the connected world supplement standards Supplement sponsored by
By the mid 1990s, the driver for the huge uptake in mobile phones was the evolution from analogue first-generation communications to the 2G GSM digital standard in 1992. With one standard to work from, all of the manufacturers and service providers throughout the European telecoms value chain were able to gain economies of scale, allowing technology, in particular handsets, to be manufactured cheaply and reliably. What this meant was that, from the outset, customers had an affordable choice of technology from an array of outlets. They knew they could choose any handset and it would run on any operator’s network across the continent. And operators knew that all of their supporting business systems only had to adhere to one standard. This enabled them to focus on building a technology infrastructure to better serve customers. Will the same be true of Connected TV? Joe O’Halloran reports.
I
Standard issues in the Connected World
t’s tempting to think that in broadcasting, in particular the world of Connected TV, such a pattern could be replicated. Yet the hard reality is that
broadcasting is a hugely complex place with competing and not complementary standards at play in terms of how video is transmitted and played out, especially and increasingly over online channels. And it is such a lack of standards that could provide a brake to any notion of a hugely profitable Connected TV universe. As the requirement from users for more content increases, there has been a commensurate pressure on operators to support multi-room services. This in turn is creating a need for a more powerful and capable range of products enabling the broadcaster to offer a real ‘home media gateway’ with all services made available to all TVs in the home, whatever form they take, be it a laptop, netbook, games console, smartphone, tablet, or even a TV set. Darren Fawcett, chief technical engineer at Pace TV, outlined the likely scenario: “Viewing will move into the 21st century and will increasingly fit around how consumers move around their home and between devices. Just as making a call on the go has
The DLNA is a reliable and proven technology for all types of device, enabling operators to generate new revenue streams with exciting new DLNA use cases such as Remote User Interface.
become common place, so too will viewing content wherever you want and on whatever device you want.” There are other issues to consider when streaming content via the open Internet and a Connected TV, OTT STB, or other connected devices, added Jim Lomax, executive VP of sales and marketing at AirTies: “Firstly there is the varying amount of bandwidth which is key to the QoS of the content received at the home. Many countries are committed to upgrading networks (either by Government legislation, or driven by commercial opportunity), however, there will always be localised issues. Currently, adaptive bitrate streaming is one way of ensuring the best available quality is received at any device and this creates a problem as there are a number of adaptive bitrate technologies available. The devices will have to support different variants of ABS to ensure that consumers can view whatever they choose.”
Different variants of different standards
Online video platform provider Brightcove would go as far as to say that the multiple standards issue, or rather the existence of so many of
26 l ibe l the connected world supplement march/april 2011 l
www.ibeweb.com
them, is a significant problem. In fact, the standards issue was Brightcove’s customers’ biggest nightmare, revealed Eric Elia, VP TV solutions: “We have a very fragmented world right now. The iPad is barely out a year. Since we’ve had a [standards] war between Apple and Adobe; Android’s surge in popularity; Google buying a video codec and releasing technology as open source in WebM and buying one of the primary DRM players in Widevine; there’s new types of encoding; new device form factors; with mobile tablets, different bit rates across different countries; and capped and unlimited bandwidth in some countries. All of that makes life much more complex for broadcasters.” But nobody ever got rich by being deterred by complexity. Certainly not the broadcast market and in attempting to make sense of the complexity of the Connected TV universe, step forward the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA). The DLNA believes that as
consumers are acquiring, viewing and managing an increasing variety of digital content on their PCs, consumer electronics products and mobile devices, they want to be able to experience this content using any electronic device, and from any
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68