The launch of the Joint Task Force on File Formats and Media Interoperability was announced today by its sponsors, the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA), Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers (IABM), American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), and Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is participating as an observer.
Bringing together manufacturers, broadcasters, advertisers, ad agencies, and industry organizations (standards bodies and trade associations) serving the professional media market, the Task Force has an ultimate goal to create greater efficiencies and cost savings for exchange of file-based content. The group’s initial focus will be to gather and analyze requirements for a machine-generated and readable file interchange and delivery specification — including standardized and common structured metadata — for the professional media industry. Use case examples include promo, spot, and program delivery from a provider to a broadcaster.
In the Broadcast and Connected Systems team here in R&D one of the things we have been looking at for a few years is adaptive bitrate technology. Recently the main focus in this area has been MPEG DASH, what profile of it to use, and how we can create content using it. The reason for today’s post is to introduce the first piece of test material we have created.
MPEG DASH is hot news. Widely anticipated to become the 'de facto' delivery standard, this session is part presentation -- to bring you up to speed on what MPEG DASH is -- and part opportunity to ask questions of one of the instigators of the standard.
Nicolas Weil's insight:
Interesting speach by Alex Zambelli on Microsoft DASH roadmap, from the 26th minute. Development track to confirm at IBC... 2013...
EuroMedia Magazine in their recent "TEST AND MONITOR SEGMENT SURVEY 2012" have asked the following question: A number of players are trialling MPEG-DASH. Is this likely to become standard, and will it help address interoperability issues?
Today the BBC iPlayer, News and Sport apps are available on an astonishing 650 connected TV devices, from internet-enabled or Smart TVs and set-top-boxes to media players and games consoles, delivering more than 45 million videos to 2 million users every month. Most recently, the BBC Sport app has been used by more than 200,000 users a day to watch the phenomenal London 2012 Olympic Games coverage on connected TVs alone, having only launched a few short weeks before.
While this is a remarkable achievement in itself, it certainly wasn't easy or straightforward, and I would like to share with you what challenges we have encountered, what we have learnt in the process of solving them and what we believe is important to consider for anyone looking at building applications for connected TVs.
The wide adoption of FIMS will gather further momentum here at IBC today, when the collaborative group behind it collect the IBC Judges Award, and SMPTE and the EBU announce an acceleration of the standardisation process.
Asked what is new for the show, Jean-Pierre Evain, the EBU FIMS co-ordinator (pictured), said: “On one side, more members like Signiant and Dalet. From the specification point of view, we are working on repositories and cloud management in FIMS, and defining requirements for quality assurance.”
The users have spoken, and the high priority idea is a repository service. What is next? “Getting different orchestration systems to work together,” saidAMWA executive director Brad Gilmer.
Deployed Jointly by Abertis Telecom and Nagra, the Live and VOD Multiscreen Cloud Service Leverages Harmonic ProMedia Suite and Nagra MediaLive Multiscreen.
Harmonic, the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, today announced that it has teamed up with Nagra, the digital TV division of the Kudelski Group and world's leading independent provider of content protection and multiscreen television solutions, to power an innovative cloud-based OTT video service for broadcasters and pay-TV service providers offered jointly by major Spanish infrastructure telecom operator Abertis Telecom and Nagra. The multiscreen hosting service is already in use by Spanish broadcasters for their HbbTV based services and will be enhanced to become what is expected to be the world's first commercial deployment of MPEG-DASH, a standards-based adaptive streaming protocol that supports multiple DRM systems via common encryption, as well as the first deployment of HbbTV 1.5.
Broadpeak, a leading provider of content delivery networks (CDN) technology and video-on-demand (VOD) servers for cable, IPTV, OTT, and hybrid TV operators worldwide, today announced that it will launch a new industry initiative called the Broadpeak Open Alliance (BOA) at IBC2012 in Amsterdam. By encouraging interoperability amongst third-party technology providers, Broadpeak aims to improve and accelerate OTT rollouts.
Employing a best-of-breed approach to video content services over broadband networks, operators can select the best technology available for each component of the delivery chain — from the headend equipment to the home network systems. BOA will create a technical framework for this vision, enabling Broadpeak to test its solutions with other technologies from strategic partners to ensure interoperability.
With the publication of the BXF (Broadcast eXchange Format) 2.0 suite, broadcasters and content distributors now have a standard way of exchanging messages and files between business and media management systems. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) has announced the standardization and release of a new set of specifications that will streamline workflows and content delivery chains for broadcast and new media operations.
SMPTE said the new set of documents addresses the specific requirements of file-based workflows, that is, ensuring that disparate system communicate with each other in order to reduce manual processes and manage a large amount of content files.
The Open IPTV Forum and MPEG Industry Forum have reached agreement to merge the assets of MPEGIF into the OIPF in a move that increases consolidation in the standardisation landscape.
The pair say the activities of the MPEG Industry Forum have reached a natural and successful conclusion with the emergence of MPEG-4 Part 10, alternatively known as H.264, as the dominant codec in next generation video technology and the proven successor to MPEG-2.
As in 2011, when the Broadcast Mobile Convergence Forum (BMCO) merged into OIPF, which followed the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) merging with the MPEGIF, these asset mergers represent natural consolidation in a maturing industry – the positive result of cross-industry consensus on fundamental technologies.
Among other things, the looming arrival of the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) is illustrating that the digital media industry is now capable of moving "nimbly and quickly" to create technical standards to address and evolve the ways that it packages, moves, and protects precious content in the form of digital assets in a world where the technology used to do all that, and the very industry itself, is fundamentally changing at a startling rate.
Unlike the DCI spec, IMF is not built of wholly new parts. Wherever possible, the file package will consist of existing pieces combined together in an MXF-flavored wrapper. This should, Chang hopes, make it easier for businesses across the industry to adapt without huge infrastructure changes in most cases as IMF comes to fruition.
"With IMF, we are using existing standards—a form of MXF (called MXF OP1A/AS-02) to wrap the files, and parts of the Digital Cinema format and other formats that many manufacturers already use," says Annie Chang, Disney's VP of Post-Production Technology and chairwoman of the SMPTE IMF work group. "So, hopefully, there is not much of a learning curve. We hope that most of the big companies involved in the process won't be caught unaware, and will be able to make firmware or software upgrades to their systems in order to support IMF. Hopefully, companies will not have to buy all new equipment in order to use IMF.
The demonstration featured simultaneous PlayReady encryption, powered by Inside Secure’s Downloadable DRM Agent for iOS, and Verimatrix encryption from the same MPEG-DASH url delivered to both Android and iOS players from Inside Secure and NXP Software.
The CENC scheme specifies standard encryption and key mapping methods that can be utilized by one or more digital rights management (DRM) and key management systems to enable decryption of the same file using different DRM systems. Such an approach supports a broader range of accessible clients from a single content stream.
Version 2.0 of the DASH-AVC/264 guidelines, with support for 1080p video and multichannel audio, is now publicly available on the DASH Industry Forum (IF) website.
The new guidelines includes several promised extensions, including one on HD video that moves the recommended baseline from 720p to 1080p.
720p had initially been chosen, according to the initial guidelines released in May, as a "tradeoff between content availability, support in existing devices and compression efficiency." At that time, the baseline video support used the Progressive High Profile Level 3.1 decoder and supported up to 1280x720p at 30 fps.
"The choice for HD extensions up to 1920x1080p and 30 fps is H.264 (AVC) Progressive 12 High Profile Level 4.0 decoder," the new guidelines state, adding support for 4.0 decoders that was lacking in the previous set of guidelines.
In addition, the guidelines also provide a way to handle standard definition (SD) content.
DASH-IF introduces a leaner, meaner H.264/fMP4 approach, officially called DASH-AVC/264.
DASH-IF has identified what it calls "interoperability points" that use AAC as the audio codec, AVC as the video codec (also known as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10), and fMP4 as the base container format. The latter is better known as the ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF).
The primary interoperability point is designed around high-definition (HD) video up to 720p at the AVC Progressive High Profile.
While many connected television devices and displays now support web standards such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, they invariably differ in their capabilities and conformance to standards. The BBC has developed an abstraction layer to decouple its own applications from these underlying device complexities. The corporation is planning to make its TV Application Layer available to third parties to help stimulate the market for connected television applications.
Although the emerging HTML5 specification is often seen as the solution to interoperable web applications, in practice there are many differences in compatibility between devices that claim support for web standards. This is a familiar problem on the web but the fragmentation of different flavours appears to be even more of an issue with consumer electronics products.
The BBC TV Application Layer or TAL attempts to deal with the differences between devices, such as remote control key mapping, media player interfaces, networking and storage. In theory this means that the BBC can develop and deploy applications on a well-defined interface without being aware of the specifics and idiosyncrasies of each device.
I’ve just tried to come to terms with the latest state of TTML, the Timed Text Markup Language.
TTML has been specified by the W3C Timed Text Working Group and released as a RECommendation v1.0 in November 2010. Since then, several organisations have tried to adopt it as their caption file format. This includes the SMPTE, the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), and Microsoft.
Both, Microsoft and the EBU actually looked at TTML in detail and decided that in order to make it usable for their use cases, a restriction of its functionalities is needed.
The DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) group is seeking an expanded role to unify global standards for multiscreen services, while also ending the historical regional fragmentation in digital terrestrial transmission.
Emerging multiscreen services are being held back by fragmented standards, particularly over interaction between companion screens and linear broadcast services. At an IBC press conference the DVB said it wanted to act as a unifying force both in digital terrestrial transmission and companion screen interaction.
So far companion screen applications have grown up around many different proprietary technologies and are ripe for standardization, according to Nick Wells, vice chair of the DVB Technical Committee. “I expect to see broadcast and IP networks working together and here the DVB has a huge amount to offer,” said Wells.
Concurrent, a global leader in video and media data solutions, announced that they have implemented support for the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) interface specifications for content delivery networks on their MediaHawk Unified CDN products.
Concurrent’s MediaHaw VX unified content delivery solution consists of software modules that can support origin, intermediate caching, and edge streaming functions for traditional and Internet-based video services. Modules may be used together to form a complete end-to-end CDN or individually as part of a best-of-breed content delivery ecosystem. The ATIS IIF specifications provide an open standards framework for integrating CDN solution components from multiple vendors, enabling operators to select the technologies that best suit their respective applications.
Harris today celebrates the publication of the BXF 2.0 suite — a move that evolves the way broadcasters and new media organizations share and exchange business data and on-air content across the media workflow.
BXF, or Broadcast eXchange Format, standardizes the exchange of schedule, as-run, content metadata, and content transfer instructions between workflow systems — including servers, editors, traffic and billing, sales and scheduling, automation and digital asset management equipment. The publication of BXF 2.0 marks an important continuation in BXF development and implementation — an effort that began with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) in 2004, led by Harris CTO Group Lead Chris Lennon.
BXF 2.0 consists of several backward-compatible enhancements to the existing standard including additional support for sponsored secondary events, re-use of house numbers, enhanced multi-language support, and the ability to communicate “aired” events (previous, current and next).
The SMPTE group now sets their sights on BXF 3.0, which includes a list of useful enhancements that advance well beyond the efficiencies published in BXF 2.0.
The Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCI Forum) today announced that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has reviewed and approved a set of video coding profiles developed by the UCI Forum. The UCI Forum submitted these profiles to the ITU for inclusion in the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) design for its H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard. A corresponding adoption of the same profiles into the MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC standard has also entered into the approval process of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
H.264/MPEG-4 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) interoperability is a key area of focus for the UCI Forum. These profiles and the resulting ITU/ISO/IEC standard will play an integral role in the UCI Forum’s interoperability certification for SVC-based video systems.
SVC is already implemented in enterprise-class videoconferencing solutions from a number of leading vendors including RADVISION, Teliris and Vidyo, with the intent to implement SVC on the roadmap for companies like LifeSize, Microsoft and Polycom. However, current SVC implementations are not fully interoperable, and therefore a standard needs to be defined in order to certify interoperability scenarios.
Viewers have seen several step changes in the evolution of television, analog to digital, standard to high definition, and if you go back far enough, monochrome to color.
There have been similar changes on the production side, but those that have had most impact are the changes from film to videotape and analog to digital processing, the introduction of HD, and now the migration to file-based operations.
The migration from physical media to files processed on computer platforms presents opportunities and a new flexibility, but potentially adds complexity. You need systems that work together, and converting to file-based technology only gets you part of the way there.
Agreed file formats are necessary, but not sufficient to build digital facilities. To simplify file-based operations many media companies are adopting a service-oriented architecture. For the future the ‘cloud’ beckons, abstracting the services from geographical constraints.
The key to reusable services in the cloud lies in agreed standards and specifications that can enable interoperability.
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