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Pre-NAB 2018 thoughts and questions

Although my first NAB was over 15 years ago, I’m still keen to get out to Vegas this year - OK not for Vegas the place, which gives me the creeps, but to catch up with the people, the trends and the tech. It remains one of my favorite conferences despite its gargantuan scale. Here are some of the questions I'll be looking to shed light on this year.

UHD

When I can get time off the Ultra HD Forum booth that I’ll be busy on, I’ll be looking into how the first generation of mature UHD technologies are doing. The debate as to whether 4K resolution was needed for a true UHD experience was all the rage just after the trailblazers were deploying UHD around 2014. Now that the paint has dried on the static metadata-based HDR solutions (HDR10/PQ and HLG), the battle seems over. Proponents of 1080p/HDR are grinning and claim they have won this round: we are already seeing some such content appearing on Netflix… For me the jury is still out, but I’ll be nosing around on people’s true intentions here.

But what’s next for UHD? I’ll be gaging the readiness of the next set of technologies, and as my friend Ian Nock says, how they might be deployed without breaking what’s already there. In the dynamic metadata space, Dolby Vision is already out there. Does there have to be a winner and a loser with HDR10+ or is there room in the market for both? As an audiophile I’ll be keen to find Next Gen Audio demos and here again fathom whether the existence of several standards (Dolby Atmos, MPEG-H, DTS:X, …) is holding things back.

Encoding

If one of my friends from the encoding space is kind enough to explain to me what's going on, I'll try to catch up on the encoding wars which have confused me with too many competing stakeholders to understand on my own. HEVC was supposed to be represent smooth transition from H264, now I don't know who to believe. The moving parts range from imploding patent pools, to Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft without forgetting the streaming people like DASH, H26x, disruptive start-ups, etc. Thierry, help! Decode it for me, tell me what's going on.

VR360

Having just published an eBook on VR360, that doesn’t predict 2018 is the year of lift-off but does explain why it’s the year to get involved, I’ll be eagerly looking how much we got right and if the hype has finally hit bottom, so we can now start to start to do business … I’ll do my best to get to the VR-IF masterclass on day 1 and if I'm lucky get an update from Rob Koenen.

Streaming Delay

I’ve been commissioned to do some work on OTT streaming delay, under the assumption that operators really care about reducing It. I’ve been very surprised that in my investigations so far, this is not the case. Sure, they’d like to reduce delay, but it’s low down their priority list. It’s got me wondering, as OTT streaming becomes more prevalent if the “norm” might, quite a few years from now become a 10-20s delay, where whatever broadcast is left, gets delayed so as to be synced with the crowd … probably science fiction but I’ll test out the idea.

Driven by Data, at last?

When I joined France Telecom (now Orange) in 2001, I remember a meeting where it was explained to me that our unique access to amazing data on subscribers and what they did, meant we would become the kings of data driven UX, data-driven decision making and data-driven just about everything … That vision of analytics was spot on, just too early and focussed on the wrong kind of operator. The Silicon Valley giants now dominate the world with Data and AI (which we didn’t see coming back then). So, have we truly entered the data era where other operators can get some of the pie? The recent Facebook/election scandals seem to say so. I’ll be looking around at vendors in the ecosystem are on the holy data grail. Is the market taking off for real or is it still vendor fantasy?

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@nebul2’s NAB 2016 Journal (UHD, HDR, VR, All-IP)

Las Vegas was again focused on UHD in 2016, at least through my eayes. The four Keywords I came away with were 1: UHD (again), 2: HDR, but also 3: VR and 4: All-IP production. Of course other things like drones were important, but I'm not a real journalist, I don't know how to write about things I don't know.

NAB Parking Day1

We got in from Europe on the Saturday evening and this year I was on a budget so we stayed in an Airbnb apartment with my colleague Marta. It turned out to be just behind the main LVCC parking lot. On Sunday morning, you can see on thE right what the parking looked like when you arrive before the show is really underway.

Size and growth of the industry

On the Sunday I sat for a moment through the "Media Technology Business Summit" run by Devoncroft and learned abit about the industry trends:

  • Starting with radio shows this year’s NAB is the 94th annual Show, so I suppose in 6 years we’ll have a big bonanza, I wonder if we’ll have something like Augmented Reality in 8K by then.
  • Devoncroft sees the global media being market worth 49bn in 2015 with the US Media industry having pushed revenue per user to the limit. 3000 vendors make up their industry panel and 2009-2015 CAGR was 1,9% with 2014-2015 OpEx spend at -4.2% and CapEx spend at -4.4%.
  • Despite the OTT craze and losing traditional subs, ESPN still gets 7$/Month from linear subscriptions, but only 0,42$/Month from OTT viewers, so hold your hats, linear pay-TV ain’t dead quite yet. Beyond sports, Devoncroft argues that even though there is growth, digital revenues are insufficient to replace linear ones. The big issue is how the ad market can transition.
  • 4K and UHD make up the third most import topic for respondents of Devoncroft's 2016 Big Broadcast Survey the results of which will soon be released. But Demand for UHD is less for “more pixels” than one for “better pixels”. So according to Devoncroft, like Ericsson, the HDR Vs. 4K debate is all but over.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

I then popped into an Augmented Reality (AR) conference where Gary Acock and Juan Salvo were discussing how to add live content to the UnReal video gaming engine. AR is seen as bringing the real world into Virtual Reality (VR). Stitching 360° video is still apparently a “pretty unpleasant experience” and French startup VideoStitch was mentioned as one of the key players working on fixing this. Currently 360° production design is limited by how effectively you can stitch video. But with AR there are also Inherent UX limitations like parallax issues with head movement or camera movement when there’s no head movement. With AR one needs to always know where the head is and how it's positioned as head movements affect the content that is being created.

The amount of data to process for VR can be well over 1TB / hour so the coming (?) VR/AR revolution needs powerful GPU and CPU.

AR, VR and any immersive experience are still moving targets in 2016. But neither AR nor VR are isolated from the broadcast experience anymore. Indeed VR is less of an isolating and lonely experience, but a new way of engaging, a bit like coming to a conference and interacting with social media on a smartphone at the same time. Content is still king and creating compelling content remains the goal where AR & VR are just other tools. As we still don't have toolsets like an « Adobe for AR/VR » we need to jerry-rig existing tools.

A VR demo that was not at NAB intrigued me. Frauhoffer’s Stephan Steglich told me about FAME. It’s the simple idea of navigating the 360 video with a remote control. 2 key advantages are removing the isolation aspect of having to wear something over the eyes and moving all the processing to the cloud, allowing for future-proof deployments. It sounded convincing but I’ll wait for a compelling demo before making an opinion.

Showstoppers

Sennheiser Mic

I had been told great things about the CES Showstoppers being a big event, at my first experience at NAB, it was a very focused affair where great food and wine seemed to be as attractive for the media as the companies to visit.

German manufacturer Sennheiser was showing off their latest MKE440 DSLR microphone, which they say is the first mini-shotgun for HQ stereo sound image in one take. I was more taken by the beautiful design of the prototype VR microphone that goes under VR camera.

I met up with V-Nova’s Fabio Murra who was showing their two OTT deployments based on their Perseus codec. FastFilmz launched on March 26 in India offering SVoD to a mobile-only Tamil customer base with a potential of 120m subs. There were 350 titles at launch and according to V-Nova, Perseus made the business case possible in southern India where only 2G is available in some areas, offering a 64-128 kbps bandwidth. The demo I saw was watchable at 120kbps using 14 fps (I had to point that out though). The Perseus codec is described as “hybrid on top of H264” with a metadata stream on top of H264. I’ll be looking to dig into this a bit more as I no longer understand exactly what this means after a heated discussion several analysts. Content is protected with DRM I couldn’t find out by who.

I only glimpsed the other demo of a 4K STB using OTT delivery. It was showing Tears of Steel at 4mbps and looked fine but without any wow effect at least for what was on screen then, or maybe it was just that I was too far away for the small screen.

V-Nova had already announced a contribution deal with Eutelsat and promised another one for the next day (which turned out to be Sky Italia).

brother

The Japanese company Brother that I wrongly thought of as a printer maker (does any Japanese company do only one thing?) was displaying « Airscouter », a surprising head-mounted monitor designed for cameramen in difficult positions. You see a 720p resolution image in the corner of one eye. It was a bit disconcerting and I guess limited to some very specific use cases. I felt a bit nauseous with it on my head but it does really work and felt maybe like what Iron Man might feel.

Ultra HD Forum

Monday was taken up with Ultra HD Forum activities for me. We had our own press conference in the morning and in the after noon I made a tiny presentation during the Pilot press conference in the Futures Park. I discussed, the forum’s reason for being, it’s history, our Plugfest #1, the Guidelines 2016 and the general « Work in Progress » aspect of live UHD.

« Pilot » is new name for « NAB Labs » that was started in 2012. We were among 30 exhibitors in Futures Park, which aims to promote « Edge of the art » concepts that are not yet commercialized. ATSC 3.0 was the star with 15 companies focusing on that alone. Other stuff is very diverse ranging from commercial R&D, government to academic research. NHK 8k Super High Vision was prominent as usual and the Nippon public broadcaster is still scheduled to launch commercially in 2018 « so people can enjoy in 2020 Japanese Olympics » in glorious 8K HDR with HFR.

Security and analytics

Monday night was over-booked and I chose the Verimatrix media dinner. I had some animated discussions on UHD and the extent to which HDR might be the only big game-changer (I still believe in 4K but am feeling more and more lonely on that front). Tom Munro the CEO gave me a great update on the company strategy and how the move towards analytics, which I now understand can be a logical progression for a security vendor. If the financial transactions are precious enough to secure, then private usage data is worthy of the same efforts. More on that in a dedicated blog soon.

Satellite industry on edge of a cliff and might UHD save it?

On Tuesday I got myself to the Satellite industry day. I have this vision on the industry (at least the broadcast and the Telecoms parts of it) sitting on the edge of a cliff wondering when fiber, 5G and delinearization will push the off the edge.

Despite a great lineup with Caleb Henry of Via Sat Mag, Steve Corda VP Bizdev SES, Markus Fritz Eutelsat, Dan Miner AT&T and Peter Ostapiuk of Intelsat, the opening panel didn’t really give me any new ideas to tackle that problem.

AT&T in particular sees similarities between the move from SD to HD and that from HD to UHD, but IntelSat sobered the audience asking how the content industry will make money from upgrade to UHD. SES’s Steve Corda made it scarier still reminding the audience that during the upgrade from SD to HD we didn't have competition from OTT as we do now with most early UHD coming from OTT suppliers.

The satellite industry panel agreed that demand for UHD channels is growing especially from their cable operator clients and that the bottleneck is still available content. AT&T's Dan Miner noted that a key change in OTT delivery in the coming 18 months is that US data plans will enable the TV Everywhere on cellular networks.

The consensus is that to have a monetizable UHD offering you need a bouquet of at least 2 channels, ideally at least to 5 including sports.

When the panel went round enumerating their live 4K services, I counted about a dozen UHD linear channels and as many demo channels as well as a few events based channels.

One of Viasat’s founders Mark Dankberg gave an inspirational talk reassuring the audience that the satellite industry’s future is safe, at least if they copy Viasat. The merger of AT&T and DirecTV is an indicator to him that Satellite without broadband is no longer viable in the long term. Viasat started 1986 in defense, during the 90's they got into VSAT (Data Networking) just on the B2B side. Dankberg believes high –orbit geostationary is still the way to go (instead of mid of low-orbit (LEO)) because it’s the best way to optimize resources with thousands of beams. He points out that as 95% of demand is in 15% of geography; LEO that orbit the earth can't do that. I was enthused by his talk and hoping to get home and write a blog about it, but when I looked through my notes I realized that in the end there wasn’t any new information, just the charisma and communicative beliefs of an industry veteran.

TV Middleware on Android

Beeniuis, the middleware guys from Slovenia that I’ve written about a few time caught me in the south hall so I went to have a look.

In demonstrating their new version 4.2 core product, Beenius told me that the EPG is dead but still went ahead to show me theirs. Navigation is via genres with favorite channels on top of a carousel that mixes live and VoD. Recommendation currently uses their own algorithms but can be based on Think Analytics with « Trending » content on second line.

beenius

The company is very Google-centric, although they still have a Linux offering with a Hybrid DVB solution. They clarified to me how GooglePlay apps can be controlled by the TV operator with three different approaches:

  1. 1. Preinstalled apps and an open GooglePlay
  2. 2. « Walled Garden » where the user chooses apps from the operator’s list typically among a dozen including YouTube, Netflix, etc.
  3. 3. Apps already embedding into the UI, which is also a closed model.

VoD also benefits from integrated recommendation but is open to extra info from the Web such IMDB content.

Beenius haven’t had much interaction with 4K yet, although they say they are ready. As with any competitive TV middleware you can fling content from screen to screen.

The operator-controlled UI can be updated from a central server so that a new version of the App gets automatically pushed to STB via GooglePlay as soon as it's closed and reopened. Playing in the google arena has enabled a full-featured app for Android powered smart TVs, Beanies just needs Google to finally get it right in the living room.

Automatically generated HDRB-COM

Ludovic Noblet of French institute of research B<>Com showed me a tool to up-convert SDR content to HDR. He sees it as a gap-filler for legacy setups which is already available for offline, with a real-time version planed for IBC 2016. The current version introduced a latency of just 3 images and was convincing even if it didn’t carry that amazing wow-effect of some native HDR content. He was very secretive about the first customers but seemed very confident.

The pull of social media

On the last day I had a quick stop at Texas Instrument’s tiny booth, simply because they engaged with me on twitter ;o)

The LMH1219 is a 12G SDI card shown above enables SDI cables to be up to 110m without any signal attenuation, instead of the usual 20-30m. Its UltraScale processing equalizes and Improves the signal. The TI chip is agnostic to metadata so should work fine with HDR for example.

Another hardware innovation they showed me was a single chip for receive (Cable EQ) or drive mode (TX) that makes BNC connectors more versatile as they needn't be just IN or OUT but can be either. The device isn’t available yet nor does it have a product name. Launch is expected in Q1 2017.

Note that I didn’t interact with any of the All-IP production vendors, but just noted it as a buzzing theme in conferences and on booth signage.

NAB Day 3

Oh and the Convention Centre car park looked like this from our apartment window by 9:30 am Monday through Wednesday:

That’s all for now folks.

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My Ultra High Definition #NAB15

There is always plenty to see at NAB and if I liked Las Vegas, I’d surely come more often. But the last time I was here was in 2001 when the show was dubbed the convergence NAB.

I’m going again this year for one main reason: Ultra HD. Sure 4K has been a key topic for at least the last five NABs, but now is different and here’s why.

Gut feelings aren’t very useful in making business decisions, but sometimes, once all evidence has been considered, that’s all you have to go by. Intuitions can even be dangerous when you don’t have enough information, like in 1993 when I advised my cousin not to join an Internet start-up because I “felt” that the Web was going to stay the realm of geeks and early adopters. Thank god he didn’t heed my stupid advice. I also missed the SMS boat with a strong gut feeling that such a barbaric user experience would never make it mainstream. But those were spot decisions made without enough background knowledge let alone understanding of what was really going on under the surface, driving user behaviour. Daniel Kanneman, in his excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow explains how any experts intuitions are mainly bunk anyway.

So I’ll attempt o explain why UHD will be real and will start now with as much argument and fact. I will own up to what is no more than opinion. To prove that this isn’t just consulting BS (yes I admit I’m also a consultant) I’m spending a few grand of my own money and taking 5 days off to go to NAB, which represents over my annual investment as one man band. Now is the time when the industry will really launch UHD, and I want to be there. The table below lists the main reasons given by those who advocate waiting for the time being.

Issue

Description

Facts

Opinion

for

against

Content creation, postproduction & workflows 4K content requires powerful hardware and four times the storage space. Studios already shoot in 4K, as do high-end smartphones. 4K cameras already used to produce several feeds in many studios. Cost, lack of standards, creates risk of needing to re-invest. To produce the best possible HD it’s already better to work in UHD then downscale. Be first out of the stalls for UHD deployment.
Content availability Most libraries are not UHD Anything shot on 70mm film can be re-mastered.

Up-scaling any content improves the HD experience.

It will take time to reach critical mass of native UHD content. This is also a chicken and egg situation. Offer and demand will prod each other forwards. Shorter content shelf life means more new content.
Colour depth and refresh rates UHD shows everything better including flaws. 30 fps looks jittery in UHD. These issues will be addressed irrespective of UHD. HD needs them too. UHD hardware may not support future HDR and HFR specs. Can cause legitimate delays. However, improved HD creates awareness of picture quality and fuels desire for UHD.
Device readiness Require more power to decode. With Moore’s law still in effect this problem will disappear shortly Impossible to leverage existing hardware in the field Smartphones shoot 4K that users will want to watch (Apples 5K iMac sets the scene). UHD is a premium feature consumers will pay for.
Distribution and Bandwidth Require 3 to 4 times the HD bandwidth Fibre and 4G deployments in full swing, HEVC is here Volumes required for ABR file storage will explode. Beyond HEVC, a new wave will come (I’l keeps tabs on the buzzing V-Nova).
Screen size and viewing distance To be at least 6 feet away from screen it must be at least 55” In urban homes shorter viewing distances make sense. Huge screen sizes are only popular in some markets As long as consumers perceive benefits they will adapt, they always do.

I wont dwell in this blog on the benefits of UHD, but unlike with other technical (r)evolutions such as 3D, all content will benefit from UHD. I also see an opportunity for a new kind of video story telling. High resolution content with shorter viewing distances lets different parts of the screen tell a different story depending on how and where you watch. Video can become more immersive. Choosing what part of the screen to watch is almost an interactive experience. Whether 3D technology is present or not will become a technical detail.

All the issues discussed above will benefit from branding, standardization and end-to-end interoperability testing which is why I will be reporting from the launch of the UHD Forum in Vegas. I’ll also look into the UHD alliance which has already launched a consumer facing Web site.

I’ll write a post-NAB blog, so far I intend to meet up with:

  • the Ultra HD Forum gang,
  • The Ultra HD Alliance (if I find them),
  • V-Nova that boasts UHD stream at HD bitrates,
  • BBright that offers an entry-level UHD play-out system that simplifies trials,
  • Verimatrix, that is launching a new UHD focussed security suite,
  • Sony to get a feel of the latest 4K cameras and TVs,
  • Please comment if you have other suggestions.

You only need to see UHD twice for it to make sense UHDUHD ;o)

[Update, just got back rather that a new blog here is the word cloud of my impressions walking around the halls and listening to conferences (see my twitter for more details)] : wordle 7