Carlos Sanchez, the company’s Global Director of Social TV, told delegates that it had already established, in UK research carried out across a 12-month period in 2013/14, that there was a strong positive correlation between TV channel audience share and Twitter share. “We found out that top-rated TV channels were at the same time the top-tweeted TV channels,” he explained.

Kantar had also established that this relationship was a causal one, by comparing viewing of 3,000 different UK TV broadcasts with Twitter activity. It discovered that for 11% of the programmes sampled, there existed a positive causal relationship between Tweets and TV ratings – to be precise, “there was an average 2% uplift on TV ratings caused by people tweeting about programmes,” said Sanchez. For certain TV genres, like comedy and sitcoms, the uplift was even higher – up to 9%.

Recently, Kantar Media had added Facebook data to its social TV ratings system. “I think that’s a key improvement which has been made because now we have the ability to get access to interactions made on Facebook by any user,” said Sanchez. “So even [when they are] interacting with TV programmes on their private ‘walls’, we have access to that information.”

An early finding here has been that, in the UK at least, those programmes with the highest social media engagement are generally the same on both Facebook and Twitter. “We don’t see a lot of differences, so it’s not that people are engaging with some programmes on Twitter and with some others, completely different, on Facebook,” noted Sanchez.

Nevertheless, the degree of engagement with those top programmes does vary between the two platforms, so this type of data provides interesting insights for broadcasters seeking to promote their programmes on social media, Sanchez suggested.

It can also be viewed as a “new layer” of data to “prove value for advertising,” proposed Sanchez, citing data from the pre-Christmas period last year showing how the well-known annual UK Marks & Spencer [clothes/food store] advertising campaign performed on Twitter. In the period November 1-6, 2016, immediately preceding the launch of the campaign, the number of Tweets averaged 2,500 per day, 22% of which were deemed to be ‘positive.’ However, in the following period (7-15 November, 2016) when the spots began appearing on TV, there was an average of 8,400 Tweets per day, with the proportion of ‘positive’ Tweets doubling to 44%. “When there is a commercial on TV, the buzz, the engagement, the conversations increase as a result of that,” concluded Sanchez.

Kantar also analysed the data to see whether Twitter performance varied depending on which TV shows the M&S ads were being shown on. This showed that the ‘spike’ in Tweets occurred on November 12, against the spots shown on ITV’s The X Factor, a programme known to engender a lot of social media activity. Either side of that spike, when the spot was premiered on Channel Four’s GoggleBox audience review show on November 11, and shown again on Channel Four’s Great Canal Journeys on November 13, the number of Tweets was around a quarter of the maximum.

This was not simply a function of the smaller audiences available on Channel Four compared to the mass entertainment channel ITV, Sanchez said. When corrected for this factor, “basically, we saw that the same GRP [Gross Rating Point] drives more Tweets about the advertiser on TV programmes with highly engaged viewers.” This was “something that could be useful for advertisers in the planning stage of a campaign.”

Photo: Kantar Media illustrates its social media intelligence tools.

Richard Broughton, Research Director at Ampere, noted that Pay TV subscriptions had continued to increase worldwide (from 674m to 923m between 2010 and 2016) despite rapid growth in subscription video-on-demand contracts over the same period (from 15m to 230m). Ampere was projecting revenues for the global Pay TV sector to grow from $200bn in 2016 to $234bn by 2021, with subscription OTT increasing from $16bn to $44bn over the same period.

These increases were partly down to the fact that consumers were increasingly willing to spend on multiple services, he said. By Q3 2017, 40% of respondents to its online panel indicated they had both Pay TV and subscription OTT, compared with a quarter in Q3 2015.

However, pointed out Broughton, this buoyant global picture disguised the fact that Pay TV growth was uneven and “actually largely driven by Asian markets. It’s driven by China and India, in particular, and if we look at some of the developed markets, in other markets like the U.S. we start to see a contrary trend.”

In fact, Ampere’s estimates suggest that the U.S. Pay TV market peaked at just under 100m subscribers around 2013/14. “It’s on the downward trajectory now, so the number of subscribers is declining year-on-year. In fact, Q2 this year was one of the worst on record for the U.S. Pay TV industry,” said Broughton. By 2022, Ampere estimates traditional Pay TV subscriptions will have declined to roughly where they were in 2004, at around 90m.

Broughton explained that this decline in the U.S. was now being compensated for by the emergence of ‘virtual MSOs’ such as Sling, Direct TV Now and Hulu’s live TV service, which aggregate channels into Pay TV packages. But while this was stabilising subscriber numbers, “the economics of these services is cheaper,” said Broughton. “They’ll typically retail at half the monthly price of a traditional Pay TV subscription, so maybe $30-$40 instead of the $70-$80 that Pay TV subscribers are typically used to paying. And that puts pressure on the channel businesses that are reliant on [traditional] Pay TV.”

Broughton added that, “In Europe, we’ve seen similar sorts of trends. So, although they’re not seeing exactly the same decline in subscribers, we are seeing the margins under pressure. Pay TV operators are typically used to operating at double-digit subscription income margins. Now they are down to single digits. Pressure of sports rights inflation has been a key factor in that.”

On the face of it, OTT providers such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, who are investing heavily in content – and between them account for nearly three-quarters of subscription OTT spend worldwide – represent a logical alternative market for channels and content providers, indicated Broughton.

But according to Ampere’s analysis, Netflix (which on its own accounts for 47% of global subscription revenue) has significantly changed the profile of its catalogue – reducing its size (from 8,000 titles in June 2015 to 6,500 in July this year) and its age (from 12+ years since release to 6 years over the same period). This, combined with a growing focus on ‘original’ or exclusive content, may render Netflix-type supply options more problematic for content-suppliers.

“Pressure is being placed on those core Pay TV business models, either in the U.S., in terms of subscribers, or in Europe in terms of margins and the ability to spend on channels and content acquisition,” concluded Broughton. “Many of the major subscription players are honing their investments: […] they want the new stuff, they want the good stuff, they actually want their own stuff. […] So, if you’ve got the brand and you’ve got the content, these factors all mean that direct-to-consumer is increasingly attractive as a business model.”

Broughton said that the most obvious gaps in the OTT market currently relate to sport, and entertainment genres, particularly reality TV. “Large entertainment shows are typically absent from many of the big subscription TV players,” he suggested.

Photo: Ampere Analysis shows the increased spending on Originals at two of the SVOD majors

Danker explained that his company had witnessed “a tremendous amount of growth of video on Facebook […] and that has really shown us a number of interesting behaviours. One of them is that what makes video quite special on Facebook is that it’s entirely community-driven: the way people find video on Facebook is through their friends and their communities.”

Another behaviour was that “more and more people are now coming to Facebook with the intent to watch video. And that kind of deliberate, intent-driven behaviour really drove us to make a place on Facebook that is dedicated to video.”

Finally, said Danker, Facebook had found that “40% of the watch-time of videos on Facebook comes from the sharing behaviour as opposed to the initial post. And so it demonstrates just the sheer value of that community for discovery and distribution.”

Asked what type of content Facebook Watch would focus on, Danker responded that it was “all about shows,” which he defined as “a new format of video on Facebook that follows or tells a story that unfolds over a series of episodes.”

One of the crucial parts of Facebook Watch, he said was that it includes a ‘watch-list’, “which means that when you follow the shows, you’ll automatically know when there’s new episodes. And that delivers a lot of value to people who come to Facebook now with that intent to watch video. But, it also delivers a lot of value to publishers and creators, who themselves want to build a much more loyal audience.”

‘Show’ examples Danker cited seemed to be mostly ‘reality’-related, featuring ‘celebs’ as presenters, and appeared to support suggestions that Facebook Watch is being positioned as a competitor to Google’s YouTube platform. They include Returning the Favour, a show by TV presenter Mike Rowe, who “finds people in the community who have done something special, and returns the favour by doing something special for them.” The way he locates these characters, said Danker, is “through his fans on Facebook,” creating a relationship “between the content creation process and the community.”

Other examples include: a show by New York Times best-selling author Gabby Bernstein, also a life-coach, who releases new episodes of every week, going ‘live’ between them with the fans in her Facebook group, answering questions and triggering new topics; and a show from Nuseir Yassin, who became famous as the presenter of viral one-minute videos in hundreds of different locations around the world.

A more mainstream ‘reality show’ Facebook Watch has picked up is the Arts & Entertainment Networks’ Bae or Bail series, where couples test their partners’ dependability as they’re pitched into terrifying ‘fake’ scenarios. Only a few weeks after its launch on Facebook Watch it had notched up over 24 million views, with over 230,000 shares and more than 35,000 comments.

Asked if Facebook Watch planned to concentrate on ‘niche’ or ‘mainstream’ content, Danker replied that it was difficult to talk about niche content in a Facebook content. “The niche content that we’ve traditionally referred to as niche, where we think it’s kind of small audience, possibly too small to reach an audience on television, or even make it on to TV – well, that niche becomes pretty big when you aggregate and bring together all the audiences around the world that have a shared interest. So we see groups on Facebook which have over a billion people using them every single month.”

Danker went on to say that Facebook “sees a future where any creator or publisher will be able to make a show.” Facebook’s proposition allows them to insert ads into the episodes of their shows or use branded content if they have a sponsor, with revenues being split 55-45% in the publishers’ favour.

Danker did not reveal when the new Facebook Watch feature would be rolling out outside the US.

Photo: Facebook Watch

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

Boissier argued that the ideas had always been there, but they now had to be translated more positively into action and new products. “You will see next year, because the ideas are already there for IBC next year, lots more innovative products,” he promised.

That, however, did not mean abandoning Neotion’s position as a lead player in the evolution of the CI Plus common interface standard, he stressed. “You will see quite soon that Neotion is willing to reinforce its position in CI Plus, and this will be announced before the end of this year. […] I heard some words that Neotion will stop this CAM business. Definitely not!” he declared.

Indeed, one of the many innovations on the Neotion stand this year was a new plug-in audience measurement system created in partnership with TV Solutions provider Viaccess-Orca, which involves the use of a Neotion CAM inserted into a smart TV’s CI slot. In effect, this turns a smart TV into an operator’s own ‘peoplemeter’, recording every customer interaction with the TV set. In future, says Neotion, the technology will be aligned with the new USB form factor being finalised within the CI-Plus V2.0 standard, which would mean operators simply distributing a USB key to subscribers.

Meanwhile, two years on from the IBC launch of Neohome, Neotion’s IoT solution for the smart home, the company was demonstrating a slew of new connected products, including ‘smart’ security devices such as door/window sensors and motion sensors, a smart home remote control, and an IoT wall-switch – all sporting a sleek, white, unified design approach – as well as new features such as voice-recognition.

Neohome’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa is a speech recognition system called Christina, which in response to spoken commands can switch light-bulbs on and off, or switch on a ‘smart plug’ linked to a radio in order to turn it on. One very relevant expertise Neotion brings to the IoT environment, which has suffered some very public security breaches in recent years, is its long track-record in the TV security business.

As one stand demonstrator explained, it might well be preferable not to allow Christina to recognize anyone’s voice (which Amazon’s Alexa appears able to do) but only those of specific family members. Speech recognition is “very sensitive because of data privacy,” she said. “We have to be careful with it.”

Neotion is currently targeting Neohome at operators including cable companies, broadcasters and Internet service providers. At the moment, Neohome is at the pilot stage with a number of operators, but Neotion is hopeful that one (anonymous) Tier One operator will have begun to deploy the system by the end of the year.

Satellite operators will also be targeted with its new OTT satellite gateway, a business-to-business IP multicast solution that would allow IP content to be delivered to areas with poor broadband connectivity. “It can be either in towns when a lot of people access the network at the same time, and it’s getting jammed, or it can be in the rural areas or places where there is very little Internet access,” explained Jerome Angeloni, Pre Sales and Support Engineer at Neotion.

The system uses one satellite transponder to feed up to fifty 1Mbps channels through a dish linked to the gateway, which can then feed up to 50 devices. “We are thinking about bars, hotels, airports, with people using tablets, smartphones, and computers, and you can watch any channels you want. You can have 50 tablets watching 50 different programmes, or 50 tablets all watching the same football games, and it works perfectly,” said Angeloni.

The solution was developed by Neotion in partnership with Eutelsat and Broadpeak.

Photo: The Neotion stand at IBC 2017

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.

Sarah Milton, All 4’s Head of Product for Channel 4, told delegates at last week’s IBC2017 conference in Amsterdam, that “The result of all the innovation and the data that we now are able to use means that the targeted proposition, in terms of ad sales that we are able to offer, means that we’re essentially revenue-neutral between a view that takes place on All 4 and a view that takes place on any of our linear [broadcast] channels. So, in theory, we don’t mind where that view takes place, from a commercial perspective.”

The revelation came during a panel session which demonstrated that both Milton, and her opposite number at ad-supported ITV, Faz Aftab, Commercial Director, Online, were in close agreement that the optimal way to ‘surface’ programming through their online portals and apps required a mix of data and human know-how.

Milton said that All 4 – which she implied now had 16m registered users across around 30 different platforms – was contributing “over 10%” of Channel 4’s total corporate revenues. She added that the broadcaster had just enjoyed its biggest audience for over five years from the first episode of the hit reality show Great British Bake Off, which it has just wrested from the BBC. “It’s also contributed to our biggest day, our biggest week and our biggest month in video-on-demand,” she said.

According to trade magazine Campaign, the debut drew 12m viewers across all platforms – live, time-shifted and on-demand – including 1.1m on All 4 and another 70,000 who streamed it via All 4’s Watch Live option.

The improvements to Channel 4’s ability to personalise the audience experience arise from a recent data analytics exercise which suggested the All 4 audience could be divided by ‘taste’ into nine different segments, rather than simply through demographics, age and gender. “For the last few months they have been served content, and indeed, communications formulated to their own tastes,” said Milton. “All these approaches are contributing to a repositioning of All 4 and a change in viewing behaviours – in fact, catch-up viewing accounts for no more than half of all the views on All 4 these days, which is pretty spectacular.”

Milton explained that All 4 content recommendations use a hybrid approach in which data insights are combined with human curation: “The segments are dictating what content is being promoted to a user when they come to All 4,” she said. But behind that process lies an editorial team which is “selecting shows for each of those taste segments,” supported by algorithms which “surface shows that might work.”

Aftab described a similar hybrid process at work for ITV’s online portal ITV Hub, which she said had “quadrupled” consumption in the last four years, and now has 20m registered users across around 30 platforms. But whereas the ‘human’ element for All 4 is curation, for ITV Hub it’s scheduling.

“The history of broadcasters has been to hone the art of scheduling,” reasoned Aftab. “We should look at TV as the paradigm that we’re trying to recreate with these VOD services or catch-up services, not SVOD services that have come from […] a very different paradigm. The art of scheduling is trying to get content you may like surfaced, that you may have not watched before.”

However, she agreed with Milton that, “The ultimate combination is a human and machine combination. […] Part of it is taking data, picking out the data and thinking, ‘OK, this person may want to watch these.’ But also taking the knowledge to people who know the art of scheduling […] and bringing those things together.”

Aftab illustrated the recent performance of the ITV Hub by citing viewing to another hit reality show, Love Island. “40% of the total viewing of Love Island happened on ITV Hub,” she noted. “[…] We had one and a half million app downloads of that show” with “an average of 500,000 people watching our simulcast – that went up to 1.3m in the final.”

Photo: All 4 from Channel 4 on PC/laptop.