In Broadcast - November 2012 - 24

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W S

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 14 - NOV/DEC 2012

InREPLY
Allegro DVT showed a developing product range at IBC, Alexandre Fouart, Allegro DVT Business Development explains the advances…
Live high density transcoder for IPTV, OTT-TV, Apple HLS, Microsoft Live Smooth Streaming and MPEG-DASH

InBroadcast: How was IBC for Allegro DVT? Alexandre Fouart: IBC 2012 was a very intense cuvee, we exhibited a very comprehensive product line. Our ﬂagship products are currently the AL2400 High Density Transcoder and ALMosaic IP/Multiscreen Mosaic Generator. We have put a strong R&D effort on developing what we think are the right products for multiscreen delivery and both of these products are now into production. InB: How does AL2400 differ from AL2000/AL1000? AF: AL2000 & AL1000 are our software-based encoder appliances. AL2400 benefits from these products’ maturity but adds hardware acceleration, and scales up to more demanding convergent deployments, where software encoding is just not an option. We don’t believe a company only providing software encoding appliances can be successful in the current technological context. InB: The multiscreen market segment is very competitive, what do you think distinguishes your products from the competition? AF: The AL2400 is built from the ground up on two axes that we thought could be added on the AL2000 to reach perfection. These are: high density and aggressive price. We’ve done our homework and we’ve come back with the most scalable multiscreen transcoder currently available on the market,

which can grow as your project, since the chassis can be progressively populated with transcoding modules – controlling cost. InB: The AL2400 is marketed on density, what does this mean for a broadcaster? AF: Density, as the number of channels that can be transcoded per 1RU (currently 84 IPTV or 48 multiscreen channels on AL2400), is really the nub of war in the encoder market. More channels per RU means less overall rack space needed, less energy consumption and less demanding cooling systems, which are recurring costs not to be glossed over. InB: The AL2400 is hardware accelerated, does this mean Allegro DVT’s development cycles will be affected? AF: In fact, AL2400 is based on a hybrid architecture, which can be seen as the best of both worlds: the H.264 encoding core is hardware based, the fragmenter and embedded origin server use an embedded general purpose CPU. This allowed us to closely follow developments of MPEG-DASH, CDN delivery, such as Akamai, among other features. This also makes AL2400 benefit from the same customer support responsiveness as our other products, what Allegro DVT is well known for. InB: What gave you the idea to add multiscreen delivery to your existing IP mosaic generator?

AF: We actually had a few customer requests for the replication of all existing IPTV services (including Mosaic Channels), to multiscreen delivery. Since we already had distinct products for multiscreen transcoding and mosaic generation, we thought it would be far easier for an operator to manage a single box rather than having to cascade a transcoder and a mosaic generator to reach OTT enabled devices. InB: You claimed a world ﬁrst announcing live HEVC broadcast encoders AL1200/AL2200? AF: Yes, Allegro DVT is proud to announce the world first HEVC broadcast appliances: AL1200 HD-SDI encoder and AL2200 IP Transcoder. These new products target high-end operators and broadcasters willing to early adopt this upcoming compression standard. While the ﬁnal standard is to be expected in early 2013, Allegro DVT HEVC encoders evolve as new drafts of the standard are submitted. InB: What are the use cases for this new product? AF: In the long term, any application where bandwidth consumption is critical to the operator, can be targeted by HEVC. In the short term, hardware HEVC decoders shouldn’t be expected before 2014, consequently and until that time, HEVC will be most interesting for applications where software decoding may apply, such as multiscreen delivery.

InB: What kind of bitrate savings are to be expected with the HEVC standard? AF: This varies according to the resolutions and bitrates in use, but it is commonly accepted that the ﬁnalised HEVC standard will bring bitrate savings somewhat between 30% and 50% compared to equivalent H.264 encoded ﬁles. InB: Does it make sense for operators to start investing in the HEVC standard? AF: Eventually, HEVC will be to H.264 what H.264 was to MPEG-2. HEVC will be allowing premium video delivery at resolutions and places that operators and broadcasters were only dreaming of before. Most of the delivery pipeline will remain untouched, since HEVC will make use of agnostic delivery protocols such as MPEG-2 Transport Stream and MPEG-DASH. InB: The standard is yet to be ﬁnalised, so how can a live HEVC encoder be demonstrated? AF: On the booth at IBC, we demonstrated an end-to-end HEVC delivery system, based on Allegro DVT live HEVC encoder, provided with a live IP video source. The encoded result was delivered to a custom version of HM reference decoder, that we adapted to support playout of live content. InB: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.

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In Broadcast - November 2012

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