite of patents for device-based time-
shifting, but these don’t extend to the cloud. As a
result, some operators are reportedly exploring
cloud-based time-shifting as a way to develop new
capabilities without stepping into patent disputes.
While proximity to the end-user is still an
important advantage for video delivery, cloud
technologies can help operators deliver a high-
quality multiscreen service. In particular, they
could help with key monetisation initiatives such
as mobile video and placeshifting.
The specific business case will, of course, vary
by operator and will depend on access to content,
scale, existing infrastructure, local subscriber
behaviour etc. But a growing number of operators
worldwide are now looking to shift traditional
head-end functions for multiscreen delivery to
the cloud.
www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 47
Migrating to the cloudCan cloud-based solutions help operators drive multiscreen revenue, asks Aditya Kishore
Aditya Kishore is principal analyst at Diametric Analysis, a consultancy focused on analysing the disruptive impact of Internet distribution on the
video and telecom sectors. He can be reached at [email protected]
To advertise contact Tiro Bestonso +44 (0)20 7562 2427 [email protected]
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ADB designs, manufactures and deploys solutions to distribute pay-TV and multimedia services to the connected home, for all types of networks, providing an amazing user experience.
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Taurus Avenue 105, 2132 LS HoofddorpThe NetherlandsTel: +31 23 556 22 22 Fax: +31 23 556 22 40 Email: [email protected] Web: www.irdeto.com
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Rödelheimer Landstrasse 75-85, 60487 Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland Tel: +49-17-1998-3676Email: [email protected]: www.atxnetworks.com
Advanced Digital Broadcast S.A. Avenue de Tournay 7, CH-1292 Chambesy, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: +41 22 799 0799 Fax: +41 22 799 0790 Web: www.adbglobal.com
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.
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48 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 49
48 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com www.csimagazine.com September-October 2013 49
To advertise contact Tiro Bestonso +44 (0)20 7562 2427 [email protected]
Business DirecTory
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.
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The 14 exhibition halls will
officially open their doors
to the public on Friday 13
September, although by then
the conference will already
be in full swing.
Conference keynotes at
IBC 2013, still Europe’s largest broadcast show,
come from the old and the new of the media
world, and will include senior execs from ZDF,
TDF, Channel 4, Tata Sky, Multichoice, Twitter
and Shazam, as well as retailers such as Amazon
and Tesco (who are now OTT providers too).
The conference programme kicks off early
Thursday morning, with a session focused on
sports broadcasting, set against the backdrop of
major events in 2014 such as The FIFA World
Cup in Brazil, the Winter Olympics in Sochi, and
the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. While
sport drives many innovations in broadcast, its
popularity comes at a price, and it is a large
contributor to escalating programme costs borne
by networks and operators – it will be interesting
to see to what extent rising tensions, reflected in
retransmission disputes for instance between
different parties, are tackled in these sessions.
The 2nd screen, of course, is a theme that will
run over the six days of the show, tapping into
viewers demand to make their TV consumption a
more sociable and interactive experience. Among
the subjects explored is the question of how
broadcasters can use this attention and
technology to help their shows and channels.
Understanding the value of Big Data and the
future of broadcast spectrum are interesting
debates and both feature multiple sessions with an
impressive group of panellists.
The idea of Big Data is not new but only a
handful of traditional broadcasters have begun to
seriously take up the challenge and use them in
new monetisation or operational strategies. Two
back-to-back sessions on Friday afternoon will
explore the pitfalls and opportunities on offer,
with input from Oracle, Amazon, BSkyB, BBC,
Tesco and Channel 4.
Meanwhile, as wireless technology begins to
encroach on terrestrial turf, the very future of
FTA television is thrown in doubt, an issue that
will be tackled by broadcasters and mobile
operators alike in the shape of Telefonica Europe,
Globo TV, ITV, Arqiva and Ericsson.
Other topical subjects under the spotlight
include ultra HD (including a session sponsored
by Sky Deutschland), Cloud and IP in broadcast,
adaptive streaming, smart user interfaces, and the
battle for the viewer experience as TV fights the
plethora of connected device for eyeballs and user
attention. In what should be a lively debate, the
last topic will see speakers from UPC, Microsoft,
YouView and Samsung debate the place and role
of TV in the future living room.
Around the halls
Elsewhere, that always fascinating Future Zone
offers a glimpse into what technologies we might
expect coming our way over the next few years,
usually in the form of prototypes from R&D labs
around the world. This year, the chosen few
involve next-generation HbbTV with contextual
recommendations, Cisco’s Project Fresco (see
page 14 for more information on this and ultra
HD), augmented broadcasting from ETRI and
High Dynamic Range (HDR) video among
others. BBC R&D will also reveal some of the
team’s latest work here, while a German
university will propose a Tower Overlay network
for LTE-Advanced, which it is positioning as more
efficient concept than eMBMS.
UHD comes with a lot of unanswered
questions about value, content and mass market
potential but this hasn’t stopped much excitement
being generated by the industry, with content
owners exercising the most restraint in this area.
Cost is another big issue.
As a number of service providers dip their toes
in 4K by testing the waters, SkyD is leading a
demo of an end-to-end live on-air broadcast chain
in tandem with Sony, 3net, SES and Pace.
The companies will show a trailer comprising
Ultra HD content, mixing sports, movies and
documentaries, aired live over satellite by SES in
a sponsored session free to all delegates. The
content will be encoded in HEVC by Harmonic
and will be received by a prototype UHD receiver
presented by Pace. The results will be displayed
on several Sony 4K displays of different sizes.
No doubt we can expect a number of other 4K,
HEVC and associated demos across the exhibition
floors this September.
Goran Nastic previews what looks set to be another action packed IBC show
50 September-October 2013 www.csimagazine.com
The old and the new in Amsterdam
IBC ConferenceStimulating debate and sharpening strategy, the IBC Conference attracts the industry’s most influential and authoritative speakers to discuss the future of electronic media and entertainment.
The conference is designed to: • stimulate discussion to challenge
and exchange ideas• enable you to network with the top
minds in the industry• allow you to formulate strategies to
implement in your business
IBC2013 Keynote Speakers include:• Peggy Johnson, Executive
Vice President, QualcommTechnologies, Inc. and President,Global Market Development,Qualcomm
• Tony Wang, General Manager,Twitter
• Rajesh Kamat, CEO, CA Media
For more information please visit: www.ibc.org/conference
IBC ExhibitionEach year, 50,000+ attendees from over 160 countries come to IBC. They are able to browse fourteen themed halls housing the latest innovations from more than 1,400 leading brands. In addition there is a wealth of free to attend feature areas including: IBC Connected World a special area of IBC which encapsulatesthe very latest developments in mobile TV,3G and 4G services
IBC Production Insightcentred around a professional standardstudio set, attendees have a host of thelatest technology to get their hands on
IBC Workflow Solutionsdedicated to file-based technologies andprovides attendees with the opportunity totrack the creation management journey
For more information please visit: www.ibc.org/exhibition
IBC Big Screenproviding the perfect platformfor manufacturer demonstrationsand ground breaking screenings
Future Zonea tantalising glimpse into the futureof tomorrow’s electronic media
IBC Awardscelebrating the personalities and theorganisations best demonstratingcreativity, innovation andcollaboration in our industry
RAI AmsterdamConference 12-17 September : Exhibition 13-17 September
Register now at
www.ibc.org/register
IBC Third Floor 10 Fetter Lane London EC4A 1BR UKt. +44 (0) 20 7832 4100 f. +44 (0) 20 7832 4130 e. [email protected]
www.ibc.org
Untitled-1 1 20/08/2013 10:34:23
Reaching the right audience comes down to a simple equation. Intelsat has
always been forward thinking when it comes to media. When we launched IntelsatOneSM,
we built the satellite industry’s largest IP/MPLS fi ber network to create fl exible, hybrid
content delivery options for our customers. And now, we’re introducing Intelsat EpicNG,
our next generation satellite platform, which combines high-throughput spot beams, for
content regionalization and targeting, with wide beams, for total continent coverage.
That’s intelligent design. Good for your operations and your bottom line.
Meet with Intelsat during IBC 2013 at Stand 1.C71.
Learn how Intelsat can help you reach more viewers.
Visit www.intelsat.com/Forward-Thinking for details.
Designed for 2030. Launching in 2015.
6849-CSI_Media.indd 1 8/20/2013 12:51:35 PM