In Broadcast - March 2014 - 39

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 29 - MARCH 2014

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

N E W S

InFILE

Accelerating Pay TV Everywhere
Streaming services are constantly evolving to compete in a rapidly changing market...

By Keith Wymbs
VP of Marketing, Elemental

C

onsumers of video have the
power today. They decide
when, where, and how they watch
their videos - for the most part.
Pay TV providers are accelerating
their IP-based video services to
compete more effectively with
rapidly emerging over-the-top TV
(OTT) providers. But there's an
Achilles' heel in many operators'
TV Everywhere game plans: few or
no live channels.
Live linear feeds of sports, news
and entertainment content are
becoming a competitive necessity
for Pay TV operators. Recent studies
show that consumers - even cord
cutters and cord nevers - put a
premium on having access to the live
content they love. In a report issued
in 2013, The Diffusion Group (TDG )
reported that 64% of online viewers
surveyed would be willing to pay
higher monthly service fees to get
content from their Pay TV operators
on devices beyond the TV set.
To keep a competitive edge, Pay TV
operators need an offensive strategy
that enables them to easily ready
their technology infrastructures for
live linear streaming at the lowest
possible total cost of ownerships.
Rapidly shifting consumer demand
and a highly competitive market also
drive the need for rapid evolution
of systems that are deployed in
an increasingly volatile technology
environment brought out by today's
bring your own device culture.

Hardware Infrastructures
While many of the infrastructural

underpinnings and video DNA are
in place for successful live-linear
streaming service roll outs, there
are challenges - most notably with
the ﬁnite nature of traditional, ﬁxed
hardware-based infrastructure that
has deﬁned the video processing
industry for decades.
These dedicated infrastructures
from incumbent video processing
suppliers won't be able to withstand
the onslaught of innovation
germinating from increasing
consumer demand to get video on
their terms. Nor will they be able
to handle the forward-thinking
technological innovations driven
by leading suppliers, research
universities, and industrial
consortiums seeking to constantly
up the ante for consumers of
branded content.
Innovations in audio processing,
colour depth, content protection
and tracking, not to mention video
encoding innovations will no longer
wait for generational swap outs
of hardware. The industry moves
too quickly now to wait. And
unfortunately, hardware-based
approaches lack the agility and
elasticity to get the job done.

New Age Software
Pay TV providers enriching their
current services with premium
live-linear streaming services can
strengthen their competitive position
and speed time to market by
deploying software-deﬁned video
processing (SDVP) architectures
as the core of the next generation

Elemental's Live Chassis

infrastructure.
SDVP utilise the most powerful
general purpose programmable
processers - both on the ground or
in the cloud - to meet the changing
needs of live-linear pay TV services.
A SDVP-enabled architecture is built
to meet the ﬂexibility, scalability and
reliability needed to deploy live-linear
pay TV services while extending the
useful life of the infrastructure as the
industry evolves. What is used to
process MPEG-2 video today, can
migrate seamless to H.264 or HEVC
in the future. What is used to trial
8-bit 4K processing might evolve to
10-bit or 12-bit processing at real
deployment. The possibilities are only
constrained by the lines of code in
the software, not by the chip design
of the traditional hardware systems.
Implicitly future-proofed, softwaredeﬁned video processing overcomes
issues around legacy hardware
encoders "running out of roadmap",
letting operators quickly and ﬂexibly
create content in new formats and
resolutions needed for streaming
to a rapidly expanding universe of
consumer devices. In many ways,
SDVP is the promise of a limitless
roadmap for the Pay TV operator.
And because SDVP architecture
has build on general processors that
can be virtualised and reside in public

cloud infrastructures, integrated
cloud platforms will enable them
to ramp resources up and down
depending on demand, preventing
overinvestment in infrastructure.
Increased virtualisation enabled by
end-to-end SDVP architectures also
has the potential to reduce the headache of storage capacity, cost, and
bandwidth when launching Catchup and Start-over TV functions. Key
monetisation capabilities, such as
just-in-time (JIT) packaging, ad
insertion/replacement and expanded
CDN, are seamlessly integrated
within the ecosystem - all in software.
By committing to an SDVP
architecture as the basis for their
next generation video processing
infrastructure, Pay TV providers can
more conﬁdently pursue live linear
streaming offers, enhance them with
innovative new functionality such as
catch-up TV and start-over TV, and
explore new delivery models such as
HbbTV (hybrid broadcast-broadband
TV), while lowering ﬁnancial cost of
entry into new projects, markets, and
applications.
The days of swapping out video
processing systems every three
years to "reboot" to the current state
of the art are history.
Customers no longer wait, neither
should your innovation.

39

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