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Anyone who wandered through IBC hall 7 this year might be led to believe that everyone is peddling the same wares. As vendors we all have a sign somewhere on our stand saying we specialize in IP solutions for broadcasters. While Video-over-IP is a big buzzword in our industry, it’s important to realize that Video-over-IP has different meanings depending on whom you are talking to.
The UHD Forum spelt out its roadmap at the recent IBC 2015 broadcasting convention in Amsterdam and indicated how it will work with its sister body the UHD Alliance to shape the future of immersive television. There was an indication that the two groups would eventually converge into one after pursuing their parallel agendas separately for the time being. But there was also a whiff of tension even among UHD Forum members with some clear disagreements over the exact form of emerging profiles for UHD.
As online video comes of age, it must match legacy broadcast services for traditional features such as consistent access to subtitles. This will be a focus of separate demonstrations at IBC 2015 from the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) and Institut für Rundfunktechnik GmbH (IRT), the research arm of German broadcasters ARD, ZDF and DLR, along with Austria’s ORF and Swiss public broadcaster SRG / SSR.
The underlying key to success in OTT services is service agility enabling continual update of the offering with key features in order to optimize the user experience and maintain competitive differentiation. This is the principle conclusion of a white paper just published jointly by Swedish TV apps developer Accedo and the Silicon Valley online video technology provider Ooyala.
Intel announced its membership in the Alliance for Open Media. And with that, we reinforce our commitment to open formats and announce our efforts for delivering the next generation of video coding tools. With founding partners Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, the Alliance for Open Media is collaborating to develop the next generation video formats that will reduce the end user cost of video delivery by being optimized for the next generation processors. Video is critically important to Intel’s business. Our customers are under constant pressure to improve video coding efficiency – whether to overcome the infrastructure challenges of the next 100M smartphones in India, or the difficulty of fitting 4K BT.2020 into legacy cables, we need technologies like HEVC to enable the next generation, and we will need to continue evolution in the generation beyond. To provide some insight into the recent history of broadcast video formats, let’s consider what broadcast video really means.
The few remaining moving parts in television stations other than automated studio cameras are fans, pumps and disk drives. Electro-mechanics has been replaced by chips and buffers with settings. Maintenance engineers need a new tool box.
Seven Internet giants have joined forces to build an open source codec to challenge HEVC for compressing high definition video content and especially Ultra HD (UHD) or 4K. The new Open Media Alliance Source project has the stated intention of developing “next-generation media formats, codecs and technologies” but the subtext is to oust HEVC as the codec for emerging UHD services, particularly on desktop PCs and laptops, although with growing convergence mobile and even broadcast platforms will also be targets.
Many industry commentators seem to consider a pure cloud delivery model to be broadcasting nirvana and that hybrid/cloud solutions are simply a rung on the ladder leading to the cloud. But, what if one size doesn’t fit all?
