At the International Broadcasting Conference this week, held in Amsterdam there were a number of recurring themes as we drifted from stand to stand ‘ hybrid services, different ways to recommend TV viewing and new classes of over the top video services, with TV traveling over the public internet to virtually any device. Other issues on show were advanced advertising systems, though none of these appeared to be anywhere near ready for implementation.
While one or two of the systems on offer are already making a showing in TV services around the world, the rest of the IBC ideas will emerge, likely over the next year or 18 months into TV systems everywhere and this is really a showcase for the future of TV technology.
Hybrid systems have been predicted as likely to have an enormous impact on TV services for the past 5 years, but it is only now that the technology is ripe for taking seriously.
Of those which have already emerged into services, the unlikely combination of Orca Interactive, the Israeli IPTV middleware company and its new parent Viaccess, was one of the most concrete.
Orca’s middleware provided a route to take Viaccess parent France Telecom IPTV services closer to rural homes in both France and Poland.
Orca CEO Haggai Barel told us, ‘When Orange in France and Poland, offered IPTV, one out of two orders it received it had to turn away. After it added hybrid capabilities using satellite for the TV portion, and us for VoD internet services, France Telecom was immediately able to allow hundreds of thousands of customers to sign up.’
Orca managed to integrate the VoD services into its new Compass recommendation UI and at the show was also showing an extension to this which supports social networking options for sharing recommendations.
Essentially the bandwidth required to offer full IPTV meant that broadband customers who were too far from their local telephone exchange could not get enough broadband bandwidth to the home to support the Quality of Service for IPTV.
We knew that France Telecom added a satellite TV service to fix this, but less obvious was the VoD services, which are offered without quality of service across the public internet.
To make this look more and more like a ‘real’ VoD service Orca helped create a form of push VoD over the network offering quick, standard and progressive download services. Quick is used to describe a push VoD file which is already entirely on your DVR and the company has added partly pushed and those where only a small buffer has been downloaded. Obviously when the Orca recommendation software cuts in it will give special attention to those files already pushed entirely to your DVR.
Talking this through with Francois Moreau de Saint-Martin, the CEO at Viaccess, he revealed that the next step being considered is moving to a cross platform strategy where multiple devices can be supported with this file download approach. ‘We see a set top issuing a new OMA BCAST version of the content to handsets, and issuing OMA keys there and then,’ he said, talking about the system extending to offering files which can play on portable devices. This is perhaps one of the clearest routes to interoperable DRM, and a way of transferring content that remains protected without any new software downloads to go through.
Irdeto almost echoed these sentiments at the show, talking about how it can now protect file downloads and progressive downloads as well as interoperate between different DRMs, with Andrew Wajs, chief technology officer explaining how Cloakware, the software from a company it bought in 2007, can keep an area inside any device safe from prying eyes. ‘We can show this with Marlin DRM or with OMA and this is how DTCP IP will be extended (DTCP IP is a way of protecting connections between devices),’ and he explained how Cloakware, even when observed by software, goes through data transformations to obfuscate any decryption keys used. Under the protection of Cloakware Irdeto can then create a safe area on chip, and use this to output content and immediately re-encrypt it using a different DRM. It claims to have 1.5 billion devices in the world protected by Cloakware.
At the show Cloakware announced a new OMA DRM system for Android.
Do modern handsets have enough power for all of these extra processing workloads? ‘Most applications processors have about 1000 dhrystone MIPS at their disposal, not counting spare capacity on the video processor,’ said Wajs. So Irdeto also feels it is in the interoperable DRM business.
When we last wrote about Microsoft’s Silverlight service it was where it had been implemented a few weeks ago at Tesco in the UK, but as we said at the time, it is not the fault of the technology that Tesco is offering online films only to those people who buy a DVD at their stores.
‘We see this as Tesco trying to get the best from their foot traffic and trying to ease themselves into the online market,’ said Dene Schonknecht Global industry manager media and entertainment division, but it turns out that what Schonknecht and his colleague Gabriele di Piazza want to talk about is the way that Silverlight has just moved to the point where it can offer reliable quality over the top services, which are just as happy being file downloads as streams.
Now a year ago we saw the smooth streaming services possible with Silverlight, but now we can see the addition of PlayReady DRM, which can now cope with the concept of domains (where multiple devices are registered once as part of the same family or entertainment cluster and can then share content).
Smooth streaming, as Microsoft is apt to say, uses open HTTP as a standard protocol instead of RTSP or the Adobe Flash Video’s RTMP. A proprietary streaming process. So this isn’t easy, as HTTP was never meant to cope with streamed data (and never meant to be smooth) because it prefers data in packets, so any strategy that uses it must somehow fudge this issue of sending packets which arrive as if they were a stream. But then again the internet was never really comfortable with real time services at all, so everything out there in IPTV land is some kind of fudge and it works pretty well. The beauty of using HTTP is that all of the Content Delivery Networks which have distributed HTTP servers are already in place and just treat the tiny bursts of Silverlight streaming traffic like it was any other http traffic.
‘We’ve used it to cover a lot of streamed live events,’ di Piazza tells us, ‘such as the NFL in the US, Sky Sports in the UK, the Tour De France and Wimbledon, and we already planning the next Olympics coverage for NBC, as well as setting up services for viewing some European soccer games.’
The new Silverlight 4.0 also includes native multicast support, which is really about using multicast routers in enterprise environments, not about supporting IPTV natively. But the key for this version is the support for offline digital rights management.
Adobe Flash may be the de facto standard for sending video over the internet, but for high quality video which can be downloaded and stored the new Silverlight will have an adapted DRM, allowing you to copy video to other devices and watch them offline, without much danger of the downloaded film or TV show ever finding its way onto internet pirate sites. Adobe is not well know for the in-house DRM system it uses, and can only be used on downloaded files with the help of another additional specialist DRM like Widevine.
So expect more and more over the top services from both camps in the coming year, as Adobe addresses this issue, and Silverlight 4.0 becomes widespread. Also watch out for legal actions, because domain protection is thought to have been patented by Intertrust, the company that sued Microsoft successfully and obtained a huge out of court settlement for its pre-domain patents about four years ago.
Closer to home in the UK Miniweb Interactive was at the show, a company that began life as an internal BSkyB project. Miniweb is trying to create a retail option to purchase over the top video when people buy set tops in a shop. Right now this is primarily targeted at free to air DVB-T services, where a specification for the set top has been issued and it is a largely already a retail proposition.
What Miniweb is trying to do is create a bridge between the consumer electronics suppliers who build set tops and the content owners who don’t want to have lots of separate relationships with each box producer.
Miniweb makes great play out of the diagram above, where it provides middleware, transcoder services, content aggregation and advertising services and brings the two sides of the equation together.
It has a standard onscreen ‘watched,’ ‘liked,’ ‘disliked’ set of buttons for giving the system feedback, which in turn creates a set of recommendations of other content. The clever thing is the way each channel (the one you are currently on) can take advantage of these separately. If you are watching a particular channel, then all you see are VoD and search options for that channel, when you click on the system with your remote. It offers VoD or recommendations or catch up programs or search or subscription options from that channel only on one side of the screen. On the other side of the screen it can show global recommendations or search from the entire database of channels or options that are operator or manufacturer defined.
The system is driven by Autonomy’s blinx video searching technology and the whole platform runs on Metrologie Linux and the service was announced in July, and is shortly due to ship. The set top can be a hybrid with any DVB protocol, DVB-C, DVB-T or DVB-S (different tuner module in each).
Founder Ian Valentine said, ‘You can have a variety of viewer profiles which will give different capabilities. For instances you can let your kids log in and use a pin with a set spending limit (plus parental controls).’
The idea is to sell the set tops at retail, but to do that it will need a pretty good set of content relationships, and from the 6 or so channels that it showed us as committed, it looked like a good idea which may not have its route to market strategy nailed down.
The system is also a route to market for paid channels and you can buy a new channel with a click, against a pre-registered credit card or account. The system takes a look at all system criteria like caching rates and codecs and rights and streaming formats, and only shows content on any given set top which will work with your broadband line and your device. It supports DiVX, AVI, and a variety of H.264 profiles as codecs.
In effect it is an over the top internet interactive TV service with low cost author once publishing, but only if the pubic can see a perfectly good reason for buying the set top with MiniWeb on, or if Miniweb can convince every supplier to sign up for it.
Seachange was also showing a three screen VoD server, which can serve video VoD content to PCs over the internet, to TV sets as well as to mobile handsets. This last step is achieved using systems from its subsidiary Mobix Interactive, which handles 3GPP streaming and mobile device management.
Seachange couldn’t point to anyone that had yet committed to all three, but has developed the technology to the point where you could be watching a program on a TV, and wish to take it with you on the phone. The system simply tickets where you stopped viewing it, and you can ask for it to be forwarded to any mobile handset. You then get an SMS and by just clicking on it you can carry on watching where you left off.
Opera spent some time with us talking about TV widgets, which we have come to associate with Yahoo and Intel’s efforts to grab the agenda in the internet to TV debate. Arnaud Caigniet, Opera Devices SDK manager puts the argument that the supposedly leading mindshare that has been build up by Intel and Yahoo Widgets, is unfounded, because it is not a cross platform system. ‘Our web platform and Widget SDK is cross platform. The Yahoo widgets would not be very easy to move to say a handset.’ Caigniet was demonstrating a widget which is not yet a product, but which he says could easily become one, using all W3C web standards.
‘Tier 1 TV OEMs (for that read Sony, Samsung, Philips, Panasonic and the like) are telling us that they are worried about the time to market of such a service and the engineering cost of using Yahoo. They would prefer to write once and deploy across the entire device chain.’ The Opera Web platform consists of a Widget runtime, middleware and APIs, and relies on CE HTML. So Opera becomes yet another company making a bid for TV that comes over the top of the internet.
At the OpenTV stand, Michael Ivanchenko, SVP Worldwide of sales, wanted to take the conversation in the direction of online advertising. It has already got its EclipsePlus product at the heart of the ads insertion software used by Comcast Spotlight. Comcast gets to insert 2 minutes per hour of local adverts into cable channels.
‘OpenTV has been able to do hybrid services for a long time. To us all the pipes into a set top are just feeds, we don’t really care what they are. And this just means that middleware is coming more and more into its own and takes on a more significant role in the set top and in deployment negotiations.
‘In our next generation we are supporting DLNA to enable content sharing around the home and it doesn’t matter where that content originated, as a broadcast, a pay TV service or if it has been downloaded to a PC or is streaming live over the internet. It needs to be viewable on every device in the home and that’s the job of middleware to make possible.’
At Broadcom Stephen Palm, technical director of the Broadband Communications Group, the big story of the show was MoCA. The company has just released a MoCA 1.1 chip, which drive the connections at Verizon FiOS TV and a number of US cable MSOs, in order to provide multi-room DVR in particular.
Broadcom has MoCA 1.1 certification but did not say who is using its chip, and has placed the MoCA design on a number of SoCs, its GPON being one of them, integrated with a MoCA media access controller, PHY transceiver, and RF tuner.
Entropic has for a long time been isolated as the sole provider of silicon in this area, and says it is working in the GPON sector with partners like BroadLight and Freescale, but that will adhere to the new MoCA 2.0 specification which moves video around with an underlying PHY rate of 400 Mbps. Version 1.1 offers a PHY rate of 270 Mbps which nets out around 175 Mbps in the real world.
Broadcom has done this all too often before, and will accelerate as it gets sales and push on to MoCA 2.0 and high volumes at low costs, and our take is that Entropic will then be forced into a niche at best, and bankruptcy at worst.
The Broadcom chip has a 3D graphics engine for advanced user interfaces, support for MHP and Adobe Flash video, is implemented in 65 nanometer geometry and Palm says that it is all DLNA compliant which means that it can undertake content discovery among 6,000 devices including 650 digital TVs.
But the other Broadcom announcement once again related to over the top internet carriage and hybrid TV technologies in a collaboration with SoftAtHome. This is a three way French consortium formed by France Telecom, Thomson and Sagem last year which is a way of producing hybrids for Orange IPTV and building new applications for it. Now this can sit on a Broadcom 7405 chip which can cope with HD class video.
Dreampark, the IPTV middleware company which dominates Swedish IPTV installations (with the exception of the successful TeliaSonera), told us about new sales this year in Poland, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, France and Spain. Many of these were pure IPTV, but once again the company is keen on hybrids, both those using digital cable’s DOCSIS for the delivery of over the top video assets and also by partnering with ISPs for channel delivery with over the top video.
‘In Sweden a customer can sign into an ISP portal, and there he can switch ISPs or more likely switch services to include a TV option or new channels or add things like over the top video,’ said Magnus Persson of Dreampark, and this is where he sees the company heading more and more.
Finally at the show the BBC stood up and talked about how it plans to offer the iPlayer to third parties through some form of open source approach licensed to other broadcasters. After hearing about all the vendors with over the top, hybrid options it made little sense to hear from even an established broadcaster, offering what is much the same.