12 TVBEurope News & Analysis
www.tvbeurope.com May 2012
ANT 3.0 reached 200,000 downloads in four days with 2 million content items accessed
Intrasonics’ boom
The rise of smartphones and tablets presents a new chance for broadcasters to engage with audiences. Jake Young talks to CEO Luc Jonker and Dr Michael Woodley, Business Development, Intrasonics, about the company’s audio watermarking technology
INTRASONICS WAS established over a decade ago as part of Sagentia, a technology management and product development company, but it was not until January 2008 that Luc Jonker joined the business, at a time, he says, when broadcasters misunderstood second-screen interactivity. Acquired by Dutch private
investors, Intrasonics put its demo app, Euphonium, in the App Store in 2009. The app was used for concept demos and trials, and to prove to customers that it was easy to download. Today, smartphones equipped
with apps supplied by Intrasonics are able to recover data embedded in broadcast audio and act upon it, depending on what the code, inaudible to the human ear, has been programmed to do. This could be playing along to a quiz show, voting in a reality TV programme or playing a video of behind-the-scenes content. As Jonker says, “Anything that
you can define in the architecture of the app can be triggered by the code, which sits in the audio.” He even claims audience voting can be made more attractive, and that the app can be linked to a ‘virtual wallet’, which cuts out the network operator and leaves all the revenue for the broadcaster. Jonker continues, “What this technology allows is very accurate synchronisation,” referring to
asymmetric synchronisation, causing the second-screen content to sync to the TV content. “On top of that we have different [symmetric synchronisation] mechanisms to continue the synchronisation during the programme, so time shift is something which this technology can easily deal with.”
Audio watermarking: piloted by Channel 4 for the new series of Facejacker
L/R: Dr Michael Woodley and Luc Jonker demonstrate Intrasonics’ audio watermarking technology at TVBEurope’s London office
Intrasonics’ technology was internally trialled by the BBC last autumn. “The first test we did over the real broadcast was actually a CBeebies [children’s TV channel] quiz,” says Dr Michael Woodley. “They broadcast that really late at night just to have a closed user group.”
Going OTT to monitor QoS
Monitoring over-the-top and connected TV services for quality of service the whole way through from the broadcaster’s server to the viewer is set to get a lot simpler, writes David Fox
BRIDGE TECHNOLOGIEShas developed an optional OTT software module, which can be enabled in all of its existing products, for deployment at any stage of the OTT network, from the origin server to the content delivery network, or ingress point, to the local internet service provider. It has also developed a
microAnalytics framework for
monitoring at the viewer end, inside tablets, PCs, residential gateways, set-top boxes or mobile phones. “You have to take a top-down
approach. You have to look at it in terms of what goes wrong at the viewing interface,” such as skipped frames, frozen video or pixilation — anything that affects the picture, said Managing Director, Rolf Ollmar.
However, with so many
different types of player and encoder, all with their own operating systems, that has been very difficult. “But we’ve made it very simple,” he claimed. It has developed microC, a small library application that is “extremely thin and easy to integrate in any player.”
Rolf Ollmar: The microAnalytics framework has “made it very simple” to monitor OTT services on an iPad or other device
The player developers, such as
Sky or the BBC, can then take that library and pick out the relative parameters, such as buffer under run, and use that to push the results to the central server, where the core monitoring system runs, which can spot
where any problems lie (whether in a geographic area or a particular OS system version). It has carried out trials of the system in Denmark and Norway, and will be rolling the system out over the summer.
www.bridgetech.tv
Then the BBC created an iPad
app that would play along to The National Lottery: Secret Fortune quiz show. The public service broadcaster provisioned it for 200 special device IDs, testing audio watermarking from Intrasonics and an XMPP-based system for delivering synch information via the internet. “Cable, analogue, terrestrial, digital, Freeview and Sky have all got different broadcast times,” states Woodley. “The network synch suffers.”
Major launches Intrasonics has recorded significant achievements this year, such as the introduction of
its ANT 3.0 app for Spanish Broadcaster Antena 3 (see TVBEurope’s April issue). “It resulted in 200,000 apps being downloaded in the first four days, and 2 million pieces of content being delivered to the audience,” reveals Jonker. ANT3.0, which allows
engagement with multiple programmes, has provided Intrasonics with good opportunities. Woodley claims that the BBC is interested in a number of different areas, one of which is a general companion app for BBC News. “The BBC News app on the iPad was launched to great fanfare, but it’s not very successful because it’s just too limited,” he states. Recently, however, Intrasonics
went live with the UK’s first terrestrial channel launch of a publicly available, audio triggered smartphone app. Channel 4’s Facejacker app enables viewers to ‘listen in’ on episodes of Facejacker to unlock bonus content. Each broadcast episode features two distinct codes, unlocking two new pieces of content. The watermarks can also
be found in other Facejacker content, such as trails, 4oD episodes and in the Facejacker DVD. The app costs £1.49 and is
available on iOS for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad from the App Store. “Facejacker isn’t free,” says Woodley. “And obviously paying for the app puts a barrier in place that’s going to reduce the number of downloads.” Despite that, the Facejacker app follows the success of the Fonejacker app, launched two years ago to coincide with the first series of Facejacker. It has become one of the most successful entertainment apps in the UK, with sales now reaching more than 440,000.
Photo credit: Jake Young
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