Indian direct to home TV operator Videocon d2h has chosen Cisco’s AnyRes Live UHD Encoders to launch its UHD satellite service. This deal appeared to represent the global launch of the Cisco 4K encoder, but given that we cannot find any antecedents for the launch of the device, we think this might be a simple reselling deal.
We wondered if Cisco was re-entering the encoding wars on the back of 4K. But it’s almost certainly not, despite Cisco’s Scientific Atlanta acquisition featuring encoders when it was acquired back in 2007, and the purchase of Inlet back in 2011. We know that Cisco lists Elemental Live as Cisco-compatible, which means it has been integrated as software into its blade hardware, and our guess is that instead of getting down and dirty in the encoder R&D department, Cisco may have pushed the Elemental platform at Videcon on its own hardware. We reached out to Elemental to confirm this, but the company would give us no comment.
If we are right, this would mean that Cisco, like Ericsson and Harmonic before it, has distanced itself from any specific encoding technology, instead preferring to offer whichever is the market leader at any point in time under its system integration arm, and within an encoding and cloud encoding architecture.
This seems to be a part of a wider industry-shift towards cloud-based, general purpose encoding hardware, controlled by a few major players – rather than the swarm of smaller businesses that comprised the encoding industry only a few years ago.
Recently, we’ve seen Imagine snap up RGB Networks for what looks like a fire-sale price, and Ericsson really push its virtualized encoding platform – which will seek out the best mix of open source software and proprietary hardware solutions for its customers, regardless of platform.
In addition, given that H.264 will be shortly replaced by HEVC (H.265), there will also be shift in the open source codecs from x264 to x265 – as good an impetus as any to encourage larger firms to swallow the assets and expertise of the smaller players in the market before they are run into the ground or are squeezed out entirely by racks and racks of cloud instances.
We saw this sort of consolidation when H.264 hit the market, and it is safe to expect the same to occur as HEVC becomes the industry standard.
So while Cisco continues to be a major player in the TV space with CPE, set tops and gateways in millions of homes, it is almost certainly not trying to reinvent encoding.
Cisco says its 4K Encoder offers best-in-class quality for real-time delivery, which is particularly apt given Videocon’s decision to launch the service during the Cricket World Cup – India’s largest sporting event. While we won’t tackle the elephant in the room (that of 4K TV penetration and sales in India), the 4K service is currently available to Videocon subscribers with a 4K set top, on channel 999 – where a select number of cricket matches are available to view for free, as well as additional 4K programming.
As for the technology behind the Videocon service itself, which will support devices from smartphones to TVs thanks to Cisco’s adaptive bit rate support, Videocon supplies a 4K set top for a monthly premium to its 12.6 million DTH subscribers. The garish black and gold set top supports DVB-S2, MPEG4 Part 10, and HEVC up to 60 fps. It runs a Cisco UI, and while it’s certainly possible that Cisco supplies the box itself, the company has not managed to respond to our inquiry before publication.
Tata Sky launched its own 4K satellite service in January, ahead of the cricket, which is supplied by Technicolor and uses the Broadcom BCM7252 SoC, with its dual-core Brahma15 processors for 2160p or dual-1080p HEVC decoding and transcoding. Technicolor said it would be supplying a 60fps picture to the TV.
Cisco’s Videoscape platform is its end-to-end TV and TV Everywhere offering, and has struggled to win big-name customers, but now counts NBC (Comcast), Bouygues Telecom, Brazil’s TV Globo and now Videocon among its larger clients. Videoscape’s most recent win was with Vodafone in Germany, powering a 4K set top using Broadcom chips. It still has nothing on the scale of Ericsson’s deal to power Telefonica’s Global Video Platform – with its interchangeably sourced encoding techniques.
There is a private cloud version of Videoscape, as well as a public cloud version based on OpenStack, which is offered as a service and pitched more at smaller operators, broadcasters and content providers.
With this, Cisco is moving into the space for services charged on a per-usage basis, occupied by Amazon’s ECS (Elastic Cloud Service). Videoscape Cloud Services will exploit the same software and APIs as the rest of Videoscape, but come with a consumption-based model, designed to build on existing infrastructures to deliver new video services quickly without the need for fresh software.
Cisco announced its intentions to fully virtualize the public cloud OpenStack-based platform on Intel blade servers at NAB 2014, and also mentioned its intentions to add full framerate HEVC encoding for 4K/UHD – and we think it has so far met only the 4K requirements.
Given that the tech specs of 24-60fps and 10-bit color are found in the Full HD (1080p) specification – and notably it makes no mention of High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology, which would be required for true UHD. We’re awaiting confirmation from Cisco on the matter, but we’re fairly sure about this.
UHD pictures require much more bandwidth than Full HD pictures. While the term 4K has now been established to denote a picture identical to Full HD in all but resolution, UHD represents a distinct evolution from 1080p pictures. The new UHD standard is an improvement in all areas on the specifications for 1080p. Full HD uses a 1920x1080p resolution, with frame rates between 24 and 60fps, a bit depth of 8 or 10bit, and the ITU Rec. 709 color space.
UHD has a 3840x2160p resolution, with a maximum frame rate of 120fps, a bit depth of 10 or 12bit, and the ITU Rec. 2020 color space – a significant increase from Full HD in all areas. The above specs form Phase Two of the first UHD expansion (UHD1 Phase 2), and UHD2 uses the same specs as UHD1, but differs only in its larger resolution of 7640x4320p.
The first 8K camera that Faultline encountered was from the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), and pushed 144Gbps of data down 10 16Gbps optical cables to the custom-built capture unit. NHK’s 4K satellite ambitions would see it launch a 4K (in name, but UHD1 in nature) service, which will push 35Mbps of signal to the home. Scheduled for launch this year, NHK is aiming for the launch of UHD2 satellite channels in 2018, culminating in 8K coverage of the Tokyo Olympics.