Digital Broadcasting Update
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commercial upsides for smaller deals. What the content industry needs is to embrace new software platforms that are thankfully emerging to answer these challenges.
One of the reasons that content owners offload the responsibility of content preparation and delivery for VOD platforms to content services companies is the sheer level of complexity. This is brought about by a lack of standardisation and the amount of manual labour involved in delivering to multiple operators — often at short notice. (Broadcast Engineering)
Satellite Mobile and Others
Ka-Band VSAT Roundtable Addresses Regulatory and Interference Issues
The Global VSAT Forum’s Ka-band roundtable assembly in London featured top speakers from regulators, legal firms, as well as satellite companies all debating the future for Ka-band and high-powered satellites (HTS). Certainly, with more of these satellites going up, there is now more pressure than ever for effective regulation as operators look to make the most of these satellites.
One of the main talking points of the event was satellite interference. While this has been an issue long associated with broadcasting, it could become more and more of factor in the data arena. Companies are working on solutions for the whole interference issue. Satellite operators and service providers have spent a considerable amount of time and money on their attempts to reduce interference. Carrier interference needs a solution quickly. More systems are getting deployed and interference issues are on the increase. There is a need to go beyond type approvals now and take periodic checks to make sure all the products going out in the field meets the requirements.
(Satellite Today) Record Demand for iPlayer
BBC iPlayer had a record 59 million weekly requests on average in February, or 2 million more than a month earlier, while across February there were an average of 8.6 million requests a day. Despite the shorter month – 28 days, as opposed to 31 in January – resulted in an overall monthly total of 262 million requests, this was only 4% down on January’s record breaking 272 million requests. Live TV viewing on iPlayer meanwhile remained stable in February at 12% of all requests.
Mobile and tablet usage was still strong, accounting for 29% of all requests for content and 77 million requests in total. The new series of Top Gear proved particularly popular in February on iPlayer, with five episodes appearing in the top 20. (Broadband TV News)
YouTube Bringing Adaptive Steaming to Mobile, Home TV Screens
In 2012, YouTube switched to adaptive bit rate streaming (or scaling) for its desktop player. The move reduced buffering by 20 percent and sped up the launch of new online videos. Now, the Google-owned video service is bringing the new technology to mobile and home television sets.
The streaming works by detecting a user’s bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of a video stream accordingly. It requires the use of an encoder which can encode a single source video at multiple bit rates. The player client switches between streaming the different encodings depending on available resources. The streaming client is made aware of the available streams at differing bit rates, and segments of the streams by a manifest file. When starting, the client requests the segments from the lowest bit rate stream. If the client finds the download speed is greater than the bit rate of the segment downloaded, then it will request the next higher bit rate segments. Later, if the client finds the download speed for a segment is lower than the bit rate for the segment, and therefore the network throughput has deteriorated, then it will request a lower bit rate segment. The segment size can vary depending on the particular implementation, but they are typically between 2 and 10 seconds.
Mobile, on the other hand, comes with different challenges, as people move in and out of the reach of cell towers while they get their video fix on public transport. Average mobile Internet speeds are much slower in India and Brazil than in the U.S. and Europe, but videos still have to play without long and tiresome buffering. Broadband in Canada on the other hand is fast, but tightly rationed, with major ISPs charging their customers extra if they go over their caps. That’s also one reason that players have retained manual settings that allow users to manually change the bit rate of a video. (Broadcast Engineering)
More Alternate TV Services to Launch
Intel, best known for its computer processing chips, is getting closer to launching its own on-demand pay-TV catch-up and ‘live’ TV service. The company is said to be in discussions with major content providers in preparation for the launch of its Intel-based pay-TV service. The new Intel service, which could launch later this year, would echo the BBC’s iPlayer system, but also have live network programming available on the system.
Key to the overall strategy is an easy-to-use Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). However, while the content owners might welcome any extra distribution for their signals, and archived content, there will be a price to pay. (Advanced Television)
BBC Goes Open Source for TV App
The BBC has made its open source TV Application Layer available to the industry at large. The BBC is making the Application Layer available via an open source repository. The open source code would allow other parties to contribute to the development of the TV Application Layer and make building applications on TV easier for others, helping to drive the uptake of this nascent technology.
The BBC is keen to encourage the connected TV market. As the BBC licence fee has funded this work, it can create more value for money by sharing this work with others in the industry, for the benefit of the audience. The BBC TV Application Layer was developed to enable the BBC iPlayer, news and sports applications to run on as many connected devices as possible.
(Advanced Television)
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