The solution – a collaboration with audio specialists DTS and low-latency video delivery experts Tiledmedia – claims to be the most reliable system available today to deliver best-in-class VR360 audio and video for VR and AR streaming to mobile devices.

VO says the system is tailored for live events such as soccer games and concerts, and – using its own ‘VO Player’ – can deliver high-resolution VR experiences for less than a quarter of the bit-rate of legacy VR streaming platforms.

According to Kevin Le Jannic, Emerging Business Leader at VO, the increased delivery efficiency arises in part from the company’s partnership with Tiledmedia. “We’ve been working with them for a year and a half, and the concept is that instead of distributing the whole 360-degree sphere while you are watching just part of the content, they will distribute only what the user is currently seeing in very high resolution.” The rest of the sphere remains in lo-res mode until the user turns their attention to another part of the sphere. “It is just pointless to distribute the whole sphere while you are just watching one part of the content,” argues Le Jannic.

Moving the head is accompanied by a rotation of the 3D audio ‘sphere’, so that the sound matches the changing video – a system provided by DTS. “You have spatial audio, meaning that you know where the sound comes from, and when you turn your head, the sound will adapt accordingly to the position of your head: it changes.”

One of the challenges such a system implies is that it has to make split-second decisions, in real-time, about which section of the sphere to boost to hi-res mode or to play sound ‘from’. Le Jannic reveals that Tiledmedia is working closely with Akamai and other CDN providers to reduce the latency of the user experience, so they are not aware a hi-res ‘tile’ on the sphere is being generated on-the-fly.

One way to do this is to include a predictive element which pre-caches tiles according to various cues. These could involve interpreting the ‘movement’ of the spatial sound track – as a user moves their head to respond to a sound heard in a different direction, for instance – or, indeed, by interpreting the direction of the head movement itself.

Previous VO demos have shown that it is possible to create ‘heat-maps’ of the VR ‘sphere’ by aggregating user behaviour – for example, eyeball-tracking to see which spots the visitor’s gaze most commonly comes to rest on (one way of deciding where to place ads in a VR environment). “This heat map can be also used for pre-caching,” points out Le Jannic, “because you know that most of the people will look at this specific position, so you just pre-cache that specific tile, because there is a big chance that people will read it or get it.”

The look-and-feel of the VR environment itself has been much improved. Certainly, when Videonet experienced the ‘Virtual Arena’ application (in this case, delivering ‘presence’ at a soccer match) through a headset on the VO stand, the experience offered noticeably better resolution levels than previously.

It was also much easier to navigate: the direction of the user’s gaze controls a red dot inside the 360-degree environment which can be used to ‘pick’ an option simply by staring at it for a few seconds. This means that manual adjustments only need to be made to the headset when initially putting it on, in order to control fine focus.

Le Jannic says the system’s improvements have enabled VO to experiment with less clumsy ways of introducing advertising and monetisation, and how to ‘push’ products inside the VR experience. “We let the user personalise their environment by choosing which team they prefer, and then we will push products that are related to these specific teams – like you choose Munich, and then we’ll have the shirt of the Munich team – that, of course, they can then buy directly from within the application.”

VO describes this as ‘gamification’ of the advertising: “Here, the advertising is really part of the experience. It’s not as annoying as a pre-roll video that you would have on TV. It’s interactive, it’s not annoying anymore. […] Of course, we also have insights that are really valuable for advertisers, because you know what the user is looking at. […] We know if the user watched the advertising, how long, how many times, etc., so this is new data that you have.”

Interestingly, Le Jannic suggested that using ‘eye-ball tracking’ for measurement and monetisation, which was all the rage in VR circles two years ago, might not represent the future after all. “Regarding eye tracking, I think that you can already do some interesting stuff just with the tracking of the head. […] If you just track the head, in the end, you are accurate enough, and you know exactly what the user is looking at without tracking the eye.”

Photo: A Viaccess-Orca exec demonstrates the company’s VR application at IBC.

“We know that in today’s world, people want to stream more and more channels. We needed to lower the cost-points,” said Meardi. While PERSEUS was fast, V-Nova knew it could make PERSEUS 2 even faster, and that translated into several benefits. “The first one is very, very low cost of encoding, low processing-power utilisation, low electricity [demand], and high densities. […] Yes, it encodes Ultra HD p60 broadcast quality at 10Mbps, but the most important thing is, it costs so much less.”

The second benefit PERSEUS 2’s speed enabled was making it easier to use on all platforms, noted Meardi. In initial deployments, PERSEUS “was working very well in closed environments like an IPTV deployment or in app deployments.” But V-Nova realised that video delivery was moving to a more fragmented environment, where “HTML-5 was taking over. […] So with PERSEUS 2 we created and we are presenting at IBC, the possibility to decode PERSEUS within a browser, within all the HTML-5 ecosystem, using simple JavaScript decoding.”

Meanwhile, PERSEUS’s ability to work in two different modes, as a standalone video compression system [PERSEUS Pro] or piggy-backing on existing codecs to improve their performance [PERSEUS Plus], was expanded. Where PERSEUS Plus previously worked in tandem with H.264, at IBC the next-generation platform was shown also supplementing HEVC. “In general, PERSEUS 2 is amenable to any type of base encoding – so when AV1 becomes available, […] it will work also with AV1. It [also] works on top of VP9,” said Meardi. This means, he claimed, that for operators, “PERSEUS is actually the cheapest and simplest option to immediately achieve massive benefits – because it’s compatible with the whole eco-system, it’s a simple software upgrade and doesn’t change anything.”

Finally, V-Nova has optimised PERSEUS 2’s performance around specific operating points, to reflect the common bottlenecks in today’s video distribution networks. “We’ve understood those limits over the past two years and we optimised PERSEUS specifically for those operating points. That’s why when we say we do OTT 720p HD at 300 or 400KBps, that’s not just a number picked at random. […] If you want to do mobile video, very often the majority of people have a maximum 300, 400 or 500Kbps.” Meardi notes that even in central London in peak hours, “very often you’re below 600KBps even with 4G.”

But isn’t there a theoretical limit to how much V-Nova can continue to optimise PERSEUS’s video compression performance?

Meardi pointed to the video compression tools built into PERSEUS 2, which were augmented in February by the acquisition of the global patent portfolio of video imaging experts Faroudja Enterprises Inc. “We haven’t yet used all those tools, so we know perfectly well that we have double-digit improvements coming soon in a lot of operating points,” he claimed.

Meardi believes that talk of PERSEUS getting close to ‘theoretical limits’ is bound up with V-Nova’s historical unwillingness to engage with conventional, laboratory-based, video compression testing protocols. These are characterised by allowing encoders to carry out repeated ‘passes’ when processing a test video segment or by giving them unlimited time or unlimited power to perfect the perceived quality of the result, he charges.

“If you have unlimited time to compress and you don’t constrain the bit-rate when it’s a tough scene, you just have a spike in bit-rate – that’s no problem. It would compress very well, and the quality would be nice,” commented Meardi. But the resulting compressed video segment, spikes and all, would be impractical to actually transmit, he argued, “because [the bit-rates spikes] would overflow the buffers in the transmission system.”

PERSEUS, by contrast, “was built for real stuff. In our claims, we have always said, ‘in real-world conditions, it delivers two times, three times, the benefits, etc.’, not ‘in theoretical, unlimited, unconstrained, give-it-as-much-power-as-it-requires [conditions],” Meardi declared. With reference to theoretical testing, Meardi pointed out that “if we want to really serve the eco-system, we need to achieve great compression with a mobile phone, with a single chip.”

Meardi stressed that V-Nova’s mission has “always been that we want to offer next-generation performance, available everywhere at low cost, and low processing-power. If people have unlimited, unconstrained processing-power, yes, maybe they can equal our performance or even better,” he conceded. In which case, “maybe they belong to the part of the sector that will not adopt PERSEUS – we’re fine about that,” he concluded.

The PERSEUS 2 codec was awarded ‘Best Digital Video Processing Technology’ at this year’s CSI Awards at IBC2017.

Photo: Guido Meardi

AirTies CEO, Philippe Alcaras, explained that Wi-Fi in the home had become “massively video-centric and massively streaming. That’s one of the reasons why for the past ten years we’ve invested in understanding, at the deepest level, how video works in streaming,” he said. This research had resulted in a belief at Airties that Android TV is set “to drive an acceleration of the innovation in the way we consume video.”

While careful to side-step the debate about whether Android TV was the right platform for operators or not – “it’s their choice, frankly” – Alcaras argued that the emerging centrality of Android TV meant that “for a company like us, it was a must-have.”

Two recent trends in video innovation are the transition from HD to 4K and app-based consumption of OTT content, noted Thomas Fehr, General Manager, Set-top Box at AirTies.

“You need to bring 4K out at economical price-points – so this new generation [of box] brings a more cost-effective 4K platform, that can proliferate.” Operators are also keen to offer the same content to customers on their TV sets that they currently access through apps on their tablets or mobiles, he pointed out – and an Android TV environment gives them easy access to those types of applications.

Previously, he explained, an operator with a propriety system running a particular piece of middleware who wanted to do this would have to approach the middleware providers and ask, “Can I please have Netflix? Can I please have Amazon? [With Android TV] you have an environment that gets those applications. They can get them quickly, it gives them fast time to market, and they get the same applications […] but in 4K.”

All of which may make for smaller, more economical platforms, but they still have to be “performant enough for operators,” argued Fehr. ‘Performant’ in this context includes not only ensuring customer quality of experience (e.g. no buffering or pixelisation in the video, etc.), but also the ability to simultaneously offer all the different types of channel – e.g. a 4K or HD one using HDR, or an OTT channel based on MPEG-Dash – that an operator would typically want to have in its portfolio.

This is where Android TV Operator Tier comes in. Fehr explained that this is a specific version of Android TV for operators that meets their quality of service and integration requirements, while at the same time giving them more control of the ‘look-and-feel’. Thus Operator Tier lets them control the ‘launcher’ – or home screen of the UI – rather than being forced to go with the usual Google-designed ‘standard launcher’.  This version of Android TV is only available through an approved OEM like AirTies that has signed an Android Operator agreement with Google, noted Fehr.

The integration of a Wi-Fi access point in the 4K Android TV box is a response to separate research AirTies has carried out, said Alcaras. This showed that 70% of people watching TV are using a second screen at the same time “at some point or another in a viewing session. […] So if there is one room that deserves the best Wi-Fi quality, it is definitely the living-room,” he concluded.

Alcaras admitted the integration was “complicated to achieve: […] you need to have a very good design in terms of set-top box to transform it into an active hot-spot.” This set-up also requires that the link between the primary modem and the set-top box is a good one. This could be facilitated by another innovation AirTies was demonstrating on its stand at IBC, Alcaras pointed out – a customer app which displays a map of the home showing which access-points are not well-connected, and how they can be moved around to optimise reception.

Fehr added that while the built-in hotspot feature gives operators better performance “in the sense that the customer’s happy to get a better Wi-Fi connection – at the same time it’s a little more economical: they integrate this in the set-top box and they save a little bit of money rather than [incur] a separate expense [for another access-point].”

Photo: The new Android STB from AirTies, launched at IBC 2017

This year, at IBC2017, DVB Chairman Peter MacAvock was lamenting the fact that “what we’re seeing now is those battles being played out all over again.”

HDR is the technology that brings extra ‘sparkle’ to UHD TV pictures both through higher contrast and its associated wider colour gamut, and it’s now considered to be as important as 4K resolution, if not more, to future consumer adoption of ultra-high definition television.

PQ, developed by Dolby as part of its Dolby Vision standard, is favoured by the Hollywood studios and OTT providers such as Netflix. However, it is not backwards-compatible with existing receivers which use Standard Dynamic Range (SDR). HLG, meanwhile, which was created by the BBC in collaboration with Japanese broadcaster NHK, was specifically designed to be backwards-compatible with SDR sets and to favour live production workflows.

The DVB position last autumn was that industry players were free to use either approach, depending on their requirements. This would cause few interoperability issues, it was thought, because it was straightforward to transcode from one to the other, and manufacturers were creating 4K panels with both options included.

However, not all DVB members were happy with that compromise, admits MacAvock. “Some of our members have stipulated that they would like to have mechanisms that are more sophisticated,” he says. Enter four new HDR variants from Dolby, Philips, Qualcomm and Samsung, which unlike the previous two are ‘dynamic’ rather than ‘static’ – that is, they support metadata that changes scene-by-scene rather than metadata that is constant throughout the entire film or video.

“There are some industry observers who suggest that the perceptible difference for the average consumer between these dynamic metadata systems and the static metadata systems like PQ-10 and HLG-10, are very limited,” notes MacAvock. “[But] there are others who say, ‘Oh, no, no. It’s really important.”

This isn’t necessarily because the proponents of dynamic metadata believe it will make any difference to consumers, claims MacAvock: “The idea is, ‘this is the way the editor would like it’ – even if the consumer can’t see it.”

His personal view is accordingly that the industry should “concentrate on getting stuff out into the marketplace and making HDR a success commercially, by providing coherent and consistent messaging to those who would implement it. […] To my mind, the standards discussion, at least this phase, is over. Let’s move on.”

In the meantime, DVB is responding by “looking at whether there’s a commercial requirement for extending beyond those static metadata systems and specifying some form of dynamic metadata system. That work is still ongoing [and] it’ll be ongoing for at least another year. I don’t know that we’ll actually end up specifying another system or not. We may say, ‘no, it’s just not worth it,’ because the market doesn’t absolutely need it.”

One HDR-related profile that the market may require more urgently is the marriage of HDR with HD – as opposed to 4K – resolution. DVB played down the possibility a year ago, but this year the combination provided one of the main demonstrations on DVB’s IBC stand.

MacAvock explains that last year, the sector equated UHD with increased spatial resolution – although “some people, including my own organisation, argued that it wasn’t just spatial resolution, it was a combination of the three features [of HDR, High Frame Rate (HFR) and Wide Colour Gamut (WCG), as well].”

Now, he says, there’s emerged a realisation that, “in fact, HDR is the unique selling point for this enhanced experience, whether you call it UHD or not.” In this connection, “there is a sweet spot for 1080p50 with HDR over terrestrial channels. Terrestrial channels have all the advantages of accessibility, but they don’t have the advantage of having extensive bit-rate. In that sphere, 1080 P50 with HDR looks pretty damn good,” he declares, “particularly with HFR. Being able to see that tennis ball is revolutionary.”

The HD-plus-HDR profile works well in part because an increasing number of 4K TV sets are able to upscale HD signals to UHD very effectively, MacAvock points out. “Particularly on a 55-inch [4K] set, if you put that in front of a substantial proportion of the public, I would argue they won’t know the difference,” he says.

“This enhances the DTT platform to the extent where it can now compete with other similar platforms that maybe have a dearth of bandwidth – so we can address the deficiencies of the DTT platform in that regard,” he concludes.

The most innovative of these was arguably a new 4K TV set which, through a collaboration with Turkish CE manufacturer Vestel, integrates Irdeto’s newly-launched TV Cloaked CA solution, allowing viewers to access premium pay-TV services directly through the TV without the need for a separate set-top box or external conditional access module (CAM). In principle, the partnership unlocks the ability for any operator in Europe to directly deliver pay-TV content where new generation Vestel 4K TVs are on sale.

Frank Poppelsdorf, Product Director, Content Security, at Irdeto, said the product was most appropriate either in retail environments or territories where there are a number of Pay TV operators prepared to work together to promote the solution. “When [consumers] connect the TV to satellite, cable or terrestrial, all they have to do is call the operator and enable the TV for scrambled content,” he says. This is in contrast to more complex procedures required for STBs or CAMs, where “they would have to call the operator first, then the operator would have to ship a device to the consumer.”

The Vestel TVs use chipsets from Irdeto partner MStar, which Poppelsdorf notes is “the number one chipset provider to TV manufacturers – so this solution can also be applied to other TV manufacturers.” However, he concedes that “it won’t work for every single market, because some operators may still want to completely control the UI and the look-and-feel.”

An alternative STB-free solution was also on offer on the Irdeto stand, in the shape of a USB form-factor CAM complying with the new CI Plus 2.0 standard, which uses Irdeto’s Cloaked CA security product. This has now completed a rigorous review by Cartesian against the stringent usage rules for 4K UHD premium content included in the respected Farncombe Security Audit, which is aligned with MovieLabs’ Enhanced Content Protection (ECP) requirements and industry best practices.

CI Plus 2.0 USB capability offers operators the ability to reach subscribers cost-effectively by adding support for Pay TV services with a simple USB dongle plugged into TVs. Given Cloaked CA’s compliance with MovieLabs requirements, the product also gives operators confidence that they are complying with stringent security standards for premium content.

Poppelsdorf says Irdeto is strongly backing CI Plus and its new USB format, which was much in evidence at IBC this year. “[The standard] has taken a long time, but I think it is actually almost done,” says Poppelsdorf. “What they have is normally a very lengthy sunrise period, i.e. when manufacturers can start implementing it. That’s typically, I think, 18 months or something like that. Our goal is to really accelerate that […] by providing this solution.”

Under current EU law, European digital TV sets are required to carry a CI slot using the PCMCIA standard, which Poppelsdorf says implies “a large cost to the manufacturers.” It is also physically cumbersome, “so if you want to make a flat TV it’s difficult to put that in.” Since TV sets over 40-inches generally include one or more USB slots, it will become much easier for TV manufacturers to support CI Plus 2.0 globally, he says.

For those operators seeking an STB solution, Irdeto was also keen to promote what it perceived to be the virtues of Android TV. “With Android TV, it’s really about time to market,” says Poppelsdorf. “You get a lot of the OTT parts basically for free and because of the certification all of the applications will work, guaranteed. For example, if you want to have Netflix, it’s there – you don’t have to do anything. […] You get DRMs included like PlayReady, Widevine, at the highest level of security.”

What’s missing from Android TV is the DVB/Pay TV stack, but Irdeto has now created a stack of its own, notes Poppelsdorf. “Again, we did this together with MStar to make sure that the time to market is shortened. When an operator wants to do a new set-up box they can basically get that complete stack and then all they have to do is focus on what’s really important to them – like the UI, the look-and-feel and things like that. They don’t have to worry about all that lengthy integration.”

Now that sports rights owners are increasingly mandating anti-piracy requirements, Irdeto is also keen to help Pay TV operators defend their premium content against pirates – but argues that implementing watermarking technology on its own will not be sufficient for them to reap any tangible benefits. At IBC the company was accordingly promoting what it described as a ‘360-degree’ approach to security – one that combines watermarking with proactive online detection and enforcement services.

Mark Mulready, VP of Cybersecurity Services, argues that “what we’re seeing now more and more is casual pirates, or what we would call social pirates, [where] people are using social media networks to show pirated streams during games or events.”

Mulready notes that during the recent Mayweather-McGregor boxing event, Irdeto identified 239 separate pirate streams, of which 165 were ‘social media streams’. “One of those streams alone had 470,000 concurrent viewers,” he said. “In total we identified almost 3 million end users gaining access to those streams.”

This implies, says Mulready, that operators “need to have technology that allows you to scan the Internet, bring all the pirated content in, and analyse it quickly. That’s where things like source detection, particularly watermarking, are now critical. Because obviously if you can track the source of the pirated content back to its origins at subscriber level and switch it off, that’s the best way, or most effective way, of dealing with the piracy.”

Irdeto has a compliance team whose job is to liaise with ISPs and try and get the content taken down during the course of an event as quickly as possible. But Mulready points out there also exist “non-compliant hosting sites”, run by pirate networks that are criminal and highly sophisticated. “And that’s where you need to collect the evidence. And this is also what we do with our customers, collecting all the evidence that they need to be able to take enforcement action.”

Mulready points to a recent action where the Premier League and Irdeto collaborated with law enforcement agencies to shut down one of the largest IPTV piracy businesses in Europe, after raids involving 12 locations across Spain and Bulgaria. Dubbed “Operation Casper,” eight individuals were arrested for the illegal distribution of 1,000 pay-TV channels across two ISPs using IPTV distribution.

Imagine Communications will be highlighting its unified delivery architecture again at NAB this month. It is probably the best example yet of how video delivery could converge around a multiscreen model, with broadcast treated as the ‘legacy’ edge conversion. Key benefits for operators include reduced CapEx and OpEx and the potential for increased agility, partly because it breaks down vertical siloes that until now have been sucking energy from operators (each requiring their own hardware, workflow and operations teams).

This approach also means you can introduce ad replacement to content that is being served to traditional set-top boxes using multiscreen technologies. Manifest manipulation and server-side dynamic ad insertion ensure a chunked video stream containing new ads can be converted into an MPEG Transport Stream at the edge.

Reynolds admits that many operators need time to get their heads around this unified distribution model, but one of the world’s largest cable operators, in North America, is already using it to run live services in several cities, harnessing the Selenio VDE (Video Delivery Edge) gateway that forms the heart of the Imagine Communications solution. Other operators are deployed on that side of the Atlantic. Some European TV providers are testing this new distribution architecture in their laboratories, using VDE, and there is lots of interest here, according to Reynolds. “This started out as a cable play but there is now interest from satellite operators, too,” he reveals, talking about the industry globally.

With this unified infrastructure approach, operators (and broadcasters) create multiple bit rate versions of a video stream and these are chunked and assigned manifest files. It is like ABR but nobody is switching between the different bit rate versions according to network conditions, since this is a core network and the bandwidth is managed and guaranteed.

HLS and MPEG-DASH streams can be used in the network core, with the streams already packaged into these formats prior to core distribution. The packaging can be performed by Imagine’s Telurio packager or a third-party solution.

One or more of these video streams can be ingested by the VDE and passed through to the legacy set-top boxes. This could be a 4Mbps chunked stream, for example. The VDE will select from the bit stream options (on the core network) based on whether it needs to supply SD or HD, or another resolution, to the set-top box. And if it needs to create a variable bit rate statistical multiplex for final distribution the gateway could make use of all the different bit rate options.

The VDE edge device can regenerate the chunked manifested video into a traditional Single Programme Transport Stream (SPTS) with constant bit rate (CBR). It includes a multiplexer so the device can also generate variable bit rate (VBR) video and a Multi Programme Transport Stream (MPTS) for any multiplexes.

This means the output from the edge gateway to a legacy ‘broadcast’ set-top box looks the same as it ever did. Multiple VDEs can be used to recreate an entire channel line-up for broadcast delivery from the core chunked video streams. For a cable network, the VDE hands the channels over to an edge-QAM or, more often in the U.S., to a CCAP device.

As the various bit rate streams on the core are already packaged (as HLS or MPEG-DASH), the VDE unpackages them for use on broadcast STBs (it consumes both the video fragments and the manifest and uses both to regenerate the Transport Stream). The VDE does not touch content that will be delivered to an IP endpoint like a tablet or Smart TV. In effect, streams destined for multiscreen viewing are simply passed through at the edge.

Multiscreen devices could request the same 4Mbps stream that a traditional STB might use, but for them the stream is forwarded as video fragments with packaging. (Obviously these streams are not regenerated into a traditional MPEG Transport Stream). Multiscreen devices will be able to switch dynamically between the  different bit rate profiles they request from the edge, as with all ABR streaming.

A simple way to think about this is that the VDE is an endpoint itself – but one that then creates a different kind of video stream for the ‘legacy’ broadcast world. VDE can interface with the DRM system to support ‘input decryption’. The output of the VDE can be delivered to a legacy CAS encryptor to provide compatibility with set-top boxes.

This unified delivery model can also be used by broadcasters, who are faced with a growing number of platforms they have to deliver content to. The elimination of siloes is the key driver for this new approach. “We have some customers who are operating five independent platforms that are all vertically separated with different technology stacks and different monitoring systems and different operational groups,” Reynolds reveals. “That is not scalable; it is probably not even sustainable.”

Operators and broadcasters want to rationalise their operations. Reynolds points out that the legacy broadcast systems still account for most of the viewing, so it might be tempting to think that this should be the default platform, with manifest-based delivery as the add-on. But that ignores the power of the modern multiscreen distribution technologies. “Why not leverage all that power on your core video infrastructure and then, at the edge, do the adaptation back to what a DVB platform like satellite needs.

“We spent lots of time working on this and decided that the focus should be on doing ‘digital first’, harnessing the advances built into HLS and MPEG-DASH. Then you can concentrate energy and resources onto one approach. The idea of moving the core of the network to manifest delivery is a pretty big change in direction. I don’t attach the word ‘revolutionary’ to many things, but this is. Often customers have not thought about this option and one of the reasons we wanted big customers first was to give the market proof points.”

Reynolds emphasises the benefits of this unified approach when it comes to advertising. He points to how complicated it is to insert ads into an MPEG Transport Stream in real-time using ad markers that flag where the advertising opportunities are. With this alternative model, the origin server knows that some of the video it has been requested to play is an advertisement and can make a decision to substitute it (using server-side DAI). The different video fragments are listed in the manifest. “The complexity is orders of magnitude less complex than real-time replacement using SCTE standards,” he claims.

The same technique used for ad replacement can be used for regional or programme black-outs, which could be applied to a sports match in specified geographies (content can be localized down to city and postcode areas).

Selenio VDE is a software solution that can be run on common off the shelf (COTS) hardware which could be deployed as an appliance or in a data centre on-premise, or possibly in the cloud. Although this unified core architecture is viewed as an enabler for migrating to an IP-based and data centre operations environment, it does not rely on this.

The serious benefits to an operator are seen when you use this model at scale but it can be applied to a single channel if you wanted, more likely for a single multiplex of channels if an operator needs a technology proof-of-concept. At greater scale, the OpEx and CapEx savings, and the greater freedom for innovation, make this model a no-brainer, Steve Reynolds believes.

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V-Nova has just completed its first acquisition and recently introduced the next-generation of its P.Link contribution solution, which provides greater channel density, ready for multichannel UHD deployments alongside existing HD feeds. Its looks as if satellite operator Thaicom is getting ready to use PERSEUS for distribution applications. The company has been demonstrating broadcasts of premium sports over satellite in UHD using the codec, with Teerayuth Boonchote, acting CTO at Thaicom, talking about “making UHD a reality for subscribers to any of our customers.”

In February, V-Nova acquired Faroudja Enterprises for its video pre-processing and post-processing technologies, which are said to deliver a 35-50% efficiency boost when used with any codec, including MPEG-2, H.264 and HEVC, subject to the usual caveats about the quality of content being compressed. V-Nova will now integrate the Faroudja solutions with PERSEUS as part of an expanded product suite.

The pre-processor and post-processor will not be marketed separately to the PERSEUS codec. V-Nova says a tight integration between the solutions will deliver additional synergies. Given the existing efficiency improvements from the codec alone, the potential for PERSEUS with Faroudja pre- and post-processing is intriguing.

The Faroudja pre- and post- processing does not require any modifications to the codec. The system includes techniques for video enhancement such as multidimensional video processing and the use of a unique support layer in parallel with the conventional compression path.

According to Fabio Murra, SVP Product & Marketing at V-Nova, ‘multi-dimensional video processing’ is a way to describe an approach to coding information independently of the dimensions used to represent it. “These could be space and time – in the case of video – but also volumetric information or the inclusion of alpha channels. In multi-dimensional encoding they are basically treated as one, collectively.

“When encoding a video, the data can be separated into multiple layers – of different resolutions or frequencies for example – and compressed, transported and decoded independently,” Murra explains. “In fact, part could be compressed with a conventional, existing system and the other used as a ‘support’ layer to better represent the source in compatible decoding systems.”

The acquisition comes six months after Eutelsat became a minority shareholder in V-Nova. As part of that deal, Eutelsat was given some exclusive rights for using PERSEUS in distribution applications (there is no exclusivity for the contribution market). This is part of a broad strategy at Eutelsat to encourage the uptake of HD, UHD and eventually other immersive video formats including 360 degree video and VR.

V-Nova can point to some significant deployments for both contribution and distribution applications. Sky Italia uses PERSEUS for studio-to-studio transport in what was the first deployment for PERSEUS in this industry, and the Italian broadcaster Rai used the codec to contribute its UHD channel during the UEFA Euro 2016 football tournament last summer. Eutelsat provided the backhaul, uplink and satellite services between Paris and Italy.

Seven matches were broadcast in UHD by Rai alongside its HD coverage and were made available on the tivùsat platform. The broadcaster had leased a 1Gbps link for the tournament (from Eutelsat) and it was deemed impossible to fit the UHD service into this alongside the HDTV, internal file transfers and other data services needed. Working with Eutelsat and using PERSEUS, Rai contributed the UHD channel at 300Mbps using visually lossless compression with low latency. This was about one-quarter of the bandwidth needed with JPEG-2000, according to the companies involved. The video was full-frame 3840 x 2160 at 50fps.

Murra says there are contribution solutions that use H.264 that could have worked for Rai in terms of their bandwidth capacity, but they relied on temporal compression, which he says would have increased latency. Rai was covering the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final in UHD and did not want any signal delays for this super-premium content, especially as it was being shown on different platforms. This could be an example of a service that would simply not have been viable if it had needed additional infrastructure costs.

Proving that PERSEUS works for the distribution market, where you need to worry about thousands if not millions of decoders, rather than just the handful for contribution, Sky Italia uses PERSEUS to stream its Pay TV bouquet to IPTV set-top boxes. This application uses PERSEUS as a software-only upgrade to Harmonic ViBE VS7000 encoders in the headend (Thomson is now part of Harmonic and Thomson announced its integration with PERSEUS at IBC 2015). No changes were needed to any distribution infrastructure or workflows. The Sky set-top boxes were also upgraded via software.

The Thaicom demonstration of UHD distribution with PERSEUS was conducted in Bangkok this week as part of a workshop on 4K/8K broadcasting and production equipment organised by the Office of The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). Teerayuth Boonchote said: “Premium sports remains the most valuable asset for operators worldwide. Yet, very few have been able to offer Ultra HD live sports at practical bit rates, while fans’ demand for it rises. Working with V-Nova enables us to deliver UHD feeds at low bit rates without compromising on quality of experience or latency, making UHD a reality for subscribers to any of our customers.”

Guido Meardi, CEO and Co-Founder at V-Nova, declared: “We are enabling the TV and media industry to tackle one of its main challenges with a simple add-on that runs on off-the-shelf hardware. We are confident this provides the impetus the industry needs to develop new premium live services.”

For the contribution and production market, V-Nova makes PERSEUS compression available with its own P.Link encoder/decoder as one option, as used by Eutelsat and Rai. This week the company introduced its new generation of P.Link, designed to help operators scale from pilot UHD services to multichannel offers, with support for an interchangeable mix of HD and UHD content and the ability to allocate bandwidth across feeds seamlessly and on a frame-by-frame basis, meaning without loss of sync or an increase in latency. This latter capability is courtesy of a Dynamic Multiplexer.

Thus P.Link makes it easy to carry UHD alongside cash-generating HD contribution feeds that are already in place. The new generation P.Link has a smaller form factor and higher density than its predecessor. V-Nova says this solution (including PERSEUS) “allows the highest quality video at a fraction of the traditional bandwidth and up to 70% lower cost per channel.”

The new P.Link is a carrier-grade, software-based 1RU COTS appliance with redundant solid-state drives, hot swappable power supplies and hot swappable fans. A single P. Link can process up to eight HD or two 4K/UHD channels per 1RU frame. No hardware alterations are needed for HD/UHD format change or for reconfiguration as an encoder or decoder.

According to the latest quarterly edition of the CSA’s Observatoire de l’equipement audiovisual des foyers (‘Household TV equipment monitor’), 43.4% of the country’s main TV sets received their broadcast TV signal via an ADSL or fibre link from an Internet service provider in Q2 2016, against 45.2% through a roof-top aerial (see Table 1 below).

Table 1: TV reception mode on main household TV set (%)*

* Percentages add up to >100% because categories overlap

** All homes receiving TV via ADSL or fibre from an ISP

Arguably, IPTV would probably have overtaken DTT in Q2 2016 on this measure had it not been for France’s ‘second switchover’, in which DTT signals in the MPEG-2 format were switched off overnight from the 4^th to the 5^th of April, transitioning France’s terrestrial platform to an all-MPEG-4 environment (see previous story).

This is perhaps surprising. Mandated switchovers – whether from analogue to digital, or as in this case, from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 – represent an opportunity, if not an incentive, for consumers not only to upgrade their TV viewing equipment, but to switch to a different platform.

In both France and the UK, for instance, analogue switchover was followed by a reduction in the proportion of DTT-only homes. Ofcom’s latest figures show that DTT-only households fell from 11.02m to 10.46m between 2012 (when analogue TV was switched off in the UK) and 2014. The main beneficiary seems to have been the free-to-air satellite platform Freesat, which saw its numbers rise from 1.76m to 2.04m over the same period.

The figures have stabilised since, but the UK’s DTT-only platform is still behind where it stood in 2012.

In France, the percentage of DTT-only homes had already begun declining a year before analogue switchoff took place there, in November 2011, having reached a peak of 67% in 2010. Here, IPTV appears to have been the main beneficiary, but – as Table 1 demonstrates – its seemingly inexorable progress ground to a halt in Q2 2016 and went into reverse.

Perhaps this was to do with the fact that France’s second switchover involved an upgrade from SD to HD on the DTT platform (historically, MPEG-2 had been mandated as the norm for standard-definition terrestrial TV broadcasts, with MPEG-4 reserved for HD).

Although broadband speeds have been increasing rapidly in France, in part due to an accelerating fibre rollout, the CSA references in its report figures from the telecoms regulator, ARCEP, that show that over 40% of broadband connections are deemed too slow to support TV viewing (ARCEP places the critical threshold at 8Mbit/s, to allow for telephony and Internet access alongside TV).

Presumably, an even smaller proportion are able to support HD.

After over a year of government-supported marketing messages under the slogan ‘Tous à la TNT Haute Définition” (“Let’s all move to High-Definition DTT”), perhaps it’s not that surprising, after all, that consumers elected to upgrade to HD on their existing DTT installations instead of joining the rush for IPTV.

As France’s broadband speeds continue to progress, however, it probably won’t be very long before IPTV is again challenging DTT as the main TV delivery platform on French households’ principal TV set.

Whereas in the past, UHD contribution feeds have been made up of four separate streams (quadrants) that are then stitched back together – each one encoded using the AVC/H.264 codec – BT Sport can now encode live action using HEVC instead of AVC and using a single encoder instead of four. A migration from AVC quadrants to HEVC full-frames also means the whole delivery chain, from outside broadcast trucks to television screens, can now be converted to HEVC where appropriate.

Dr Giles Wilson, CTO and Head of Portfolio & Architecture for TV & Media at Ericsson, points out that HEVC encoding is already established for distribution (from playout locations to homes) but contribution represents a much bigger challenge. Contribution requires higher picture quality (as this is source content, which also means it has to be 4:2:2 chroma sampled rather than 4:2:0 to enable mixing, like for graphics), with higher bit rates and low latency. This means greater demands on video processing.

“When you move to something that is very processor intensive you can make the challenge easier by dividing the picture and splitting the processing across four encoders that create four combined tiles. The down-side for this approach is that you lose efficiency,” he explains. “We can do some clever things with tiles [to get the best outcome possible] but this approach does not allow motion vectors to be projected from another tile and it limits how hard you can push the encoding because you cannot rate control and balance across the edges, as you do not want the edges [between the four tiles] to be visible.”

Ericsson has new encoding/decoding technology that makes it possible to use HEVC and use it on a single encoder to perform one encode for the entire UHD/4K picture. There is no need for complex AVC quadrant generation. Notably, when you use a single encoder you only need a single receiver, too. Ericsson says the new approach delivers a 40% bandwidth saving on the previous technique (partly because you now get to use HEVC rather than its predecessor, AVC). Wilson says broadcasters will want to move to single-slice encoding as soon as they can.

“This is a turning point in UHDTV,” declares Elisabetta Romano, Vice President and Head of TV and Media at Ericsson. “It makes 4K live sports and events a practical, cost-effective and high-quality reality for the first time. We can drive better quality, operational simplicity and bandwidth efficiency.” Mark Wilson-Dunn, Vice President at BT Media and Broadcast, says, “The combination of the new equipment with our new UHD links truck will deliver unbeatable high-quality sports footage to viewers.”

BT Sport UHD was the first ultra-high-definition channel to launch in the UK and is one of three BT channels that Ericsson was contracted last year to help launch and run (the others being BT Sport Europe and the free-to-air service BT Sport Showcase). In 2013, Ericsson and BT produced the world’s first multi-camera production of a live sporting event in a 4:2:2, 10-bit resolution 4K UHD signal at 60 frames per second using AVC compression.

Photo: AVIVA Premiership rugby on BT Sport (courtesy of BT)

That’s because, essentially, it was B2B event, albeit one open to the public: the audience being customers of musical instrument company Roland Corporation in eight different cities around the world, including Tokyo, Los Angeles and Paris; and the performers being professional musicians hired to put more than 30 of its new products through their musical paces, including synthesizers, digital pianos, electronic drums, and DJ and guitar-related equipment. In other words, it was a product launch.

The enabler for this primarily B2B live online broadcast event, dubbed The Future. Redefined, was IBM Cloud Video, which supported Roland with a combination of different service offerings from Ustream, acquired by IBM earlier this year.

Video delivery was handled by Ustream’s Pro Broadcasting service, with global reach facilitated by its Software Defined CDN (SD-CDN) technology, which according to IBM is capable of serving live content globally to more than a million concurrent viewers on a single stream, all wrapped up with a rich layer of video data analytics.

For the audience, the event presented a high-quality, audiovisual experience integrating some of the interactive features of a webinar – for instance, the ability to ask questions, to register expressions of interest and so on.

For Roland, according to David Mowrey, Vice President of Strategic Planning at IBM Cloud Video, the benefits included not just being able to “set these streaming events up very quickly and easily”, but the ability to harvest the associated data. “Capturing the audience and how they’re interacting with the content, how many are watching, obviously where are they from, on what devices, is integrated [into the service]. For a broadcast event, that’s really important, to know where to promote your events, and how you can follow up with those consumers.

A company like Roland needs to have that data behind it to make their business decisions about how they make very big marketing decisions and spend their budget.”

For Mowrey, this defines IBM Cloud Video’s key market differentiator, namely “all the other services that we can bring along with the video technology platforms, particularly around data insights.”

Meanwhile, noted Mowrey, this package of different service offerings is “very rapidly shifting to one technology where it is IBM Cloud video, and not Ustream and Clearleap: the technologies are melding very quickly, both for our customers and within the [Cloud Video] unit.”

Mowrey also emphasised that this type of data-enhanced, live broadcast events platform was not confined to B2B use-cases such as Roland’s. “B2B plus B2C scenarios are blending very frequently these days, and I think Roland is a great example of that. We’re doing live sporting events as we speak.”

While Mowrey would not be drawn on which such events IBM was supporting, he said that “IBM Cloud Video, and the combined technologies that we have within the unit, are being used together in a lot of different scenarios in B2C environments. The B2C over-the-top type use-cases are still very prevalent; it’s a growing market. IBM Cloud Video now has significant assets and customers within that segment.”

IBM Cloud Video customers include HBO, A+E Networks, BBC America, Scripps Networks Interactive, Roland Corporation and Mazda.

Photo: Kai Hahto performs on the Roland TD-50 Series V-Drums.