In Broadcast - March 2013 - 86

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

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 17 - MARCH 2013

N E W S

InMEDIA
Know Your ABC From Your IPTV Cont.
the open source Kaltura video
platform, we also implemented
cost effective workﬂows to ingest,
store and convert the Wiggles’ video
content for delivery to many other
platforms globally.”

Doing The Sums

86

One of the ﬁrst things to consider
by a content owner when looking to
become a commercial IPTV entity
is the bandwidth and data charges
in the geography you are serving it
from. For example, in the Wiggles’
home territory of Australia, it is a
relatively expensive proposition
when compared to a lot of other
countries, so one of the things
that must be taken into account
is that if your IPTV service is very
successful and you have a lot of
people watching your content on a
frequent basis, those data charges
can become huge.
It is therefore essential to plan
carefully to get the balance right
between the size of audience, the
amount of content you need to serve
and the demand on the service, in
order to be able to work out your
business model.
This was the first hurdle that
the Wiggles had to overcome,
explains Spear.

Playroom’s Digital
Media Director,
Cora Spear

Playroom has
“…TheHD broadcast
a full
facility … but we’re
always walking a
ﬁne line in terms of
what’s possible with
IPTV technology
and what is
acceptable

”

“We worked with them quite
extensively on this, going through
the various scenarios if they have
x thousand people watching x
amount of content for x hours
a day, the charges for streaming
that data will be x, so what is that
subscription model going to look
like for the customer?”
Another issue the Wiggles had
to consider was that of a fair use
policy for subscribers. Given that
their target demographic is young
children, who love to watch their
shows over and over again, they
realised that was going to place quite
a demand on the service, especially

if it’s available 24/7, so they had to
consider the imposition of daily limits
on viewership so that costs would
not spiral out of control and make
the enterprise ﬁnancially unviable.
Spear outlines how they arrive at
a determination of potential usage:
“You have to look at the available data
on your demographic’s Internet use
and their television consumption and
come up with a blended view of your
customer’s consumption of media to
understand how much time they will
potentially spend making demands
of the service.”

Testing Times
The Playroom were kept very
engaged with the technical aspect
of serving the content – digitising
the content into an archive in a
traditional storage facility. High
resolution content was stored as
digital ﬁles and transcoded into the
correct format to deliver to an IPTVbased platform.
They also spent a long time doing
test ﬁles with the platform providers –
the aforementioned Sony, along with
mobile platform providers Samsung
– to send over transcoded digital ﬁles
in order to ensure that the quality
was good enough and high enough.
The bitrate of the content also has
an impact on the cost of the service.
Adding to the complexity for
The Playroom was the fact that
the platform providers also have
slightly different speciﬁcations, but
this hurdle was overcome with a
robust testing process.
“The workﬂow needs to be very
smooth,” explains Spear, “so the
content comes in, it goes through
the same workﬂow, then it gets
transcoded into the right format and
is served to its designated platform.”
She continues: “The Playroom has
a full HD broadcast facility, so we’re
used to dealing with the highest
quality pictures available as far as
broadcast goes, but we’re always
walking a ﬁne line in terms of what’s
possible with IPTV technology and
what is acceptable.
“Samsung and Sony continually
review what they can accept and
they keep pushing. Every few
months we get an update where
we are asked to send through a new
test ﬁle with detailed speciﬁcations,
so they’re continually looking to
improve the quality so that we
ultimately reach a stage where
there’s no difference in the quality of
getting the content over the Internet
compared to watching on free to
air or cable networks, but at the
moment there’s still a certain level
of compromise in that regard.”

Picture Perfect
Despite recent technological
advancement, IPTV still has a

little way to
go before it is
indistinguishable from the
picture you get
watching regular
broadcast TV on
your ﬂat screen,
but Spear says
the gap is
closing fast.
“There’s
always going
to
be
a
compromise
insofar as how
much data you
The Wiggles website
can serve, as
this impacts how big the ﬁles can
be, and the speed of the Internet
connection also impacts it. It
has come on leaps and bounds
compared to where we were a few
years ago but we are continuing to
push the boundaries ever further.”
The expectation of viewers when it
comes to picture quality is increasing
incrementally year on year as new
TVs come on the market with
superior picture quality and more HD
channels become available to view.
This expectation inevitably trickles
down and extends into what users
expect from IPTV content as well.

Fast Infrastructure
Spear says: “At the moment, people
are relatively accepting of slight
picture graininess, but certainly
gone are the days when a customer
will accept anything buffering or
stuttering, and that was only a few
years ago when that was prevalent.
You’d get frustrated with it but you’d
put up with it. Those days are long
gone now and I think we are on the
verge of customers reacting the
same to grainy content. The picture
quality has got to be right up there.”
In Australia, it is hoped that the
NBN (National Broadband Network)
– a high speed infrastructure that
is currently under construction –
will eliminate any issues with IPTV
once and for all.
“We are anticipating it will be
the real tipping point where data
costs will start to come down
significantly and therefore the
commercial model for the content
owners starts to become a reality.
The free to air providers probably
aren’t as excited, as it will mean
more competition for them. For a lot
of us in the industry it can’t come
soon enough, as questions around
picture quality and the quality of
service will cease to be,” says Spear.

Know Your Rights
Spear says that complying with
broadcasting rights internationally
is another mineﬁeld, particularly for
a client with almost universal appeal,

such as the Wiggles.
“It’s still a bit of a Wild West out there,
as some of the broadcast regulations
don’t apply to the Internet.
“When it comes to working out the
digital rights, I recently heard that it
was now standard practice at the
BBC when dealing with production
companies to have something like
25 different clauses written into the
contract which cover all the different
platforms and digital rights.”

The End Product
The Wiggles can now convert
their content into a sustainable
digital video library and deliver it
to multiple digital platforms.
The Playroom system supports
delivery to any IP-based device
and platform in order to provide
viewers with an optimal online video
experience across all browsers and
on any portable device.
The Playroom has also provided
The Wiggles with efﬁcient workﬂows
that allow them to explore diverse
business opportunities worldwide.
Spear concluded, “In addition to
the ingest and archiving solution
we have also developed and
implemented a system whereby
the Wiggles’ team can log in and
remotely add metadata to their
digital assets stored on servers at
The Playroom.
“This content management system
allows remote management, viewing
and distribution of the assets by the
Wiggles’ team to any platform from
any desktop PC.
“The key is that all of The Wiggles
content is ingested, optimised and
delivered by The Playroom media
asset management systems and
storage solutions.
“This gives The Wiggles an efﬁcient,
scalable and future-proofed solution
which underpins their global
expansion strategy for their brand.”
Wiggle Time TV is now live and
available on both The Wiggles
website and via the Sony Bravia
TV platform.
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