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

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