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ACCESS has been presenting a vision of how Pay TV operators can start to marry their broadcast/VOD infrastructure with multiscreen/OTT delivery infrastructure and treat them as a shared resource to optimize the delivery of content to multiple devices around the home, including televisions. It uses its Netfront Living Connect DLNA stack and client software to provide a central view of what each device is capable of and what is currently happening on that device to then manage whole-home resources. Content can be distributed using the new DLNA Commercial Video Profile-2 (CVP-2), which was developed with the cooperation of service providers to enable more secure playback of their content across multiscreen devices. It also gives them more control over the user interface on different devices. CVP-2 leverages HTML5 Remote User Interfaces (RUIs) and HTTP Adaptive Delivery and Authentication on top of the DTCP-IP-based link layer protection, which was already available. ACCESS is actually demonstrating NetFront Living Connect with CVP-2 at the DLNA Members meeting in Hawaii today (Thursday October 10). In this new architecture, DLNA acts as an abstraction layer. Not only does it provide a unified view of activity across diverse devices, it also means platform operators can avoid writing native apps for each DLNA-enabled device. You still need a software client to reach them but not the unique applications development work. “DLNA is a way to overcome device fragmentation,” says Larbey at Alcatel-Lucent.
Orange will introduce what could be the world’s first HEVC-based service this spring, delivering HD movies to 2013 models of Samsung Smart TVs in France. The innovation coincides with the launch of a new Orange VOD Connected TV service in partnership with Samsung, covering pre-2013 models as well. The company revealed the partnership with Samsung at CES last week and was demonstrating the VOD service on the Samsung booth. A Full HD movie (1080p, 1920×1080 at 24/25 fps) was being played at 3Mbps thanks to the new video codec, which is due to become a standard imminently.
Whether you're required by law to offer closed captions or not, there's good reason to add them to your online video workflow. Here's how. Though relatively few websites are required to provide closed captions for their videos, any website with significant video content should consider captioning. Not only does it provide access for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but captions and the associated metadata can dramatically improve video search engine optimization. In this introduction to closed captions, you’ll learn about who needs to caption and who doesn’t (and why you may want to anyway), the available workflows for captioning live events and on-demand files, and a bit about web caption formats and how to marry them to your streaming files. Let’s jump in.
Last fall, premium video-on-demand (PVOD) appeared to be a short-lived studio experiment that gained little traction among consumers — crashing infamously with the release of Universal Pictures’ action-comedy Tower Heist. Now that window could be re-opening, albeit with a few significant tweaks. Nomura Securities analyst Michael Nathanson contends PVOD could make a comeback with better marketing and a greater value proposition to the consumer. The analyst said improved marketing, lower prices, better title selection and, more importantly, implementing rev-share agreements with theater operators could produce a renaissance for the nascent window. Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp. in May signed a license deal with Prima Cinema, which operates a business platform that can deliver secured theatrical releases with “better than Blu-ray” resolution — including 3D — into home theater systems. Cinedigm CEO Chris McGurk said the Prima license agreement allows the company to alter distribution windows for its library of independent films, documentaries and other premium specialty content.
Now that you intensively crawled through part 1 of this blog-post and asked yourself all the right questions intended to avoid common OTT-traps, we can safely presume that you are ready to spend some (or a lot of) time and money on launching your own multiscreen OTT service. So it’s definitely time to choose your bricks, mortar and trowels... As multiscreen OTT/TV Everywhere offers do proliferate while each video tradeshow approaches and connected devices multiply, it’s difficult to monitor all of them and get a 100% accurate idea on who’s got the best offer. Basically your ideal technical partner will most likely be a unique target depending on your background (telco/content owner/TV channel…), your needs (target devices, business models, time to market…), your workflow constraints (CMS, billing, deployed transcoding engines, already deployed apps…) and your budget. Nevertheless, what I tried to do first is to isolate a list of actors whose offer is end-to-end and sufficiently versatile to cover the most common use cases and devices, then provide a complementary list with actors who provide less information but are also known in this market, and then wrap up the post with a bunch of ideas on how you could DoItYourself with less integrated/locking-in solutions. This way, you will end-up with a complete panorama of available technical solutions in mind.
At NAB, the Mobile500 Alliance, one of two competing groups of broadcasters working to make Mobile DTV a reality in the United States, brought a second-generation MDTV system to the convention that melds OTA Mobile DTV reception via an iPad dongle receiver with the social media interactivity of Twitter.
There is a growing effort by broadcasters to make regular TV content available online. For example, the BBC has developed the BBC iPlayer and the bbc.co.uk website to support replication of most BBC broadcast material. The service has been outstandingly successful: 79.3 million requests were serviced in October 2009. NBC coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics included live and recently recorded content, complete with commercials.
Whenever there is the possibility of a large or dynamic viewer audience, a reliable CDN is required. CDNs once only used to replicate website content around the world. Now, they have expanded dramatically to handle streaming media. Research and markets estimated the value of CDN services for 2008 at $1.25 billion, up 32 percent from 2007. Top CDNs include Akamai, Mirror Image Internet, Limelight Networks, CDNetworks and Level 3. Streaming media services must deal with content collected from disparate sources and distributed to a growing number of devices.
CableLabs -- hoping to spur the industry's adoption of dynamic video-on-demand advertising -- has released tools under a free open-source license for testing standards-based VOD ad-insertion equipment. The R&D consortium's Document Profile Architecture (DPA) toolset is designed to let vendors and developers test implementations based on the SCTE-130 set of specifications. SCTE-130 define techniques for the delivery of interactive and targeted ads in cable VOD systems and other on-demand environments. Essentially, the DPA Toolset lets developers emulate multiplatform architectures for delivering ads across an array of distribution channels, including VOD streams, Web pages and interactive program guides.
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Microsoft announces the general availability (GA) release of Windows Azure Media Services. This release is now live in production, supported by a new media services dev center, backed by an enterprise SLA, and is ready to be used for all media projects.
As a teaser for my upcoming blog post (“OTT distribution optimization technologies”), here is a bonus study for you, dear readers… It aims at isolating the main OTT Video Services trends (End-user driven & Production driven) and at pointing out relevant technologies with their maturity estimation and corresponding Vendor + Technology offer tuples. Enjoy and share your thoughts/technology suggestions in comments either here or on the blog ! NW
How do broadcasters and VOD services schedule video content to appear on different platforms? We look at the four main methods : #1. Use Excel Spreadsheets #2. Build your own VOD Scheduling system #3. Use Specialist Software #4. Use Media Management Services from Existing Partners
Swedish pay TV provider Viaplay has become one of Europe’s first to offer a full hybrid service combining digital terrestrial with OTT. The operator, which is part of the Swedish media company MTG (Modern Times Group), has teamed up with French set top box maker Netgem to develop a dedicated Viaplay box. This delivers a range of free to air terrestrial channels combined with paid premium content delivered over-the-top (OTT). Viaplay says this is the first time a pay-tv operator in the Nordics has combined adaptive bitrate streaming technology and free-to-air digital terrestrial TV in one single channel list with seamless channel change.
HLS is available on iOS and Mac OSX Quicktime Player only. Onlinelib brings HLS to millions of devices with help from Adobe Flash Player. The HLS Streaming Solutions from Onlinelb are ready-to-go solutions : - HLS Player for Adobe Strobe Mediaplayback - HLS SDK for Developers - VCS HLS Hardware Analyzer - HLS Encoder for OSX - VCS Live HLS Encoder
SyncTV, the leader in delivering television services to the largest set of Internet connected TVs, mobile platforms, and other media-enabled devices, today announced that M6 (RTL Group), one of France’s largest and most popular broadcasting and media organizations, selected SyncTV to develop its first Over-The-Top (OTT) service for the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming and media console. M6 worked with SyncTV to bring the new branded channel to market which launched on December 21.
Comcast subscribers might have noticed that the company has been putting a lot of effort to grow its video-on-demand (VOD) library, adding huge amounts of new movies for rental and ad-supported TV shows for viewers to catch up on. What they probably didn’t realize is that the increase in content is just one part of a massive restructuring of its network architecture that is shifting delivery from more than 100 locally distributed VOD servers to a more centralized, IP-based delivery system.
The ICE Streaming System is based on Imagine's widely deployed ICE Video Platform, which today serves thousands of live streams to over half of all US digital cable subscribers and is recognized as the industry's most powerful multi-codec, multi-rate, multi-resolution video processing platform. A fully integrated, high-density solution, the ICE Streaming System boasts support for up to 1000 stream-aligned multi-profile transcodes from a single carrier-class blade system platform.
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