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Today’s European TV landscape is burgeoning, providing a bountiful and vibrant business environment for broadcasters, operators and content owners. Once available, this high quality content is met by a clear willingness from viewers to pay for the privilege of access, further bolstering a TV industry that is valued at upwards of $130 billion annually (iDate).
Broadcasting and telecoms have had a long relationship, one that in recent years has become closer and more symbiotic. But there is one area where the two clash head on: radio spectrum. This is a vital resource for not just television and radio transmission but also the production of entertainment shows and outside broadcasts today, which relies heavily on wireless microphones and cameras, in-ear monitors (IEMs) and mobile communications. Parallel to this is the ever-growing demand from mobile phone companies for frequencies to support video streaming and wireless telephony as well as telephony.
The DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is already plotting its future course as its VidiPath certification programme aimed at guaranteeing device conformance with subscription TV services gets going. A major future focus will be second screens, both for interacting with and controlling primary services, according to DLNA Director Stephen Palm.
Forensic watermarking is the key to combating OTT stream piracy. Anyone who has attended a seminar on video security over the last year cannot fail to have noticed that content redistribution over the Internet is set to overtake traditional control word sharing as the biggest single piracy threat to premium content. This has been borne out by events, with some OTT premium sports services finding that as much as 50% of their “customers” do not have a legitimate subscription. Instead they have either bypassed security controls directly or accessed a pirated stream that they may have paid for, or that may instead carry advertising.
WinMedia, vendor of content management software for broadcasters, and Orange’s media services company Globecast, have agreed to integrate and distribute each other’s technologies. The tools to prepare, plan and playout the content encompassed in WinMedia solutions have been combined with Globecast’s satellite delivery platform. Six leading TV channels in North and West Africa already use this package.
Amid all the talk of set top box (STB) virtualization an important underlying question is how much functionality is moved to the cloud and what is retained on the customer premises. This is important because it will play a major part in shaping the economics of STB virtualization, depending on how this is defined. There are many definitions, with the weakest being just the direct replacement of the STB with an Internet connected smart TV. This involves incorporating all key STB functions in the smart TV, including IP Multicast support, DRM integration and a SDK (Software Development Kit), enabling operators to create their own apps for the platform.
Broadcasters are increasingly migrating to IP based data networks for video distribution to cut costs and reach new audiences, but some are then finding it difficult to negotiate rigorous SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that underpin performance, robustness and availability. Part of the problem is that Telcos and others providing the IP transport services are themselves not fully up to steam with the more stringent requirements broadcasters have over QoS and reliability.
When the MPEG LA licensing organization, released its final Patent Portfolio License fee structure for High Efficiency Video Coding (“HEVC License”) for using the technology behind the latest generation compression scheme, many in the industry were quite prepared and are now saying all is well…. although it took longer than many had hoped to solve.
