Envivio transcoding For its 2012 Summer Olympic Games multiscreen video delivery, Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) selected Envivio for transcoding and processing of video content delivered to subscribers’ PCs, tablets and smartphones. The leading telecommunications service provider in Taiwan, Chunghwa Telecom serves nearly 12 million fixed-line, mobile and broadband customers, including more than one million video subscribers. CHT has expanded its existing Envivio multiscreen headend, which powers the Multimedia-On- Demand platform, to add support for video delivered to PCs, iOS and Android devices via Apple HTTP Live Streaming. Products in use for the MoD platform include: Envivio Muse Live and Muse On-Demand software-based encoders on the Envivio 4Caster appliances, the 4Balancer load balancer for VoD services, and Envivio 4Manager. 1.D73
Chunghwa chooses Managed loudness is key
Peter Pörs, managing director, Jünger Audio, explains why loudness has become such a key topic in recent times Opinion
Loudness has become an issue because people want to watch TV in comfort and don’t like surprise changes in their audio levels. With digital transmission technology, any kind of uncomfortable listening experience can be clearly determined by bad source material. This differs from analogue where bad effects could actually be caused by the transmission itself. In the analogue environment, keeping level under control was the key for quality transmission. However, this isn’t good enough in digital and consequently loudness measurement came into place. This is now the key for delivering quality audio content.
In an ideal world
broadcasters would simply issue parameters to producers and receive content as needed. But the reality today is that broadcast programming often uses a variety of content and sources. Material from archive
Peter Pörs: ‘A variety of content and sources’
sources can have unpredictable audio levels. This makes it impossible to rely on just a pre-check, and there’s still the need for online control of output streams.
TV sets or in home equalisers might offer an alternate solution
for viewers. But whatever changes are made in a TV set at home can no longer be controlled by the programme producer and that might change the listening experience for the audience in a way that no-one planned while creating and producing the content. Therefore it is best to prepare the audio in such a way that whatever goes to transmission is ready for the user. This may or may not use metadata to control the final decoder. Multiscreen distribution is demanding dedicated audio conditioning to offer an ‘easy listening’ experience. This is what people prefer. Personally, I don’t see any
reason why louder content should attract more viewer attention – and indeed we are now clearly seeing that this can have the opposite effect. Too loud is annoying, and anyone who is still taking this approach risks losing the positive attention they want.
The only one way to emerge so far is based on the ITU standard. Regional adaptions are arising because countries are following different recommendations created by different organisations, although in fact all recommendations are based on the same measurement standard published by ITU. If the reference values for the loudness target differ by 1LU, it doesn’t make a real difference to the actual listening experience. I think a mixture of the recommended practises given in ATSC A/85 and EBU R128 would be the best choice. All regions should adopt the
recognised standards as soon as possible because it would definitely improve television audio quality. Regardless of which recommendation is applied, the improvement in audio quality is guaranteed, and well proved technical solutions are available to help broadcasters do this. That in itself should be enough motivation to go ahead. If a concept has been created there will be solutions available. Managed loudness is the key, ask us and we can get you some answers. 10D20
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