US GPU encoder specialist Elemental Technologies dropped by in London for a pre-IBC briefing, wanting to be clear in its messages and not have them caught up in the rush for HEVC announcements at IBC. That’s because IBC is in September, and everyone by then will have mocked up a HEVC demo, whether or not they can actually deliver a service.
The message from Elemental was clear, it has HEVC, it is working, it is giving a 50% throughput improvement today and it is live with customers now and it is even being considered for linear real time encoding, despite issues that rivals raise regarding the massive power consumption of a Graphics Processing Unit.
Elemental is basking in being the new kid on the block in encoding, the way Envivio was for a couple of years previous, able to be more flexible and quicker to market, because they both rely on their own software encoding system which work on existing generic servers.
The difference between Elemental and Envivo is the way Elemental has harnessed parallel processing inside commonly deployed Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), and it has lucked out in that the Amazon Elastic Cloud uses servers that have Nvidia GPUs in it as standard, so Elemental has been very early to having a cloud offering or Platform as a Service (PaaS) as it calls it.
But the difference between both Envivio and Elemental and the more established real time linear channel encoder makers is that those others use special chips, Ambarella ASICS for Harmonic, RGB and Ericsson, although Ericsson is soon to be switching to its own chips, and people like Media Excel use an x86 Sandybridge CPU with a Texas Instruments DSP, plus an embedded acceleration module.
For all of these, it is an anxious time when a new encoder first hits the market. Software only implementations can often move early and update often, but in Elemental’s case it has squeezed the technology onto its existing servers, and has rocketed into the market. All these rivals question whether Elemental can maintain its momentum, but marketing supremo Keith Wymbs is very clear about it, ‘We are now being used on linear systems for live TV and live multiscreen encoding. At NAB the Cloud PaaS we were showing was all about VoD files, now it is already on Live encoding jobs.’
The biggest criticism on using a GPU is that it can often use 20 times the amount of electricity that a specialist ASIC uses, and given that encoding HEVC is 6 to 10 times more complex, that power consumption may have gone up by yet another order of magnitude. Wymbs is entitled to ask when his rivals will have their HEVC 4K ASICs out, but says simply, ‘If you use our service in the cloud, you only have to worry about what you are charged by us, we don’t charge extra for the electricity. We have HEVC now and there are already clients who can see that if they spend $200k on Elemental encoders and switch early to HEVC, it might save them $100k out of $200k a month bill from Akamai in costs to deliver multiscreen TV. That way we pay for ourselves in just a couple of months. We can do that today, no-one else can.’
We are inclined to believe him, but we’re sure that as HEVC rolls out Elemental will not get things all its own way for too long. The demo though is a clincher, with a 720p file that runs in 6 Mbps in H.264 then runs with HEVC and is delivered in 3Mbps. It was a Spiderman clip and shown on a 15 foot screen, and there were no artifacts we could see, or edge problems, the outputs looked identical for 50% of the bandwidth.
‘The real time version of our encoder was finished two weeks before NAB when we first showed it. At NAB we showed 4K live encoding using H.264, and it came up as an 18 Mbps stream. We can now do the same demo in 12 Mbps. We showed a 1080p 30 stream at NAB in 3.2 Mbps using HEVC. Already that same video steam has been brought down to 2.8 Mbps just a few weeks later.’
Elemental harnessed the London Soho viewing theatre of WRN Broadcast, a transmissions solutions provider that is working on a Formula 1 app for one of the major media companies in Japan, and it will use Elemental for the encoding. The app will go live soon on iOS and Android, and is being provided for an operator that is supposed to have 60 million subscribers. The only operator that has that many subs all in Japan in NTT DoCoMo with its mobile base, but the TV rights for Formula 1 in Japan lays with Fuji TV, so perhaps it’s a joint venture or something, Elemental wasn’t saying.
It is all well and good being on the end of the 4K wow factor right now, and the quality of the video really was as good as any demo we expect to see at IBC come September, but what happens if Nvidia stops being flavor of the month in GPUs or Amazon drops them from its server spec. ‘We already have ports to other chips and to other server configurations. We have had to do that to make sure that investors were happy we could operate on other clouds.’
The company also announced a couple of new deals, one with Foxtel in Australia, to create an OTT TV Everywhere system, and another with Finnish cable equipment vendor Teleste.
Teleste hasn’t got any Elemental customers that can be announced right away, but there are bound to be some of the Nordic cable players, such as Com Hem in Sweden, who would just love to re-harvest a chunk of their cable bandwidth, and cut back its capex plan by introducing HEVC. Elemental says it will be powering the Teleste Optimo OTT solution, which it says is a complete OTT multiscreen system which includes delivery to set top boxes.
The Foxtel deal came about because the broadcaster had a segmentation snag, and asked if Elemental could help, Wymbs says that it got to the heart of the problem and became the supplier on the back of a simple piece of good client servicing. Foxtel will use Elemental Encoders to deliver 50 channels on Foxtel Go along with catch up content.
We pointed out that surely it is more expensive to use the cloud for encoding and transcoding rather than an in-house computer system? ‘If a customer used the cloud for everything and needed a server up all the time, then it would be more expensive,’ Wymbs admitted, So would that be double the cost?’ we asked. ‘Not double, but that’s not how our customers use it. We provide the identical software on a device as we do in the cloud, and customers can have some devices they host and spare capacity in the cloud.
‘Doing it this way our customers get detailed usage reports and we find that many companies are only transcoding heavily at certain times of the day, and because they can see the load in clear graphical reports, they know when it is more cost effective to buy in-house equipment. We find that using the cloud makes customers far more aware of their own transcoding trends,’ said Wymbs.
Finally we thought we’d share one of the graphs that the company used at the event, which shows how requests are changing at its customer BBC iPlayer, with mobile and tablet requests doubling to 30% of the total in just one year.
We still feel there are issues to do with power consumption that will never go away from GPU processed encoding, but high use of a cloud version does partially answer this. This may mean that the banks and banks of real time encoders which are in place for the world’s linear channels may never again be replaced in-house, with the Cloud providers finding perhaps one of their best applications in targeting their replacement, whether that cloud comes with Elemental codecs or those of others.