As consumption habits continue to evolve with the diversification of devices, content, and channels, it has become increasingly complex for brands to plan and target audiences on TV. Finecast addresses these challenges for Canadian clients, providing a single point of access into the whole TV ecosystem by managing distribution and frequency holistically across broadcasters and screens to delivering relevant audiences wherever they’re watching.

“As the largest media advertising company in the world, GroupM is able to create the scale of partnerships required to find relevant audiences in the fragmented TV landscape,” GroupM Canada CEO Stuart Garvie said. “With Finecast, we have partnered with the top content providers, broadcasters, platforms and data providers in Canada to build this market that will inevitably add more value to consumers and advertisers.”

The Finecast model gives advertisers the ability to deliver targeted ads to audiences across multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms and set top boxes, a range of video on demand (VOD) services, over-the-top (OTT) providers, and game consoles – all combined for scale, inherently viewable, within high-quality, brand-safe content. At launch, this includes distribution across broadcast partners such as Bell, Rogers, CBC and Corus who all develop high quality premium content, as well as distribution across platforms such as Tubi, Amazon, Roku and Samsung with further partnerships to be announced later this year.

Data partnerships with Environics Analytics, Mastercard and a variety of third-party suppliers with in-depth Canadian consumer expertise facilitates intelligent segmentation by socioeconomics, life-stage and financial behaviours providing our clients with highly precise audience profiles on the big screen. This enables Finecast to show different ads to different households who are watching the same program, thereby reducing ad wastage, driving effective CPMs and minimizing costs.

“There’s never been a better time to watch TV, as investments in original content continue to exponentially increase,” Finecast Global Chief Executive Officer Jakob Nielsen said. “With the advancements in data and technology, the advanced TV advertising opportunities available for brands is truly exciting. We know linear TV viewership has been declining, but the audience is still there; they are just changing the way they consume content. Finecast gives GroupM’s clients a holistic view of, and access to, their audience, regardless of where they are watching.”

A first for the business, the advisory board will bring together a diverse team of issue experts and thought leaders across a variety of disciplines in the TV, and broader communications space, encompassing research, technology, strategy, marketing and media.

The board will act as a think tank that provides strategic guidance and counsel to Adgile Media across all facets of the company including technology, operations and global expansion.

The Adgile Media Advisory Board will be made up of:
• Karen Nelson-Field PhD – Founder & CEO, Amplified Intelligence / Professor of Media Innovation, University of Adelaide;
• Anthony Fitzgerald – ex CEO, Multi Channel Network / ex Network Director of Sales, Seven Network Ltd;
• Paul Evans – Board Advisor, Brand Advance / Mentor, Media Trust / ex Global Head of Media, Vodafone;
• Justin Lebbon – Co-Founder & Director, Mediatel Events Ltd;
• Grant Wechsel – President, Ortus Mining Capital / Executive Director, MPX.

“Challenging the status quo of TV’s measurement landscape and conventions is at the heart of everything we are doing here at Adgile,” Adgile Media chief innovation officer Shaun Lohman says.

“With our Advisory Board we have brought together a group of liked minded people who are extremely experienced and have a depth of relevant expertise, complimentary skills and a commitment to shaking things up. Frankly it’s a bit of a dream team for us,”

Anthony Fitzgerald says for some time he has been quite vocal that a complete reinvention of TV measurement using new digital metrics that move beyond average audience, CPM, reach and demographics to more accountable engagement, attention and business impact metrics is urgently required.

“Change to TV measurement needs to happen now, and quickly, if TV broadcasters are to compete effectively in the future. Adgile Media’s platform is a big step forward in realising this change, these guys have looked at TV measurement through an attribution and effectiveness prism and designed technology that focusses primarily on measurement of results rather than audience,” Fitzgerald says.

Com Hem selected Android TV and engaged with 3 Screen Solutions (3SS) as overall project coordinator. Technicolor supplied an Android TV STB, and Verimatrix provided the Pay TV security. This was a major project undertaking with unique challenges, being the world’s first large scale Android N (Nougat) deployment based on Android TV Operator Tier. The content security aspect is crucial given that Android TV is an open environment. Special care must be taken to separate the Pay TV security processing and data from the other apps in this open environment. This is a very different challenge compared to the closed environments of traditional STBs.

This case study explores how the content for all services across all Com Hem’s three networks and screens is secured end-to-end by the Verimatrix VCAS Ultra revenue security solution.

To download the free case study, please complete this form:

Orange customers have access to a selection of the following channels on their smartphone or tablet: Eén, Canvas, VTM, Q2, VIER, VIJF, National Geographic NL, Discovery NL, Ketnet, Disney Channel NL, La Une, La Deux, RTL-TVI, Club RTL, TF1, AB3, 13ème RUE, Syfy, Disney Channel FR and Disney XD FR. It works via their Love Wi-Fi connection at home or to be connected to a mobile 3G or 4G network in Belgium or in the EU.  Orange customers with Love Unlimited are the only convergent customers in Belgium to benefit from unlimited mobile data which makes watching live TV completely worry-free

The report contains insights from Ampere Analysis, IHS Markit, NAGRA, Fox Networks Group, Vodafone, Liberty Global, TVNZ, Telefonica, Swisscom, ARRIS, Roku, Technicolor, xRoadMedia and others. It considers the opportunity to bring the best premium content offers under one roof again, why a one-size-fits-all UEX is no longer fit for purpose, and the role of AI and voice services, among many other things

To download the report, please complete the form below. There’s no charge for this report.

Connected screens and OTT created unprecedented threats and opportunities for traditional TV companies. The disruption justified high-budget multiscreen service launches to achieve defensive and offensive business goals.

As the multiscreen market matures and board level priorities change, budgets may not be as generous again, yet multiscreen practitioners know that they must innovate relentlessly and maintain services across an ever-changing device population. It could be time to reassess multiscreen innovation strategies to see if more is possible with less.

This webcast will help platform operators and content owners to prepare for their next multiscreen innovation crossroads. Should you keep building your own multiscreen capabilities in-house or is it now time to buy an off-the-shelf platform? If you bought multiscreen capabilities, should you bring this function in-house and build your own? Is there a role for a hybrid ‘build-some-and-buy-some’ approach and would that offer the best of both worlds?

In this discussion we will consider the success metrics that have been applied to multiscreen launches in the past and whether they are changing, including short-term versus long-term objectives. We will look at whether the decision-making culture and procurement practices need to change, what skillsets are needed internally when giving more or less responsibility to outside partners, and how internal champions can create a business case for their preferred option: build, buy or hybrid.

The discussion will cover the trade-offs that must be made with different innovation models, considering the degree to which services can be differentiated, the extent to which ‘standard’ off-the-shelf platforms can be customized, the implications for time-to-market and cost of ownership. We consider how internal technology teams faced with staffing limits can make the best use of partners to complement their own work – and how best to manage this cooperation.

Speakers Include:

Chair: Barry Flynn, Consulting Editor, Videonet
Fernando Garcia Calvo, Head of TV Products, Global Video Unit, Telefonica
Sebastian Edreira, Digital Media Sr Director, A&E Television Networks
Michael Lantz, CEO, Accedo
Igor Macaubas, Product Manager – Online Video Platform, Globo TV

The ‘build or buy’ decision is a significant one when balancing your immediate video experience transformation needs with long-term growth and optimising profitability. Whether you’re a pay TV market leader, a challenger or a new OTT entrant in the video service market, discover if you should buy or build with Accedo: https://www.accedo.tv/white-paper/

In the days immediately following IBC 2016, the UltraHD Forum hosted an HDR-focused UltraHD Plugfest involving 25 people from 17 TV/Video equipment manufacturers, content companies and platform operators. Participants included both members and guest enabler companies. The Plugfest was hosted and supported by Dutch telecom operator KPN, at its Hilversum facilities, and demonstrated the developing level of support for HLG and PQ HDR in displays and STBs. It also evaluated key content processing parameters for platform delivery of UHD in a mixed SDR/HDR world, including the use of leading HDR implementations of HLG10 and PQ10.

The UltraHD Forum is a forum composed of a broad membership base of companies involved in the movie and television ecosystem, including content creators, content distributors, consumer electronics manufacturers, professional equipment manufacturers and technology companies. It is an advocate for industry consensus around common technical standards and methodologies for the glass to glass delivery of the UltraHD experience through the development of its Guidelines for the sound and functional deployment of services to the general public by its members and the industry as a whole.

The Forum and the Importance of Plugfests

The creation and publication of the UltraHD Forum Guidelines back in the spring of 2016 kick-started the work to run the first plugfest hosted and supported by PBS at the ATSC 3.0 meetings in Washington DC in late March 2016. In formulating the guidelines, the Forum identified that it was critical to base them on practical technologies, techniques and approaches which necessitates the efforts by the memberships to fully prove them. In the first plugfest, bringing members together proved glass to glass, camera to display live UHD delivery including HDR (HLG and PQ). It stressed the early technology adopter displays for their implementation of HDR and this first event resulted in direct updates/changes to existing and new products, to improve the level of support they had for HDR and alignment with developing standards for UHD prior to publication. The success of this event, reported at the Ultra HD Forum Masterclass at NAB2016 on April 20th along with work on the evolution of the UltraHD Forum Guidelines, led into the planning for a series of plugfests for the rest of 2016. These events were to be focused on validating key aspects of the Guidelines as HDR standards are developed and products implemented. The second Plugfest brought together a wider group with the support of key operator member KPN for two days following IBC2016 – September 14th and 15th – in Hilversum, Netherlands.

Coming together for Plugfest 2 – Hilversum Tower, KPN Media Park, Hilversum, Netherlands

The objectives of the second plugfest were to expand the glass to glass chain to include operator STBs from deployed UltraHD services where those operators are now working on how to deploy HDR services in addition to their existing UltraHD SDR services, as well as to fully allow all attendees to see and experience HDR content delivery using PQ10 and HLG10 in both 1080P and 2160P resolutions and understand the challenges with these new forms of content including the end devices. The glass to glass chain was emulated over the weeks running up to the event with content capture, processing, color grading and distribution encoding all being undertaken by member companies in the run up to the event, with the final playout and validation taking place during the two days of the Plugfest itself.

Figure 1: Glass to Glass Delivery Emulation

Playout to devices took place from local storage and via unicast and multicast IPTV streams, fully representing the final distribution to consumers along with their customer experience. With great support from the operators and manufacturers, we were able to ensure that the validation took place with a broad range of displays and STBs.

The Event

Arian Koster, Product Owner New TV Ideas for KPN and Renard Jenkins for the UltraHD Forum opened the event before teams got down to running through the content/device combination tests through the day, right through until the participants finished and enjoyed a KPN sponsored, well deserved meal at a local restaurant to digest more than the results of the day.

Progress was faster than expected on the first day, with completion of all of the plugfest combinations, leaving problem test re-runs, issue investigation and evidence gathering being the focus of the second day. In addition Jacob Groote, EVP Service Platforms and Peter Claerhoudt, Manager Innovation TV & Media attended and experienced a full demonstration of SDR, PQ10 and HLG10 consumption.

“KPN supports the work of the Forum and we see UHD, and specifically High Dynamic Range, as an important technology that will bring a superior viewing experience to our customers, said Jacob Groote. Peter Claerhoudt added: “We highly appreciate the Forum’s  hands-on efforts to bring interoperability for equipment manufacturers, content providers, operators like KPN and, ultimately, the consumers who are our joint customers”

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Plugfest Outcomes

The event closed with a full team discussion to conclude on the outcomes for the event. We set out to demonstrate and validate the end to end delivery of combinations of SDR/HDR UHD services and for this we were successful. SDR and PQ10 based delivery proved to be mature and straightforward at both resolutions, providing more than satisfactory results with correct auto identification of content based on VUI/SEI parameters over USB and HDMI delivered content. As an emerging technology, HLG10 was a different situation. We had gone into the plugfest expecting problems due to the state of standardization and implementation – this is a Q4 2016 target. Auto-identification of the content as HLG10 was ‘spotty’, with best results on USB delivered content but HDMI delivered content required manual selections of mode. These issues are fully expected to be resolved through the next update to HDMI, prior to any commercial usage of HLG10 via HDMI delivery, as is now planned in the UK with the recent announcement that Digital UK will be using HLG10 for their OTT support of UltraHD HDR. Through the HDR processing we also identified additional variables to the workflow, that even in our simplified version of glass to glass, required care and attention to ensure best results.

“PBS became a charter member of the UltraHD Forum because we believe in its mission. I am very pleased with the level of industry participation and support for this second plugfest. It is good to see that each participating company finds value in the exercises and tests performed during these events’, said Renard Jenkins, Co-Chair of the Interop-WG, Ultra HD Forum and VP Operations: Production, Media & Distribution at PBS.

Reflections on the Mission of the Interop WG

In writing the guidelines, the forum takes input from the industry as a whole, and through its members also works to determine and derive approaches and methods itself for the various stages of the delivery of video, which also need validation before use can be made. The Interop Working Group working through member companies, standards definition organisations and other industry groups, amongst others, proves and demonstrate the efficacy of the approaches, technologies and methodologies contained within the guidelines that the Forum publishes. The results of this second Plugfest fed critical experience and validation back into the definition of the guidelines, and planning is well underway for the next plugfests in this last quarter of 2016 and beyond.

The Interop Working Group is chaired by William Frantz, Director of Product Marketing for NeuLion and co-chaired by Renard Jenkins, VP Operations, Production, Media and Distribution for PBS. Ian Nock for Fairmile West project managed and led the Plugfest.

For information on membership of the UltraHD Forum, please do visit http://ultrahdforum.org to become involved.

A parallel body, the UHD Alliance, comprising global entertainment, electronics and technology companies, is working on the elements that define a premium UHD entertainment experience, with a focus on the devices at each end, such as production and TVs. This leaves the Forum to concentrate on everything between the “glass” at each end, the delivery and content processing infrastructure with an emphasis on the complexities of linear service production. This involves components at all stages of the delivery chain built around the four pillars of UHD, which are HDR (High Dynamic Range)/WCG (Wide Color Gamut), HFR (High Frame Rate), high resolution (4K at 3840 x 2160) and next generation audio. The scope is reflected in the Forum’s membership, embracing a broad range of participants spanning the whole video entertainment ecosystem with content creators, service providers, infrastructure technology companies, consumer display companies, and more.

Join the UHD Forum Masterclass at IBC 2016 as they host a free-to-attend session covering this topic and much more on Monday 12th September. Full session details

As the Forum’s President, Thierry Fautier from Harmonic, noted, the Guidelines are the fruit of 12 months hard work to which members of the Forum have contributed. “One of the main drivers of the Phase A was to provide a deployment framework for operators on the broadcast as well as the adaptive streaming side (that also covers OTT) to deploy commercial services in the 2016 time frame,” said Fautier. “The initial focus of the Guidelines is on technologies and practices that support a commercially deployable Ultra HD real-time linear service with live and pre-recorded content in 2016, which is termed a ‘UHD Phase A’ service.”

Fautier agreed the desire to establish a baseline relatively quickly has constrained the technology choices made, and therefore that future versions of the Guidelines will support additional functions. “The Forum is going to work on the next phases of the Guidelines that will include more fidelity, going beyond 10 bits for color as well as additional versions of HDR, High Frame rate and the full scope of Next generation Audio,” said Fautier.

But the immediate priority is to help operators deploy a Phase A UHD Service by documenting the aspects they most need to attend to, according to Fautier. These aspects include elements of production, distribution, encoding and packaging, delivery, decoding and finally the display perspective. Indeed the Ultra HD Forum and the UHD Alliance are cooperating ever more closely to ensure that their respective recommendations are fully aligned.

This in turn also involves working closely with the SDOs shaping the standards themselves, for although the Forum does not define these directly it will have a strengthening influence on the direction of those relevant for UHD. In turn the SDOs are playing a key role helping shape the Forum’s guidelines. “While it is too early to say exactly what influence our guidelines will have on the work done by SDOs, the early signs are that that they could well be considered as a “baseline” that would represent the minimum requirement to be met, especially for operators who want to deploy services using existing technologies in production, distribution, decoding and the TVs themselves,” said Fautier.

The guidelines cover all the key requirements of the content delivery infrastructure, notably security and interoperability, which are each addressed by separate blogs in this mini-series. The overriding point is that the Forum’s activities have been intensifying and over the next 12 months will be utterly focused on making sure that Ultra HD will happen. This will mean working hard to resolve the teething troubles and issues that inevitably arise at this early stage of arguably the biggest advance in the TV experience since the introduction of colour around half a century ago, greater perhaps than HD.

If you’re interested in this topic and the latest developments of the Ultra HD Forum, listen back to this pre-IBC webinar

Rio was a much bigger online hit than London. Most countries reached new online records. BBC Sport’s coverage reached 102 million unique users globally, with 68 million coming from the UK. This represents the biggest success ever for BBC Sport’s digital service. 150 million videos from France Télévisions were watched on its websites, apps and external platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram – six times more than the London Games. The Netherlands also set online records with a total audience of 6.5 million unique visitors on the online platforms of NPO, a growth of 27% compared to London.

Katty Roberfroid, Director General of egta comments on behalf of PEPPTV: “The Olympic Games in Rio once again proved the power of live TV and its capacity to bring people together. Broadcasters throughout Europe have reasons to be proud of the audience figures achieved during the Games in Brazil. The Games evidently prove that live events – and especially sport events – are the biggest asset for TV broadcasters. This is what makes TV so relevant, so appealing to massive audiences and so social. There is no alternative medium that reaches and impacts such a big crowd as TV does.”  

PEPPTV is an informal grouping of broadcasters’ trade bodies and sales houses, active at EU level and worldwide for the promotion of television. www.pepp.tv

Not surprisingly therefore watermarking has been a major preoccupation for the Ultra HD Forum’s Security Group, given its role in developing guidelines for the whole delivery ecosystem. This group has been working hard to bring out the first guidelines specifying some baseline degree of interoperability among the principle forensic watermarking systems ready for deployment in pay TV services. These come from Content Armor, Nagra, NexGuard and Verimatrix. Recent announcements demonstrate that watermarking technology and use is moving from marginal to mainstream: ContentArmor, whose watermarking technology was originally conceived within Technicolor for post-production services to Hollywood studios, was hived off through a management buyout in March 2016 and in July 2016, Kudelski group, owner of Nagra, strengthened its position by acquiring all of NexGuard Labs BV.

Join the UHD Forum Masterclass at IBC 2016 as they host a free-to-attend session covering this topic and much more on Monday 12th September. Full session details

The objective of forensic watermarking is to provide a new line of defence against illicit redistribution, especially over the Internet, of content that may initially have been acquired legally by apparently legitimate subscribers. Existing content protection mechanisms are bypassed, possibly by direct camcording from a screen, although a greater threat is through direct capture of streams using illegal tools that circumvent the protection provided by HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) over the HDMI interfaces to TVs.

It has been acknowledged not just by MovieLabs but widely within the content security industry that watermarking, admittedly in conjunction with other techniques such as network forensics, is uniquely placed to combat illicit redistribution. This is because the threat can only be dealt with by identifying individual streams and tracing them back to their source, which must require insertion of some unique identifier at the source or during distribution. A watermark can be designed to be tamper resistant and at the same time to make minimal impact on the video or audio, although there is a balance to be struck between robustness, performance and transparency to the user. It is worthwhile to note that visible marking, also known as visible fingerprinting, is already used in some countries, but pirates are finding ways to remove the mark before redistributing the content. Therefore, one of the merits of forensic watermarking is that pirates cannot know if the forensic mark is (still) present before redistributing the content.

It is up to the watermarking technology vendors to make sure their products fulfil these requirements and can resist attempts by pirates to circumvent the protection in some way such as by transforming the marks to make them unrecognisable. The task of the Ultra HD Forum is to make sure that watermarking in general can be deployed as easily as possible by operators and that the different products are interoperable, given that for various reasons such as mergers there may be two or more within a given delivery infrastructure.

An underlying challenge here is that watermarking has not been deployed widely on Pay TV. Although forensic watermarking has been used for protection of movie content in Digital Cinema for some years to identify individual theatres that are sources of pirated camcordings, for pay TV operators it did nothing to combat their traditional threats such as card cloning and sharing. It was only with the rise of content redistribution over the Internet that watermarking came in the frame for pay TV.

If you’re interested in this topic and the latest developments of the Ultra HD Forum, register to listen live or catch up on-demand to this pre-IBC webinar recording August 25th at 4pm GMT. 

“The challenge is the lack of maturity for pay TV, the fact that only a handful of Pay TV operators have done it,” noted Laurent Piron, Principal Solution Architect at Kudelski’s Nagravision and member of the Ultra HD Forum security group. Piron suggested that version one of the Forum’s security guidelines due to be unveiled at IBC will set the stage for more widespread deployment of watermarking. “Our aim is to find a common ground level where all the watermarking companies can agree on something they can put their technology on top of, so that any company, such as an encoding vendor, can integrate with the API. Then they will know it is going to work and can implement one technology or another one. It will also ease the life of operators who want to introduce watermarking, by saving them the pain of integrating all technical components themselves, benefitting from pre-defined and pre-tested integration frameworks.”

Although watermarking has stolen the limelight in the content security sphere recently it is only part of the overall solution, with common encryption being just as important to protect assets in flight or during storage. The Forum will be publishing its encryption guidelines separately from the watermarking in version one, driven it seems by pressure from members to get these out as quickly as possible. Then in version 2 due out hopefully by the end of 2016, the watermarking and encryption guidelines will be integrated as part of the drive to provide a coherent framework for end to end UHD security. At the same time the Forum will revisit earlier work on CAS (Conditional Systems) and DRMs for version 2, which at that stage will still be a separate document from the Ultra HD Forum’s general guidelines.

Piron emphasized here that there was no appetite at all for attempting to converge towards a common DRM as was once a widespread ambition. This idea has been blown out of the water by the proliferation of device platforms each raising somewhat different security issues, served in many cases by major vendors seeking competitive advantage. As Piron pointed out the Forum’s role is to ensure that every DRM can work within the UHD ecosystem and that operators can switch readily from one to another. This again means establishing a baseline to define the encryption and how to identify the licence keys.