In Broadcast - April 2013 - 46

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 18 - APRIL 2013

N E W S

InFILE
Serving Up Video Content Over The Top Cont.

46

service,” claims Peter Maag, CMO.
“Many operators have traditionally
looked at density as being the
driver of efﬁciency, but this attitude
is changing with an understanding
of the scalability of software-based
technologies. Certainly with events,
short-term workflow needs, the
ﬂexibility of software deployed on
readily available cloud resources is
clear. Consider the question – do
I ship in 12 transcoders from a
manufacturer for the week or do I
spin up 12 software transcoders in
a cloud? The answer is clear.”
Haivision believe that given
unlimited uplink bandwidth, then
encoding quality is best derived
straight from baseband sources.
“Uplink bandwidth is complicated
when servicing all device dependent
formats – Flash, Smooth Streaming,
HLS, HDS, DASH, and whatever
comes next,” says Maag. “Reencapsulation is a relatively
lightweight process easily handled
in the cloud or even pushed to
the edge of the CDN. However, if
you push it to the CDN edge you
are depending on a single CDN
in a world where redundancy and
ﬂexibility is king.
“If uplink bandwidth is limited,
that’s where cloud transcoding is
critical,” he asserts. “Typically, your
cloud transcoder should be in the
general area of the event, stretching
across a CDN as appropriate to the
audience. Having software-based
cloud transcoding is essential to
give you such location ﬂexibility.

With our HyperStream Live SaaS
(a workﬂow engine automating the
KulaByte software transcoder on
Amazon EC2), users can establish
short-term transcoding on any of
Amazon’s regional data centres.”
MPEG-DASH Momentum
MPEG-DASH, which is designed
to unify Adaptive Bitrate streaming,
has gained momentum over the past
year which saw a number of proofof-concept trials. In 2013, Digital
Rapids expects to see increased
adoption with considerably more
pilot projects as well as commercial
deployments, with growing
device support.
Says Nann: “MPEG-DASH isn’t in
a position where people are thinking
that it will be the only spec they’ll
need to support in the near to midterm, but most believe that it will
reduce the number of adaptive
streaming speciﬁcations that they’ll
need to prepare their content for.”
RGB Networks’ Senior Director,
Product Marketing Nabil Kanaan
thinks DASH has been slow to gather
a following among CE and software
tech vendors, delaying its adoption.
“The various profiles defined
by DASH have added too much
ﬂexibility in the ecosystem, at the
cost of quick standardisation,” he
asserts. “We still believe it’s a viable
industry initiative and are supporting
it from a network standpoint and
working with ecosystem partners
to make it a deployable technology.”
Jamie Sherry, Senior Product
Manager at Wowza Media Systems

says: “If the ideals of MPEG-DASH
become a reality and traction occurs
in terms of deployments – perhaps
with the help of the proposed
DASH-264 deployment guidelines
– the impact to the market will be
positive as operators and content
publishers in general will have a real
opportunity to grow their audiences
while keeping costs in line.”
Nann looks to the recommended
interoperability and deployment
conﬁgurations of DASH-264, which
has focused DASH requirements
onto MPEG4, for renewed impetus.
“As an analogy, look back at the
evolution of MPEG-2 and transport
streams. If every cable operator,
encoder, middleware vendor, set top
box vendor supported a different
subset of parameters, proﬁles, levels
and features, they might all be within
the MPEG-2 transport stream specs,
but we probably wouldn’t have the
widespread interoperability we have
today. DASH-264 is a means of doing
the same for MPEG-DASH, providing
a constrained set of requirements for
supporting DASH across the devices
that support it, and giving vendors
interoperability targets.”
“The client device support is going
to be one of the biggest factors in
how quickly MPEG-DASH rolls
out,” says Nann.
Telestream Product Marketing
Director John Pallett concurs: “The
primary driver for adoption will be the
player technology to support it. The
companies that develop players are
generally working to support MPEGDASH alongside their legacy formats.
Most of the major player companies
want to migrate to DASH, but real
adoption will come when a major
consumer product supports DASH
natively. This has not yet happened,
but we anticipate that it will change
over the next year.”

HEVC Game-Changer

Haivision HyperStream Live provides cloud-based transcoding

NAB sees a number of encoder
developers adopting HEVC (highefﬁciency video encoding/H.265)
which promises to greatly expand
delivery of high-quality, highresolution video over bandwidthconstrained networks.
“We believe that 4K delivery to
desktop and tablets will be the
ﬁrst area where HEVC takes hold,”
reports Pallet. “These devices will
support software decoders which
are easily and affordably distributed,
and there are several devices
approaching full 4K resolution.
“While 4K will be the ﬁrst big push
for HEVC, we also believe that HEVC
will be adopted over the next few
years to achieve lower transmission
costs for SD and HD, particularly for
IPTV and mobile,” adds Pallet. “This
will generally require new hardware,
and availability of native HEVC

Keith Wymbs,
Elemental
Technologies VP
of Marketing

“…Our software
delivers H.265
content at very low
video bit rates to
a wide variety of
viewing devices

”

decoding in consumer products
(including cell phones, where
software decoding would lower
battery life). As a result, we believe
that the timeframe for this adoption
will be longer-term than that of HEVC
for OTT 4K delivery.”
The computational intensity of
HEVC lends itself perfectly to the
processing performance advantage
available with GPUs, adds Wymbs.
Elemental Technologies’ processors
will support the new codec via
software upgrade from Q2 this year.
“Our software delivers H.265 content
at very low video bit rates to a wide
variety of viewing devices, creating
ubiquity that will richly reward
content providers, broadcasters
and consumers.”
The potential of HEVC to double
the compression efﬁciency of H.264
will have a significant effect on
OTT streaming for both operators
and consumers, claims Nann. “I
say ‘potential’ because in early
implementations, the efﬁciency gains
are likely to be a bit lower for ‘live’
encoding than for ofﬂine ﬁle-based
encoding, with the gap closing as
HEVC implementations mature.
“Relative to H.264, HEVC will
enable content to be provided at
signiﬁcantly higher quality at the
same bitrates–thus enabling, for
example, full HD resolutions on
CONTINUED ON PAGE 48

Elemental Technologies Version 2
software is now available
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Phillip&last=Izzard&search=Go https://twitter.com/inbroadcast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpzEatLsHdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.facebook.com/InBroadcast http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/inbroadcast/id468652679?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.branded.inbroadcast&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5icmFuZGVkLmluYnJvYWRjYXN0Il0 http://WWW.INBROADCAST.COM http://www.haivision.com/products/HyperStream http://www.youtube.com/user/elementaltech/videos?view=0
In Broadcast - April 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - April 2013
