Get Adobe Flash player
Multiscreen & OTT 2012 > Technology Digital TV Europe July 2012 Network service providers and the CDN Quality assurance Operators and content owners delivering to multiple screens must absorb costs both fixed and variable. While headends are fixed costs, Content Delivery Network (CDN) costs vary with the number of viewers a video asset attracts. While the headend is the biggest item of capital expenditure, CDN costs therefore can make the real difference over the long term. CDN costs will multiply if video service providers need to deliver multiple copies of the same asset many times. “The headend is the biggest capex initial- ly but CDN is what makes the difference in the long term,” says Boris Felts, vice-president, product marketing, Envivio. Live content presents a particular set of chal- lenges. Video processing providers can convert video on the fly for distribution downstream. “From one encoder you can receive one chan- nel and create multiple renditions. You might have 10 resolutions from small screen to HD,” says Felts. “Out of these 10 resolutions you need to have two or three ways to package it – over MPEG Transport Stream, in Adobe Flash, in 3GPP, in HTTP Live Streaming – so we can pro- vide 40 variants of the same live channel com- ing in,” says Felts. As many flavours of video assets also need to be created for catch-up pro- gramming and video-on-demand. In order to simplify and save bandwidth, operators have turned to the concept of the mezzanine format, where multiple resolutions are created in a package from which different flavours can be created to support the different format as required at the edge of the network. Services including network DVR and personali- sation of advertising is best done at the edge. Delivering content efficiently to multiple devices has led operators to turn to CDN providers and has opened up the possibility that they may be able to market their own ‘access network CDN’ infrastructure to third-party con- tent providers. Few network operators have tried to take on the Akamais of the world direct- ly and there has been relatively little movement towards the development of a significant access network CDN business so far, however. “We believe network service providers will try to leverage what others can’t,” says Jacques Le Mancq, CEO of Broadpeak, a specialist in access network CDN. This could mean trying to use the home network as a tool within the CDN: “We believe that the home gateway and to a lesser extent the set-top can play a role in con- tent distribution and be part of the CDN, either as a cache or to deliver live content.” Service providers can also use their networks to deliver so-called on-the-go access outside the home, for instance by partitioning in-home equipment to deliver wireless hotspots, says Le Mancq. Operators face the issue of how to makemoney from this – either by marketing CDN services to content providers or by selling its own subscription services. In the latter case, they may wish to grant privileged access to their services on the assumption that con- many streaming formats,” he says. “We might be lucky sometime in the future, and might end up with truly consolidated industry where a single VOD file format and a single stream- ing format will be all that it is needed to reach 100% audiences. However this dream is for the distant future.” The need to prioritise the more popular devices nothwithstanding, Nativ’s Folland argues that the relentless pace of innovation in consumer electronics means that broadcast- ers really can’t afford to pick and choose. In addition to improvements in the processing power of devices enhancing their ability to play back high quality video, there are also ongoing improvements in the user experience driven by social networks and software providers that means broadcasters need to have access to rich metadata. “At the moment it’s a great big mess – it’s an exciting mess but people need to understand the challenges for content owners,” says Folland. Given the heterogeneity of the environment in which those content owners are now expected to operate, one of those challenges is measur- ing and monitoring the consumer experience and gathering data on consumer expectations and how users are behaving. According to Johan Görsjö, strategic prod- uct manager at quality assurance specialist Agama Technologies, extending quality assur- ance solutions to the OTT environment is not particularly problematic, with software embedded in the player via which the video is consumed rather than on the set-top box. Multiscreen means a more complex delivery chain, however, says Görsjö. “You have more devices in the home and a more complex delivery chain with more entities involved,” he says. “Having a monitoring system that can tie all the parts together is an important benefit for the operator, because TV everywhere is more complex than cable.” TV Everywhere services could involve video being handled by multiple CDN providers that do not provide comparable data sets, meaning that it is difficult to see how the cus- tomer experience is affected, he says (see side- bar for more on CDNs). Only one part – the service provider – is going to be held respon- sible by the customer for anything that goes wrong, on the other hand. “Many CDNs offer information but you may not be able to com- pare it and decide what it means for the cus- tomer experience. It’s going to be a challenge for operators and something we want to pro- vide to give them and idea of what it all means for service quality,” says Görsjö. Embedding monitoring software in the player at the point of consumption can enable information to be provided to the service provider without the need to invest in expensive hardware, he says. Görsjö also points out that adaptive bit-rate encoding, which also adds complexity to mon- itoring services, should not be seen as a silver bullet by service providers. “You could give customers inconsistent quality because bit- rates keep toggling between bit-rates or cus- tomers keep getting driven down to the lowest bit-rate – you don’t want Game of Thrones pushed down so it looks like a YouTube clip,” he says. Agama’s CEO Mikael Dahlgren says that operators typically are not looking to target every Android device in the market. “It’s not Le Mancq: the home gateway and set-top box can be part of the CDN infrastructure. sumers of free services do not necessarily expect high quality and availability of the serv- ice. But the danger of this strategy is that con- sumers may simply blame their internet service provider for poor video quality on services they want to consume. Visit us at www.digitaltveurope.net 6