THE FUTURE FACE OF TV

SHOW PREVIEW

The future face of TV ● 3

As the mid-part of the decade approaches and the global economic downturn recedes in the key markets, the

broadcast industry can be proud of itself on a number of levels. Mostly in terms of its resilience and the innovation that it has shown despite the most testing of circumstances.

It has come out, indeed flourished, with service bouquets capable of delivering TV

content in new and exciting forms across new and exciting platforms: online video is now well established more or less everywhere, leading to proliferating over the top services, which are now beginning to eat away at traditional pay-TV services.

Second screen is for many first in mind and catch-up TV and on-demand services are table stakes as the advances in gateways and wireless technologies mean it is normal for TV and video to be consumed everywhere around the home, arriving to set top boxes and other receivers and delivered at acceptable levels of quality to state of

the art TVs, PCs, laptops, netbooks, media tablets (such as the iPad), mobile phones, games platforms and portable media players of all descriptions. The mass availability of high bandwidth TV network infrastructures such as fibre to the home and advanced DSL and cable networks have allowed IPTV and cable providers to face off satellite in the delivery of the most advanced, enhanced and enriched TV content and services such as 4K/UltraHD. The rollout of 4G/LTE networks has meant TV everywhere/mobile TV is now a commercial reality.

And the latter is an important point: all of the aforementioned industries are in monetisation phases. It will be the aim of this supplement, timed to coincide with IBC 2014, to examine the landscape in which such services will bring about business transformation, delivering prosperity to all corners of the broadcast market.

Joseph O’HalloranEditor In ChiefRapid TV News

The future face of TV

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Is software still eating broadcast technology?

How can operators deal with the mobile video revolution?

The long and winding road to UltraHD 2

TV everywhere: from experimentation to expectation and execution

Are conversational interfaces the future?

Limiting latency, the potential hidden killer of online video

Taking content truly everywhereSocial TV is here to stay

Plugging security leaks in the 4K age

How content providers can drive value from data

Breaking down the barriers to digital ad insertion

Why interactive video and why now?

Content and engineering: the driving force behind internet video

The future face of TV ● 4 The future face of TV ● 5

By Steve Plunkett Chief Technology OfficerRed Bee Media

A little over a year ago, with thoughts turning to what major trends in broadcast technology would be at

the forthcoming IBC show, apart from the predictable replacement of 3DTV with 4K /UltraHD as the Next Big Thing, a more general theme seemed to be emerging. To paraphrase Marc Andreessen, software appeared to be eating broadcast technology.

In his original article, Andreessen argued that software was “eating the world” and it does indeed seem to be chomping its way into broadcasting. This shift from atoms to bits has lagged behind other industries for a number of reasons, but primarily due to the nature of high resolution video processing and distribution. Tape-based workflows have refused to die and for good reason – they provide a reliable and predictable medium from camera to playout, but times are definitely a-changing. File-based workflows have seen dramatic growth over the past few years and this of course removes some atoms from the scene (tapes, VTRs and people, for a start).

Thus I posed the question in a blog – Is Software Eating Broadcast Tech? It proposed that as always, change is the only constant in a technology-driven world and broadcasting was in the eye of the storm at that point in time. Innovation is hard, most innovations fail and companies that don’t innovate die. But,

Is software still eating broadcast technology?

installation project. This should result in reduced costs, greater business agility and high fives all round.

The badUnfortunately, this transition to software nirvana is non-trivial. Writing good quality, high-performance software to process audio and video, particularly in real-time, is hard. We know this already of course because such software already lives inside the hardware products we have used historically.

But hardware-delivered products should contain what is sometimes called mechanical sympathy (a term coined by Jackie Stewart to describe a driver being at one with a racing car by understanding its hardware intimately). The product designers and developers know exactly what to expect from their chosen hardware stack and optimise accordingly. In the ‘software-running-on-hardware-of-your-choice’ world, things are less certain.

Different CPU implementations will

provide different functional and performance characteristics through clock speed variations, cache sizes/levels, multi-core architectures, internal bandwidth, specialised accelerators and that’s just the CPU. Mix in storage IOPS/throughput variations, memory size/bus bandwidth differences, GPUs, LAN throughput, OS and driver versions: the list goes on. In this new world the software will need to be capable of optimising for generalised rather than specialised hardware and vendors will need both to provide guidance on minimum system requirements and accept that supporting a much more diverse underlying infrastructure will be more complicated and costly.

Then there is the question of how best to combine software components to perform multiple operations on the media. For real-time delivery, the serialised model of video processing, necessitated by using discrete hardware components, interconnected via SDI, isn’t likely to be optimal in the future.

Instead of emulating this architecture by interconnecting virtual machines with IP interfaces (though the most viable approach in the short term), it would be attractive instead to cluster multiple operations on the media being processed while it is in memory on a single machine. This is an obvious benefit of integrated systems such as ‘channel in a box’ solutions.

Unfortunately this is an area lacking in standardisation, or even interoperability, so today that often means taking the whole integrated system from a single vendor even though they are likely to be good at some functions (probably based on their product heritage) and not so good at others. And because increased software complexity often pushes the boundaries of reliability, the result of more functional integration can be system fragility. Not a property that sits well with the high availability familiar to and expected from the broadcast television industry.

The uglyIf we know where we want to go (the good) and we know it’s not going to be easy (the bad) then the transition period over the next few years is likely to be the ugly. Customers who have bought into the vision will be impatient to receive it and thus put pressure on vendors to deliver soon. The vendors meanwhile will inevitably find it is harder, takes longer and costs more money to get there than they estimated (or at least publicly communicated). There is an old software development maxim that applies here – you can have it faster, cheaper or better but you can only choose any two.

The nature of this type of industry disruption tends to lead to a change of fortunes. Some companies will fare better than others in the transition. This is all happening against a background of industry consolidation, it’s one of the reasons driving it, and it will be tough for certain categories of companies. Large companies may be better able to absorb the costs required to successfully evolve and small companies may be nimble enough to adapt more quickly but those in the middle might find it a tough road ahead.

Pretty much every vendor at NAB 2014 said they would have their new software products ready for business by the end of the year if not before. Let’s make a note in the diary to see how things look a year from now.

concluding, it asserted that shouldn’t stop us for a minute.

So how does this question look a year later? Based on the number of traditionally hardware-centric vendors announcing or showcasing their software-based product roadmaps at NAB 2014, it’s looking like a resounding yes. Particularly in the media processing and playout areas, both historically dominated by hardware-delivered products, everyone seemed keen to stress their future credentials as providers of software solutions that would run, variously, on commodity IT hardware, virtualised infrastructure and the cloud.

This is all good news, but it is not something that can happen overnight or with little effort and no teething problems. Here are my thoughts on the upsides, downsides and likely difficulties ahead (with a tip of the hat to Sergio Leone):

The goodSoftware-based products will ultimately deliver much greater flexibility. We can deploy them on infrastructure that suits our purpose (cost, speed, location, vendor preference, etc) and we can do so dynamically – such as using common compute resources to perform an Auto QC at one moment and then reallocating them to perform a transcode at another. This allows us to either get much greater efficiency from our private infrastructure, reducing its physical density, optimising power consumption and so on, or pay a third party such as a public cloud provider only for the resources we need at any particular time.

We can perform the deployment much more rapidly than in the physical product world too. Need a new channel? No problem, choose

from a menu of service options and it will be ready to receive and publish content in minutes rather than weeks or months. I am hugely over-simplifying this, of course, but you get the idea – in a software-centric world, the effort takes place before a channel deployment through software integration of channel templates; the act of deployment to available virtualised hardware is a process of launching machine images and/or configuration profiles, not a large

“Software-based products will ultimately deliver much greater flexibility”

A broad swathe of industries is being disrupted by software-delivered services and software companies in general. Does this number include broadcasting?

The future face of TV ● 7

By Joseph O’HalloranEditor In ChiefRapid TV News

At first glance, the sumptuous surroundings of the Ducale Palace in Lucca, Italy, seem rather odd as

the place where European TV’s future could be decided, but the building has in the past been a seat of power and maybe history was repeating itself.

For it was here that the Forum for Advanced Media in Europe (FAME) sat, setting out a roadmap for the evolution of UltraHD in the continent, examining why the market had not taken off to date, what was needed to kick-start it and what lessons could be learned from fellow professionals in Asia, in particular Japan and Korea, where development was far in advance.

Setting out the scene, Stephan Heimbecher, head of innovations and standards at Sky Deutschland, put a rather hefty stake in the ground for an industry that has been guided by technological futures rather than commercial realities. In his candid address, he reminded the audience of content owners, distributors and operators that the stark reality was that many broadcasters are actually still in transition to HDTV and that there was fundamentally no immediate big market for the first generation of UltraHD services, let alone a prospective second generation.

Sharing insight of research, he conceded that UltraHD was unlikely to be an instant hit. Moreover, he revealed that consumers regarded UltraHD sets as being far too

expensive and that in any case there was a general lack of content to make a purchase worthwhile. Heimbecher added, somewhat worryingly, that there was evidence of consumer scepticism of UltraHD due to the abject failure of 3DTV.

Counter argumentProposing a counter argument that all players in the UltraHD ecosystem had to have the courage of its long-term convictions, despite being chided somewhat by Heimbacher’s UK colleague Chris Johns of BSkyB that his company’s transponders didn’t come cheap, Thomas Wrede, vice president of reception systems at SES, called on the European UltraHD players to have more courage and to “just launch” services. Adding that the industry had to show a little more action and a little less conversation, he said: “We discuss [the issues] too much. We should just launch something as consumers are used to the rapid launch of [other advanced TV services].”

Wrede confirmed that SES had the capacity to go live immediately if necessary with UltraHD, as did Markus Fritz, director of

commercial development and marketing at Eutelsat who while sharing the general thrust of his arch-rival, was a little more circumspect about prospects.

“The entertainment industry will only make UltraHD happen where there is viability,” he cautioned. “We do indeed need courage to make it a mass market, but you can only share a cake once you’ve baked it.”

NHK’s UltraHD cake is most certainly out of the oven and the conference offered the opportunity to hear from the company’s Keiya Motohashi, also senior strategist 4K/8KTV and head of the Next Generation Television Forum in Japan as to how development was much in advance, thanks to not just innovation but also a lot of government subsidy. Poetically, Motohashi described UltraHD development as a long and winding road with, even for NHK, a number of key issues to be addressed. UltraHD post-production, he revealed, was still optimised for film production and improvements had to be made when it came TV.

“We need to improve day by day,” he added. “A [viable UltraHD] business ecosystem has not been established yet and needs to be expanded. All of the issues that need to be solved are not easy.”

That said, Motohashi was optimistic that his marketplace at least would see services established within the next year, with 8KTV trials happening by 2016 and full-scale 4K and 8K by 2020 at least. The long and winding road of UltraHD, whether this or the next generation, he asserted, would lead to a revolution whose ramifications could be on the scale of the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg.

The long and winding road to UltraHD 2

“We do indeed need courage to make it a mass market, but you can only share a cake once you’ve baked it”Thomas Wrede, SES

Despite a frank admission that 4K was yet to make a wow, those leading UltraHD are already setting out plans for the next generation of such services

The future face of TV ● 9

By Anna YongSenior Product Marketing ManagerCitrix

Whether you are streaming the latest TV series on Netflix while on your commute to work, browsing

Facebook on your lunchbreak or watching the most talked-about goals from the weekend on YouTube on the train, you will have probably noticed that videos sometimes seem to take an eternity to fully buffer.

In these situations you have probably found yourself asking ‘is this the type of service I expect to receive from my mobile operator?’ Too often, you are not getting the Quality of Experience (QoE) you expect and need to enjoy that video content. Mobile video stalling is today’s dropped call. A poor video QoE can damage customer loyalty and drive customer churn for the mobile operator.

In a recent report from Citrix it was discovered that video generates more than 50% of total mobile data traffic on wireless networks. Of this, YouTube accounts for 82% of all videos over mobile networks. The announcement by Facebook that it will expand its auto play video ads to seven countries outside the US and the arrival of Netflix in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg heralds an inevitable rise in mobile data from consumers.

But the challenge for operators is already

How can operators deal with the mobile video revolution?

significant. Currently, on average, mobile videos on an LTE network stall for an average of 15 seconds, while on a 3G network video stalling averages 47 seconds. Furthermore, video abandonment rates dramatically jump when videos stall. It is clear that currently subscribes are not getting the QoE they expect or deserve especially and that this stat is seemingly only heading in one direction as data usage rises.

Lessons to be learntThe impending increase of data from Facebook and Netflix traffic means operators urgently need to take steps to ensure QoE is not affected. The outlook for consumers looks bleak unless operators learn lessons from events when network traffic was at its highest, such as the World Cup, and seek out ways to improve mobile video QoE.

Nowhere was it more apparent that video is the biggest single source of network traffic than during the World Cup. Citrix observed a three to fourfold increase in HLS streaming, the video format used to serve live streaming of the tournament. Live streaming puts more pressure on the network as everyone switches on at exactly the same time and methods such as caching cannot be deployed.

Spike in demandData from the period of the World Cup reveals that some operators still need to learn these lessons and understand that more needs to be done to deal with the rise in demand during live events. When demand for live video streaming spiked (such as during the Brazil v Germany game where we observed a 20-fold increase in data traffic across a single sports network, ESPN) the number and duration of videos stalling doubled. Can you imagine the frustration of experiencing video stalling just as Götze scores the winning goal of the tournament?

Operators need to urgently address video QoE. New initiatives from the big players Facebook, Netflix and Instagram are making video a mainstream part of a subscriber’s experience. Measuring and mitigating negative impacts on the mobile user experience for video in such a time-sensitive and demanding environment can be a significant differentiator for mobile operators. After all – who would want to watch the Götze goal even two seconds after everyone else saw it?

“Can you imagine the frustration of experiencing video stalling just as Götze scores the winning goal of the tournament?”

Of all the matters to address in the video industry, ensuring quality of experience is a priority matter

The future face of TV ● 8

By Jonathan FriendCTO Friend MTS

When one hears the term ‘online piracy’ the mind springs to the music and movie industries’

decade-long battle against file sharing. In the television industry there has, of course, been an equally hard-fought engagement against those facilitating access to encrypted signals, but this has always been in the ‘offline’ world of satellite and cable systems.

The industry has been somewhat protected by the simple lack of adequate last-mile internet bandwidth to deliver a linear stream in a sensible quality to provide a competitive user experience on the large screen. This was an obstacle the movie industry didn’t have shielding them due to the acceptable ‘out of order download’ nature of a file-sharing protocol such as BitTorrent. So, the battles have remained those of control word (‘card’) sharing, CAM emulators and countermeasures.

In recent years, however, there have been two paradigm shifts that have levelled the playing field in the pirates’ favour: the increase in last-mile bandwidth; and the adoption of the multiscreen experience. These together have brought the issue of online piracy to the fore for pay-TV operators.

A common misconception is that the perpetrators of online piracy are social misfits, opportunistically providing a service in order to gain a form of acceptance within society.

Plugging security leaks in the 4K age

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Unlike file sharing, the operation of a

unicast streaming service requires significant resources (servers and bandwidth, or an account with a CDN) and this costs money. The higher the demand for the content the greater the resource requirement, and therefore the increase in cost to the service operator. These sums can stretch into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month ~ an amount one could hardly spend as a service to society.

The audience figures on many pirate streaming services would be the envy of many a legitimate streaming service, and without the cost of the content large profits are there to be had. The revenue of these businesses comes sometimes from low subscription fees, but more often than not the content is free to the viewer, or at least free in initial monetary terms. While advertising is certainly a source of revenue, the involvement with organised crime and malware distribution is equally as lucrative.

DRM is the oft-cited technology for securing streaming platforms. Whether services are providing VOD or live streaming capability, there are a variety of technologies

available to secure the content.It is difficult to argue against the benefits

of a well-implemented digital rights management system. While it’s clear that these deter the casual thief, without which the problem could be even more widespread, the evidence of leakage from these services (obtained for example where different/ additional graphics are added to the online versus broadcast product), and the visibility of the content on major pirate services, shows that they achieve little to tackle the professional thief.

Forensic watermarking has been in use for many years by the movie industry to identify the source of leakage of pre-release content: screener discs, etc. Set-top box and VOD service watermarking systems have been available for a while and, while these are in use, without universal adoption their effectiveness is limited. Limitations in their adoption are abound: receiver device modification; CDN edge modification; they don’t work well with live content; how do you find the leaked watermarked content; watermark detection is a complex, time-consuming and expensive process. All of this stems from the legacy application for the technology being for movies and not for what would traditionally be televised content.

As we move into the 4K era and beyond, what is needed is a single system that can work equally as well for live and VOD, doesn’t require player/device or CDN edge modification; has in-built leak discovery and watermark detection; and will uncover and enable you to tackle the operators of pirate streaming services in just minutes through proactive notification not reactive investigation. This is all now possible ~ and just in time.

“The audience figures on many pirate streaming services would be the envy of many a legitimate streaming service”

Those operating pirate streaming services are often technically sophisticated individuals or organisations, looking to generate a profit. How do you beat them?

The future face of TV ● 11

Campbell FosterDirector of Product MarketingAdobe Primetime

The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics marked a shift in viewer expectations of multiscreen TV everywhere, and

in the IP delivery of live and linear TV programmes. Consumer experimentation yielded to expectations of performance and engagement. Technology experiments among broadcasters and pay-TV providers yielded to real investments in IP delivery and monetisation of TV content across connected screens.

In many cases, upstart video businesses yielded to established companies with the scale, resources and capacity necessary for delivering live events to massive concurrent audiences with the stability and reliability of traditional broadcast TV.

Historically, watching television content on a mobile device – particularly live and linear programming – was frustrating, with playback errors and redundant advertising creating a less-than-satisfying viewing experience. Prior to 2014, media companies were in an experimental phase, testing different technologies and partnerships for multiscreen delivery, while holding tightly to the existing business models that have historically made television profitable.

Data from the Sochi Games highlighted how quickly and enthusiastically viewers were beginning to embrace mobile and

TV everywhere: from experimentation to expectation and execution

desktop TV viewing as a genuine alternative, or supplement, to traditional linear delivery. Over 25 million viewers watched NBC’s digital broadcast of the Winter Games on desktops and devices, with the US v Canada men’s hockey game garnering an audience of more than 2.1 million viewers. More than 10.8 million video hours were consumed on NBC Olympics’ digital platforms, and the NBC Sports Live Extra app was downloaded more than 11 million times.

The BBC’s broadcast television coverage of Andy Murray’s Wimbledon victory in 2013 drew a peak audience of more than 17 million viewers – one of the largest TV audiences for a live sporting event in UK history – with device consumption a footnote. One year later, ESPN’s coverage of the Argentina v Germany FIFA World Cup final drew an audience of more than 1.8 million on digital devices alone.

Admittedly, this apples-to-oranges comparison ignores differences in

consumption patterns across borders, among other factors, but the larger point is that viewers are watching more television on more devices – a trend that bodes well for broadcasters and pay-TV providers, and for advertisers wishing to marry the reach of television with the personalisation of digital. Perhaps most importantly, according to a recent report from Needham, TV everywhere is boosting linear tune-in: ESPN’s multi-device FIFA World Cup delivery added 12% to its TV audience. Rather than cannibalising its core TV business, ESPN is growing its traditional linear TV audience by creating great viewing experiences on devices.

Not all plain sailingNot every live broadcast in 2014 has been a success. TV everywhere coverage of the Oscars in the US and certain World Cup matches in the UK experienced major outages. Both are examples of broadcasters failing to scale adequately to meet consumer expectations for multiscreen TV.

As broadcasters and pay-TV providers seize the opportunities that TV everywhere presents, and monetise content through dynamic ad insertion and subscriptions more efficiently, established companies like Adobe are creating measurable value for customers. The technology providers that will thrive in this new environment are the ones helping media companies achieve real results and efficiencies by providing the flexibility, scale and capacity required to meet viewers’ expectations for live, linear and on-demand TV across desktops and devices.

“Viewers are watching more television on more devices – a trend that bodes well for broadcasters and pay-TV providers”

As demand for TV everywhere increases, broadcasters and pay-TV providers are seizing the opportunities it brings

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The future face of TV ● 13The future face of TV ● 12

and one with huge ramifications. “It’s really important that online video

distributors and the content owners understand that of equal importance to their content is the experience around the video. What we have to remember is that when people go to watch a video, the difference between watching online and the TV experience is that you can’t just tune it on and have it go,” the analyst explained.

“There’s no such thing in the online world of a set of channels that you can tune into – you have to go find that video and that video is embedded in an experience that is equally as important as the video itself: what’s surrounding it; what does the player look like; how fast does the player load; how fast does the website that the player is embedded in load?”

All of which, and hence viewer experience, is seriously affected by latency. All forms of it. “The online video industry needs to understand that it is subject to both kinds of

By Joseph O’HalloranEditor In ChiefRapid TV News

It’s funny to think that it wasn’t that long ago that people wondered how online video could be successful. Now it seems

that the only thing that will limit online video will be service providers narrowing consumer choice by buying each other out – such as Amazon’s acquisition of LOVEFiLM – and for services not providing an acceptable quality of service.

The latter is not so much overlooked as rather assumed, that is to say people assume that a service worthy of the name will be delivered in high quality. But that’s exactly what it is: an assumption. And potentially a business-threatening one; latency could be the hidden killer of an online vide service.

Just glancing at the 2014 Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) shows that the increased appetite for IP-delivered video is poised to have a profound effect on bandwidth consumption. The VNI predicts that monthly global IP traffic by 2018 will be the equivalent of 8.8 billion screens streaming the FIFA World Cup final in 4K/UltraHD, all at the same time with an annual run-rate equivalent to 5.5 billion people binge-watching Game of Thrones Season 4 via video-on-demand in HD or 1.5 billion watching in 4K/UltraHD or 4.5 trillion YouTube clips. Of this online video will be the fastest growing residential Internet

Limiting latency, the potential hidden killer of online video

latency. You can call one video latency – that is how fast is the video loading, how quickly can I get to first play, what kind of bit-rate switching am I having during the experience,” Thibeault added.

service, Cisco added, with a CAGR of 10% from 2013-2018, growing from 1.2 billion users to 1.9 billion users. More interestingly, 4K/UltraHD video is set to account for 11% of IP video traffic by 2018, up from 0.1% in 2013; HD video will account for 52% (up from 36%) and SD will account for the remaining 37% (down from 64%).

Will the cost be passed on?Dealing with this demand is something that is very much at the forefront of the minds of not just service providers but also the network operators. The issue has taken its sharpest relief in the investment that Netflix has made, rather begrudgingly it has to be said, throughout 2014 with Comcast, AT&T and Verizon in the US to guarantee an acceptable quality of service. The question is whether the cost of these fast lanes will be passed on to the viewer. If so, that will mean that any buffering or glitches in quality will be regarded as even more unacceptable.

These issues are something of a priority for Jason Thibeault, Senior Director, Marketing Strategy of Limelight Networks. Thibeault believes that viewers have been raised on the experience that surrounds television – that is, when we turn the TV on the pictures are going to start playing and the experience will be of high quality. And so we are taking those expectations into the online world and forcing the companies that provide those services to offer the same type of experiences.

“What we are seeing from our perspective as a service provider is that more [of those] who are delivering content are trying to compete not on the service offering itself because everyone is coming to market with the same features and functionality,” he

“They also suffer from the latency around the video experience, the non-traditional latency that we might see from an eCommerce provider such as how fast does every little object load, what’s my type of interaction, how quickly can users start clicking.”

Iterated approachBut what can the distributors do about such things? For Limelight the key was to adopt an iterated approach whereby rather than just ‘solve’ the video problem and then the associated experience, it built a network in the service offering to address latency in general. This, Thibeault insisted, was the fruits of the company’s foresight when it started in the early parts of the last decade when it foresaw an explosion in online video and built a network with the capability to support media servers and all that was required to deliver video, including the experience around it.

This approach is one that Thibeault is confident will stand it in good stead even as demand increases and services becomes more data intensive as 4K video usage rises. In fact he would go far as to say that he does not regard 4K as that challenging. “As video gets larger it’s really to us just the same: bits being delivered. So there’s nothing more special to us about 4K than say 1080i etc; there’s just larger bits to deliver. But as more content owners deliver more 4K traffic it fills up our pipes faster. We are getting bigger each year to support more and more of this higher resolution content. Things are just going to get bigger and bigger: 4K, 8K, 16K; where’s it going to stop?”

Looking into the crystal ball, Thibeault believes that for content owners the most pressing challenge will come from the number of devices to support. “For the content owners, I think it’s more about more people consuming more content on more devices, such as viewing 4K content on a tablet and smartphone – this multi-device content consumption that we are seeing already but on a much larger scale. We’ll also see a tighter integration between the television experience and the online video experience.”

It seems logical that content delivery network providers are set to become the shovel providers of the new TV Klondike as providing high quality experiences across any device anywhere becomes table stakes. And for provider these stakes are high, too high to gamble.

argued. “And now because content is so much easier to license, these companies are really competing on the quality of experience. How fast can I get the video to you and at broadcast quality?”

What is the new reality is that companies such as Netflix are being driven to push the bar upwards. Indeed as the over the top leader expands around the world it has not only pushed online distribution of HD content but also has a confirmed 4K content distribution strategy already in place. This has seen global incumbents such as Comcast, BSkyB and the BBC being judged against what is available online. It has also resulted in such companies feeling compelled to follow suit with similar types of services that are adding even more strain to the networks.

Even though Thibeault does not think that mass numbers of viewers are really holding online content providers to the same quality standards of broadcaster just yet, he does believe it is a process that is starting happen

“Looking into the crystal ball, Thibeault believes that for content owners the most pressing challenge will come from the number of devices to support”

After a couple of very strong years of growth, thanks to the mass availability of compelling content, online video has now evolved to the point where the key issue is quality of experience. But how is this ensured?

The future face of TV ● 15The future face of TV ● 14

By Graham Reid, YouView

Recently, 22 sportsmen from Germany and Brazil kicked a football around a pitch for 90 minutes. Twitter

exploded. It was reported that a record 35.6 million people tweeted about the World Cup semi-final, and in 90 minutes the Internet confirmed that social TV was booming.

But what is social TV? Back here in Britain, we at YouView have discovered that social media is affecting the way we connect over TV more than ever before. We’re tweeting telly tips to each other, checking Facebook for TV news, and sharing our TV experiences over the social online world. Social TV is people connecting over TV in new and modern ways.

To celebrate YouView’s second birthday, we recently conducted our second annual census into TV viewing habits and found that, for starters, almost a quarter of 18-24 year olds talk about their favourite telly every day on Twitter, with Facebook not far behind with a figure of 20%.

Social media has had a huge impact on our TV tastes, with around one in seven viewers now getting TV recommendations directly from it.

As a company on the rise, it’s important to us to know our customers inside out as we look to innovate and improve our platform. With BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5,

Social TV is here to stay Driving value from data

BT, TalkTalk and Arqiva making up our seven-strong group of shareholders, we’re seamlessly combining live and catch-up television, maintaining a high quality on demand TV service that continues to improve.

So, where does social media fit into our vision? Firstly, the mobility of social media means that people can discover TV recommendations wherever they are, at any time. That’s why we launched our YouView app, with the ability to set recordings on the YouView+ box on your mobile. Our research found that 10% of TV viewers, across all available platforms, now use remote record.

Changing habitsThe importance of on demand content also continues to grow, putting us in a great position as TV viewers’ habits change and evolve. Crucially, what the numbers continue to show is that, while social TV becomes ever more powerful, the average TV user

still wants to just sit down in the living room, find their favourite programme, and watch it. This means that discoverability (a YouView watchword) is crucial. Whether it’s finding the right programme on live channels, using seven day scroll-back via the programme guide, delving into on demand players such as BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4oD or Demand 5, or bringing up a list of recordings, as television evolves the need for great discoverability is paramount.

Sharing the experienceOur TV census also focused on the rise of second screening. Telly fans don’t just want to view their favourite drama, they want to share their experiences on Twitter with their friends, or check the news headlines, or browse the net on their tablet. While the numbers are still relatively small (14% of viewers use Facebook while watching TV, and 4% use Twitter), they’re significant enough for us to take notice. With YouView’s funding secured for the next five years, we’re now looking at how we widen our content delivery across all platforms and devices, giving viewers a more complete TV experience.

A final question then: what did we learn from our research? Well, it looks like social TV is here to stay. Just like the social media outlets that facilitate it, it’s growing. People are sharing more information with each other, more easily than ever before. But TV, as much as it ever was, is nothing without great content.

“Social media has had a huge impact on our TV tastes, with around one in seven viewers now getting TV recommendations directly from it”

“Content segments do not need to be specifically based on genre or talent”

Are Facebook and Twitter now natural extensions of YTV services? If so, where do they and other social media services fit into the vision of operators and providers?

By Sef Tuma, Managing Director, Accenture Digital Video Services

While content companies have traditionally allowed downstream organisations to provide direct call

to action marketing to consumers, the advent of digital interactions provides an opportunity, and in some cases a responsibility, to use these nascent channels to increase uptake, engagement and loyalty or ‘stickiness’. An improved ability to segment a consumer base gives marketing departments the ability to leverage internal creative capabilities (such as content curation/editorial) tied to more sophisticated targeting tools to not only create effective marketing messages but also generate feedback on what works.

With the right execution this can create a test-and-learn culture that delivers a smarter organisation, able to optimise its marketing spend and react quickly to changing consumer sentiment. While this would require an investment in a platform (or a partnership) to support these capabilities, the return on investment should be measurable in marketing ROI and increased consumer engagement to drive other revenue models on digital channels (e.g., advertising). The key benefits can be described as follows: • Product definition – For digital-only products, or traditional products that are distributed across a number of channels, the insights collected from digital interactions can be extremely valuable. Given the end result is a more engaged audience, any information about current engagement, segmented by content or demographic, can support decision making as products are designed. This works very well in ‘test and learn’ scenarios in which functions and features may be difficult to prioritise without data to show what works

best with the target consumer.• Content pricing – Finding the optimal price point to enhance returns is driven by the ability to segment and test different content pricing models and messages across various digital channels. As content catalogues become larger, the ability to understand the likely yield based on the characteristics of both the consumers as well as the audience can help support more predictable pricing.• Ad sales and operations – While the value of digitally collected data has been understood to support online ad sales, more innovative players in the industry are developing the ability to use the same data to better understand the value of traditional advertising. Given most consumer devices can handle OTT distribution of video, as well as collect data across both linear and OTT, the use of correlation as well as segmentation techniques can improve understanding of whether a household is more responsive to certain types of advertising, independent of pure programming considerations. The insights here can be used in a number of ways from enriching traditional advertising footprints, which may have STB devices that can provide targeted linear advertising, to

creating an option for traditional advertising to use OTT as a ‘make good’ channel.• Rights acquisition – More insight into consumer engagement across digital channels helps rights negotiations as innovative content and consumer segmentation can help better package or consolidate rights across numerous windows and enhance the return on spend. For instance, being able to cluster the consumer base across a number of content segments that have been calculated through usage or interaction enables connections around content usage (or recommendation effectiveness) that can support decisions about expected return for particular mixes of content rights packages.• Content commissioning – Better understanding of core digital audience behaviour enhances the content commissioning process by providing insight into the types of content segments that are most effective with the footprint reached through those channels.

Content segments do not need to be specifically based around genre or talent. Appropriate, fine-tuned algorithms around correlation and predictive modelling can create new types of segments. These can be used to support and test curation and editorial recommendation processes, and then help predict whether commissioned content would have similar hit rates. Netflix has demonstrated the success of this approach numerous times, harnessing its usage data to help green-light relatively pricey productions more confidently.

Having compelling content is not enough: monetising it effectively is the name of the game

The future face of TV ● 17

By Garrick SimeonManaging Director, General DynamicsMediaware

As we know the key factor for the future of broadcasting will be delivering different, tailored versions

of programmes to a range of devices – mobile phones, tablets and computers, as well as the new generation of smart TVs – with targeted advertising, local news and other items that will attract regional audiences. But how easy is this and how ready is the broadcast industry?

Broadcasting has long followed established engineering principles of extensive research and development, followed by long trial periods, before implementing innovative technologies. But recently we have seen that where there is a perceived instant benefit – either from more efficient working or higher viewing figures and revenues – the adoption period can be much shorter.

Today we are in a place where the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) is increasing and the benefits of IP technology are clear but facilities largely continue to work with uncompressed video. This is partly for the high quality it brings but also because it is what people are used to. There is some comfort in dealing with a familiar format and since modern network infrastructures have made moving uncompressed video around easier, there would appear to be little point in changing. In addition, the technical impracticality of moving uncompressed, full-bandwidth video over IP only reinforces such a view. It will take time for many to forget about how, in the past, IP packet-based networks have lost data, produced jittery pictures and generally caused problems.

However changes are being forced by the consumer and the commercial end of

Breaking down the barriers to digital ad insertion

the broadcast market and in terms of hard business this also means finding ways to make money from localised advertising. National and regional broadcasting, using the traditional linear model of scheduled TV, reaches a vast number of potential consumers but as more people begin to watch streaming and on-demand services – whether on smart TVs, computers or mobiles – a new market is opening up.

Encoding materialHowever existing broadcasting techniques are not necessarily the best way to connect with this new market but IP and compressed technologies are well placed to smooth the way in extending the reach of broadcasters. The best way to do this is to encode material once and localise it at the point of transmission, or as close as is possible. Inserting commercials and local content into a service after it has been compressed for play-out is expensive and time-consuming. As well as needing a significant investment in hardware, decoding and re-coding in this way also results in lower picture and sound quality each time the process is carried out.

Operators should take advantage of the fact that video is already being compressed through the delivery chain and insert ads and play-out functions while it is in that format and ignore the temptation to go back into base band. Advanced MPEG splicing technologies are now meeting both the quality and important integration requirements across the entire chain requirements of linear delivery. Having an integrated system means that the automation, traffic management, billing, logging and reporting functions needed to make everything work can be incorporated easily.

Splice pointsSplicing allows operators to target both advertising and programming on a regional or local level across multiple platforms, including DTV, cable, IPTV, OTT and online. Technologies such as InStream, developed by General Dynamics Mediaware, offer this capability for all-compressed digital video systems. As well as the practical task of inserting specific material, such solutions can enhance viewing experiences by creating splice points that are seamless and so indistinguishable from the original programming. It also handles frame accuracy in a live environment in different ways to older MPEG-based systems, which allows input streams and ad files to be configured on the fly.

The result is that systems for real-time, frame-accurate processing of compressed video, are giving broadcasters the tools to not only improve profitability and operational efficiency but reach more people with professional, targeted programming.

“Existing broadcasting techniques are not necessarily the best way to connect with this new market”

Delivering the right ad to the right viewer at the right time should be easy, right?

The future face of TV ● 18

Jonathan BeavonDirector of Strategy, Service Provider VideoCisco Systems

Examining the progression of Internet video trends over time, our annual Cisco Visual Networking Index serves

as a useful benchmark. As a proportion of total IP traffic, video transmission totalled 36% in 2008; today that figure is closer to 70%. The increase is even more remarkable considering total IP traffic grew five-fold in the same period.

In case it wasn’t already, the meteoric rise of Internet video became apparent following a claim from Netflix earlier this year. Having launched its video-on-demand offering in 2008, the streaming service announced in May that it already makes up a third of all US Internet traffic.

Trend slowdownAs broadband speeds continue to rise and IP video markets mature, it seems very unlikely that this upward trend will slow. Indeed, in the case of most of the pay-TV operators that we speak to, the conversation has shifted from simply ‘how do we make this work?’ to ‘how can we make the most of this?”

There are crucial decisions to be made early on. OTT video providers put content at the heart of their offering, while cable TV differentiates itself on connectivity and distribution, specifically based on the speed and reliability of its broadband products. Large satellite TV operators have taken a hybrid approach, coupling in-house production, investment in commissioned

Content and engineering: the driving force behind Internet video

content with the option to distribute over both broadcast and broadband networks.

Regardless of the route taken, gearing up for the impending growth of video traffic generally entails some form of technological or infrastructural development. Content delivery networks, conditional access technologies, digital rights management (DRM) and STB software are just a few of the factors that must be considered.

Video businesses increasingly need speed-

In an increasingly competitive landscape, defining and articulating your role within the mix is fundamental

Thirst for IP-delivered video is poised to have a profound effect on bandwidth consumption, according to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI).

The survey predicts that annual IP traffic for 2018 alone will be greater than all of the Internet traffic that has ever been generated globally (from 1984-2013).

That would mean monthly global IP traffic by 2018 would be the equivalent of 8.8 billion screens streaming the FIFA World Cup final game in 4K/UltraHD, all at the same time. The annual run-rate in fact should be about 1.6 zettabytes, or more than one and a half trillion gigabytes per year. That’s also equivalent to 5.5 billion people binge-watching Game of Thrones Season 4 via video-on-demand in HD or 1.5 billion

watching in 4K/UltraHD; 4.5 trillion YouTube clips; or 940 quadrillion text messages.

Online video will be the fastest growing residential Internet service, Cisco said, with a CAGR of 10% from 2013-2018, growing from 1.2 billion users to 1.9 billion users by 2018. And on the business front, desktop and personal videoconferencing will be the fastest growing business Internet service with a CAGR of 45%, growing from 37 million users in 2013 to 238 million users by 2018.

Taken together, IP video will be 79% of all IP traffic by 2018, up from 66% in 2013. More interestingly, 4K/UltraHD video will account for 11% of IP video traffic by 2018, up from 0.1% in 2013. HD video will account for 52% (up from 36%) and SD will account for the remaining 37% (down from 64%).

IP video to drive unprecedented surge in bandwidth usage by 2018

to-market, flexibility of deployment, and most importantly control of the technology that underpins their business. Set against that context, technology suppliers’ remit is changing; we are increasingly approached for our expertise in consultation and service viability.

With IP video traffic set to treble again over the next four years ours is an exciting industry to be part of, with many great innovations to deliver to our customers.

The future face of TV ● 21

By Charles Dawes, Global Strategic Account Director,Rovi

Within the entertainment tech sphere voice recognition and interaction has been portrayed as the ultimate

human-to-machine interface. But while speech-driven interfaces have been used for decades, practical uses have, until recently, been limited to supporting basic structured queries and stock responses. The truth is, speech-driven interfaces have not yet realised their full potential and delivered the natural interactions we envisioned.

Unfortunately, while speech capabilities can be broadly applied, we are currently seeing a great disparity in performance of voice-enabled services. Although there’s evidence of serious attempts to try and break through to the futuristic ideals of speech-driven interfaces, most solutions available today are largely unintuitive. This is because they still rely on structured menus for information retrieval so navigation with voice is as tedious as it would be with touch input.

At this stage we are only really scratching the surface of what’s possible. While many task-orientated systems may provide the notion of conversation continuity, in reality each request-response pair is independent of the next and is therefore limited in context – not exactly the ideal basis for a conversation.

Conversational interface – what does this mean?Conversational interfaces allow users to converse similar to the way humans do with one another. They are user interfaces that simulate natural communication qualities on devices and applications, allowing users to interact with them in casual language modes.

This level of interaction can unlock a

Are conversational interfaces the future?

range of opportunities when applied to basic activities such as booking a cinema ticket – comparing dates, locations time schedules and prices – or deciding what to watch on TV when faced with hundreds of live TV channels, thousands of VOD titles, and potentially millions of OTT options.

Consumers increasingly desire the ability to speak naturally with devices and have them effectively understand and execute their requests. One of the essential enabling technologies for these new experiences is graph-based search and discovery. This graph (aka ‘knowledge graph’) is a semantic database of named entities, where the relationships between these entities are dynamically mapped for predictive and intelligent results for search and discovery.

“What’s that Matt Damon film about fracking?” For consumers, a more intuitive discovery and recommendation process is critical as video is a semantically opaque medium. Multiple criteria are now involved when it comes to ways in which people evaluate viewing options – from cast to plots, genres, moods, and more – all of which are subjective to users. With this in mind, the TV viewing experience is a prime example of where a knowledge graph-based semantic approach is of great benefit to consumers. As the landscape becomes increasingly complex with the sheer volume of content available, traditional lexical metadata and structured menu-driven search and navigation prove difficult and cumbersome. A knowledge graph assists in streamlining discovery by showing content options in the way people think about

How we experience content is increasingly becoming as important as availability. But have interfaces been meeting user expectations?

programs rather than through traditional keyword or structured menu-based attributes.

Semantic technologies become even more interesting with conversational interfaces that enable semantic interpretation for natural-language queries. This is extremely exciting for those in the TV space as it can discern when a user is drilling down into a context or has switched topics, such as moving from movies to sports. This not only mimics our conversation style, but it also reflects how users typically browse for programming, often not sure what specifically they’d like to watch or perusing a range of different viewing options.

When will we start talking to our TVs?With the technology moving forward at such a fast pace, it’s safe to say that conversational interfaces are the logical next phase for the emerging era of smart-connected devices. Samsung for example has introduced a remote control with built-in microphone that facilitates voice-interaction and we can undoubtedly expect Google to introduce something similar when it launches Android TV.

However, simply adding speech enablement to existing solutions will not provide consumers with the interactions they desire. To become fully functional and effective for users, voice technologies must be backed by sophisticated search capabilities, such as knowledge graphs and deep metadata. By building these technologies effectively, consumers can expect to reap the rewards of fast, accurate and intuitive voice content search. Stay tuned, talking to your TV may soon no longer be a sign of madness.

The future face of TV ● 23The future face of TV ● 22

By Pieter Mees, CEO and co-founder, Zentrick

In a recent report from Cisco, it was estimated that IP video will account for 79% of all consumer Internet traffic by

2018, up from 66% in 2013. With faster and better online provision, as well as a host of devices that allow people to access the Internet on the go, online video has quickly become the go-to method for people seeking to fulfil their information and entertainment needs.

This trend has been echoed in business, especially in the area of content marketing. Numerous studies and reports have shown that over half of companies use online video as part of their general customer outreach and over 64% of marketers expect the medium to dominate their strategies in the future. With near limitless potential reach, successful video allows customers to act as endorsers and promoters by sharing content with people within their social networks, leading to increased time and interactions with the brand.

Standing out from the crowdHowever, this new paradigm has created a host of challenges and issues for organisations looking to best use it. Considering that YouTube, by far the biggest online video platform, receives more than a billion unique users every month, brands and companies must work hard to ensure that their video

IBC Content Everywhere is a new series of global events that reflect the changing nature of the industry and will launch at

IBC 2014 in Amsterdam in September.Destined to take place at key regions

round the world, they have been created as a response to requests from IBC exhibitors and attendees alike, and acknowledge that IP-connected smartphones, tablets and personal computers are altering the way we consume media. This especially applies to TV and video content as broadband pipes get fatter across continents and mobile delivery technologies become faster and more widespread, short-circuiting the traditional developmental cycles and bootstrapping whole regions online faster than would once have been deemed possible.

The events will cover rich media production, devices, apps, digital marketing, social media, content personalisation, big data, cloud services, second screens, investment and much more.

Global reachAnd they are truly global, the initial three events spanning Europe, MENA and LATAM, with the latter two taking place in Dubai and São Paulo next year.

Not only will the inaugural IBC Content Everywhere Europe provide a forum for discussing the latest developments and the future of digital content in Europe’s single

Why interactive video and why now? Taking content truly everywhere

stands out in the crowd and really delivers sufficient engagement. Also, with companies increasingly looking at the bottom line and costs, the ROI of digital video, be it against revenue, subscribers, leads or click-through etc, is an area that needs to be addressed.

One answer to this issue is interactive video. A modern business needs to maximise the interactive capabilities built into digital devices (touch, the web, geo-location etc) to ensure that it not only engages viewers and customers, but also sustains that interest. Interactive videos create a unified environment that gives consumers truly engaging experiences, so they have a clear path to follow up their initial interest within the video. This new online paradigm allows users to click for immediate reaction, link to related information or have their experience personalised according to available data. They can engage, follow their own thought process, act upon it and respond immediately for instant results, which are personalised.

Interactive online video can also deliver true economies of scale by unifying outlets,

market, but it will also mark the debut of a radical new technology that promises to change the nature of the tradeshow experience. Touch & Connect exploits near-field communications technology to allow attendees to exchange contact details or information by touching device-to-device or device-to-tag. Via some innovative distribution geography it extends the reach of IBC Content Everywhere throughout the whole IBC show and 24/7/365 online as well, granting access to a special online portal and a global community of like-minded professionals working in this rapidly developing field.

Given a constant slew of surveys indicating the growing importance of connected devices to the global viewership, content is truly migrating everywhere and these new events will follow its progress assiduously.

You can expect the subject to be examined in detail too in one of the IBC Conference keynotes this year. The agenda-setting

The good news for online video is that it is now well established in broadcasting with an ever increasing number of players. The bad news is that such growth makes standing out ever harder

As the way we consume media continues to evolve, IBC announces the launch of Content Everywhere, a new series of global events that will cover every aspect of the innovation story of our industry

networks or partners with automatic cross screen compatibility. Companies and organisations can scale and optimise both workflows and assets to drive business growth while reusing creative work across paid, owned and earned media. Not only this, but by collecting engagement information about viewers along the way, brands can programmatically target, personalise and optimise content to meet media performance goals, serving the right content to the right user at the right time for real time marketing optimisation.

Encouraging brand engagementRecognising and partnering the latest trends in the video and online worlds is what interactive video is ultimately about, while at the same time ensuring that they are used in the most effective ways possible for real results. From social rewards to real-time commerce, inline gamification, timed surveys, embedded contact forms or local store finders, the interactive layers embedded in this new form of video can encourage and facilitate the next step in brand engagement. Ultimately, video has become more like the apps that we know and love on our devices; a content experience where everything is clickable, and dynamic and compatible across all devices and screens.

If online video was the original development, then think of the interactive iteration as Video 2.0 – the next stage in one of the most important business developments in the online world.

keynotes are given by the thought leaders at the very forefront of innovation in the industry, an international line-up of the pre-eminent and most visionary leaders in their field that anchor and guide the conference agenda.

Each day of the conference this year will cover a different aspect of the innovation story of our industry and each will feature a dedicated keynote. Here, one of the visionary speakers attracted to IBC will give their analysis, insight and predictions of the day’s agenda, looking at the present challenges, future opportunities or potential disruptors that we collectively face.

Big names and big subjectsAlways informative, thought-provoking, insightful and often entertaining as well, the IBC keynotes provide exactly the sort of top-level insight that helps delegates make their strategic business decisions for the years to come. Expect some big names and equally big subjects to be announced over the coming months.

For more information about IBC Content Everywhere please visit the IBC Content Everywhere dedicated websitewww.ibcCE.org

To view the full IBC2014 Conference Programme please visitwww.ibc.org/conferenceprogramme

“Over half of companies use online video as part of their general customer outreach”

“Content is truly migrating everywhere and these new events will follow its progress assiduously”