In Broadcast - March 2018 - 56

56

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 3 | March 2018

InMedia

Toward A Better Quality of Experience
UHD, WCG Quality
As 4K/Ultra HD, HDR and wide colour
gamut increasingly become part of the
broadcast production and distribution
processes, there will be a need to
guarantee the quality of what will
be premium services, at least in the
short to medium term. Schadle feels
that QoE will have to be expanded
to accommodate these technologies
but the process itself will not change
massively. "As human subjective
studies with HDR video are created,
new metrics to quantify artefacts
produced by encoding technologies
being applied to HDR will need to be
developed that correlate highly to
the human subjective tests based on
HDR video sets," he explains. "With
this evolution we will see an added
capability offered for HDR quality
assessments with metrics highly
tuned for this new enhanced type of
video. This will likely take the initial
form of specific indicators used in
the processing steps to indicate HDR
quality degradation before we see the
number of human study correlated
metrics we have today for SDR video."
Kenneth Haren at Telestream is
more adamant that higher resolution

and dynamic range and wider colour
selection will call for greater scrutiny
through QoE: "The monitoring agents
need to have the flexibility to respond
to the rapidly changing delivery
landscape. HEVC is rapidly gaining
adoption as a codec that offers
significant efficiency benefits. 4k/UHD
is also gaining traction and HDR/WCG
has an enormous impact on audience
quality perceptions."
Sound Matters
Audio is a major part of the video
experience, particularly in the
mobile domain where the screen is
considerably smaller than that of the
average TV. Loudness has been the
hot topic in sound for broadcast in
recent years but with the introduction
of standards including ITU BS.1770
and EBU R128, broadcasters have
been able to go a long way in
addressing the problem of disparities

Video Clarity ClearView Shuttle 4K

in sound between programmes and
commercials/trailers.
Loudness monitoring is part of
the QoE process; companies such
as Telestream and Video Clarity
include it in their main products. New
procedures could now be necessary if
the latest sound technology, objectbased audio, is widely adopted by
broadcasters. This goes beyond
channel-based systems and is used
for immersive sound, alternative
languages/commentaries and audio
description."
"Both VidChecker and iQ Inspector
provide audio quality monitoring and
alerting, including audio loudness
and for delivery monitoring and lip
sync measurement," says Haren.
"Immersive/object-based audio like
Dolby Atmos can have a dramatic
impact on audience perceptions of
quality. Audio production needs to
conform to the delivery endpoints and
often is an incredibly time consuming
element of the equation."
At Video Clarity, Adam Schadle says
the issue that needs to be addressed
for object-based audio is not
necessarily the type of measurement
for quality or loudness but the number

Brainstorm And never.no
To Release OnMedia
B

rainstorm and never.no have
announced a NAB launch for
OnMedia.
An end-to-end solution for managing
virtual and augmented reality 3D
graphics based on social media feeds,
OnMedia is one of the developments
resulting from Brainstorm and never.
no's partnership as leaders of Project
VisualMedia in the Europe 2020
Horizon framework programme. The
project is funded by the European
Commission, as a response to the
needs of creative industries in the
broadcast media sector.
OnMedia integrates both neverno's and Brainstorm technologies,
delivering all the power of its 3D
Graphics Engine to display the
information gathered and structured
previously from the Internet. The
Social Media Engine can select
the information, edit the graphics
template, publish it and send the
graphics
to
any
broadcaster's

workflow, or play them
out to air directly,
presenting such data
in the most attractive
manner, and enhancing
the
information
displayed. OnMedia is
also scalable, so it can
be adapted to the needs
of local and regional
TV stations, national
broadcasters
and
production houses.
OnMedia allows endto-end social content management,
customisation, and publishing to both
3D TV graphics and second screen
environments, going far beyond the
requirement for displaying live social
data in dynamic TV formats, but also
provides a missing production flow in
traditional broadcast environments.
It is an integrated, stand-alone,
modular application which makes it
easy to search, filter, publish, visualise

OnMedia integrates on-screen social
media content production flow

and engage with content from the
audience.
David Alexander, Commercial Director
of Brainstorm, said: "OnMedia
helps broadcasters to enhance their
programming content to drive higher
audience ratings and foster loyalty
from their audiences, providing a
unique, end-to-end solution for social
graphics management that takes

cont'd...

of channels that are tested at one
time. "When this count gets above
sixteen at once there may need to be
recordings segmented by time and
measurements applied after recording
to get the job done," he comments.
"This would be in most facilities that
have either SDI or new IP standards,
which today generally apply up to
sixteen channels in infrastructures and
current test systems based on those
interfaces."
Future Technologies
Other new technologies that will also
test the capability of testing and need
to be considered in QoE are virtual
and augmented reality (VR/AR). "The
consumer's experience of a new,
immersive world will be substantially
determined by the perceived realism
of that world," concludes Frostad
at Bridge Technologies. "By the
correlation between the data sent
and the data received, QoE will only
become more important. The good
news is that the tools we have today
for measuring it - in an objective
fashion - will stand us in good stead
for what promises to be an exciting
future."
advantage of our more than 20 years
of experience in delivering high-end
real-time graphics."
Scott Davies, CEO of never.no
commented: "This goes far beyond the
desirable requirement of live social
data in visually dynamic TV formats,
but
also
fundamentally
provides a missing production
flow in traditional broadcast
environments.
Whilst
visualisation is key, the ability
for producers, journalists and
editorial teams to collect,
moderate and build visual
formats in real-time where
simple
creative
changes
can be made in a single
interface quickly and easily
is something that is missing
in the industry. Now with the
OnMedia solution, end to end social
content management, customisation,
and publishing to both 3D TV graphics
as well as second screen environments
can be achieved quickly and simply."
See OnMedia at NAB 2018 for an
interactive demo of how to manage
live social content, control and preview
scenes, publish to 3D and virtual studio
graphics, control gesturing as well as
sync with second screen applications.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.brainstorm3d.com/event/nab-show-2018/
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - March 2018
