i3 - September/October 2017 - 17

By Mike Bergman

Tech

PIPE LINE

Connecting
Content and Tech
ore than 160 engineers are
working on improving Smart
TV with CTA. The WAVE Project
brings together many major players in
commercial over-the-top (OTT) video,
all seeking to improve interoperability.
But if you own a smart TV and have
watched a movie using Netflix, Prime,
Starz or other online services, you might
wonder why all the fuss? Doesn't OTT
video already work pretty well?

Pictafolio/iStockPhoto

A smart or connected TV contains a pretty amazing suite
of media technologies. Simply making a connection to the
internet requires quite a bit of code. From there, add in
handling of many audio and video codecs; building interfaces to services like Netflix and Amazon Prime; figuring
out some way to authenticate the same TV each time you
want to watch Game of Thrones and you realize there is
quite a bit going on in Smart TVs.
If this wasn't already a challenge for the development
teams at your preferred TV brand, consider the challenge
of getting all of this to actually work across the board.
It's one thing to build a Smart TV that does all of these
things with one service, say, Netflix. It is quite another
to also make it work with Amazon Prime. And Hulu,
YouTube, Crackle, etc.
Each of these services faces many options for how they
compress, package, encrypt and ship a multimedia service
to consumers. Four major media streaming technologies
can ride on top of internet services and adapt to the speed
of the connection. There are also multiple video codecs,
audio codecs, encryption schemes and closed-caption technologies. It is easy to build up to thousands of possible combinations that could be inbound to that poor smart TV.
At this point you have to hope it really is extremely "smart."
Actually, the companies making devices - phones,
tablets, laptops, smart TVs, "sticks" (like Chromecast
or Fire) - cannot test every combination. Instead, they
estimate which combinations are most important or
likely to be used, then test for those. Manufacturers discuss
the technical specifications with content providers, then
engineering teams integrate and test for the most necessary
combinations. These are the ones that light up the screen
when you turn on the device.
C TA . t e c h / i 3

The
Underlying
Tech of
OTT
The WAVE Project
doesn't create new
"core" standards
for things like video
compression or
delivery. Instead, WAVE
is specifying how to use
the best - and best
supported - modern
standards. The core
standards for adaptive
bit rate streaming are
Apple HLS and
MPEG-DASH. MPEG
Common Encryption,
MPEG-CENC, is used to
pass critical information
about the encryption
used, from the source
to the device. Streams
are packaged in
MPEG-CMAF format.
On the device side,
WAVE uses an HTML5
API framework as a
reference (handy for
providing test suite
materials) but doesn't
require it; HTML5-MSE
and HTML5-EME are
the W3C Recommendations key to this
functionality along
with the rest of the
HTML suite.

The result is that the devices cannot
be entirely consistent in how they support
the many possible services. On the content
side, service providers know that target
devices have these inconsistencies, so they
create multiple versions of the same content
for multiple "platforms." Imagine a version
of Wonder Woman that is formatted to work
on iPhones, another version set for Samsung
TVs, and yet another version for those
Android phones. It's a bit of a nightmare.
In between the content companies
(sources) and devices (destinations), more
elements to this infrastructure deal with
getting from the source to the destination.
Software companies, chipmakers, content
delivery networks, transcoding services,
the list goes on. And all of these companies
are struggling with their role in this fragmented OTT ecosystem.
The WAVE Project is working on
a common, interoperable approach that
can work on all devices to make everyone's
OTT life easier. The WAVE Project will lead
to solutions that are tested, interoperable
and predictable. A consistent approach will
lower development costs, raise reliability,
and enable new products and services to
come to market. WAVE is about consistently
using the best standards and providing
usable test suites to verify those standards.
The WAVE Project is global and working
with the regional and international standards bodies that are critical to OTT, including broadcasting groups like ATSC and
HbbTV. Partici-pants in WAVE are seeing
the future, in terms of the requirements, procedures and test suites under development.

GO ONLINE: Get involved
at standards@CTA.tech.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017

https://standards.cta.tech/kwspub/wave/ http://www.cta.tech.com

i3 - September/October 2017

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