future of vod level 3 q&a mobile ... · accounts marilou tait, ... cheques payable to...
TRANSCRIPT
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
February 2017
Fut
ure
of V
oDL
evel
3 Q
&A
2017
tren
dsO
pen
sour
ce in
TV
Mobile prepares to change up a gear
csi-cover-February2017-V2.indd 1 09/02/2017 14:46:21
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
September 2016
Mill
enni
al v
iew
ing
Sate
llite
bro
adba
ndL
ive
OT
TIB
C 2
016
prev
iew
As close as it gets: Virtual Reality television
csi-cover-september2016.indd 1 23/08/2016 11:45:24
CSI magazine is now available as a digital-edition across all tablet and smart-phone devices
• Your window to the world of digital TV and media • Targeting top-level industry decision-makers • Independent news, insight and analysis• International coverage • Market trends
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
June 2016
NF
V &
SD
NC
able
tech
spe
cial
DV
B-S
2xM
ulti-
chan
nel n
etw
orks
Connected living:A look inside smart cities
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
csi-cover-june2016.indd 1 23/05/2016 11:22:56
sign up to our free e-newsletters and CSI Magazine at www.csimagazine.com/csi/signupcsi.php
For advertising opportunities please [email protected] [email protected]
digitalEditions-feb2017-204x271.indd 1 13/02/2017 11:12:25
Perspective Publishing3 London Wall BuildingsLondonEC2M 5PDwww.perspectivepublishing.com
Editor’s report:Shockwaves is perhaps too strong a word, but Sky certainly caused a stir with its announcement that it would deliver its full rostra of channels over fixed broadband (see page 5). SES, whose contract with Sky runs until mid-2022, subsequently played down the threat of OTT, and satellite delivery does indeed remain in rude health despite occasional harbingers of doom claiming to the contrary. While Sky’s plans, due to start in 2018, will
initially affect only a small percentage of its overall customer base, it can nonetheless be seen as something of a watershed in the move to all-IP. The industry has talked about this shift for a while and we are now seeing some very real and tangible action from operators. Of course, Sky is not just any old satellite TV company, but it is a big brand so as statements of intent go, it is certainly one to take note of moving forward. In the meantime, more and more people will keep streaming linear and on-demand TV across all platforms. Goran Nastic, editor
Contents
05 NewsThe latest industry news and analysis
10 Open source in TVHow is the use and proliferation of open source software and ways of working affecting innovation in the television industry?
13 Analyst corner Futuresource Consulting delves into the market opportunities for professional PTZ cameras
14 2017 trendsHDR, machine learning and live sports streaming are among the key trends we can expect to see this year
18 Security and geo-locationIP intelligence can restore the value of video-on-demand content, says our guest columnist
20 COVER STORY: 5GWe look at the business case for the upcoming mobile standard and the impact it might have on the media sector among others
24 Q&A: Level 3A chat with Jon Alexander, senior director, product management, about carrying more broadcast content over the company’s CDNs
27 The future of VoDIn the wake of some high profile service closures last year, what does the future hold for VoD platforms?
30 Artificial intelligenceA look at how AI is being applied in theory and practice in today’s media
33 Data corner Drilling into the numbers for EU quad-play bundles
34 Video optimisationOTT needs to implement further optimisation methods to thrive
36 CSI Awards 2017This year’s categories in full
38 Events diaryA list of some of the main industry shows
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 03
2017
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
ww
w.c
sim
agaz
ine.
com
February 2017
Fut
ure
of V
oDL
evel
3 Q
&A
2017
tren
dsO
pen
sour
ce in
TV
Mobile prepares to change up a gear
csi-cover-February2017-V2.indd 1 09/02/2017 14:46:21
EditorGoran Nastic
CommercialJohn Woods, Camilla Capece
Design and productionMatt Mills (Manager)Jessica HarringtonMatleena Lilja-Pelling
Regular contributorsAdrian Pennington, Philip Hunter,David Adams, Stephen Cousins, Anna Tobin, Chris Pickering
CirculationJoel Whitefoot AccountsMarilou Tait, Lynta Kamaray
Editorialtel +44(0)20 7562 [email protected]
Advertisingtel +44(0)20 7562 [email protected] +44(0)20 7562 [email protected]
Subscriptionstel +44 (0) 20 1635 588 861 [email protected] Circulation manager: [email protected]
Subscription ratesPer year: Europe £88; UK £68; Rest of World £98. Cheques payable to Perspective Publishing Limited and addressed to the Circulation Department
Printed by Buxton PressManaging DirectorJohn Woods
Publishing DirectorMark Evans
ISSN 1467-5935
3-contentsfeb.indd 1 13/02/2017 11:16:14
Celebrating excellence and achievement inthe broadcast, video, OTT and loT sectors
OPEN FOR ENTRIES
Deadline for entries: 12 May 2017
Entry costs frozen from 2016
For the latest news and updates follow us CSI_Magazine #CSIAwards
For the latest news and updates follow us For the latest news and updates follow us
www.csimagazine.com/awards
Save the date: The CSI Awards 2017 will take place on Friday 15 September in Amsterdam
Entry fees frozen from 2016
CSIAWards2017_Ad.indd 1 08/02/2017 15:07:37
news in brief
Eutelsat closes on 1,000 HD channelsEutelsat broadcast 997 high
definition channels at the end of
last year, versus 757 a year earlier,
an increase of 32%. The
penetration of HD channels
stood at 15.7% compared to
12.6% a year earlier. HD
penetration at HOTBIRD stood
at 24%, up from 18% a year ago.
As the satellite operator notes
progress on ultra HD, it goes to
show how far UHD has to go to
match these rates. At 31
December 2016, the total number
of channels broadcast by Eutelsat
satellites stood at 6,339 up 5.6%
year-on-year. The number of
operational transponders rose by
58 to 1,326 year-on-year, mainly
due to the entry into service of
Eutelsat 36C, 9B and 65 West A
satellites. The fill rate stood at
70.9% compared to 73.9% a year
earlier, reflecting mainly the
impact of this new capacity.
Highlights include contracts
signed for in-flight Connectivity
for SAS and Finnair on KA-SAT
and for Saudi Arabian Airlines on
the HTS payload of Eutelsat 3B,
which is now fully leased.
EU content portabilityThe European Parliament and
European Union member states
have reached an agreement
on the European Commission’s
proposal to allow consumers
to use their subscriptions to
films and music services when
travelling within the EU, under
the same terms as at home.
The agreed text, part of the
Digital Single Market strategy,
must now be formally confirmed
by the Council of the EU and
the European Parliament.
Once adopted, the rules will
apply by the beginning
of 2018.
February was a busy month for
Sky, with some big
developments that point to the
future of TV from a delivery
and business perspective.
The European pay-TV
provider, which has 26m
subscribers across five
countries, will for the first
time make its full lineup of
270 channels available over IP
without the need for a satellite dish
in 2018.
CEO Jeremy Darroch said the
move would allow Sky to target up to
six million households across Europe
who cannot, or will not, have a
satellite dish. In the UK, where the
all-IPTV service will be rolled out
first, it could open up about 2m
homes in the UK for Sky to target.
“This is the first we have been able
to offer the full Sky TV service
without a satellite dish,” said
Darroch. “It is a big moment for the
business, building on our position as
Europe’s leading OTT provider.”
The broadband-based service
comes both as a response to
competitive pressures, but also
because of the benefits Sky stands
to gain by going all-IP, such as
flexibility, personalisation
and interactivity.
Sky is only dropping satellite
delivery, which has provided the
backbone for its business for 30
years, for some customers - those
with a new SkyQ box, which is in
some 600,000 homes.
In addition, although not specified
by the press release, it is likely that
Nokia’s Velocix CDN will act as the
main underlying architecture for the
new broadband TV service. Sky has
been migrating its VoD and OTT
customers onto Velocix over the
course of 2016, citing greater control
from moving away from third-party
global CDNs, and Nokia confirmed
it is in talks with the operator for its
plans in 2018.
Sky is high profile enough to make
this noteworthy, even though it is
very much a long-term game. As Eric
Beaudet, a satellite equity analyst at
Nataxis Securities, said in a research
note: “We do agree that, as fiber
expands, more and more people will
watch TV through a terrestrial
solution as it has an advantage
compared to satellite. On the other
hand, even with current ambitious
coverage plans by European telcos,
there will still remain 30/40% of
Europe will not have access to
DTT solutions with enough
bandwidth to view TV.”
Sky also caused a stir when a
dispute over carriage fees between
Sky and another big name,
Discovery Communications, went
public. Both companies used
customer interests as their motives
in the negotiations, which almost
saw the entire Discovery line-up
pulled from the Sky platform on
February 1.
Eventually, a last-minute
deal was reached that will see
Sky continue transmitting
Discovery’s portfolio of channels,
including Eurosport, in the UK
and Germany.
Sky claimed Discovery wanted
$1bn for channels that are losing
popularity, a figure that Discovery
subsequently denied.
Darroch told the media: “Their
main channel, Discovery, is down
by one-third over the last ten years.
In a world of so much choice, in
my view, this is where success is
going to lie. Because re-runs of
Animal Planet just aren’t going to
cut it any more, unfortunately.”
US cable operator Altice USA has
signed up Nagra as its main content
security provider for advanced new
services, in the process also giving it
greater choice of set-top box suppliers.
Nagra will provide Altice, the
country’s fourth largest cable
company, with the content protection
and innovation platform to enable
encryption and content security for
its HD and 4K offerings.
Nagra Connect, the converged
CAS/DRM protection solution,
together with the MediaLive platform
multiscreen video platform, will allow
Altice USA to deploy new IP- and
QAM-based content including 4K
Ultra HD. The security solution
offers CAS/DRM, multi-DRM and
forensic watermarking technologies
as well as anti-piracy and
cybersecurity services.
Through the use of advanced
encryption technology, Nagra said its
solution can efficiently coexist within
legacy US cable systems while
avoiding duplication of bandwidth.
Equally significantly, the deal will
also give Altice greater choice in
selecting set-top vendors.
“We have been impressed by the
flexibility NAGRA has shown in
adapting to US-specific
requirements in a short amount of
time, and this partnership will
enable us to design integrated
services to meet our customers’
expectations,” said Hakim
Boubazine, COO, Altice USA.
Sky, IP and the future of content
Nagra helps Altice USA open up, innovate
News
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 05
05news.indd 1 10/02/2017 15:42:25
news in brief
BT offers mesh WiFiUK telco BT has commercially
started to offer its meshed
wireless solution to customers in
order to enhance WiFi coverage
in the home. The telco claims it
is the first whole-home WiFi
system of its kind in the country.
The system, which costs £299.99,
consists of three small 165mm
repeater discs that are placed
around the home, each with four
dual-band antennas and a wired
Ethernet port. The ‘Whole Home
Wi-Fi’ solution eliminates
so-called dead spots around the
home that either have weak or no
wireless signal, believed to be
based on MediaTek’s adaptive
network technology. BT joins a
select group of payTV operators
deploying mesh WiFi.
News
Benchmark for video encoding ‘Cinescore’ is claimed to be the first
industry relevant benchmark for the
meaningful measurement of video
encoding performance.
Developed by Cinegy, Cinescore
is said to accurately benchmark a
wide range of commonly used
formats and codecs by measuring
the encoding speed and the load
that encoding places on a system
for different target resolutions, such
as SD, HD and UHD.
Cinescore uses a combination of
professional- quality codecs to
measure the encoding speed of a
system and determines a system
score. It provides a reliable
indication of how many channels
of a particular video format a given
machine can capture; how suitable
it is for HD or 4K editing; or what
transcode speed to expect from a
newly purchased server.
CPU-accelerated, graphic-
card equipped commodity
machines powered by Intel
processors are at the heart of
modern video and broadcast
systems. Yet it is still difficult
to quickly and accurately
measure any machine’s actual
video processing performance.
Cinegy co-founder and chief
technology officer Jan Weigner
said, “The industry has been
waiting for a tool like Cinescore,
which provides a simple way to
assess the video processing
performance of any given machine.
Although there are many benchmark
tools that provide general ideas of
system performance and comparison,
there have been none specifically
designed for the broadcast industry,
until now.”
• In related news, V-Nova has
acquired the global patent portfolio
of Faroudja Enterprises for an
undisclosed amount. The addition of
the Faroudja technology is expected
to further improve the efficiency of
V-Nova’s own Perseus compression
technology after tighter integration.
According to the companies,
Faroudja’s software has already been
demonstrated to provide a bitrate
reduction of 35-50% over an existing
compression technique.
30 May - 1 June 2017EXHIBITION & CONGRESS
• 30 May - 1 June 2017
• Cologne / Germany
• www.angacom.de
EXHIBITION & CONGRESS FORBROADBAND, CABLE & SATELLITE
BROADBANDTELEVISIONONLINEOTHER EUROPEANCOUNTRIES
FRANCE
NETHERLANDS
GERMANY
INTERNATIONAL
OTHER EUROPEANCOUNTRIES
FRANCEFRANCE
160+ SPEAKERS52 % INTERNATIONALFROM 37 COUNTRIES
CONGRESSATTENDEES
BUSINESSVISITORS
EXHIBITORS18,000 2,200 450
2005800 CA
2005–2016: + 56 %2016
2200 CA
2017
NEWEXHIBITIONHALLS
ANGA Services GmbH
Nibelungenweg 2 · 50996 Köln / Germany
Tel. +49 (0)221 / 99 80 81-0 · [email protected] Kindly supported by www.angacom.de
news in brief
Grand Tour a hit for AmazonIndependent figures reveal the
show swept the board versus
other titles viewed on the SVoD
service. It is also helping to
attract new subscribers to
Amazon’s UK video service.
According to GfK’s analysis, The
Grand Tour “drove spectacularly
into pole position” as the most
viewed title in both November
and December 2016, attracting
the biggest audience reach for an
Amazon show in the UK since
GfK’s tracking service began in
2015. Despite launching halfway
through the month, TGT became
the most streamed show on
Amazon in November 2016,
accounting for 8% of all the
streams watched. The following
month that increased to 17% of
all streams, well ahead of the
second placed title, The Man in
the High Castle, which attracted
9% of all streams viewed.
Interestingly, 45% of all Amazon
users in December watched at
least one episode of the
programme: the highest
proportion of unique viewers ever
recorded by GfK - not just for
Amazon, but also across all other
platforms captured by GfK’s
tracker in the UK, which includes
Netflix and NowTV. If this were
to be equated to actual viewer
numbers, GfK’s estimates would
put the total audience for TGT at
around 2.3 million viewers, a
figure slightly higher than the 2.1
million online adults recorded by
BARB as watching Game of
Thrones on Sky Atlantic during
the same time period.
Fell becomes WBU chairSimon Fell, director of the EBU
Technology and Innovation
Department, has been elected
chair of the World Broadcasting
Union’s Technical Committee.
08 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
News
HbbTV issues streaming RFP The HbbTV Association has
announced a Request for Proposals
for the creation of a reference
application for online streaming of
DRM protected video to supported
televisions and set-top boxes.
Through this initiative, HbbTV
aims to make it easier for
broadcasters and content providers
to monetise content in the HbbTV
ecosystem by providing a known
working application with content
that they can use as a model for
their own services.
The Association said it has
approached DRM suppliers for
support on this project, as it does
not include specific DRM systems
in its specifications.
HbbTV is a global initiative
dedicated to providing an open
standard for the delivery of
broadcast and broadband services
through connected TVs and STBs.
The installed device base now
reaches 46 million of which a large
majority support DASH and DRM.
The commissioned reference
application will work on as much of
this installed base as possible, as well
as on HbbTV 2 products entering the
market in 2017, the group added.
Companies interested in
responding to the RfP can access it
at http://hbbtv.org/resource-
library/#current-rfi
• Meanwhile, a new specification
from AIMS is designed to make it
easier to create and change
connections between IP-enabled
devices, providing a common
upgrade path from SDI.
The Alliance for IP Media
Solutions has added the IS-04
specification to its roadmap.
According to the group, IS-04 will
bring critical uniformity to the use of
video, audio, and ancillary data on a
network of devices.
The specification is important
because it defines how IP-enabled
devices can discover each other and
connect compatible IP streams as
part of a workflow, it said.
Furthermore, IS-04 automates that
process, making discovery and
connection more fluid than in a
conventional SDI environment.
The membership agreed that a
common approach to managing
discovery and registration was
important, as such an approach
provides a clearly defined way for
SMPTE 2022-6- and SMPTE
2110-compliant devices to find and
connect to each other. This allows us
to leverage the benefits of IT and
networking technologies to create a
more flexible and scalable solution
than conventional SDI routing
systems will allow.
“IS-04 provides the next level of
interoperability beyond transporting
data. By adding it to our roadmap,
AIMS is not just advocating for
protocols related to video, audio, and
data transport, but for protocols that
determine how multivendor solutions
can create seamless interoperable
environments,” said Michael Cronk,
AIMS board chair.
Vizio fined for use of smart TV dataVizio, a manufacturer of smart TVs,
is found to have unlawfully tracked
viewing habits and sold it to
other companies.
The US Federal Trade
Commission said Vizio’s smart TV
technology had captured data on
what was being viewed on screen
and transmitted it to the company’s
servers. The FTC said data was then
sold to third parties.
Vizio has now agreed to pay
out $2.2m in order to settle
allegations, although it said the
data sent could not be matched up
to individuals, such as name or
contact information.
The practices challenged by the
government related only to the use
of viewing data in the ‘aggregate’ to
create summary reports measuring
viewing audiences or behaviours, the
company noted.
The FTC said the data collection
began in February 2014 and affected
around 11 million televisions.
“Vizio collected unique data from
each household with a Vizio smart
TV that included not only second-by-
second viewing information, but also
the household’s IP
address, nearby access
points, zip code, and
other information,” the
FTC said in a blog
post explaining
the settlement.
As part of the
settlement Vizio
agreed to more
prominently tell its
customers how data is
stored and collected, and to seek
firmer, clearer consent beforehand.
The company has been ordered to
delete the data it collected.
It is not the first time smart TVs
have been involved in illicit use of
data. Samsung and LG have raised
privacy concerns before with their
models, both in the US and Europe.
08_news_3.indd 1 10/02/2017 11:14:09
www.dvbworld.org
Speaker sessions include an impressive line-up of influential figures in the broadcast industry to update and inform on current work taking place in DVB as it engages in the ongoing development of UHD TV with HDR, HFR and Next Generation Audio; future transmission systems; reports from Study Mission Groups including Virtual Reality; and much more...
Lunches, coffee break sessions, a sightseeing tour of Vienna as well as a night out for dinner and celebration provide the opportunity to connect with other delegates, exchange ideas and explore new horizons.
Further information including the Conference Program, Virtual Reality Masterclass and Hotel Reservations is available on the DVB World 2017 website.
For Exhibition & Sponsorship opportunities please contact Désirée Gianetti: Tel: +41 22 717 2714 Email: [email protected]
Vienna13 - 15 MarchConference + Exhibition
2017
CSI 204 x 271 DVB World 2017.indd 1 28/11/2016 17:31:23
Open source software has been
gaining momentum across pay
TV and broadcasting, driven
partly by growing demand
from consumers for the same
kinds of apps, services and
experiences on TV they have
come to expect online and especially on mobile
devices. This is leading operators and therefore
their infrastructure providers towards the Android
TV OS in particular to gain access to the huge
community of developers around that platform,
which as a derivative of Linux is open source.
Indeed, a notable trend evident at IBC 2016
last year was a profusion of open source
developments, including software for set top
boxes. Among notable developments was
integration of Ericsson’s MediaFirst platform,
the multiscreen sequel of its Mediaroom, onto
the Android OS, as well as its alignment with
the “shared source” RDK. Shared source is a
hybrid where the software is owned by multiple
entities, with some of the same benefits and issues
as open source.
True open source software is available free with
access to the source code so that anyone can
make changes and enhancements. As such it is a
model for building, evolving and maintaining
software at all levels, including the OS,
components, tools and applications, as opposed
to proprietary software, which is under the
control of a single provider. Neither is inherently
superior to the other and operators should be
wary of jumping onto the open source bandwagon
for the sake of it. At the same time the open
source approach does bring some benefits,
including robustness, agility and speed of
innovation, in the right context. The main caveat
is that it does require resources and commitment
to work properly, which means that smaller
operators will require a trusted partner to make it
work, which could be a systems integrator or a
turnkey platform provider.
Client and server-side considerationsLike many recent developments in video
infrastructure, such as cloud computing and
software defined networks, open source has come
across from the enterprise IT world, where it has
a long history dating back to the 1950s when all
software was produced by academics. The modern
era perhaps began with the release in 1991 by
Linus Torvalds of the Linux operating system as
freely modifiable source code. Most recently open
source has proliferated in the era of the internet
in projects like Wikipedia as part of the broader
open collaboration movement.
Proponents argue that open source
development brings potential for greater agility
and faster innovation, because the resulting
software is the product of collaboration among a
large number of programmers. This same factor is
also held to increase reliability and robustness,
because the golden rule of software testing is that
errors and bugs can only be eliminated through
large scale exposure. By contrast developers of
proprietary software may be under commercial
pressure to prioritise new features over reliability
because that helps sell the products.
Critics contend that open source development
tends to favour technical innovation at the
expense of ease of use, which has to an extent
been born out in the enterprise IT world. While
Linux has had great impact on the server side for
corporate software such as finance and
manufacturing control with a move towards cloud
based open source components, there has been no
corresponding trend on the desktop front. This
reflects the challenge of getting to grips with
Linux and the inferiority of the associated user
interfaces, compared with the Windows or Apple
Mac OS X operating environments. This holds
also for applications, with the Microsoft Office
more polished and easier to use than open source
alternatives such as Apache OpenOffice.
This point is picked up by Andy Hooper, Vice
President, Software & Services, at Arris, who
argues that open source is unlikely to gain any
foothold on the client side of pay TV. “The UI is
too important for most pay TV operators and
hugely subjective in terms of design to the degree
that it would be near impossible to run as an open
Open source
The march towards open sourceOpen source can help boost TV innovation, but is not a panacea, says Philip Hunter
10 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
“Operators should be wary of jumping onto the open source bandwagon for the sake of it.”
10-12_Open_Source.indd 2 13/02/2017 12:36:24
source project,” says Hooper.
On the server side the situation is more
nuanced but even there some operators would
continue preferring proprietary software. Most
larger operators at least regard their server-side
applications for payTV as highly important
strategic assets to be kept in-house and run either
on a private cloud or internal data centre, Hooper
adds. “In this context, open source selection by
operators can still play a role for some set of
server-side components. Equally, some server-side
platforms will continue to be serviced by
proprietary software solutions from a variety of
software and systems vendors.”
When it comes to underlying software
components and tools that are not sources of
differentiation and will be employed by many
operators the open source approach is tending to
win out, according to Fleming Lampi, Global
Product Director at ACCESS, a German-based
provider of software for TV services and the
connected home.
“Such open source software can be used as
applications and also components of proprietary
solutions to complement their core features,” says
Lampi. “Such software is under constant review
by the public, which allows the industry to rely on
its quality. Operators tend to prefer this as it
enables them to avoid long and costly
development and testing cycles on these building
blocks and to focus on their own developments
to provide a ready to market solution to the
general public.”
Hooper agrees that open source toolkits and
libraries were being used even on the UI and
client side, because they provided broad functions
embedded within the system, offering no
competitive advantage. In those cases open source
brought economies of scale.
DevOps and agilityWhen it comes to front line software for
functions such as the UI, personalisation and
recommendation, there can be tension between
the desire for differentiation and the need for
innovation, both of which are driven by
competitive pressures. Open source tends to
favour agility and rapid innovation but at the
cost of opening up to third parties including
potential competitors.
According to Lampi at ACCESS, the drive
for agility and rapid innovation is winning and
favouring open source increasingly. “We believe
that open source and standards are fundamental
for payTV innovation,” he says. “Today’s fast-
paced and highly competitive market needs
solutions that can be implemented in record
time frames and updated easily. Using open
source and standards-based software provided by
expert third parties is the best way for operators
to comply with demand for high quality,
consumer-friendly UI and services without having
to invest in support and maintenance teams.”
Lampi does agree, though, that the innovation
issue went deeper than the debate between open
source and proprietary software. “The key is
to remain relevant and to continue to provide
high value software solutions that easily plug
into existing infrastructure and workflows,
including content protection, search and
discovery, and connectivity.”
Others go further and argue that this debate is
a complete red herring and what matters is the
overall approach taken to software and project
development, not whether the components are
open source or proprietary. The key challenge is
to establish a software development pipeline that
enables the latest features to be delivered quickly
and at high quality, according to Roland Mestric,
Video Marketing Director at Nokia, which has
become one of the main players in TV
infrastructure through its EUR15.6 billion
acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent finally completed in
November 2016.
This can only be delivered by adopting DevOps
methods bringing together development and
operational teams, which enables software for new
features to be rolled out on a continuous basis
with much shorter lead times between
specification, deployment and testing.
“In order to deliver quality software into
production and support robustness, security and
performance, DevOps models are important,”
says Mestric. “This is true for pay-TV, where
delivering functionality at the expense of
robustness, security and performance is not an
option. Modern software delivery methods should
be adopted, such as CI/CD (Continuous
Integration/Continuous Development), where
continuous, iterative development underpinned
by automated testing raises the confidence of
software quality. Closer interworking between
Development teams and Operation teams
increases confidence further by supporting rapid
code delivery into production and rapid feedback
from production.”
Mestric regards the open source question as
orthogonal to this more fundamental issue of
development methodology. However, he does
acknowledge that the open source movement
has become an important source of software
that has a big role to play, but alongside
proprietary components and subject to the
same scrutiny. “Open source is important to
Nokia products and we leverage it extensively,”
he says.
“We also contribute to various projects and
leverage the wider benefits of being active
within the community. But for Pay TV, Open
Source is not the beginning and end of building
video delivery products. Nokia brings open
source and our own software development
together to the value required by pay TV
operators to support robustness, security
and performance.”
Mestric’s key point here is that open source
is not a panacea and all software needs to be
integrated into wider video delivery platforms
that provide a consistent experience,
incorporating a common platform for analytics,
monitoring, management, deployment, security,
Open source
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 11
“There can be tension between the desire for differentiation and the need for innovation.”
“But for payTV, open source is not the beginning and end of building video delivery products.”
10-12_Open_Source.indd 3 13/02/2017 12:40:34
performance modelling and device integration.
“These are all massively important factors
which enable Pay TV operators to more
seamlessly integrate our products into
their products and services, rather than having
to integrate multiple solutions themselves
in a multitude of different ways,”
said Mestric.
Costs and savingsKaltura is an open source advocate and the
company’s VP of Platform, Ecosystem and
Community, Zohar Babin, argues that it
brings benefits across the whole video lifecycle,
including the UI. He suggests that the inferiority
of some client or desktop open source projects
was a result of less commitment rather than
an underlying deficiency in the culture. “As a
counter example, look at WordPress, which is
the leading blogging platform by far,” notes
Babin. “I’d argue that it is the leader because
of its UX.” WordPress is open source.
Babin does agree though that open source
should not be adopted on the basis of expected
cost savings, which may come as a surprise to
those who believe that commonly touted headline
figure that it saves the world’s users $60 billion
a year. Babin’s point, which most in the field
would now agree with, is that when the ongoing
costs of software such as maintenance, support,
updating, customising and integrating with other
systems are taken into account, open source
will not necessarily yield any savings. “This is
not really the value that open source ever
brought to the table. It’s more about trust,
ecosystem and not being locked into black
boxes,” he says.
What about security?One final bone of contention relating to
open source is whether it improves or weakens
overall content security, with arguments in
both directions. The negative argument centres
around the fact that since the code is generally
openly available, pirates or hackers can readily
scout for vulnerabilities. But the counter
argument is that the weight of community
exposure will identify vulnerabilities and develop
fixes more quickly, shortening the window of
opportunity for attacks.
Babin is in the latter camp. “Yes, the
code is open, and thus security holes will
be found faster and more frequently, but at
the same time, these will be fixed faster and
more frequently. Another point is your own
ability to scan the software for these types of
risks and holes, which you can’t do with
proprietary software.”
Hooper from Arris espouses an increasingly
common view when he suggests that security
considerations have little bearing on whether
to adopt open source. “We would not cite
security in the case against open source,” he
says. “It is now very well established that in
this regard, open source has both strengths
and weaknesses when compared to closed,
proprietary software. Security is a much broader
issue and closed versus open source is just one
of many dynamics.”
The conclusion perhaps is that operators
should not be led towards open source in the
hope of enjoying immediate cost savings or
functional benefits. It should be just part of a
longer-term commitment to modern agile software
development methods that enable continuous
innovation but not at the expense of robustness
or security.
Open source
12 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
The Netflix modelThe open source question can, however, be
shaded by the size of the operator, with the
very largest Tier 1s seeing it as a route to
innovation and competitive advantage, not just
for individual components or tools, but by
establishing a culture that attracts the best
people both internally and at a community
level for solving problems.
Netflix is notable for taking this route at an
early stage of its evolution and has singled out
its open source strategy as pivotal to its
success. Netflix embarked on this path by
becoming a major user of Apache licensed
open source software for a variety of
components. This included its data storage
solution based on the Apache Cassandra open
source database. That gave Netflix
programmers access to the Apache Software
Foundation, one of the world’s largest
decentralized open source community of
developers and enabled them to exploit
Amazon Web Services (AWS), which relies
heavily on this model. This led Netflix to
adopt AWS as its global cloud infrastructure
provider because it was deemed to provide the
greatest scale, broadest features set and
adequate redundancy. At the same time,
Netflix started to contribute fixes and also
extensions to Apache Cassandra, which as
Ruslan Meshenberg, Director, Cloud Platform
Engineering at Netflix, has explained in
various blogs, led to much deeper involvement
in the open source movement.
Since then Netflix has enjoyed the benefits
of being a producer as well as consumer of
open source projects, according to
Meshenberg, although by the very nature of
the movement the distinction between the two
can be blurred. Meshenberg has cited various
benefits for Netflix, including some derived
from improved community relations and peer
pressure. He reckons the quality of code and
documentation has improved because of the
latter, driving engineers almost as a matter of
pride to raise their game over these issues. He
also cited durability, which is perhaps one of
the more widely agreed benefits, in the belief
that code will improve over time if it is actively
developed by an open community and used
widely, rather than being maintained by a
small number of software engineers for a
single workload.
However, Meshenberg also made a point
that would chime with Nokia’s Mestric when
he conceded that open source projects would
only deliver high quality software when they
were well managed and involved good
engineers. Netflix has owned up to issues with
some of its own open source products, for
example, failure to make it clear when some
projects had been archived with active
maintenance ceasing, and generally not being
open about internal assessment of quality.
At least these deficiencies are being
remedied but this does highlight that open
source as well as proprietary software can fall
by the wayside of history and end up leaving
users adrift. Netflix has also admitted that it
has had to devote a lot of resources to its open
source programme to make it work, with the
obvious implication that this would be beyond
many other Tier 1 operators and certainly
smaller Tier 2s and Tier 3s. Those operators
are more likely to encounter open source
either through systems integration partners or
complete solution providers. Kaltura is
an example of the latter, offering a variety
of turnkey and integrated video
delivery platforms.
10-12_Open_Source.indd 4 13/02/2017 12:36:50
One of the uniting aspects
of most of the pro video
and AV industries is that
almost all end-users are
looking to cut costs
whilst at the same time
aspiring to do more with
the video format. This idea of doing more for less
has driven down price points significantly in the
pro camcorder market (a global figure of -28%
over the past five years) and has encouraged
people to consider alternative ways in which to
capture video.
Alternatives to pro camcorders include
DSLRs and CSCs, a trend which has been well
documented, but in the world of live video
production, the burgeoning professional (pan-tilt-
zoom) PTZ camera market is fulfilling
this function.
For instance, take broadcast, the origin of
professional video use. Traditional studio set-ups
require at least two or three cameras and their
camera operators as well as a camera controller in
the studio’s gallery. Use of comparatively
inexpensive PTZ cameras does away with the
need for camera operators, reducing the required
headcount for a three camera set up from four to
one. In a world where budgets are being squeezed,
this is a significant reduction in both CAPEX and
OPEX that is very appealing to some.
There are caveats to this of course: PTZ
cameras can’t yet match the image quality of 2/3”
sensor studio cameras and they can only be used
in non-dynamic environments where the action is
pedestrian. PTZ cameras are therefore better
suited to static studio set-ups (interviews, news or
cooking shows for example) than fast moving
sports. Because of this, reality TV is another key
application, for example the UK production of
reality staple ‘Big Brother’ uses 55 high-end PTZ
cameras controlled by just one operator.
Away from broadcast, the video conferencing
market is going from strength-to-strength, partly
due to the cost savings derived from people being
able to communicate face-to-face without the
expense of traveling.
Another way broadcast is starting to save
money by using PTZ cameras is through remote
production. Where small, satellite studios are
required, PTZ cameras (along with other
production equipment) can be operated remotely,
requiring no on-site staff. This is perfect for
locations that often require people to be
interviewed, but don’t warrant investment in a full
stand-alone studio - financial districts for example.
Aside from cost savings, another point key to
the growth of the PTZ camera market has simply
been the emergence of video as a central part of
modern life. The dominance of the internet in our
lives and increasing broadband speeds has meant
that video is now everywhere. Smart phones and
tablets mean that video content is always at arm’s
reach, websites are now almost expected to feature
video in some way and video-based display
signage is ubiquitous, we can rarely escape video.
It follows therefore that the use of video is
growing fast outside of the world of broadcast.
Video hasn’t been the exclusive preserve of
broadcast for at least 10 years now, but its use
in a whole variety of applications is now being
accelerated by this wider
cultural phenomenon.
In addition to video
conferencing, other markets for
PTZ cameras include internal
corporate communications,
education, houses of worship,
government and military as well as
medical, event venues and stadiums.
Some of these applications use PTZ
cameras due to their low cost and
comparative simplicity (they are
often seen as “fire and forget” in
terms of installation) while others such as
education, stadiums and houses of worship
use them because they can be mounted out of
the way on ceilings or high on walls and
controlled remotely.
The education market in particular is extremely
interesting in its use of PTZ cameras and is a
good example of the cultural encroachment of
video. While PTZ cameras are used to record
lectures or lessons for students to catch up on
later or for teacher assessment, the cameras come
into their own in this environment when distance
learning is considered. Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCS), typically fielded by
technology companies rather than educational
establishments, are forcing some of the world’s
leading universities to change their business
models. The ability to distribute videos of
lectures, whether recorded or live, gives
universities valuable assets that can be monetised
without geographical boundaries. PTZ cameras
are at the heart of this trend and are allowing
traditional higher-education establishments to
compete in this new market.
Considering all of these factors, the PTZ
camera market is growing in volume terms, with
49% growth expected between 2016 and 2021.
Although much of the 103,000 units shipped in
2016* were accounted for by comparatively
inexpensive products used extensively in video
conferencing, most volume growth over the next
five years will be found in the $2,000-$3,500
segment as more quality conscious markets grow
in importance. This means that despite significant
price erosion, the shift in product mix will allow
for a 27% growth in value over the same time
period, up from $220 million in 2016 (note that
as the report was completed before the end of
2016, full 2016 data was forecasted based on
vendor feedback). Futuresource’s 2016
Professional PTZ Camera Market Overview
Report was published in December 2016 and is
available at the Futuresource website.
Professional PTZ cameras A market full of opportunities
Adam Cox is senior analyst, broadcast & professional video equipment, futuresource
Analyst corner
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 13
13_Analyst_Column.indd 2 10/02/2017 11:59:15
The Guardian newspaper hailed
2016 as the year that TV
streaming finally came of age,
pointing to the number of
popular ‘must-see’ shows that
made the move from terrestrial
onto SVoD platforms.
Most notably these were The Crown, Stranger
Things and The Grand Tour on Netflix and
Amazon. The BBC, meanwhile, experimented
with showing some programmes on its online-only
BBC3 channel, as well as iPlayer exclusives. Sky is
similarly pushing to original content – and not
just expensive sports either.
In terms of multi-device viewing and self-
scheduling, the paper said “2016 was the year the
revolution finally happened. We will never look at
television the same way again.”
This sets the backdrop to our predictions for
2017. Of course, OTT will continue its march but
there is a lot more innovation to look forward to
in other areas.
1. Ultra HD with HDRIn the fast paced world of technology, neither
UHD nor HDR are that new anymore, but we
should start to see some concrete deployments
from broadcasters and payTV operators
throughout this year, following approval of the
HDR specs by leading standards organisations. In
parallel, wider 4k delivery will also happen while
in some cases a combination of 1080p with HDR
can deliver a better viewing experience.
“The majority of activity we’ve seen so far has
been in the growth of devices supporting UHD,
rather than UHD content,” notes Matthew
Huntington, CTO, Freesat. “In 2017 I believe we
will see rapid growth in UHD content production,
including HDR as the format of choice for high-
end production. What is clear is that content
production and new UHD broadcast services will
move directly to UHD with HDR.”
Huntington similarly thinks 2017 will become
the year that standard definition becomes
unacceptable for the majority of consumers with
access to a HD service, requiring vendors,
broadcasters and operators to provide services in
HD at the very least, if not UHD.
“HDR will become a growing consideration
in the market, with 4k/HDR probably the new
high-end standard for people to aspire to and
broadcasters to aim at,” agrees Jonathan
Berman at MX1.
Harmonic’s Ian Trow is more cautious. He
thinks that UHD HDR is going to be limited to
proof of concept, with a few operators delivering
HDR to a limited set of screens. This is due to
limiting factors including screen availability and
lack of an end-to-end production workflow.
“Once there is an established solution for
delivering UHD to SDR legacy screen sets and a
complete production and distribution workflow,
UHD HDR will really take off. Expect to see
UHD HDR deployed to the masses toward the
end of 2017 and early 2018,” says Throw.
As Ravi Kumar Palepu of VirtusaPolaris notes,
though the network technologies to deliver 4k
UHD are already present, the bandwidth to
deliver 4k is not available in every household.
“In 2017, we’ll witness the real test for content
delivery, as providers try to adapt to the 4k
boom and start delivering far richer content on
a massive scale.”
While much of this will still be of the
on-demand variety, John Bishop, CTO for Media
at Akamai Technologies, anticipates seeing more
live events being streamed in 4k over the public
Internet as well.
As the costs incurred to create and deliver this
pixel-rich content are higher, however, the
availability of cost-effective solutions is paramount
to the success of UHD content creation for
content players, and its concurrent adoption by
consumers, argues Ian Finch of Simplestream.
2. From big data to machine learning/artificial intelligenceBig data analysis is now big business, which
operators are trying to get to better grips with.
Netflix has set something of a data analytics
benchmark in the digital entertainment space,
acquiring and presenting content to individuals
profiles based on sophisticated algorithms.
But making use of and deriving true business
value from all the massive data collecting
capabilities that today’s digital entertainment
networks have at their disposal still remains “quite
a tough nut to crack”, acknowledges Kai-Christian
Borchers at 3 Screen Solutions (3SS). “We
foresee that in 2017 and beyond the secret recipe
will begin to become clearer. The mystery behind
big data alchemy will begin to dissipate.”
Good news, then, for solutions with advanced
analytics capabilities. Viaccess-Orca believes that
data analytics will be a game-changer in the
payTV environment from this year, especially for
OTT. Utilising data related to the television
subscriber profile, operators can provide
contextually relevant content and ads, increase
satisfaction with the service, boost content
efficiency, and prevent piracy.
“Regardless of whether you’re an advertiser,
broadcaster or platform operator, everyone will be
2017 trends
Future imperfectFrom VR to micro-services, CSI looks at what lies in store for the industry this year
14 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
14-16_trends.indd 2 06/02/2017 16:05:34
looking for ways to better understand their
audiences and viewers. By bringing together rich
and broad datasets the industry will be able to
gather greater insight into TV viewing behaviour.
We will see organisations begin to capture and
use data that will enable them to do so,”
adds Freesat’s Huntington.
Slightly longer term, he sees census-level
audience data emerging in years to come become
a staple ingredient in delivering compelling TV to
viewers for all parties in the TV value chain.
Beyond big data, there is a lot of excitement
about the potential for machine intelligence and
machine learning to transform networks into
smart and proactive ones that offer better service
delivery and personalised customer experiences.
“When algorithms become more sophisticated
and become AI assisted, we will start to get
dynamic scheduling where content in segment 34
is determined by the combination of the choice of
content in segments 23 and 25, for example,” says
Craig Moehl, Groovy Gecko. “So the scheduler
has a rough idea of the program stream and the
users pull the active and passive content via
replacement in real-time. The short term gains
will be massive surges in CPMs but the longer
term there will be increased value in brand loyalty,
helping to build small niche communities
(gaming, amateur architects and small space /
shed lovers for example).”
Guavus sees service providers leveraging
machine intelligence for smarter networks and
automation to improve customer experience.
“This will manifest itself with CSPs adopting
analytics solutions that can embed machine
intelligence into operations fabric, automating
decision cycles and preventing customer affecting
issues,” reckons Chris Menier.
For organisations looking to provide rich
experiences to their customers while still
maintaining profitability, automation is the only
answer, agrees Brite:Bill’s Alan Coleman.
Machine learning enables the system to
understand that an interaction is needed to avoid
the next step and artificial intellignece can be
applied to determine the right response given the
previously learnt preferences of the customer.
3. VR/AR & 360 videoIt will be interesting to see how Virtual Reality
evolves and whether it will bridge the gap to the
mass market or instead become simply more
established with the gaming community. While
the focus is on gaming, there have been some
successful examples of VR VoD content being
streamed to PlayStation, so others may follow.
If nothing else, we can safely assume that
broadcasters will experiment more with delivering
virtual reality content, particularly around live
events. Whereas Akamai helped deliver roughly
two or three VR events per month during 2016,
the CDN company expects to do around ten a
month during 2017.
As Accedo points out, VR is just in the
beginning of the hype curve and we will see many
failed attempts in this market. It may take another
five or six years before technology has matured.
Again, as with UHD, VR may suffer from
bandwidth constraints. “As more people look to
adopt it – or even just try it out – the challenge of
distributing content that essentially requires 16
times more bandwidth is more evident,” says
Edgeware CEO Joachim Roos.
In parallel, we will likely see more 360 content
emerging, which can be viewed on a standard
device, but giving consumers some of the benefits
of VR, meaning they can move the view around to
get a different camera angle.
According to Kaltura’s Iddo Shai, this may be
the year in which we finally get to judge for
ourselves if the mixed reality headset that Magic
Leap has been working on is as great as all the
initial reviews by the tech geeks who have had
an early look. He also thinks the iPhone 8 will
need to deliver something really spectacular and
that thing may be a new Mixed Reality and
Virtual Reality technology. “Those technologies,
along with Google’s DayDream and Samsung’s
GearVR, will make video in VR even more
exciting and valuable in ways that we are only
now starting to realise.”
Ultimately, Viaccess-Orca believes that the true
potential of VR technology will be unlocked when
it’s combined with UHD.
4. Live sports streamingLive sports streaming is on the rise, as the
2016 European Championship saw record views
over OTT platforms, as did other big events
like the Olympics.
While live sport has always been considered by
broadcasting companies to be the lynchpin of live
TV, new studies have suggested that they don’t
have the same appeal to the younger generation.
As young people seem to be watching less live
sport, broadcasters need to find better ways of
engaging them and making sport content more
relevant to them.
One sports body trying to combat this change
in behaviour is the NBA, points out Tom Williams
at Ostmodern, who says last year saw the
basketball association move to a new content
distribution model, as they look to social media
and other channels to give millennials short,
‘snackable’ content in places that already capture
their attention (see also Facebook Live, below).
“Broadcasters/content creators will have to
fiercely adapt to accommodate how young people
view sports. They will be much more creative
about how they deliver first and second screen
experiences, and combine these with social, for
young people,” says Willaims.
Another is the rise of eSports video content,
which has, to date, been dominant on free
platforms like YouTube and Twitch. As e-sports
continue to surge in popularity, premium services
with advanced UX will become increasingly viable
options to reach those hungry fans 24/7, notes
Simplestream’s Dan Finch. Moreorver, he thinks
OTT TV offerings present the most promise for
effectively hosting 24/7 eSports channels.
“The future lies in adding eSports channels to
alternative TV packages that live stream over-the-
top and offer a growing range of niche sports
content from around the world – think
skateboarding, surfing and darts. These packages
could enable eSports fans to justify the cost of
premium, 24/7 gaming content that includes
access to a selection of other channels without
the burden of locking into a fixed-term contract.”
Harrie Tholen of NexGuard sees premium live
sports remaining the top driver of subscriber
attraction and retention for pay TV operators.
2017 trends
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 15
“Broadcasters/content creators will have to fiercely adapt to accommodate how young people view sports.”
14-16_trends.indd 3 06/02/2017 16:05:41
And demand for online access through fixed and
mobile devices will only continue to encourage
operators to make live content available across
multiple platforms.
5. More Live OTT: part IIMuch of online viewing has been on-demand but
Per Lindgren at Net Insight believes that live will
be a strong focus in OTT in 2017.
According to Lindgren, there will be an
increased focus on low delay in live streaming and
screen synchronisation. For the first time live
television will be harmonised across all screens,
enabling new features to be applied to a
complementary second screen and provide
unprecedented viewing experiences that will
induce new business models to accommodate the
changes in the media landscape and consumer
viewing habits
This coincides with OTT’s general move into
mass market. In some markets, OTT distributed
video is already more than 20% of total amount of
video minutes consumed.
“Healthy business case analysis will drive new
launches rather than what we’ve seen in the
earlier stages of the market. We will also see some
less well run services decide to pull out or adapt
their strategies to reality,” says Accedo CEO
Michael Lantz.
In parallel, as Harmonic’s Throw observes,
software-defined networking and cloud technology
will be used more and more by video content and
service providers to speed up time to market for
these new services.
6. The role and impact of Facebook LiveIn 2016, Facebook launched its Facebook Live
feature and as a result it has seen 88% growth in
video posts. Since the launch of Facebook Live, a
number of broadcasters began to experiment with
streaming content or teasers live to the platform
to attract viewers to broadcast programming.
Commentators expect Facebook Live to keep
growing in the coming years. There is a lot of
interest in using it as an avenue to build
awareness, driven by Facebook’s established
market position and ability to help content owners
reach niche audiences through its rich data on
user needs and wants.
There is an OTT opportunity to effectively
harness this platform, but it has to be part of a
larger strategy to deliver in ways that provide
better direct monetisation, according to Finch at
Simplestream. He sees Facebook Live as a prime
example of simplified content delivery: “All
content players need is a good-quality smartphone
with an Internet connection and suddenly
thousands can tune in.”
Monetisation, however, remains a crucial piece
of the puzzle. With platforms like Facebook Live
generating and delivering live content to a
plethora of socially-syndicated devices, the need
to ensure effective delivery to drive monetisation
efforts is important, especially to mobile.
Craig Moehl of Groovy Gecko shares the
opinion that over the coming months, we are
likely to see a growing role for Facebook for
broadcasters and other content providers
including brands. “This year sees the launch of
Facebook Live 360, giving broadcasters the
opportunity to stream live 360 content direct into
the news feed and we are likely to see some
innovative uses for that.”
7. And some othersAddressable TV is here. The notion of being able
to serve personalised ads in TV pods has existed
for a long time, but the infrastructure was never
there. To date, addressable TV was only present in
about 3% of the US market, but this year AT&T is
planning to sell targeted ads via Direct TV Now.
In addition, Facebook’s Audience Network is
testing ad delivery in TV apps running on Roku
and AppleTV. If Facebook can do as good of a
job on the big screen as it does on mobile and
web it will have a bright 2017, reckons Shai.
Continued shift to personalised video
experiences. The movement towards customised
video experiences will continue as the audience
moves to new-age content platforms like Facebook
live and Periscope. Content will continue to shift
from destination-oriented models to social-feed
based, more personalised model, says KA
Srinivasan of Amagi. Adoption of personalised,
multi-screen viewing will also have an impact on
advertising and monetisation, he adds. With the
rise in ad-blockers, we could see major
broadcasters and content owners moving to a
native app-based subscription model for
monetisation, or shifting to a server side ad
insertion platform.
Collaborative models of broadcast management
and delivery. Srinivasan also predicts a rise in
cloud-based, dynamic collaboration for broadcast
management as broadcasters and content owners
try to tackle the demand for personalisation.
For example, a live broadcast could be produced
with multiple contributors who may or may not
be co-located. The live feed could be from an
event in Germany, the commentary from
Norway, and the on-screen graphics could be
processed in India.
Early window movie releases. People expect
films sooner after their initial cinema release
window. With Netflix releasing blockbuster films
straight onto its service, 2017 could see the
cinema business model challenged even more
strongly. “We’re likely to see a growing sub-section
of VoD services in 2017 that cater to home-
release models, including exclusive partnerships
between VOD providers, studios and production
companies,” says Williams at Ostmodern.
NexGuard’s Tholen is confident shortening
release window for home consumption will
benefit forensic watermarking technology, which
constitutes “a crucial step” in an early release
VoD environment.
Mico-services. More and more (micro-) services
will move the beating heart of their operations
to the cloud. And a diverse range of services
will start to be made available to consumers via
APIs. Nobody will need to build everything
in-house from scratch any more, or even continue
to rely on standard software components that are
hosted and operated in-house. “Complete
ecosystems will be made available in the cloud as
‘plug-and-play’ solutions,” predicts Borchers
at 3SS.
“Generally our industry will be seeing less of
what we conventionally consider ‘development’, in
favour of more digital engineering in the purest
sense of the word, combining and configuring
services that are readily available in the ‘cloud-
sphere’ with real creativity and flexibility as
fundamental requirements of progress.”
2017 trends
16 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
14-16_trends.indd 4 06/02/2017 16:06:01
SHORTLISTANNOUNCED MARCH 2017
@NTechAwards #NationalTechAwards
The inaugural National Technology Awards - celebrating the pioneers of technology and encouraging excellence
The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony and gala dinner on:
17 May 2017Millennium Hotel London Mayfair
BOOK YOUR TABLE NOWwww.nationaltechnologyawards.co.uk
Supporters
FStechFStech
Organised by
Sponsored by
NationalTechnologyAwards2017-v2.indd 1 10/02/2017 09:55:23
While the increased
popularity of Video
on Demand (VoD)
has given
broadcasters a
wealth of new
and exciting
opportunities to engage consumers, it also brings
with it a host of challenges as viewers expect
access to a full range of video content wherever
and whenever suits them.
More than ever, consumers are trying to
circumvent geographic restrictions and access
video content from all over the world, whether
content owners consent to it or not. Tools such as
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Domain Name
Systems (DNS), Tor, and proxy servers are
helping drive a growth in the illegal viewing of
geographically restricted content, posing a
significant challenge to the media industry. And
with the threat of “spoofing” – in which an
illegitimate viewer uses technology to impersonate
a trusted IP address and appear to have a
legitimate connection – having directly affected
the value placed on content in recent months, the
pressure is on to provide and implement robust
measures to combat the issue.
It is vital that video distribution companies
utilise effective technology to understand where
their viewers are accessing content from and
identify those who are falsifying their locations,
to ensure content suppliers’ regulations are
adhered to – in fact, some studios mandate that
providers incorporate IP geolocation technology
into their distribution platforms
for this very reason. But how are
viewers hiding their locations and
how can VoD providers utilise IP
intelligence to block these users,
without having a negative impact
on those watching content legitimately?
Where they’re hidingBy using proxy servers such as VPNs, users can
hide their physical locations in an attempt to view
content, which may be restricted in their country.
And as more and more viewers use proxy services,
production companies are seeing their profits
diminish, as they no longer have the ability to
control content distribution effectively. As
a result, broadcasters are facing increasing
pressure to keep abreast of their audience’s
viewing habits and ensure they deliver the right
content to the right users, adhering to geographic
rights restrictions. Achieving all of this can
prove a juggling act, even for the savviest of
content operators.
Security
Where in the world are you?Charlie Johnson outlines how IP intelligence can restore the value of VoD content
18 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
18-19_Geotagging.indd 2 07/02/2017 12:41:46
It is no longer acceptable to turn a blind eye to
users who appear to be bypassing restrictions for
accessing online content, and some of the major
VoD providers – including US-based Hulu – have
already started to tackle the issue of geofencing
circumvention by blocking viewers who use a
VPN, DNS or other hosting designation to view
content from another country.
It seems the industry is starting to come
together in the fight against illegal access, but
how will the new measures affect legitimate,
subscription-paying customers?
It is important to recognise that not all
users who connect to the internet with tools that
hide their location are intending to view content
illegally. There are several reasons for connecting
via a proxy, for example to protect user privacy,
or to take advantage of a faster internet
connection, and ultimately, enjoy an enhanced
viewing experience. VPN usage also tends to
rise dramatically in countries where certain
websites are unavailable. For instance, internet
users in China are progressively turning to
VPNs to access social networking sites such
as Twitter. Increasingly, users are accessing
the internet via mobile connections, even
to watch content. However some telcos and
mobile providers are sending through centralised
proxy servers, unwittingly changing the
customer’s location.
How to find themUntil now, content operators have understandably
found the prospect of detecting which users
are illegally viewing content a daunting
prospect, as unlike terrestrial channels – which
broadly speaking do not function outside their
country of origin – digital channels require a
different approach and a clear strategy for
handling geofencing.
IP geolocation technology, however, enables
broadcasters to pinpoint where in the world a user
is viewing content, right down to their postcode.
Once the viewer’s location has been established,
the broadcaster can decide whether to allow or
revoke access to that user depending on the
country they are in. In many cases, geo detection
down to a postcode level may be overkill but in
reality, with geographic borders being just a line
on the map, country-level accuracy has become
increasingly important. Recognising when a
Norwegian subscriber drives into Sweden and
may only be a few miles away from his or her
home address is a big concern for many VoD
channels. This level of “bleed” used to be deemed
acceptable within the streaming space, but with
tighter margins this is no longer the case.
Layering on proxy knowledge to understand those
who may knowingly (or not) be changing their
physical locations can keep broadcasters on the
right side of their geofencing commitments. This
ability to holistically evaluate user location along
with proxy data is invaluable in enabling
broadcasters to remain compliant with geographic
rights, while at the same time delivering the best
possible viewing experience to genuine customers.
IP intelligence technology is continually
evolving and now has the capability to combine
accurate location analysis and proxy data to
assess user connections in real time. So how does
it actually work?
IP intelligence and geolocation at work One company that has successfully incorporated
IP intelligence and geolocation data into its digital
rights management (DRM) initiatives is
VUBIQUITY. The organisation connects content
owners and video providers to deliver
entertainment to viewers on any screen, and
works with nearly 650 leading film studios,
television networks, independent producers and
multi-channel networks (MCNs) to bring
premium content to over 1,000 global video
distributors spanning 109 million households
across 121 territories.
VUBIQUITY needed to find an IP geolocation
provider that would offer accurate and reliable
data, specifically for African and Latin American
regions, to gain access to high quality, all-
encompassing datasets that were continually
updated. Using IP intelligence technology, the
company was able to uncover actionable
information about online users such as geographic
location and proxies (including VPNs) – all while
respecting the user’s right to privacy.
VUBIQUITY has incorporated this technology
into its Content as a Service (CaaS) platform,
which consists of a cloud-based centralised
repository of pre-licensed, pre-configured content
that is stored, hosted, and distributed across a
global delivery network.
The use of these datasets within the CaaS
platform assists VUBIQUITY in processing
incoming requests and delivering content to any
point on the network on demand, while managing
entitlements and access to video assets based on
the authentication of user rights and integration
into the order process. According to
VUBIQUITY, the risks are significant without
this type of digital protection and the company
takes comfort in knowing that it is using reliable,
quality data to meet the studios’ licensing
requirements, protecting not only the studios,
but also the company and its operators.
Restoring value for content producers and distributorsTo optimise revenues, the media industry must
constantly adapt to changing consumer habits
and the growth of digital platforms, which
present wider opportunities to connect. Analysing
IP addresses is a complex business, with new
attempts to overcome restrictions occurring on a
daily basis. Winning this game of “whack-a-mole”
requires expert engineering knowledge and regular
updates 365 days a year. Meanwhile, isolating
suspect connections means the rest of the user
base (i.e. legitimate customers) remains
unaffected, and media companies are able to
protect the value and revenue derived from
premium content, which would otherwise be lost
to opportunistic proxy users taking advantage of
modern-day technology.
The fact that broadcasters are increasingly
taking more steps to combat these circumventions
represents a positive and significant milestone for
the media industry. However, there is a long way
to go before digital piracy is eliminated
completely. Content producers and distributors
need to work together to invest time and resources
into their DRM strategies, and identify the
patterns and behaviours of their users, which
includes generations of “always on” consumers.
In an age when maintaining data privacy is so
important, using IP intelligence also enables
broadcasters to verify each of their customers
without any Personally Identifiable Information
(PII) ever being exchanged, which means they can
rest in the knowledge that they are remaining
compliant with data-protection laws.
Focusing on high-quality data – powered by
accurate IP intelligence and geolocation
information – will enable media companies to
strike that all-important balance between
compliance with geographical rights and provision
of a first-class streaming service, which keeps
their customers coming back for more.
Charlie Johnson is Vice President, UK and Ireland,
Digital Element
Security
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 19
18-19_Geotagging.indd 3 07/02/2017 12:41:51
The mobile industry has never
been one to shy away from
big targets so it’s only
natural that its ambitions
scale up with every new ‘G’.
The latest pushes up the dial
a significant level up from
previous mobile communications generations,
which were focused on a narrower set of services:
2G was designed for voice, to which was added
packet data; 3G was voice, circuit-switched and
then low-data rate packet data; and 4G was for
mobile broadband, now being extended to support
narrow-band machine-type traffic.
To be sure, 5G’s scope is wide ranging to say
the least. Digitalisation, business transformation,
ubiquitous connectivity (both machine and
human) and automation (highly automated
systems and processes) are terms that are used
almost synonymously with 5G.
“Arguably 5G is the first network to be
designed to support all types of traffic. Previously
we designed networks with more of a specific
purpose in mind,” notes Jason Elliott, 5G market
development manager at Nokia.
The industry is trying to put technology in
place that can handle exponential traffic growth
that will only increase with the Internet of Things
(IoT) and other applications, such as AR/VR.
Cisco’s latest Mobile Visual Networking Index
forecasts that by 2021, 5G will account for 0.2%
of connections (25 million), but 1.5% of total
traffic. Cisco estimates that by 2021 a 5G
connection will generate nearly 30 GB per month,
which is (a very specific) 4.7 times more traffic
than the average 4G connection and 10.7 times
more traffic than the average 3G connection.
At the same time, industrial, healthcare and
transportation sectors are especially on 5G’s
opportunity radar.
According to Ericsson’s research, 94% of
executives from eight major industries rate next-
generation mobile networks as a top strategic
priority. “We believe 5G is not only a facet of
mobile technology;
it will do for
industries something
like what mobility
has done for
consumers and
smartphones. It will
bring the benefits of
scale, affordability, ubiquity, mobility and
performance to industries beyond smartphones,”
says Aniruddho Basu, head of technology
advisory and portfolio at Group Function
Technology, Ericsson.
“5G is about enabling new ‘use cases’ and
creating new business models. It is more than a
new radio technology and will fundamentally
change the way we build and operate networks,”
adds Elliott.
5G use cases have been grouped into three
high-level categories:
• Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB);
• Massive Machine Type Communications
(MMTC); and
• Ultra Reliable and Low Latency
Communications (URLLC).
To achieve these goals, 5G is asking for very
high bandwidth (up to 10Gbps), together with
very low end-to-end latency (under a millisecond).
This makes 5G something of a “requirement
paradox”, as Dr Sameh Yamany, CTO at Viavi
The long and winding road to 5GTransformative or overly grandiose? Goran Nastic weighs up the big fi fth-generation mobile debate
20 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
5G
20-23_5G.indd 1 13/02/2017 11:53:50
Solutions, puts it.
Independent analyst Dean Bubley likens 5G to
something of a philosophical debate. “As usual,
the biggest risk to the mobile industry is strategic
over-reach,” he says. “If it persists in trying to
define 5G as an all-encompassing monolithic
architecture, with the hope of replacing all fixed
and private networks, it will fail. The risk is that if
it tries to create a jack-of-all-trades, it will likely
end up as master-of-none. 5G has huge potential -
but also needs a dose of pragmatism, given that it
is running alongside a variety of adjacent
technologies that look like potential disruptors.”
Anand Gonuguntla, co-founder and CEO of
Centina Systems, agrees that, historically, the
mobile industry has perhaps tried to get too far
ahead of market realities. “But, the other thing
that’s historically accurate is that with the
migration to previous generations, the use cases
weren’t always spelled out. So, with 5G the same
questions are coming around, and maybe ‘killer
app’ is kind of an antiquated term.”
Build it and they will come?Within all these stated opportunities, mobile
network operators (MNOs) will need to identify
new and profitable business models for deploying
new services.
Dr Yamany sees 5G as the next industrial
revolution in terms of automation. “Automation
will be the business model that drives 5G,” he
argues, noting that CTOs of Tier 1 MNOs like
Vodafone and Orange have solid business plans
on how they will use 5G technology. As a result,
he points out we won’t see a wide range but a very
specific, very individually business-model
orientated deployment of 5G. In this sense, he
suggests, MNOs have learned from their
experience with 4G/LTE, which failed to generate
incremental ARPUs.
Others aren’t so convinced. “The business case
is unproven and the user-case situation is quite
frankly a bit of a mess. At the moment, there
simply aren’t the applications that require a 5G
network,” reckons Kester Mann at analyst firm
CCS Insight.
“There’s an awful lot of potential applications
touted by 5G that actually the evolution of 4G
networks is perfectly capable of dealing with,” he
continues. “Ideas like autonomous cars, drone
deliveries and remote surgery are all well and
good but that’s very much in the long run and do
they create a genuine business case?”
VR and IoT can be done with 4G advances
such as LTE-Advanced Pro, while 4G in
combination with NB-IoT can address most needs
of M2M type connections, adds Mann.
Nevertheless, he is not entirely dismissive.
“Low latency is probably the headline feature of
5G, more so than simply greater speed. That
could be become a key marketing tool of
promoting 5G.”
Mann also highlights the need to involve
other industries such as health, energy and
utilities in developing a 5G vision and inputting
into standards. “For operators, such engagement
is vital to establish early business models and
could create opportunities to establish
competitive advantage.”
Nicolas Ott at Arqiva, admits that 5G will
struggle to live up to the hype - at least early on.
“It’s being heralded as the mother of all solutions,
but it’s unlikely that all of these promises will be
delivered, or at least in 5G initial phases. However
of those promises you can be almost certain that
ultrafast mobile broadband and probably
improved latency will be fulfilled. It will be
transformational and you’ll see a wider divide
between winners and losers after it’s happened.”
Standards timelineThere is no official definition yet of what makes
5G, but it is taking shape. The ITU will ratify the
standard in 2020, with a lot of pre-standard trials
and momentum in place as MNOs and vendors
jostle for positioning. Nokia and Ericsson count
more than 75 5G projects between them alone,
and that’s without mentioning other equipment
heavyweights like Huawei. Different companies
and regions have different priorities in terms of
which features should be standardised when.
“Our target is to commercialise 5G during next
year and we are on track regarding that target,”
notes Nokia’s Elliott.
A key activity that is taking place now is the
standardisation of 5G radio access and core
network technologies. With the aim of submitting
a candidate radio technology to the IMT-2020
process that was established by the ITU-R, 3GPP
has started the standardisation of a new access
technology named 5G New Radio (NR). The first
phase of 5G NR specifications - 3GPP Release 15
- is expected to complete in 2018, allowing for
early commercial deployment in the 2020
timeframe. The second part - Phase 2 Rel 16 - is
expected to complete in late 2019, allowing for
commercial deployment in 2022 onwards.
“It’s important to try to cut through some of
the hype,” warns Mann. “Given what’s happened
in the industry and efforts of some operators and
manufacturers have made early on in the 5G
roadmap this could almost create confusion,
where some claim they have launched 5G before
standards have even been ratified.”
Perhaps with this in mind, 3GPP in February
2017 unveiled a logo for 5G, which can be used
for both Rel-15 and Rel-16 specifications.
In a way, 5G will entail revolution, but it will
also be about evolution. For instance, 5G will not
replace 4G. It is designed to co-exist and many of
the fundamental building blocks for 5G will come
from the evolution of today’s 4G LTE networks.
“Operators will need to identify optimal
investment timing for 5G networks to support
services that can operate on 4G+ networks,” says
Chris Cave, director, R&D, InterDigital, which is
involved in the system design, prototyping and
standardisation of 5G systems.
4G LTE networks continue to evolve and will
be capable, in the 3GPP Release 15-16 timeframe,
of addressing a large number of use cases and
requirements that have been defined for 5G.
“5G is indeed very ambitious in its objective to
support such a broad set of use cases. In our view,
this will work itself out through the ‘phasing’ of
5G, for both standardisation and commercial
deployment,” reckons Cave.
5G technologiesA number of key changes are expected on the
mobile infrastructure side for 5G, taking in
constituent technology parts like beamforming,
massive MIMO, small cells and dense networks
with intelligence moved to the edge.
All the vendors CSI spoke to see virtualised
NFV and SDN as key building blocks for 5G
networks. Both 5G Radio Access Network (RAN)
and Core Network (CN) architecture and
protocols are being designed in 3GPP under the
assumption that they could be deployed using
NFV/SDN concepts in order to enable more
flexible deployment options for operators.
In theory at least, NFV/SDN together with
network slicing, will handle these diversity of
requirements that comes with 5G, with networks
themselves becoming more flexible and fluid.
The point of slicing is especially important in
5G, as it allows for multiple virtual networks each
with a specific level of service running on the
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 21
5G
20-23_5G.indd 2 13/02/2017 11:40:44
22 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
5G
same hardware infrastructure, which in turn will
allow 5G networks to satisfy Dr Yamany’s
paradox of high broadband and low latency.
“Network slicing will fundamentally change the
way we look at provisioning services,” points
out Elliott.
Additionally, a 5G architecture is designed to
accommodate different types of access
technologies, which includes non-3GPP ones like
WiFi. Fixed access will also be included in
delivering the increased capacity to meet demand.
“After all, the application experience is always
more important that the access it is delivered on,”
notes Ericsson’s Basu.
“The line between what is wireline and wireless
will very soon literally disappear,” adds Dr
Yamany. “We are seeing Ethernet, transport and
backhaul fundamentally change.”
These elements together are expected to create
an architecture that looks and behaves much
differently than previous generations.
“We have a system view on 5G where radio
and core assets will evolve at the same time. It is
a merger of the building practices of telecom, IT
and media industries, embracing both mobile and
fixed access, data centre and cloud base core
networks, micro service architectures from the
media world, and more horizontal and
programmable platforms than ever before,”
explains Basu. He belives that with a 5G system
approach the industry can address a bulk of
critical and mass scale use cases.
“Strategically, you’ve got to think differently
about managing that, and getting systems in place
that are capable of tracking the health and
performance of this dynamic network,” believes
Gonuguntla at Centina.
Will Europe lag behind?Each region is looking at 5G in a different way,
depending on their needs. Trial activities are
currently more intense and timelines are more
aggressive in markets such as Japan, Korea, China
and the US than in the rest of the world.
Asia has taken an early lead, with a strong
push to showcase 5G technology at key
international events. The winter and summer
Olympics in South Korea and Japan in 2018 and
2020 are driving pre-commercial trials and early
deployments in late 2017 and into 2018.
The US market is looking at a very specific
segment of 5G, which is fixed wireless in order to
stave off competition from cable. The first
deployments there are also expected by the end of
this year, with AT&T planning to launch pre-5G
services in Austin and Indianapolis offering
theoretical speeds of up to 400Mbps initially and
1Gbps thereafter through the use of carrier
aggregation. The telco (which aims to explore 5G
signal coverage for the 28GHz, 39GHz, and sub-
6GHz bands) is involved in a strategic game of
5G chess with rival Verizon.
In Europe, meanwhile, MNOs appear a lot
more conservative and will likely deploy new 5G
technology in phases in line with commercial
demand for new services. There is nonetheless a
lot of engagement in trials, pilots and projects,
with a big focus on cross-industry participation
and public-private partnerships, chief among them
the EU-formed 5G Public-Private Partnership
Association. Within 5GPP, there are some 20
projects taking place focusing on all different
types of applications and approaches, albeit with
M2M and automation firmly in mind.
Europe is very keen to leverage the 5G system
to a higher degree than was done with 4G, argues
Ericsson’s Basu. “Europe’s ambition is to
on-board industries very early. We see initiatives
such as METIS, Horizon 2020 and 5G for Europe
which include industries, universities and
operators. The ambition is bigger than just a
consumer perspective.”
But Bubley at Disruptive Analysis does not
mince his words in his own assessment of the
practical challenges involved. “The European 5G
community seems to be seduced by academia and
the promise of lots of complex network-slicery
and equally-dubious edge-computing visions. It’s
much more interested in the (late, uncertain-
revenue) IoT use-cases rather than fixed-access
and mobile broadband.
“Fixed-access 5G won’t need complex network-
slicing & NFV cores to be useful, as it can be
functionally similar to other forms of broadband
access. It’s a lot simpler, and a lot faster-to-market.
“In other words, it’s missing the boat. By the
time the EU, the European operators and
European research institutions get their 5G act
together, we’ll have had a repeat of 4G, with the
US, Korea and Japan leading the way.”
Nokia’s Elliott is, naturally, somewhat more
optimistic. “At the end of the day, it is not only
about who is first but mainly who is able to
generate most business out of 5G and who can
generate most impact of the entire economy. And
this phase has not even begun.”
Spectrum fragmentationWhatever happens gloablly, spectrum allocation
and harmonisation are widely perceived as key,
including the need for unlicensed frequencies. 5G
will require significantly more spectrum than is
currently available. The three ranges are Sub-1
GHz, 1-6 GHz and above 6 GHz depending on
the use case.
Although there has been significant progress
towards 5G spectrum identification
internationally (namely in ITU-R), it is still not
entirely clear which spectrum bands will be used
above 6 GHz in various regions around the globe,
notes InterDigital’s Cave.
20-23_5G.indd 3 13/02/2017 11:41:10
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 23
5G
The US operators have freed up around the
28Ghz band to trial and use. So have their South
Korean counterparts like SK Telecom, including
above 30Ghz for high bandwidth purposes.
As 28Ghz is taken up by the satellite industry
in Europe, operators are looking at 3-6Ghz for
low latency applications, using different access
technologies including microwave.
European MNOs may have access to 25Ghz
and 32GHz frequencies, which are in the process
of being identified, as well as harmonised 700Mhz
spectrum used by incumbent broadcasters.
“5G is really an open vessel into which
everyone pours their hopes and dreams. The only
realistic way to make this spectrum available is
through aggressive sharing, through the use of a
collection sensing, location monitoring and
database technologies,” argues out Kalpak Gude,
president of Dynamic Spectrum Alliance.
“The standard is catching up but there are so
many flavours of 5G I don’t know how we will
standardise that and have ubiquitous 5G services
across the entire planet,” agrees Dr Yamani.
“With spectrum not yet completely defined, you
can imagine the headaches all of these handset
and chip manufacturers are thinking about.”
That’s where potential fragmentation could
arise. Equally important, the higher bands will get
the support from the major handset
manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung.
With regards to these handsets, as 5G will
support a broader range of radio spectrum and
new coding schemes, devices will need be
designed to take advantage of these improvements,
according to Steve Plunkett, CTO, Broadcast and
Media Services, Ericsson. “From a media
perspective, increased support for multicast
modes within devices will offer more flexibility
and capacity for live events.”
5G TV: what about satellite, cable?With regards to media, is 5G a threat or an
opportunity to broadcast, and what role will it
play? A somewhat unsatisfying answer is that it is
too early to tell, but probably a little of both.
5G NR is being designed with the requirement
to natively efficiently support existing 4G
Multicast/Broadcast services, notes Cave.
The broadcast industry has enjoyed a somewhat
chequered relationship with mobile, but has
identified 5G as an important enabler for future
media services, with standards bodies, trade
associations, media organisations and the vendor
community tracking progress and actively
contributing to 3GPP activities in 5G.
The EBU, which has been critical of mobile’s
spectrum demands in the past, ran a consultation
process with its members in 2016 and in
November published a report identifying the
opportunities 5G presents for A/V distribution, as
media consumption on mobile devices continues
to increase year on year, both in terms of viewing
hours and bandwidth consumed.
“More than any previous generation of mobile
technology, 5G is drawing in a broad constituency
of industry interest and media is very well
represented,” says Ericsson’s Plunkett
Ericsson reckons 5G will enable “live TV at
scale”, while in a recent report Strategy Analytics
similarly recommends it is time to include TV
delivery as an ‘anchor’ use case for 5G.
“The emergence of 5G TV would represent a
further stage in the convergence of media and
communications. It would also raise important
questions relating to the roles of different
ecosystem players and the future structure of the
media value chain,” says Strategy’s David Mercer.
“For 5G to become a viable TV platform, other
emerging network technologies need to be
deployed, improving the overall capacity and
suitability of the network for TV-like services.
Realistically it is likely to be beyond the next
decade (2030+) before 5G TV becomes as
important as existing platforms in terms of
market penetration, but we could see regional
success stories over the course of the next
decade which will help to demonstrate its
commercial viability.”
In the meantime, the satellite industry is keen
to push the message that satellite has a big role to
play in 5G and IoT. Satellite body ESOA
published a position paper arguing that a win-win
solution can be found that allows terrestrial and
satellite 5G services to cooperate. Indeed, satellite
already delivers many services promised by 5G
and the growth in High Throughput (HTS)
systems delivering terabits of connectivity
worldwide, so it would almost be rude to ignore.
Ericsson’s Basu further notes that the HAPS
(high-altitude platform station) is showing a
strong interest to start using 4G and 5G in
their ecosystems.
These are still early days on the road to 5G and
developments will almost certainly occasionally
stall on the way. But, whatever form it eventually
takes, get ready for a 5G future.
5G in the UKAs part of the UK government’s 5G research
initiatives, the country’s Ordnance Survey
(OS) is to lead a consortium developing
what is being labelled a groundbreaking
planning and mapping tool that will be
instrumental for the national rollout of 5G
technology. It will determine the prime
locations to place the radio antennae or
access points necessary to enable a 5G
network. The intelligent modelling tool will
be trialled first in the city of Bournemouth,
and if successful it could be shared with
other countries as they develop their own 5G
networks. The aim is to deploy 5G quickly
and efficiently and turn the UK into a 5G
and digital leader.
While the 3.4-3.8 GHz band is identified
as a ‘primary’ band to provide capacity for
5G services in the UK, the 24.25-27.5 GHz
band is described by Ofcom as a ‘pioneer’
millimetre-wave spectrum for higher capacity
services. “The choice of 700 MHz, 3.4 to 3.8
GHz and 26 GHz will create the best
opportunity for the UK to benefit from the
first wave of 5G equipment,” said Ofcom.
Arqiva, the UK communications
infrastructure company, also sees huge
opportunities in outdoor small cells
proliferation, in macro sites densification,
and in the possible emergence of 5G fixed
wireless access to complement fibre where it
will become uneconomical.
“We’re very excited about it. We’re
working with Ofcom to explain the positive
implications of 5G as the government needs
to take bold decisions now to allow 5G to
flourish in future,” says Nicolas Ott, MD
telecoms & M2M at Arqiva.
According to Ott, the radius of a small
cell is typically around 250 metres and may
decrease with use of higher frequencies. “So
when you look at a major city, London being
an example, you might need as many as
500,000 small cells”.
Arqiva is, in fact, currently rolling out
small cells in London, and the amount of
small cells that would need to be added
would be a significant jump from current
figures. “So there is a very interesting
opportunity there,” says Ott.
20-23_5G.indd 4 13/02/2017 11:41:51
CSI: Give us a quick company update to start with.Jon Alexander: I run the media business for
Level 3. This includes the CDN network as well
as a separate product called Vyvx, our broadcast
video transmission service. Those services are
bringing the two worlds together – with the rise of
OTT, we see those products are getting closer
together and we see we are well placed to help our
customers take the traditional broadcast content
and move it online. It made a lot of sense to
put those groups together and we’ve aligned
our engineering, operations and development
teams together as well; sharing the expertise
between those worlds.
Satellite used to be the only way of moving
broadcast quality video around. The 1990 Super
Bowl was our first major event, and we’ve carried
it every year on the Vyvx network – that’s our
marquee event we launched with and have
supported ever since.
We acquired the CDN business in 2007 from
Savvis but that business goes back to 1996. So a
long history with separate development paths and
we only really brought them together
in 2012 inside Level 3.
As we started to see more OTT and convergence
with our customers, it made a lot of sense for us
to go down the same path as well.
CSI: How would you say the CDN landscape has changed since the start of the century? Is it a case of evolution or revolution?JA: That’s a good question. There have been
step changes but the pace of growth in that
market is pretty phenomenal, even if there
hasn’t been acceleration. We have grown our
network between 60-80% year-on-year. It’s
been almost ten years now that we’ve been
growing at that pace and there’s no sign of
that slowing down.
Key drivers behind that are not just OTT
video, but also increasingly we’ve been
seeing gaming driving peak traffic levels that
are even bigger than large video events. When
a new patch or game is released, it can drive
terabits of traffic pushed out to millions of
users pretty quickly. In terms of eSports or
online gaming, companies like Twitch were
regularly delivering to audiences of a million
concurrent users even five years ago.
Broadcasters have now overtaken that. All
the connected devices are driving those
trends as well.
CSI: How much of a concern is commoditisation in the CDN market?JA: As with any network service or hardware,
there is price compression. It runs typically
around 10% y-o-y. We see the same thing in the IP
transit business, voice and other markets we
operate. It is something we are constantly looking
at working out how to bring our cost down in line
with that. Fortunately, so are silicon, networking
equipment and other components built into
our costs structure. That point around
commoditisation of bandwidth keeps coming up
in relation to CDNs, and this is one of the
advantages that Level 3 has. With our ownership
of the network, we are in a strong positon of
owning many of the underlying elements that help
facilitate the CDN business. Given the three
largest cost components of a CDN – the servers,
network and data centres – we really have an
advantage with the last two. So some of our
competitors may be feeling the pressure where we
have more advantage in ownership economics.
CSI: I guess then you would distance yourself from the ‘spray-and-pray’ approach given to your competitors.JA: We wouldn’t call it spray-and-pray, there’s a
lot of science that goes into it. Within Level 3,
we have a robust planning organisation that looks
at all the layers of our network. We plan from
fibre in the ground, the IP equipment that sits on
top of that, the CDN servers on top of that, all
of the interconnections with last-mile network,
data centre connectivity power and cooling
infrastructure… if we’re looking into expanding
into a new market, we’re really looking from the
ground up. We have to be very rigorous and we
have developed good prediction models based
on demands placed on the internet.
CSI: How have broadcasters’ demands changed over the years in terms of CDN and data centre requirements?JA: It’s a little different for every broadcaster.
It comes down to their specific culture, if you
will. For instance, some have a strong internal
technology team and like to do things in-house.
Others want more of a managed service with a
usage-based model. This influences their decision.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all.What I would say is that
the online media part of broadcast was an
underfunded side project 10 years ago, whereas
now it’s a central part and has seen as a huge
growth driver for broadcasters.
CSI: Can providers such as Level 3 play
Q&AQ&A
We spoke to Jon Alexander from Level 3 about the company’s plans for growth and how it aims to carry more broadcast content over its network
Taking CDNs to the next level
24 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
Jon
Ale
xan
der
24-25_Level_3_Q&A.indd 1 06/02/2017 14:05:41
more of a role in terms of tacking growing online piracy threats such as live OTT sports?JA: We definitely have a role to play. It’s not
a problem we can solve alone; there’s an
ecosystem we fit into. Within our products, we
have security controls, access and authorisation
mechanisms to make sure content goes to the
right people. We make sure we protect the
content on our network and that it’s not
leaking out. For premium events like the Super
Bowl with huge global audiences, protecting
that content is obviously key. There’s very
much a layered approach to that, from
acquisition, contribution in mezzanine format,
and as that moves through the processing chain
and gets encoded for broadcast and online
distribution, it then gets encrypted, wrapped with
DRM maybe or other access controls put in
place, and as it comes onto the CDN, we get
involved in protecting those when delivering
to consumers.
CSI: Are you seeing a rise in encrypted content as Netflix and others move more toward this type of traffic?JA: We have seen a huge increase in requests
from our customers to deliver the video over an
encrypted transport, so using SSL or TSL
encryption. Over the last six months, there’s
been a 10x increase in the amount of encrypted
content that we are delivering. A lot of that is
driven by browser vendors like Google, Apple
and Mozilla, who are now preferring encrypted
content. If video delivered to Chrome for instance
is not encrypted, it will generate warnings.
Apple also won’t allow any apps to be published
that don’t deliver encrypted video.
CSI: On a general level, what technologies or techniques are you looking to help deliver high bandwidth services like 4K UKD and VR?JA: Again, it’s more incremental rather than
revolutionary. The way we deliver video today
is primarily over TCP, using HTP as the
transmission protocol. On top of that, the
majority of video we deliver is formatted as HSL
and encoded as MPEG-4/H.264. New codecs
such as HEVC and new formats like MPEG-
DASH are coming along to make delivery more
efficient. More fundamentally, there are new
versions of HTTP like HTTP/2, which make
transmission more efficient, reduce some of
Q&A
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 25
24-25_Level_3_Q&A.indd 2 06/02/2017 14:05:57
the overheads and help us support higher bitrate
streams at a high level of resiliency. UDP is
also an alternative protocol to TCP that has
some advantages in delivering very high
bit-rate video.
None of these are a silver bullet for jumping to
a 4K or 8K stream, but in aggregate, all these
changes - in conjunction with faster network
infrastructure and inter-connections with last-mile
ISPs in more locations to bring the content closer
– all of that together is how we are enabling
those higher quality experiences. We did testing
with VR streams in 2016 and customers were
typically looking at a 15-25 Mbps stream, which
is at the top end of what most networks can
sustain. The issue we are seeing is not the
backbone, but more from the last mile perspective
and inside the home; the last 10 feet is often
the bottleneck.
That’s the path we are on now. Twenty years
ago, none of the things we are talking about now
was possible. In five years time, we will deliver
even more. We will continue to see incremental
improvement, as a lot of technologies exist
already that will get us where we need to be in
five or even 10 years. We just need to continue
investing to keep up with demand.
CSI: Away from technology, how do you see the CDN market evolving over the next five to 10 years? JA: As a CDN provider, we are very bullish on
the market. There are two fundamental trends
driving the industry: growth in OTT consumption
and OTT replacing broadcast; and IoT. We will
see more devices connected to the internet that
will require software and security updates and
content pushed to them. Both will need
more CDN services.
We feel good about our position in the market
and our opportunity to scale up. We have seen
the overall market growing at roughly 18-20
percent over the last several years, and that
rate will continue going forward.
CSI: What impact do you see 5G having on your business? JA: Part of our challenge is that we can only
get so close to the end user devices. The lowest
common denominator affects our service and
the challenge can be in that final piece we
don’t control. So new technologies that make
networks perform better are helpful for us. 5G
is not a silver bullet, but that kind of investment
will keep us on our path and stay ahead
of demand.
CSI: Finally, what’s on the horizon for Level 3?JA: We announced a service last year called
‘Linear Channel Distribution,’ which is a
Vyvx service. The idea there is around facilitating
the distribution of broadcast television, and
we’ve actually launched the service with Fox
in the U.S. Traditionally, Fox has distributed
all of its programming via satellite to MVPD,
MSO and cable customers. Fox wanted to deliver
a high quality mezzanine feed and richer
metadata to describe the video and allow more
advanced ad replacement, supporting things like
local blackouts, which wasn’t possible over their
traditional broadcast means. With the LCD
service we launched, we are providing a fibre-
based transmission; Fox publishes all of that
programming onto our network and we provide
the ability for those MVPD platforms to subscribe
to that content and pull that content over fibre-
base connections into headends or
processing centres.
A lot of the early growth we’ve seen in that
service is from the OTT services, primarily in
the U.S. and Europe. We launched with Fox and
added several other broadcasters to that platform.
Our goal is to make that the default location to
get access to broadcast content.
Q&A
26 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
“Over the last six months, there’s been a 10x increase in the amount of encrypted content that we are delivering. A lot of that is driven by browser vendors.”
24-25_Level_3_Q&A.indd 3 06/02/2017 14:06:27
VoD
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 27
The era of VHS
video popularity
in the 1980s
seems a very long
time ago now,
but the pleasure
of being able to
get hold of the content you want
to watch quickly and easily has
a universal, timeless appeal. This
is part of the reason why online
subscription video-on-demand
(SVoD) services appear to have such a bright
future. Or – to be precise – some
of them do.
The number of homes with a subscription to
some kind of SVoD service should reach 428
million, across 200 countries, by 2021, compared
to about 248 million at the end of 2016,
according to Digital TV Research. Global SVoD
revenues grew from $12.2 billion in 2015 to
$17.46 billion in 2016; and may reach $32.18
billion in 2021.
Any SVoD strategy is shaped by and depends
upon the interaction of factors including country-
specific consumer preferences, regulatory
conditions and the existing TV landscape within a
country. But the emergence of global SVoD
services has had a significant impact in some
markets. In November 2016, Canadian SVoD
service Shomi, a joint venture run by cable
providers Rogers Communications and Shaw
Communications, ended operations. It had
around 700,000 subscribers, compared to the
5.2 million households in Canada with a
Netflix subscription.
It is now ten years since Netflix launched its
streaming service. With a business model now
based in large part on original content, since
January 2016 its services have been available in
almost every country on earth (exceptions include
China, Syria, North Korea and the territory of
Crimea). Digital TV Research suggests Netflix
will have 118 million subscribers worldwide by
2021, 27.5 per cent of the global total, although
44 per cent will be in the US, which will provide
52 per cent of its predicted $13.14 billion
revenue. This is despite the fact that its impact in
Asia, which may by then be the fastest growing
SVoD region, is expected to be limited.
Meanwhile, since December 2016, Amazon’s
SVoD services have also been available almost
everywhere; and Amazon is also investing heavily
in original content. Further global competition for
Netflix may soon come from other technology
giants: in January 2017 it was reported that Apple
is planning to produce original TV and movie
content to offer subscribers to its music services
by the end of 2017, while Google is also expected
to continue to invest in original programming to
add to Google Play services and catalogues.
“I think what Netflix and Amazon have done
means that the market changed dramatically in
2016,” says Mihai Crasneanu, CEO at VoD
content service provider Grey Juice Lab.
In addition, a growing number of content
owners, from broadcasters to
sports organisations, are
developing direct to consumer
(D2C) SVoD propositions.
Recent launches include
BritBox, an ad-free SVoD
service being launched in the
US by BBC Worldwide and ITV
to showcase the best content
produced by both broadcasters.
Nor does the emergence
of OTT SVoD seem
to have been a purely negative development for
all payTV providers. For example, research
released by Decipher in December 2016 suggests
that SVoD usage in pay TV households in the
UK increased from 10 per cent to 45 per cent
over the past four years, while the whole pay
TV base increased from 61 per cent to 69 per
cent of the UK population. Top tier pay TV
subscribers seemed to be buying SVoD services
at a faster rate than subscribers to cheaper
pay TV packages.
The same research suggested that households
without pay TV subscriptions were less willing
to subscribe to SVoD: take up of such services
had increased only from nine per cent to 28
per cent. The study suggests that households
favouring free TV but also using OTT apps
and SVoD were not a large enough group
to affect the pay TV segment to a
significant degree.
Understanding local audiencesLocal knowledge can also play an important role
in helping broadcasters and other players develop
viable SVoD services that can prosper alongside
Netflix and other global players, says Tom
Williams, chief executive of content delivery
specialist Ostmodern.
“Established broadcasters know they can’t
compete with these content giants with their
endless budgets, and must instead coexist with
them,” says Williams. “Localisation,
personalisation and content discovery are
What next for VoD?With some high profi le SVoD closures in 2016, David Adams asks what the future holds for video-on-demand services
“What Netflix and Amazon have done means that the market changed dramatically in 2016.”
27-29_VoD.indd 1 10/02/2017 15:44:56
personalisation and content discovery are
all concepts these players can and should use
to adapt and thrive.
“It’s important for VoD services to understand
the changing behaviours of these local audiences.
In Brazil, for example, evening TV has in the
past been dominated by telenovelas but in
recent years, a new trend has emerged in which
younger people increasingly turn away from
linear broadcast towards OTT content like US
sitcoms or dramas and short-form content on
YouTube or Facebook. Pay TV operators
need to respond to this change by providing
SVoD services tailored to these preferences
that does not replicate the operator’s cable
offering.” With the right strategy, he suggests,
incumbent operators and broadcasters
may be ideally placed to capture SVoD
market share.
Niche and not-so-niche D2C servicesOther service providers are focusing on a
particular niche of content, such as children’s
programming, content in a specific language,
non-mainstream sports, or telenovelas. A
number of technology companies offer solutions
enabling delivery of D2C services via multiple
platforms and devices. In January 2017 Turner’s
Cartoon Network App was adapted as a cross-
platform app using the You.i Engine One solution,
which is pre-integrated with widely-used
online video platform backends.
Iddo Shai, director of product marketing
for OTT at online video management firm
Kaltura, suggests that many smaller companies
now have more options in terms of template
applications and end to end solutions provided
by his company and others. “This really
lowers the barrier to entry for the smaller
companies,” he says.
Overall then, the picture is complex for
consumers and for industry strategists alike.
“There are a lot of OTT platforms,” says Peter
Docherty, founder and chief technology officer
at content recommendation technology provider
Think Analytics. “You’ve got content owners
with OTT services going direct to the consumer,
you’ve got Netflix and Amazon, you’ve got
VoD broadcasters, pay TV operators with an
OTT VoD arm and other OTT VoD services on
top of that. “Many consumers now have multiple
VoD
Sour
ce: A
rthu
rSto
ck /
Shu
tter
stoc
k, In
c.
28 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
“Many consumers now have multiple OTT subscriptions. That’s a technical challenge for the industry, but also a big commercial opportunity.”
27-29_VoD.indd 2 13/02/2017 11:00:39
remember where everything is. That’s a technical
challenge for the industry, but also a big
commercial opportunity. But it all comes back
to the content. You’ve really got to make sure
you have the right kind of content; and that
means you’ve got to understand your customers.”
“There is a battle underway,” says Kai-Christian
Borchers, founder and managing director at
multiscreen service software provider 3 Screen
Solutions (3SS). “The key will be to use analytics
in the smartest way, adapting the user interface
and content display for users, with all of the
cloud and big data abilities in the background;
to constantly adapt SVoD services to become
more efficient and attractive to end users.”
However, it is still generally the case that
the best way for a service to be found by a
potential viewer is through some form of EPG.
“When these services are available as part
of a TV service, usage is much higher,” says
Jeff Miller, president and CEO at cloud-
technology content delivery provider ActiveVideo.
“The real challenge for those services is how
to be discovered.”
Ultimately, the niche service providers will
depend on different forms of aggregation
mechanism, whether this comes in the form
of a specific consumer technology platform or
device, or the EPGs of larger service operators.
Redefining service qualityBut just capturing eyeballs and good
content may still not be enough: the last
piece of the strategy must be ensuring a
very high quality of service (QoS). Ian Munford,
director of product marketing, media solutions,
at Content Delivery Network (CDN) and
cloud services provider Akamai offers a few
details about research commissioned by the
company that will be published shortly, in
which the company sought to quantify the
impact of good and poor quality TV experiences
on specific business models. It measured
consumer responses to a range of VoD
experiences, created for the purposes of the
research to avoid any brand bias. The
researchers tested the responses to free ad-based
VoD and SVoD services in standard definition
form; and in HDR/4K with very high
quality audio.
“We found that the SVoD services actually
had a much higher propensity to be impacted
in terms of viewer engagement than any other
form of business model,” says Munford. “SVoD
is seen as a premium service, so if you introduce
a quality impact you reduce the engagement
an individual has with the service. The
responses suggested many people would stop
using the service or cancel subscriptions if [QoS
problems] persisted.”
This underlines the need for a strong
infrastructure. One option that successful
SVoD providers may consider taking in future
is – to some extent – to emulate Netflix, which
has effectively created its own CDN capability
by placing video servers within operators’
premises rather than relying on CDN
service providers.
Nivedita Nouvel, vice-president, marketing, at
video delivery technology specialist Broadpeak,
notes that it is among the technology specialists
that can offer equivalent capabilities and
efficiencies to smaller content owners and
service providers.
Cloud technologies are also likely to play a
more important role within SVoD infrastructures,
particularly for smaller service providers, suggests
says Sam Orton-Jay, sales and marketing director
at video delivery specialist Simplestream.
“Cloud makes it easier for a niche broadcaster,
or content owner to launch SVoD,” he says.
“We’re able to deploy services for some of these
small content owners very rapidly and at low
cost. We have services running with less
than 2,000 subscribers, very profitably.”
Getting a slice of the SVoD pieBut even with strong technology, a very good
service and great content, there is still no
guarantee of success. “In the next couple of
years there will be attrition of smaller SVoD
players,” says Chris Alner, business development
director, satellite and media, at Arqiva. “It will
be increasingly hard for them to make meaningful
returns in terms of the cost of content and
of running the platforms, and the number
of customers they can get.”
Yet this is no reason for any content owner
to give up on the idea of getting a piece of the
SVoD pie, says Matt Nelson, director of strategic
alliances at You.i TV. “This market is so huge
and is only going to keep growing,” he says.
“By 2020, 95 per cent of all traffic on the
internet is going to be video. Higher bandwidth
services for consumers is only going to drive
more video.”
For consumers, even in markets where
service providers fail to develop genuinely
effective, personalised content discovery/
recommendation capabilities, competition
in the SVoD market should continue to
encourage the development of ever-improving
SVoD services, with a growing range of content.
Interactivity features may well continue to be
developed, but service providers must never
forget that, ultimately, it is the quality of content
that decides the fate of any video service, says
Docherty at Think Analytics. “It all comes
back to the content in the end,” he says. “It
doesn’t matter how cheap your service is if
there’s nothing interesting to watch.”
VoD
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 29
Sour
ce: A
rthu
rSto
ck /
Shu
tter
stoc
k, In
c.
27-29_VoD.indd 3 10/02/2017 15:45:15
Artificial Intelligence
was arguably the hottest
topic at the CES with
products from Amazon
Alexa voice controlled
speakers to toothbrushes
boasting the new capability.
In media, such systems are already being used
to develop new compression schemes and
better analyse big data for services like
content recommendation.
Although alive in concept since the 1940s,
AI began its renaissance around 2010 by
being applied to a number of problems
that had been extremely hard to solve:
object recognition, voice recognition and
text translation to name but a few. To illustrate
the scale of the progress, the performance
of object recognition algorithms on the
benchmark ImageNet database went from an
error rate of 28% in 2010 to less than 3% in
2016, lower than the human error rate on
the same data (see www.image-net.
org/challenges/LSVRC/).
Such extraordinary advances
have been possible mostly thanks
to technical and intellectual
advances that have allowed the
development of very large Artificial
Neural Networks (ANN) coupled with
the availability of a huge quantity of data
to train the networks.
Following the moneyAn unprecedented amount of money
subsequently poured into machine
learning research, led by the largest internet
companies - Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM,
Twitter - to develop the software and hardware
tools to support the design and deployment
of ANNs.
Equity funding of AI-focused startups reached
an all-time high in the second quarter of 2016
of more than $1 billion, according to researcher
CB Insights. There were 121 funding rounds for
such startups, representing more than $7.5bn
of investment.
Among the investments, Facebook acquired
FacioMetrics in November. This spin-off from
Carnegie Mellon University developed IntraFace,
a technology that can detect seven different
emotions on peoples’ faces. Speculation is that
the acquisition will feed into Facebook’s work on
life-like avatars that convey emotions via
‘VR emoji’.
In August, Intel bought machine learning
start-up Nervana Systems and in October
Samsung acquired AI software developer Viv
Labs [http://viv.ai], with plans to equip its
next Galaxy S smartphones with a Siri-like
digital assistant.
In September, Amazon, Facebook, Google,
IBM, and Microsoft formed the nonprofit
Partnership on AI to advance public
understanding of the subject and conduct
research on ethics and best practices.
“The reality [is] that every person, business
and nation must deal with the emergence of
AI as a competitive advantage,” says James
Canton, CEO at the Institute for Global Futures.
“Those that have it will gain a vital global
strategic advantage over others.”
If that sounds like overkill, here’s Google chief
Artificial Intelligence
Advanced neural networks take shapeMachine learning and AI systems are set to become a dominant feature across the media ecosystem. How is AI being applied to media in practice today and in planning for tomorrow, asks Adrian Pennington
30 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
30-31_AI.indd 2 10/02/2017 15:49:03
exec Sundar Pichai; “We are at a seminal moment
in computing. We are evolving from a mobile-first
to an AI-first world.” Speaking at the launch of
Google’s Pixel phone in October, Pichai said that
the company’s shift to AI is as fundamental “as
the invention of the Web or the smartphone.”
“When I look at where computing is heading, I
see how machine learning and artificial
intelligence are unlocking capabilities that were
unthinkable only a few years ago. This means that
the power of the software — the ‘smarts’ — really
matter for hardware more than ever before.”
Augmented IntelligenceMachine learning and AI are used
interchangeably, but in reality most so-called AI
apps are productised machine learning (ML)
applications for which AI is a catch-all but
misleading phrase. ML is best understood as
learning machines and should be distinguished
from AI, or machines that think. AI is a branch of
computer science attempting to build machines
capable of intelligent behaviour, while Stanford
University defines machine learning as “the
science of getting computers to act without being
explicitly programmed”.
You need robust ML built on ANNs
before you get to AI but currently there are
few true mainstream AI applications outside
of autonomous cars and, to a lesser extent,
virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri and the
Google Assistant.
“More complex types of cognitive technology —
neural or deep learning networks, natural
language processing, and algorithms — can
seem like black boxes even to the data scientists
who create them,” says Thomas Davenport,
a professor in IT at Massachusetts’ Babson
College, co-founder of the International Institute
for Analytics and a senior advisor to
Deloitte Analytics.
“AI used to be relegated to only the fastest
supercomputers, but recent advances in software
and the use of GPUs to process the algorithms
mean that the cost of AI assistance is no longer a
barrier to entry,” says Paul Turner VP, enterprise
product management, Telestream.
“You can certainly imagine that AI systems
will be able to analyse the actual content for
metadata gathering. Given that metadata is key
to automated workflows, this could vastly
expand our capability to ‘mine’ content for
other purposes.”
IBM prefers to talk about augmented
intelligence. “It’s an approach which asks how AI
supports decision making and demands a societal
change in how we look at technology,” says Carrie
Lomas, IBM’s cognitive solutions and IoT
executive. “Through personal devices like tablets
to all manner of items with sensors, the (industry
as a whole) is taking in lots of data and
combining it with different types of information
to enable a genuinely new understanding of
the world.”
IBM’s cognitive computer system Watson,
for example, has combined its Alchemy Language
APIs with a speech to text platform, to create
a tool for video owners to analyse video – forming
IBM Cloud Video. It is able to scan social media
in real time to monitor reactions to live
streaming events.
Much of the ML and AI applications a CES
are built on Nvidia chipsets. Nvidia describes
its TensorRT product as a “high performance
neural network inference engine for production
deployment of deep learning applications”.
It is targeting delivery of super fast “inferences
and significantly reduced latency”, as demanded
by real-time services such as streaming video
categorisation in the cloud.
AI technologies will undoubtedly broadly
impact the media sector at all stages, from media
production to delivery.
The biggest corporations on the planet are
embedding predictive intelligence into everyday
apps to make all our lives easier. The most
obvious examples are digital agents or chatbots
like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant,
Facebook M, and Microsoft Cortana. Siri, for
example, acts as a personal assistant, using
voice processing.
Promising applicationsThe bulk of AI’s potential, however, has still to
reach the mainstream. Here are a few examples of
Artificial Intelligence
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 31
Most Active VC Investors In AI Startups Q1’11 - Q2’16
Rank Investor
1 Khosla Ventures
2 Data Collective
2 Intel Capital
4 New Enterprise Associates
4 Google Ventures
6 Plug and Play Ventures
6 Horizons Ventures
6 Formation 8
6 Andreessen Horowitz
6 Accel Partners
11 Norwest Venture Partners
11 GE Ventures
13 Samsung Ventures
13 Two Sigma Ventures
13 Bloomerg Beta
13 Frost Data Capital
13 500 Startups
Source: CB Insights
30-31_AI.indd 3 10/02/2017 15:50:16
the most promising applications that are
being developed:
Accessibility. Automatic description of photos
and movie scenes for the blind. Facebook
delivered a first cut of this technology for static
photos. Microsoft and Google have similar
functionality in the works.
Subtitling. Automatic subtitles for hearing-
impaired people, both from speech recognition
and lip reading.
Content production. AI should not be
confused with intelligent creation, yet even here
the edges are being blurred. Editing software
such as Magisto, with 80 million users, takes in
raw GoPro or smartphone shot video and
automates the process of editing and packaging
it with a narrative timeline, tonal grade and
background music for consumers and even
marketeers facing huge demands on their
time and too much video to process and
publish online.
A number of recent developments in ML
research will allow picture and movie content
editing with Photoshop-like tools that edit
conceptual elements of an image instead of
individual pixels. It will soon be possible to
directly edit facial expressions.
Ad insertion in movies. Mirriad, a London-
based startup, has developed an application for
product placement (replacement or insertion) in
movie scenes depending on target audience,
location, context, etc.
Content creation. In the near future, AI
methods will be used to create new content. The
first pioneering applications are already available.
A documentary assembled by the Lumberjack AI
system is hoped to be presented before the
SMPTE-backed Hollywood Professional
Association (HPA) by 2018 and has already
helped create Danish channel STV ‘s 69 x10’
episodes of semi-scripted kids series Klassen.
In the more distant future, AI will be able
to generate new written and video content
on the fly, based on the interaction with
the user.
Content distribution. According to Berkes,
new ANN techniques are being developed to
beat traditional encoding and decoding algorithms
for pictures and movies. “They will allow the
transmission of high quality media content
even in regions with low internet and mobile
bandwidth,” he says. “ANNs are being used not
only to build better compression methods but
also to artificially clean up and increase the
resolution of transmitted images (known as
‘super-resolution’; one example is from
London startup Magic Pony Technologies,
acquired by Twitter last June for $150m to
reconstruct a HD video from a low-definition,
compressed stream).
The need for a human touchWhile some AI critics imagine catastrophic
scenarios, others like to imagine a future in
which AI helps us all to be more productive
and constructive.
“Overall, end-users will benefit from the
increasing role of AI, in particular in interacting
with the media,” says Berkes. “Virtual assistants
will understand their preferences and respond
to vocal command, facilitating content discovery
from multiple sources. As traditional media
becomes increasingly connected, AI will enable
content providers to interact with end-users. AI
assistants will help consumers select personalised
camera angles for sport events and they will
deliver automatic summaries of the latest news
and missed TV shows.
He also predicts that AI will make creative
tools accessible to everyone, assisting users in
editing pictures and movies and creating musical
compositions.
One fear is that AI will inevitably force humans
out of work. This was realised in Japan last month
when Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance replaced
34 employees with IBM’s Watson.
“You still need people to train Watson,”
emphasises Lomas. “That’s where the magic
and specialism of creatives is of huge value. AI
has a huge opportunity in the creative space. It
doesn’t mean we don’t need creatives, it means
they can move to higher level jobs and focus on
being even more creative.”
32 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
Source: CB Insights
“New ANN techniques are being developed to beat traditional encoding and decoding algorithms for pictures and movies.”
Artificial Intelligence
30-31_AI.indd 4 10/02/2017 15:50:23
The cable business has
long been about service
contracts and multi-play.
It was the cable industry
that first championed the
counting of contracts—or
revenue generating units
(RGUs)—as a measure of its own success. Now
that the industry has embraced wireless in the
form of mobile, four services make up the
top-end bundle.
Bundles have been the bread and butter of the
infrastructure-led cable business for years. These
days though it seems that all anyone talks about is
Over-the-Top (OTT), a distribution freed from the
reins of infrastructure altogether. But, as more
and more homes bundle multiple OTT services
into their entertainment mix, the benchmarking of
OTT subscriptions on a contract share basis
becomes more applicable.
So, as operators outside the cable sector
increasingly launch triple or quad-play offerings,
and with OTT ascending in the overall
communications and entertainment mix, what’s
the reality of contract market share and is the
fuss over OTT justified?
Taking three cuts of pan-European Union
multi-play contract share is revealing. OTT
barely makes a dent when measuring contracts
by service type (TV, broadband, telephony,
mobile) accounting for just three per cent of
the market in the EU. This compares to 12%
for traditional pay TV; 14% for fixed broadband
and a whopping 55% for mobile.
Looking instead at technology, mobile again
dominates. Cable, DSL and PSTN are all roughly
equal in market share of contracts. at between
nine and 12%. Satellite’s share of EU multi-play
contracts is just five per cent (5%)
and OTT and IPTV are even at three per
cent a piece.
So why all the fuss about OTT? For that
we need to look at contract counts a third way…
splitting paid TV subscription contracts and
recalculating market share of subscriptions shows
that OTT accounts for one-fifth of all EU paid TV
subscription contacts, not far
off satellite’s 23% and IPTV’s
21%. Cable remains the biggest
paid TV platform at 33% of
contracts. Within the paid space,
at least, terrestrial sits at just
three per cent.
OTT’s disproportionate
impact within the TV sector
becomes crystal clear by this
measure, but being platform
agnostic, it’s far more common
for homes to take multiple
OTT services than multiple
paid services from more
traditional providers. In that
respect the figure can still be
a little misleading.
Nonetheless, while there
remains a strong ARPU disparity
— the EU average for OTT
television monthly revenue per
subscriber stands at €7.50
against traditional pay TV’s €21
— it becomes crystal clear how
important multi-play as
a core strategy could become.
Infrastructure-led operators
launched multi-play services
to compete with one another,
not with OTT. Historically,
it is the pay TV business
that has not been subject to
commoditisation while bundled
communications services have
come under increasing
price pressure.
But now that those TV
services face an increasing
competitive threat — and if (and
it’s a big if) OTT services cause
a price adjustment in the wider
market for TV — those good old
commoditising communications
bundles might just come to
the rescue.
Three sides to four-plays
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 33
Source: Ampere AnalysisBy Guy Bisson, Research Director, Ampere Analysis
Data corner
33_DataCorner.indd 3 10/02/2017 15:52:18
The growing popularity of
streaming media turned
OTT video, that only a short
while ago was considered
a complimentary service,
into a multi-billion market.
Nowadays, in addition to
OTT-only players like Netflix and Amazon, many
carriers offer a streaming experience not only as a
complimentary “on-the-go” service to their primary
cable/satellite TV subscription, but also as a
stand-alone option. The entire industry looking to
attract new audiences, while promising greater
variety of content and subscription packages,
higher resolution video and broadcast-like
streaming experience.
What’s choking our networks?With great promises, come even greater
expectations - today’s consumers expect their
streaming experience to be great, regardless their
location, time of day or devices they are using. As
a result streaming video content providers,
connected device manufacturers and the rest of
the ecosystem, are looking into ways to perfect
the viewing experience, by offering consumers
higher resolution content, enhancing devices’
streaming capabilities and improving the delivery
techniques. But with more users streaming
content - the more challenging it is to deliver on
the promise of flawless and stable streams.
While UHD 4K and HDR formats’ adoption
is led by the streaming services, their delivery
impacts the entire ecosystem, further challenging
the current video delivery infrastructure
capabilities. Although 4K streaming may seem
less challenging compared to broadcast, the
viewing experience is still very much constrained
by users’ available bandwidth, due to large file
sizes of such content. In addition, the
proliferation of live streaming and the Virtual
Reality (VR) hype, made the networks even more
congested, affecting end-users’ viewing experience,
even in case of a low-res short clip.
Balancing the cost vs quality tradeoff Network operators now find themselves in a
conflict between delivering greater viewing
experience to their subscribers and optimising the
costs of their operation, such as network
infrastructure upgrade.
Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming protocols
were introduced also as a way to mitigate
buffering at the tradeoff of video quality. Aimed
to eliminate buffering pauses, the implementation
of ABR eventually created a user experience
paradox in form of constant bitrate switches, that
tend to be more visible to the human eye with
HDR and UHD 4K and in particular with VR.
The viewers no longer always get the content
quality they have subscribed to, especially in case
premium UHD content plans. They expect
flawless true 4K resolution but eventually receive
HD, SD and on occasion even buffering.
In order for the streaming to really thrive, the
OTT ecosystem will have to implement further
optimisation methods and match the increasing
consumers’ expectations.
Bandwidth demand reduction can be achieved
through more efficient encoding and compression
technologies. Innovations in HEVC and other
compression technologies that will continue
the reduction in file sizes and at the same time
will reduce the required computing power,
essentially leading to faster
streams. Moreover, to reduce
the bandwidth for VR and
360 degree video, app
developers can implement
tiling solutions aimed to
improve immersive video
quality, like the recently announced integrated
platform from Viaccess-Orca, Tiledmedia,
Harmonic and Digital Immersion.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) coding on lower
resolution video can also contribute to smaller
video files and lead to bandwidth reduction. Since
HDR delivers wider range of color shades and
greater luminance, HDR-enhanced content will
provide more vivid viewing experience, instead
of pushing enormous 4K files over congested
networks, in many cases the combination of
1080p with HDR can deliver better viewing
experience than unstable 4K.
Of course there is an option to increase the
available bandwidth. Expending and building next-
generation networks takes considerable amount
of financial resources and will take time. 5G
networks are not expected to become mainstream
in the next 5 to 7 years.
Increasing the capacity of existing fixed
networks, as well as using virtualisation
technologies to dynamically adapt the capacity
for major events when needed (like the Olympics
or Super Bowl live stream), can provide a timely
and cost-effective response to the growing
demand for OTT video.
More efficient CDN implementation will also
save costs and deliver better viewing experience.
As ABR video files consist of multiple fragments
of different bitrates, using techniques that
minimize the number of files will lead to reduced
storage and smaller manifest files, leading to a
more efficient CDN distribution.
There are measures, too, that can be taken
on the client side to increase bandwidth
efficiency. Improving media players’ streaming
logic will significant increase the QoE, as well
as the integration of network congestion
management solutions.
Streaming video, 4K, VR and ABR will only
continue to grow, but they need to work together
for OTT and connected devices purchasers to
receive the highest quality experience - both in
content delivery and perceived value.
Ravid Hadar, VP Product, Giraffic
34 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
Mobile Video
Better streaming experience- at what cost? Further video optimisation methods are needed for OTT to strive, says Ravid Hadar
34_Video_Optimisation.indd 2 10/02/2017 10:45:31
2016 was definitely a year of great
change in which we saw 4K/
UHD launches, Freeview Play
and Freesat celebrating their
success and Virgin simplifying
TV, as well as dynamic growth in
VOD, Catch-Up and Hybrid TV.
The widespread adoption of HbbTV and
mandating HEVC for IP HD services (as outlined
in the DTG’s D-Book 9 which was published in
November 2016) provides a real opportunity for
UHD content to be more widely distributed and
hopefully paves the way for broadcast to follow
in the very near future. The publication by
DVB of the latest specification of Ultra HD
(UHD-1 Phase 2) options for object and scene
based immersive audio profiles, also offers
exciting potential.
However, what we didn’t see was 2016
becoming the Year of Virtual Reality. After
discussion about whether VR was the next 3D
early in the year and stories about significant VR
investment in March, IBC 2016 really set the
scene with much VR excitement and then
October 2016 became ‘VR Month’ with launches
from Google Daydream, Oculus Touch and
Playstation VR.
The DTG has been heavily involved in an
industry initiative to help make new VR
experiences simple and interoperable for both
content producers and consumers. This came to
fruition at CES 2017 when the Virtual Reality
Industry Forum (VRIF) was launched with the
goal of encouraging the adoption of common,
interoperable technical standards for end-to-end
VR systems and plans to create voluntary best
practice guidelines and promote VR services
and applications. These will certainly be needed
if it is to be widely adopted within the
broadcast industry.
Despite the fears of Brexit impact, the DTG
believes that 2017 will be a pivotal year from a
Policy perspective and undoubtedly a year of
major opportunity for our industry. The UK has
historically led innovation in TV, although some
European states have recently made bold moves
in the adoption of DVB-T2. Still many of our US
and European digital, creative and television
partners are currently looking to the UK to
innovate and lead.
To expedite this the we are focusing on some
key initiatives for 2017 which have been designed
to address the future of content delivery. These
include: Advances in Broadcast & Hybrid;
Advanced AV – UHD, VR & AR; The IP Future;
Wireless & Mobile Innovation; Spectrum
Changes; Content Innovation; and Data.
Our work on D-Book 10 is well underway and
we look forward to TV going from strength to
strength. While OTT viewing will grow it doesn’t
mean it will be to the detriment of traditional
linear broadcast viewing. Internationally, we are
interested to see how ATSC 3.0 takes off. With
LG announcing the launch of an ATSC TV for
Korea is this likely to prompt other countries
(such as the USA) to look at a switchover? Some
predict this points to a move away from the
transport stream with a new IP based hybrid
broadcast world. Probably not something for
2017 but ATSC aren’t the only ones looking
seriously at this.
What we are looking forward to this year is
that HbbTV looks set to be the standard for
hybrid and interactive services in horizontal
platforms. This will place the UK not only in-line
with a growing number of European countries,
but also at the forefront with regards to
functionality such as UHD support for IP
services. This is all due to the DTG working with
our Members and Partners in the form of DUK
and Freeview in capturing the Freeview Play
HbbTV requirements for 2018 products in
D-Book 9, and then also these being adopted for
Freeview HD in the future too.
Mobile and wirelessOur Future Wireless Technologies programme,
which incorporates 5G, brings together all
aspects of wirelessly delivered TV and video.
One element of this programme is the Mobile
Video Alliance (MVA) which is a DTG Working
Group. We have looked at methods of optimising
unicast delivery, as well as quantifying and
describing the ‘quality of experience’ of the
mobile video viewer. Our experts have also looked
extensively at LTE broadcast, which although
unlikely to replace DTT, is a crucial optimisation
in the way live content is delivered to mobile
handsets. Consumers have shown that they have
an appetite for live events on mobile – and LTE
broadcast looks to be leading the way to do
this at scale.
Where 2016 was a rollercoaster, all in all
2017 is shaping up to be an exciting year
for our industry.
DTG
www.csimagazine.com February 2017 35
2017 – a pivotal yearDTG’s Peter Sellar looks forward to what we can expect this year, including VRIF and HbbTV
Peter Sellar is Associate Director, Programme Delivery, the DTG
35-DTG.indd 1 13/02/2017 13:58:05
The CSI Awards 2017 – Call for entriesDeadline for entries: 12 May 2017 Established in 2003 the awards are among the most prestigious and competitive technology awards in the industry, designed to recognise and reward innovation and excellence in the cable, satellite, broadcast, IPTV, telco, broadband/OTT video, mobile TV and associated sectors.
NEW CATEGORY ANNOUNCED! Best 5G project or innovationThe mobile industry is on the cusp of a major transformation as fifth generation cellular technologies begin to appear over the next few years ahead of a widespread commercial rollout globally around the 2020 timeframe. These are expected to impact a range of other industry verticals, with trials ranging from smart parking to massive MIMO. This award category is open to companies and organisations that are involved in pre-standard 5G projects, solutions and strategies.
For the latest news and updates follow us @CSI_Magazine #CSIAwards
1. Best digital video processing technology
2. Best cable IP solution
3. Best satellite IP solution
4. Best customer premise technology
5. Best monitoring or network management solution
6. Best content protection technology
7. Best content-on-demand solution
8. Best interactive TV technology or application
9. Best mobile TV technology or service
10. Best internet TV technology or service
11. Best ultra HD TV technology or project
12. Best TV everywhere/multi-screen video
13. Best social TV technology, service or application
14. Best data & analytics innovation
15. Best cloud/virtualisation innovation
16. Best IoT product, technology or application
17. Best virtual reality innovation
18. Best 5G project or innovation - NEW CATEGORY
The CSI Categories
Awards 2017page thirty six www.csimagazine.com
CSI magazine • Awards
AWARDS CEREMONY15 September 201715 September 2017
Amsterdam
For the latest news and updates follow us
36-37_Awards.indd 2 06/02/2017 12:40:09
For awards or entry enquiries:Danielle Devine+44 (0)20 7562 [email protected]
For sponsorship enquiries:John Woods+44 (0)207 562 2421 [email protected]
Camilla Capece+44 (0)207 7562 [email protected]
ENTER NOW: www.csimagazine.com/awards
The CSI Awards 2017 will be taking place on Friday 15 September in Amsterdam.Join us at the 15th annual CSI awards to see this year's winners exclusively announced. The Awards ceremony will include drinks and canapés and will as always be a wonderful evening.
Date: Friday,15 September 2017
Timings: 6:00pm: Drinks Reception6:30pm: Awards Ceremony 7:15pm: Post Networking and Drinks
Host of the CSI Awards 2017 The 2016 awards were hosted by specialist business presenter Nadine Dereza, and we are delighted that she will be back to host the 2017 CSI Awards.
page thirty sevenwww.cable-satellite.comAwards 2017CSI magazine • Awards
AWARDS CEREMONY ENTER NOW
Why enter the CSI Awards? • Stand out against the competition• Attract talent• An opportunity to celebrate• Reward employees and motivate your team• Leverage your marketing - through PR and increased brand awareness• If you are shortlisted your company logo will feature at the awards ceremony attended by hundreds of the leading names in the industry.
36-37_Awards.indd 3 06/02/2017 12:40:37
Events diary 2017
Date Name Location Website
14-16 February FTTH Conference Marseille www.ftthconference.eu
27 February - 2 March Mobile World Congress Barcelona mobileworldcongress.com
28 February -2 March BVE London bvexpo.com
6-9 March Satellite 2017 Washington DC satshow.com
8-9 March Cable Congress Brussels cablecongress.com
13-15 March DVB World Vienna dvbworld.org
21-23 March CabSat Dubai cabsat.com
21-22 March HbbTV seminar Munich irt.de/en
23-25 March CCBN Beijing ccbn.tv/en
28-30 March TV Connect London tvconnectevent.com
3-6 April MIPTV Cannes miptv.com
22-27 April NAB Las Vegas nabshow.com
27-28 April M2M World Congress London m2mconference.com
16--18 May Internet of Things World Santa Clara iotworldevent.com/
17-18 May Connected TV Summit London connectedtvsummit.com
10 May DTG Summit London dtg.org.uk/dtg/summit.html
23-25 May Broadcast Asia Singapore broadcast-asia.com
25-26 May FTTH Council Asia-Pacifi c New Delhi ftthcouncilap.org
30 May-1 June ANGA Com Cologne angacom.de/en
13-15 June Apps World London tmt.knect365.com/apps-world
14-18 September IBC Amsterdam ibc.org
20-23 September Smart Summit London iotsmartsummitlondon.com
26-28 September SD-WAN Summit Paris CDG
16-19 October MipCom Cannes mipcom.com
17-20 October SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo Denver expo.scte.org
November 2017 OTT TV World Summit London ottworldsummit.com
November 2017 CDN World Summit London cdnworldsummit.com
December 2017 Connections Europe Amsterdam parksassociates.com/events
TBC December Future TV Advertising London futuretvads.com
For a full list of events taking place in 2017 please go to http://www.csimagazine.com/csi/events.php
38 February 2017 www.csimagazine.com
EventsDiary2017.indd 2 10/02/2017 15:43:10
38 May-June 2014 www.csimagazine.com www.csimagazine.com February 2017 39
To advertise contact John Woods +44 (0)20 7562 2421 [email protected]
Business DirecTory
Verimatrix specializes in securing and enhancing revenue for multi-screen digital TV services for more than 500 operators around the globe. The award-winning and independently audited Verimatrix Video Content Authority System (VCAS™) and ViewRight® solutions offer an innovative approach for cable, satellite, terrestrial and IPTV operators to cost-effectively extend their networks and enable new business models. As the recognized leader in software-based security solutions for premier service providers, Verimatrix has pioneered the 3-Dimensional Security approach that offers flexible layers of protection techniques to address evolving business needs and revenue threats. Maintaining close relationships with major studios, broadcasters, industry organizations, and its unmatched partner ecosystem enables Verimatrix to provide a unique perspective on digital TV business issues beyond content security as operators seek to deliver compelling new services. www.verimatrix.com
6059 Cornerstone Court West, San Diego, CA 92121-3713, USTel: +1-858-677-7800 Fax: +1-858-677-7804Web: www.verimatrix.com
Intelsat is the leading provider of fixed satellite services worldwide. Intelsat supplies video, data and voice connectivity for leading media and communications companies, Internet Service Providers and government organizations. Intelsat’s valuable regional video neighborhoods deliver more television channels than any other system. Intelsat’s terrestrial network of eight strategically-located teleports and over 36,000 miles of leased fiber complements a global satellite fleet of more than 50 satellites, covering 99% of the world’s population. Intelsat utilizes a fully integrated satellite operations model, enabling global delivery from a single platform. With Intelsat, communications with your customers are closer, by far.3400 International Drive, NW, Washington D.C. 20008 USA
Tel: +1 202 944 6800 Fax: +1 202 944 7898Web: www.intelsat.com
EchoStar Europe is dedicated to enabling digital entertainment providers to optimise revenues by delivering added-value connected device solutions, services and applications. Through a comprehensive product range, including STBs, DVRs, home networking and TV anywhere technology, our solutions enable the provision of state-of-the-art and cost effective entertainment services.
Headquartered in the UK, EchoStar Europe comprises a number of business units and is affiliated with EchoStar Technologies, a subsidiary of the publicly traded EchoStar Corporation (NASDAQ: SATS).
Beckside Design Centre, Millennium Business Park, Station Road, Steeton, Keighley BD20 6QW, United Kingdom Tel: +44 1535 659000 Fax: +44 1535 659100Web: www.echostar.com
There’s never been a better time #neverbetter for Cisco to partner with Service Providers to transform Entertainment. As the longstanding, market-leading supplier of video entertainment solutions and cloud services, the company empowers Service Providers and Media companies to connect consumers and businesses to a world of new experiences. With more than 7000 video professionals, Cisco has the scale, resource, and vision to deliver differentiated solutions..
Cisco, One London Road, Staines, Middlesex TW18 4EX Tel +44 (0)178 484 8500 Fax +44 (0)178 484 8600Web: cisco.com/go/videoscape
ATX Networks designs, manufactures, markets & delivers a broad range of OTT, IPTV & CATV digital video solutions to the global cable television industry, & PVNs (Private Video Networks). Sectors served include cable operators, broadcast, education, enterprise, government, healthcare, hospitality, sports & entertainment, retail, worship, & telcos.
ATX’s solutions include mini headends, multichannel encoding, transcoding, middleware, content streaming solutions, RF management (1.2 GHz), RF filters, transmitters/receivers, headend & MDU amplifiers, node segmentation, node/amp upgrades, monitor/control equipment, pads/EQs, digital voice switches, & connectors.
Corneliusstrasse 22, 60325 Frankfurt am Main, GermanyTel: +49 171 998 3676Email: [email protected]: www.atxnetworks.com
39_Directory.indd 1 08/02/2017 16:02:21
SECURING THE CONNECTED FUTURE
The world of video is becoming more connected. And next-generation video service providers are delivering new connected services based on software and IP technologies.
Now imagine a globally interconnected revenue security platform. A cloud-based engine that can optimize system performance, proactively detect threats and decrease operational costs.
Discover how Verimatrix is defining the future of pay-TV revenue security.
Download the follow-up Frost & Sullivan Paper: Build or License: The Multi-DRM Quandry forOnline Video Publishers www.verimatrix.com/build-or-license-drm