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-
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