In Broadcast - February 2018 - 30
30 www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 2 | February 2018 InMedia OTT Trends - Part II "VITEC is thrilled to deliver the highest HEVC video quality on the market with its compact, portable, and easy-to-use second-generation MGW Ace Encoder firmware. This release is a major milestone to VITEC's support of the HEVC standard, and this is only the beginning," says Richard Bernard, Product Manager at VITEC. "Any MGW Ace Encoder on the market can be updated, showing our customer base VITEC's dedication to building highquality, future-proof, field-upgradable hardware." LiveU's HEVC Pro Card LU600 cont'd... VITEC's MGW Ace Encoder v2 packs HEVC GEN2 codec power LU600 HEVC solution for live sports and other vertical segments." According to LiveU, data traffic for live video over IP has doubled over the last two years, with around 1.5 million live broadcasting hours delivered by LiveU alone in 2017. The average live stream per customer is 2.7 hours per day. With the advances in HD video quality, HD 720/1080 video traffic now accounts for almost 80% of all traffic delivered this year and there has been an increase of over 120% in live HD sessions compared to 2016. The worldwide average uplink speed for video acquisition has reached 4.5Mbps, with developed areas experiencing approximately 9Mbps on average. LiveU's HEVC Pro Card is a powerful addition to the LU600 portable transmission unit although the company is adopting the HEVC standard across its entire product portfolio from its smallest uplink units to hybrid truck solutions. Samuel Wasserman, LiveU's CEO, said: "What stands out in these findings is the transition away from traditional transmission methods to cellular bonding. This trend is gaining even greater traction with our LU600 4K HEVC solution offering broadcasters and other content creators unmatched quality and reliability. We believe growth in 2018 will come from this transition, broadcast cloud services and HEVC. Bringing higher quality with even greater reliability to the market, HEVC enhances our technology's use across multiple genres. We're already seeing its use increase beyond news, with our global customers looking to deploy the HEVC alternatives However, industry concern about the high licensing costs of HEVC/H.265 had led to interests in alternative compression schemes. Chief among these are the Alliance for Open Media's AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) codec and the Joint Exploration Model (JEM), developed by the ISO and ITU. JEM promises a 25% improvement in coding efficiency to HEVC and AV1 offers a potential licence-free alternative that could match HEVC in quality. The EBU has commissioned an evaluation of the rivals with results to be presented shortly. The AV1 standard is built on top of Google's VP9 codec while AOMedia is supported by Google, Amazon, Cisco, Intel, Facebook, Netflix and Apple. based solutions. These range from internal processes such as billing, eSIM provisioning and authenticating subscriber access during roaming. Public Wi-Fi authentication and payments could be made more cost-effective through autonomous blockchain-based transactions between devices and access points, the analyst points out. Micropaymentbased business models for digital assets, including music and mobile games, could result. An "increased willingness to pay" is an attainable goal, reckons Deloitte. "Especially younger digital natives are more willing to pay a few cents for a music track they favour than to be charged a flat monthly subscription." In a report on the topic, Deloitte suggests, "Copyright tracking becomes more accurate, as does allocation to media copyright holders and the subsequent distribution of royalty payments. Copyright infringements and piracy would be nearly impossible." Deloitte describes a new market of "paid content without boundaries. The current regional limitations of paid content subscriptions and complexities of Digital Rights Management (DRM) are overbearing, and result in many lost customers that may want content but don't have access to it." This problem can be decreased through Blockchain technology, according to the firm. "Blockchain has the potential to make DRM systems obsolete or at least to reduce the complexity of these systems, because every transaction/ consumption is tracked in the blockchain and directly linked to a user," it states. Blockchain's Media Potential U ntil recently, blockchains were associated with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and were primarily of interest in the fintech market. However, a new breed of 'programmable' blockchain platforms, notably Ethereum, has broadened the applicability of the technology. Some of the new features introduced by secondgeneration blockchains include 'smart contracts' - agreements formalised in code - and private, or permissioned, blockchains. Using cryptographic techniques, blockchains allow the creation of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) ledgers. In computer science terms, the ledger is an ordered linked-list that is cryptographically linked to previous entries on the ledger. Consequently, the ledger is secure in that it is extremely difficult to change or remove a transaction that has been added to the blockchain. Moreover, the older the transaction, the more difficult it is to change the transaction. CableLabs, the research and development consortium, believes blockchain solutions are widely applicable to the cable industry in these categories: * Digital currency and payment systems; * Transaction processing and records management; * Augmenting security practices. "Blockchains may be transformative in developing new customer experiences, reducing cost of media distribution, and securing burgeoning device ecosystems," argues Steve Goeringer, Principal Security Architect, CableLabs. "The technology is still emerging but it's not too early to start considering how it may strategically benefit cable operators." Comcast's Advanced Advertising Group, for example, plans to launch a Blockchain Insights Platform this year. The project seeks to increase the efficiency of premium video advertising and enable secure exchanges of non-personal audience data for addressable ads. According to Analysys Mason, several areas of operators' activities could be improved through the implementation of blockchain-