Video Breakthroughs

Avec le passage au full HD et bientôt à la 4K de a diffusion OTT, le modèle de distribution unicast montre ses limites. La course à l’armement des CDNs dans le déploiement de baies de serveurs et la multiplication des points de peering n’est pas scalable à l’infini, et pourtant le traffic vidéo ne cesse d’augmenter de manière exponentielle, y compris – et surtout – sur les terminaux mobiles. La recherche de modèles de distribution OTT complémentaires avec le multicast est donc une priorité pour continuer d’assurer la qualité de l’expérience utilisateur et optimiser les coûts de diffusion. Les regards se tournent de plus en plus vers le transport multicast qui a fait le succès de l’IPTV, ainsi que le Peer-to-Peer qui, malgré sa réputation sulfureuse, a déjà fait ses preuves pour la diffusion de chaines live OTT à très grande échelle.

Pour tout savoir du multicast et du P2P, et apprendre des retours d’expérience et de recherche des membres de la Squad qui travaillent sur ces systèmes hybrides, OVFSquad organisait le 23 janvier 2014 une soirée spéciale de présentations (aka « Conférensquad ») dont voici le compte-rendu et les présentations.

Geneva in late March doesn’t feel as wild as a Las Vegas boulevard, but still there was a reasonable amount of gaming excitement at the EBU headquarters, where several events were following each other, beginning with a DASH Interoperability Forum meeting which was closely followed by the BroadThinking event, where industry actors and broadcasters come to show off their latest implementations advances and/or share the results of their real-life deployments or research studies. A good way of managing the transition between TV Connect and NAB…

Where Broadcast meets Broadband : that’s the promise of the EBU’s hybrid event which flies between industry competition, standardization efforts and broadcasters’ realpolitik – all wrapped in a warm and funny ambiance provided by the various speakers and the EBU team gently lead by Bram Tullemans whom I’d like to thanks personnally here for the presentation invitation (kudos also to Filka, Peter and Eoghan for the organization!). Actually the 2013 edition was a major success because it allowed the participants to get a rather good idea of the general trends of the industry, and at the same time to go deep in technology when needed, while having opportunities to discover edge tech demos on the lobby attending the conference room.

It’s virtually impossible to render a complete report of everything that has been said or shown there during two days by so many quality speakers (including OnlineVideoFrenchSquad group distinguished members Lionel Bringuier [Elemental Technologies], Martin Boronski [M6 Web], Thierry Fautier [Harmonic] and Nicolas Weil[Challenge2Media] – Les 4 Mousquetaires /poke @sfaure  ), but I’ll nevertheless try to provide you here a selection of relevant informations that will help you grasp the trends and prepare the upcoming tradeshows efficiently…

So let’s start with DAY 1 recap !

4K streaming, mobile broadcasting for the crowd, generalized delinearization, worldwide video events…

OTT delivery is just multiplying the challenges, as customers’ expectations are raising each day in terms of video fast-start, instant channel switching, lack of buffer and high frame size/rate – on all devices in all network conditions. To answer those challenges, OTT delivery answer today is basically more unicast sessions, more servers, more peering – and less and less guarantee of satisfying end-user experience as long as there is no specific end-to-end paid agreement to guarantee that the path will be provisioned from the origin server up to the video device. Even in this ideal scheme, the device might still suffer from poor wireless conditions which jeopardize the experience. So, how do we deal with all this stack of potential problems: do we stick to the aging receipts, rely blindly on Moore’s law and perpetuate a hopeless CDN weapons race? Or do we try to find smarter ways to make the OTT growth reach a sustainable delivery model ?

Nothing was more welcome after day 1 of EBU BroadThinking 2013 than a good night of sleep, in order to reset the tech hype counters and make some mental room for two new sessions on broadcasters’ CDNs and the latest advances of hybrid platforms. What would be the best broadcasters’ CDN architectures today, what would be their smartest (green) evolutions, would CDN-Federation standards finally bring interop reality over hopes, what would be the most advanced deployments and future of HbbTV, how it compares with YouView in the UK : day 2 agenda was looking quite attractive – and indeed the presentations were packed with valuable informations and experience feedbacks.

So here is the recap of the most interesting DAY 2 presentations and a short report on some insightful demos that were playing on the EBU floor right to the conference.