In Broadcast - May 2014 - 72

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Elemental Technologies Looks Ahead
To Era Of Software Defined Video
Elemental Technologies highlight the increasingly vital role of software-defined solutions
for multiscreen content delivery in today's viewer-centric user experience...

A

72

t NAB, the core message from
Elemental Technologies was
that its video processing software
runs on multiple processing
architectures including appliances,
blade solutions, virtual machines
and the cloud.
Elemental said that this would allow
customers to economically optimise
infrastructure and implement ﬂexible,
scalable and easily upgradable video
architectures with software deployed
across various resources in both
private and public data centres.
In his NAB press conference
Elemental's CEO Sam Blackman
contrasted legacy and current
system implementations: "If you
look at legacy devices - the way that
video content has been delivered
in the past 50 to 60 years - you
really had a single device that was
consuming content and what this
meant was that user experiences
were very provider-centric.
"So the way that Comcast or your
broadcaster wanted to deliver your
content and when they wanted to
deliver your content was completely
deterministic. It was a providercentric experience - consumers
really didn't have that much choice.
"Today and the future is an
experience that is very consumercentric where consumers have
complete control of the experience
- a viewer-centric experience. They
are able to watch content on any
device over any network at any
time and any piece of content. So
it's a really completely different
paradigm and that is the paradigm
that Elemental have been building
for. Today is really a consummation
of the past seven years of software
development at Elemental. We talk

Software is at an inﬂection point

about a whole
new category
that we are
deﬁning called
s o f t w a r e
defined video."

Inﬂection
Point
Pointing to the
cyclical nature
of the upgrade
path for codecs,
Blackman said:
" We b e l i e v e
that software
is at a unique
inﬂection point.
If you look at the Elemental Technologies CEO Sam Blackman at NAB
history and the
codecs that evolved over the years,
expectation is that there's going
there is really a new codec standard
to be 15 billion devices that can
roughly every decade.
consume video in the next five years."
"In the '90s it was MPEG-2
Blackman said: "Our belief
at Elemental is that software
delivering content to televisions and
architectures are going to start
set-top-boxes and if you look at the
to steadily dominate the video
scale - the number of devices - it
was roughly in the low hundreds
infrastructure market. With support
of millions. In the '00s (2002 and
for multiple processing architectures,
beyond) H.264 comes around
Elemental has laid claim to "ﬁrst-tothere's a lot more devices for H.264
market with a hardware-agnostic
- whether they are PCs, Roku boxes,
platform that can run on a customer's
X-Box, PlayStation, mobile devices,
deployment model of choice".
iPads, tablets - there's now a billion
At NAB Elemental announced
devices that can play video.
that its video processing software
"And so software starts to take over
is fully integrated into the Ericsson
a little more of that because you
Virtualized Encoding solution.
need to evolve to keep up with all
Dr Giles Wilson, Head of TV
those devices and by the way Intel
Compression for Ericsson, said:
and NVIDIA have been leveraging "By expanding Ericsson Virtualized
Moore's Law and the processors
Encoding to also support Elemental
are getting faster and faster.
software encoding, we are enabling
"Well today we are at the dawn of a
TV service providers to efﬁciently
new codec change which of course
address the growing complexity
is HEVC or H.265 and looking at
of multiscreen TV service delivery
our partner Ericsson's numbers the
within a single solution.

"As providers strive to address
consumer demand for TV Anywhere,
we are focused on helping them
make the right choices with their
multiscreen video processing
deployments."
Designed to remove the complexity
of TV Anywhere video processing,
Ericsson Virtualized Encoding aims
to provide intelligent utilisation
of multiple encoding resources
regardless of the platform.
A task and service-oriented
solution, it can allocate resources
and simplify the process of selecting
the right encoding method and
platform based on the operator's
priorities for deployment speed,
video quality and output.
It eliminates complexity, enables
more efﬁcient resource utilisation
and bandwidth management and
bridges the gap between broadcast
and IT infrastructures, allowing
deployment of enhanced TV services
much more quickly.
Commenting on the partnership
with Ericsson, Blackman said:
"Elemental's view of the future of video
aligns well with Ericsson's vision of
the Networked Society where there
will be 50 billion connected devices
by 2020, 15 billion of which will be
video enabled.
"The integration of Elemental
solutions into the Ericsson platform
will help enable pay TV operators,
content owners, broadcasters and
sports programmers to transform
their traditional TV businesses
into multiscreen successes across
the globe."

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