Digital UK Ltd is to combine the operations of the UK terrestrial platform Freeview with those of the satellite platform Freesat.

Digital UK, which is owned jointly by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, facilitates the Freeview TV platform, while the subscription free satellite platform Freesat is operated on behalf of the BBC and ITV.

The organisation said the merged operation would benefit from technological innovations and developments across the two services.

Jonathan Thompson, CEO, Digital UK, said: “We welcome this opportunity to work more closely with Freesat whilst continuing to deliver our mission of ensuring everyone in the UK can access a high-quality TV service for free. The combined entity will promote the very best of free-to-view content whilst reflecting the changing nature of consumer consumption.”

In December it was announced that Arqiva was to stand down as a shareholder it Digital UK following reluctance to invest further in Digital UK’s Freeview Plus, the HbbTV-based hybrid platform that has been able to add streaming services from both Freeview’s PSB shareholders and the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Now TV.

Arqiva officially stands down at the end of the month, and will continue to provide infrastructure services, but the transmission company’s departure has tidied up the shareholder structure.

“We believe that building on the best that both Freesat and DUK have to offer will ensure that free to air continues to be an exciting and vibrant proposition for UK consumers. This proposition will continue to provide UK viewers with great content however they choose to consume it, whether that is linear or on demand,” said Alistair Thom, CEO, Freesat.

The integration is subject to regulatory approval and can be expected to close in the next few months.

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VP9 Encoding : Journey So Far

Qian Chang

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· 7 min read · 7 min readFeb 8 · 7 min read

As we rolled out our encoding using VP9, we saw a bunch of improvements on video quality and bitrates (compared to H264), however, we also ran into challenges, which we will talk about.

Exploration

We’re using libvpx to encode our videos. After a period of time, we found that some content can be leaner with similar perceptual quality, by adding some entropy preserving filters. With these changes, we got remarkable bitrate savings on some of our most popular shows.

We found that some of our VP9 encoded content didn’t perform well on some content with high motion scenes and dark scenes. So, we decided to pause VP9 encoding on content types that would exhibit these issues. We then found that on some specific contents, the manifest bandwidth of the 240p layer is higher than that of the 360p layer. Due to the above issues, we paused VP9 encoding and dug deeper to analyse and investigate them. Finally, we came up with solutions that made our VP9 encoding output better.

Encoding

In this part, we would like to talk about 2 points that are not so frequently discussed on tech forums: the 2pass rate control method and multi-thread encoding speed.

Rate Control method

Similar to x264, VP9 has 1pass ABR, Constant Quality, 2pass ABR, and Constrained Quality rate-control methods.

CRF with bitrate caps is frequently used in x264 encoding. In VP9 CRF mode, the encoder tries to reach a constant (perceptual) quality while keeping the average bitrate below the bitrate limit.

This is different from the x264 CRF rate-control. In x264 we can use VBV buffer and VBV maxrate to control the bandwidth (maxrate) value of each layer in the DASH manifest. But in VP9 CRF mode there is no way to control this directly. The maxrate value is very important in adaptive bitrate selection. With a higher maxrate value, the stream will be picked up by fewer clients.

Another thing that is rarely noticed is that we can use 2pass in Constrained Quality mode encoding. As 1pass CRF is widely used in x264, we didn’t try 2pass CRF in VP9 at the beginning. However, 2pass CRF performs much better than 1pass CRF in VP9. It can improve the quality of some complex scenes. We will discuss the details later.

Multi-thread encoding speed

For VOD encoding, we tend to use a slow speed setting to get better quality and smaller size. In x264/x265, we can use 10 or more threads to speed up the encoding of 1080p videos. However, we can not utilize that many threads in libvpx. And the 1080p encoding speed is much slower than x264 under slow preset.

After some investigation, we knew that the maximum threads that libvpx can utilize are related to tiles. The max tiles are determined by the resolution. This table shows the max tiles for each resolution.

For 1080p contents, the video width is 1920 and the max tiles are only 4. Therefore the encoding time of 1080p is a bottleneck of our VOD service. Fortunately, the -row-mt option was introduced in libvpx v1.7 and the multi-thread encoding speed became faster than old versions. But for video content that requires a short release time, libvpx still could not meet our requirements and we need GOP level parallelization to improve it.

Packaging

Bento4 or Shaka packager?

Bento4 is very popular in HLS/DASH packaging for H264/H265 contents. For VP9, we have one more choice: Shaka packager. According to the developers, Bento4 focused on all formats based on the ISO Base File Format standard and Webm was thought to be very different. Besides, some VP9 + AAC streams generated by Bento4 could not play well in our Chrome browsers. On the contrary, Shaka packager can cover all of our use cases. So we decided to use Shaka packager in VP9 packaging.

The Shaka Packager can output fMP4 DASH streams with VP9 + AAC codec and Webm DASH streams with VP9 + Opus codec. It supports AV1 + AAC and AV1 + Opus well too.

Shaka Packager ...

Overview of FOX’s Resilient, Low Latency Streaming Video Architecture for Super Bowl LIV

Mayur Srinivasan

· 8 min read · 8 min readFeb 5 · 8 min read

On February 2nd, 2020, FOX delivered the most live-streamed Super Bowl in history, delivering an average minute audience of 3.4 million viewers. Behind the scenes, FOX’s video engineering team designed an innovative and highly redundant video streaming workflow to support this record breaking audience with a flawless experience.

We built this cloud-based streaming workflow in-house using a collection of vendor services across transmission, encode, storage, origin shielding, delivery and playback. Our focus was on building resiliency for every component of the video workflow.

This article will cover the following topics:

Architectural overview of FOX’s resilient, low latency video streaming workflow

Monitoring tools that were built/leveraged for the workflow

Testing strategies

Rehearsals leading up to game day

Game day recap

1. Architectural Overview

The following diagram illustrates the signal flow architecture that can be broken up into:

Transmission

Encode

Origin

Origin Shield

Delivery (Multi CDN)

Playback

Transmission

The primary broadcast signal originated from Hard Rock Stadium, in Miami and was then sent to FOX’s Master Control in Los Angeles. Master Control inserted commercials, rating watermarks and closed captioning. From LA, we used a managed fiber network to deliver the finished signal over four diverse fiber paths to multiple cloud regions.

Encode

For encoding resiliency, we used redundant encoder pipelines, deployed in multiple regions . For seamless failover in case of transmission issues on one of the paths, we made sure that the signals were sync locked. Each incoming signal was an RTP-FEC feed with video at 720p60 20 Mbps, AVC. In order to achieve low latency, we chose 2 sec segments with a live window size of 15 segments (30 secs total). On game day, end users experienced latency of roughly 8–12 secs behind the feed from Master Control!

Origin

We used two redundant origins, one in each region. This gave us geo-redundancy in the scenario wherein an entire cloud region had an outage/issue.

Origin Shield

To properly implement our Multi-CDN strategy and protect against congestion, we deployed a industry leading origin shield product to ensure that servers weren’t getting hammered with requests and to optimize for better caching. We also had the necessary knobs/logic to failover in either of the following scenarios:

If a particular feed in a region was down, failover to the backup feed within the same region

If a particular region was down (either dual feed failure/encoder failure/origin issue), failover to the backup origin in the alternate region

Additionally, in the scenario where the origin shield were to go down, we had the option of switching over to a backup shield with a different partner. This backup shield also had the same amount of redundant logic as the primary origin shield.

The ability to switch between primary and backup origin shields was handled through DNS.

Delivery (Multi CDN)

We used a pool of five CDNs for the event. We built a backend service for CDN decisioning that ran at each session start based on the following metrics:

Latency: We used test objects embedded within FOX properties to capture real time user metrics for latency. The size of the test objects was representative of our typical video segment size, in order to emulate latency measurements for video segment downloads. These test objects were fronted by each of the CDNs using configurations similar to actual segment delivery.

Rebuffering ratio: We utilized player rebuffering % metrics as part of the decisioning process.

Number of errors: We utilized player error metrics as part of the decisioning process.

We had protocols established, wherein if a particular CDN approached its reserved capacity, we would rebal...

As remote working and distance learning can put heavy demand on a home network's bandwidth, Google has updated Chrome OS to ensure that video conferencing software runs smoothly on Chromebooks even when a user has other apps open.

Students and business users alike have grown accustomed to multitasking and it has become increasingly common to be in a Google Meet video call while having a Google Doc or Sheet open in the background. However, video quality can take a performance hit with too many apps running or when a user has a particularly demanding app opened.

For this reason, Google has improved how Meet videos are streamed to make it so that users can still see everyone in a video call using features such as grid view without affecting the performance of other apps on their systems.

We've built a list of the best video conferencing software available

These are the best business webcams for working from home

Also check out our roundup of the best headsets for conference calls

At the same time though, the search giant has also made changes to Meet so that the software will now adapt intelligently to a user's device, network and workflow. This means that if a user wants to take notes in Google Keep while on a video call, Meet's video resolution or frame rate may be decreased slightly so that video performance doesn't suffer as a result. Meet also now adapts to the speed of a user's network by temporarily turning off some videos so that users won't be interrupted if other members of their household are connected to the same network.

Chromebook video calls

In addition to its recent improvements to Meet, Google has also improved the camera and video performance and efficiency of Chromebooks by making it so that audio and video data don't require unnecessary processing. This could help productivity as user's Chromebooks will have more processing power available for other tasks while in a video call.

While many organizations and schools use Meet, others use Zoom which is why Google and Zoom's engineering teams have been collaborating on service enhancements for devices running Chrome OS. Just like with Meet, Zoom will now adjust video performance based on the devices in use and what participants are using their devices to do.

Whether you're studying or working from home on a Chromebook, you'll now be able to do more with your device while still being able to keep in touch with your co-workers or classmates.

We've also rounded up the best Chromebooks

Amlogic S905X4 is a quad-core Cortex-A55 SoC for 4K TV boxes and set-top boxes with H.265, H.264, VP9, and AV1 hardware video decoding. The silicon vendor usually provides a lower cost version of the processor for dongles without Ethernet, but keeping most of the same features, as we’ve seen in the past with S905X2 and S905Y2 processors for instance.

S905X4 has now its own cost-down version with S905Y4 for Android TV (certified) dongles relying on WiFi for connectivity, but instead of keeping Cortex-A55 cores, the processor features four low-power Cortex-A35 cores. We do not have the full details about S905Y4 processor just yet, but it has start to show in dongles from SEI Robotics and SDMC that appears idendical.

SDMC DV6071Z / SEI Robotics SEI450 TV dongle specifications:

SoC – Amlogic S905Y4 quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A35 processor with Mali-G31 MP2 GPU

System Memory – 2GB DDR (4GB optional)

Storage – 8GB eMMC flash (16GB optional)

Video & Audio Output – HDMI 2.1 up to 4Kp60 with HDCP 2.3, HDR (HDR10, HLG, etc..)

Video decoding

* AV1 MP-10 4Kx2K @ 60fps

* H.265 HEVC MP-10 @ L5.1 up to 4Kx2K @ 60fps

* VP9 Profile-2 up to 4Kx2K @ 60fps

* H.264 AVC HP up to 4Kx2K @ 30fps

Connectivity – Dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi 5, Bluetooth 4.2 or higher

DRM – Widevine, Playready, Verimatrix (Optional)

Misc – Reset pinhole, LED indicator

Power Supply – 5V/1.5A via Micro USB port

The dongle runs a certified version of Android 10 for Android TV or greater, and by default ships with a power adapter, a Bluetooth and IR remote control with voice support plus two accompanying AAA batteries and a user manual. SEI Robotics and SDMC dongles are not meant for end users but instead TV operator that would typically prefer using a custom launcher to promote their services rather the stock Android TV launcher.

You’ll find conflicted information about the Arm core used in S905Y4, but an AndroidTV_rumor tweet seems to confirm S905Y4 is indeed based on four Cortex-A35 cores using information from the Google Play Console. Cortex-A35 core should be more efficient, but a fairly slower than the Cortex-A55 core used in S905X4, as it is an evolution of the Cortex-A7 32-bit core with 6 to 40% improvement in efficiency.

However, If the 2.6 GHz frequency reported above is correct then a quad-core Cortex-A35 @ 2.6 GHz may perform just as well, if not better, than a quad-core Cortex-A55 @ the typical 1.9 GHz used with S905X4, but that seems really high for this type of core. Strangely, S905X4 is also shown as running up to 2600 MHz on the screenshot above, so go figure.

Additional information about the Android TV dongle may be found on SDMC and SEI Robotics websites.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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A Look Back at Streaming Video's 2020

In many ways, 2020 feels more like a decade than a year. From global warming to global warnings, from political instability to pandemic uncertainty, from Wall Street cratering to Wall Street pretending nothing happened, 2020 has played out like a Saturday night doubleheader of B-grade horror movies that our parents attended back in the dark ages. Except this decade-long year of 2020 is the real thing. This is reality.

Looking back over the year, though, it certainly wasn’t all bad, at least not from a streaming perspective. After all, almost every schoolchild and working adult in these United States now knows not only what Zoom is but also about 50 different uses for it, including lectures, class gatherings, weddings, and funerals (and, sadly, Zoombombing). Zoom, like Google, has almost become so ubiquitous that it’s at risk of being turned into a verb. At the very least, I suspect it’ll be one of the words of the year when the Oxford Dictionary folks release their newest list.

This was also the year that several major premium content companies went direct to consumer with their own streaming platforms. Just in time, too, as traditional broadcast, event venues, and amusement parks all came under significant financial strain. In just a year, Disney has gone from using Disney+ as a loss-leader funnel into its theme parks to seeing streaming as the primary focus of the company—enough so that it launched Hamilton online to drive subscribers, then sold those subscribers the upcharge of watching the Mulan remake, minus the theater experience, since both stage and screen remain closed in much of the country.

It is true that the streaming industry had some low points, including the "disbanding" of the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), technical glitches at some major now-online-only events, and the release of so many new codecs that we’re back to asking if our former selves learned nothing in the halcyon days of the late 1990s and early aughts, before the Pax Romana of H.264 came into effect and helped the industry grow through a common video compression scheme.

Be that as it may, H.264 is still with us, as witnessed by a number of surveys, reports, and conference speakers in late 2020 who continue to remind us that H.264 still has legs. We’ve been saying that now for almost 3 decades, starting in the ’90s videoconferencing days. It’s almost like H.264 is a zombie that won't die.

On a personal note, I’m thankful for stream­ing in a way I didn’t expect I'd experience in 2020: I got married the weekend before the lockdowns in mid-March, and the only way people from across the globe—who had planned to attend, before flights were canceled and borders closed—could celebrate with us in real time was to watch the live stream that a fellow streaming exec offered up and emceed.

As the streaming industry continues to set record after record for streaming delivery, with on-demand content consumption surging above pre-pandemic levels—and holding steady, even after lockdowns eased—and live user-generated content (UGC) stepping up in such quantities that it seems like UGC is re-applying for the title of King of Content, it feels almost like deja vu from the big streaming party that was 1998 or 1999.

But, as Prince warned us, "Forgive me if it goes astray / But when I woke up this mornin’ / Could have sworn it was Judgment Day." So let’s hope that we’re not going to be waxing nostalgic for 2020 anytime soon and that the future includes more streaming records but fewer coronas (viruses not cervezas).

With all that’s gone down in 2020, I’m hesitant to even approach my normal look forward into next year. In fact, I'll save that for the first column of 2021 and conclude here with one more thought about the year that we’ve just been through: "You know what they say about hindsight ..."

Let’s just hope that saying ends with 2020 and doesn’t follow us into 2021.

[This article appears in the ...

Netflix streaming turned 14 years old in January 2021. Rewinding back to 2007, streaming was called “Watch Now” and it only worked on Windows PCs (see this Hacking Netflix article about the initial launch). The architecture powering the streaming experience was very simple: hardware load balancer, a monolithic webapp, a few web services, and a relational database all running in one data center. That worked well for the thousands of members using streaming at that time. Fast forward to 2021 and Netflix has 200M+ global member households, 1000+ supported devices, and 1000s of original titles. Powering this requires a very different architecture.

Overall Architecture

Netflix’s overall architecture is a dichotomy:

1. Cloud-based microservices for running the services that power the experience

2. Hardware-based Open Connect infrastructure to deliver the bits as fast as possible

The cloud provides flexibility and scalability for the parts of the ecosystem that need that dynamism and ability to evolve rapidly. Open Connect is purpose-built to do video streaming data delivery at planetary scale. Both are necessary for Netflix’s global scale.

Cloud Edge Architecture

The “Edge” of Netflix’s cloud architecture is the front door into the microservices ecosystem. It’s where every request starts and ends, so resiliency is paramount. If any part of the edge is down, Netflix doesn’t work. There are four core layers to the edge architecture:

1. Cloud Gateway

2. Backend-for-Frontend (BFFs)

3. Customer Journey APIs

4. Domain Services & Data Stores

Every Netflix-enabled device interacts with the cloud edge architecture to create the Netflix consumer experience.

Cloud Gateway

The first cloud layer is the Cloud Gateway, also known as Zuul. This is an open source solution that solves many top level gateway concerns. Code is contributed by multiple teams and configurability enables using the gateway for many types of incoming traffic. Zuul’s responsibilities include:

Authentication - determine what device and user is sending the request

Routing - analyze the URL and other incoming parameters along with configuration to route the request to the appropriate origin services

Insights - measure request timings and reporting success/failure metrics, record tracing information for debugging purposes

Rate Limiting - limit some requests to avoid overloading the overall architecture

Enrichment - add ancillary data like geo-IP information

Backends-for-Frontends

The next layer is the BFF layer where device specific logic and data transforms live. This runs on a platform called NodeQuark: an opinionated set of Node.js libraries and frameworks offered as a managed service by the Node.js platform team. Device teams write code to be run in this managed layer, from calling the downstream APIs they need to build a given experience to transforming and packaging the resulting data into what’s needed to render that experience on the device. There are BFFs for the website, Android, iOS, TV, and a few other device platforms.

Customer Journey APIs & Domain Services

Beyond the BFFs are a full set of APIs for the customer journey. These cover everything from signing up to Netflix, logging in, adding and updating profiles, finding something to watch by browsing or searching, playing content, and more. These APIs rely on underlying domain services and data provided by many teams across the Product Engineering organization at Netflix. For a deep dive into one of those teams, see this Product Edge Systems (PES) Overview.

Architecting for Failure

Failures are to be expected in every subsystem of a complex ecosystem. In light of this reality, we’ve designed the architecture so that local-level failures don’t cause a macro-level outage. Ways we achieve this include running multi-region with fast failover, deploying multiple clusters for our critical services (sharded by functionality), and practicing chaos engineering regularly, f...

Thu, Feb 04

www.smadvancedforum.com

Loke has a wealth of experience across the sector, and often joins the chatroom .. so we invited him in! And Vanessa has a very broad insight of many aspects of the industry spanning two decades!

The future of WebRTC is already in the works

With the use of WebRTC expanding beyond the initial core design to power video conferences and collaboration systems in web browsers and other ecosystems (e.g., native apps), more features and more optimizations are now needed.

There is already work underway in the IETF WebTransport (WEBTRANS) and WebRTC Ingest Signaling over HTTPS (WISH) working groups that will build on, coordinate with and extend efforts of other IETF working groups. These include QUIC, to define new protocols that support the development of the WebTransport API, and HTTPBIS, to specify a simple, extensible, HTTPS-based signaling protocol to establish one-way WebRTC-based audiovisual sessions between broadcasting tools and real-time media broadcast networks.

The W3C WebRTC Working Group has started work on WebRTC Next Version Use Cases to map out WebRTC's future, notably:

End-to-end encryption in server-mediated videoconferencing

Live processing of audio and video feeds, including via Machine Learning

Internet of Things (e.g., an IoT sensor maintains a long-term connection and seeks to minimize power consumption)

The WebRTC Working Group is iterating on existing and new use cases, with a focus on understanding the full range of the needs and their priority. W3C recently started work on WebTransport and Web Codecs, which promises to bring the benefits of low-latency streaming to the broader media and entertainment ecosystem.

WebRTC joins the many W3C standards that define an Open Web Platform for application development with unprecedented potential to enable developers to build rich interactive experiences, powered by vast data stores, that are available on any device and environment.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) and its Board of Directors announced today that Bob Lyons, previously CEO at Alert Logic, has been named President and CEO and will join the company and the board of directors effective February 1, 2021. Bob Lento, President, CEO and Director since 2012, is retiring.

Lyons is a proven technology executive with an extraordinary track record of successfully scaling businesses and creating enterprise value through strategic revitalization, improved profitability, and revenue growth. At Alert Logic, he led the company through a multi-year strategic reposition that resulted in becoming a global leader in cybersecurity, specifically in managed threat detection and response. Prior to Alert Logic, Lyons held executive positions at Connexions Loyalty/Affinion Group, Ascend Learning, and Stream Global Services.

“We are excited to welcome Bob Lyons as we believe he is uniquely qualified to lead Limelight into its next phase of accelerated growth, profitability, and innovation. His passion for the customer and demonstrated track record of building high performing, innovative organizations aligns very well with our strategic objective to build on our current strengths and become a leader in delivering edge-based solutions," said Walt Amaral, Chair of the Limelight Networks Board of Directors. “We are grateful for Bob Lento’s leadership and the many heights reached during his tenure. His success in rebuilding the company, outstanding customer relationships, and creating a dynamic, high-performance culture are some of his most notable accomplishments,” continued Amaral.

"It has been a great privilege to lead Limelight and be a part of this amazing company for eight years. I am enormously proud of what we accomplished and believe Bob Lyons is an excellent choice to lead Limelight in its next phase. He is a seasoned leader with deep experience in scaling technology businesses and creating shareholder value. Most important, his core values strongly align with the Limelight culture to allow for a smooth transition and ability to quickly have an impact,” said Lento.

"I am honored to have the opportunity to join Limelight at a time of unprecedented opportunity. The digital transformation is creating new challenges and big opportunities alike. Limelight’s ability to leverage content, compute, and cybersecurity capabilities at the edge enables us to create a distinctive digital experience and we are uniquely qualified to deliver strategic edge business solutions. I look forward to expanding on Limelight’s strong CDN heritage to build an edge-based solutions company that accelerates growth and profitability," said Lyons.

About Limelight

Limelight Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: LLNW), a leading provider of digital content delivery and edge services, empowers customers to provide exceptional digital experiences. Limelight’s edge services platform includes a unique combination of global private infrastructure, intelligent software, and expert support services optimized for video workflows. For more information, visit www.limelight.com, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

View source version on businesswire.com:

Investor Relations

Veronica Bracker, (602) 850-5778

[email protected]

Source: Limelight Network, Inc.