In Broadcast - October 2013 - 49
ISSUE 24 - OCTOBER 2013 | WWW.INBROADCAST.COM I N T E R N A T I O N A L N E W S InFILE The Inexorable Rise Of IPTV Cont. George Boath VP of International Sales Enterprise Products, Telestream the same high quality material from IPTV/streaming providers as they get from traditional broadcasters. “The clearest evidence of that is customer loyalty in the number of subscription renewals for services that deliver high quality video,” he explains. The paradoxical problem, he continues, is that high quality pictures and sound equal high bit rates, which increase the buffering time for downloading or delivery. This is something that in turn can impact quality of experience over ADSL and, ultimately, the level of service. “The opportunity is there for manufacturers, including Telestream, to help operators achieve high quality at fast speeds,” Boath says. “Better coding is at the heart of this and devices like the x264 codec allow them to give viewers high quality pictures but at the same time reduce the bit rates.” Boath observes that over the next year or so a new range of products based on emerging coding technologies, notably HEVC with the x265 codec, will bring more efficient processing and less lossiness. “The challenge for all content owners,” he comments, “whether they’re public service broadcasters, which have a mandate to give the best technical quality, or the new breed of commercial streamed operations like Netflix, is how they manage their delivery costs and make money.” Mike Nann at Digital Rapids believes that multiscreen distribution for IPTV, OTT and other streaming services will be of strategic importance for “premium media organisations”, with the lines of distinction between the different market sectors - in terms of closed platform and general streamed delivery over the internet - becoming increasingly blurred. At Accedo Michael Lantz sees an explosion in the market: “We believe that essentially all video providers or content owners will launch multiplatform applications to reach new consumers and users. To do this cost-efficiently there is a need to manage software with processes and solutions on a scale that none of these companies are used to. We believe that our market will double in size every year over the coming 2-3 years.” Ingo Hoffmann of Artec Technologies is even more dramatically metaphoric. “Just the tip of this market’s iceberg is visible now,” he concludes. “Just stop and think how the entire world marketplace has been changed by the internet. Just a few years ago, you had a lot of problems simply calling up TV and VoD streams. VoD meant downloading: there was no way around it. But now streaming is the future. Through new technologies, adaptive streaming has been optimised. Will the future still include the standard TV set with the family gathered around it? Sure, that will still be around in the future but growth rates are declining, whereas the market for smartphones/tablets is growing. Personally, I watch an increasing amount of TV on my iPad.” The likelihood is that broadcast TV will co-habit with IPTV and OTT services for a good time to come, which will keep high quality video as a benchmark and so drive the need for something comparable on the new platforms. Telestream Vantage automatically transcodes and delivers video and metadata between all leading formats and systems 49