Today's Top Stories LAS VEGAS--The broadcast industry has reached an "inflection point" where broadcast licensees, such as online video providers like Netflix, "can move from being the disrupted to the disruptor," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told NAB Show attendees at a keynote here. And he warned that the industry needs to pivot or risk being overtaken by companies that are taking advantage of the changing technology landscape.  | | At left, NAB President Gordon Smith interviews FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, right. (Photo courtesy of NAB) | Calling over-the-top "the hottest topic in the industry today," Wheeler said Netflix was the prime example of an entrepreneurial-focused company that seized the opportunity to buy content and distribute it via OTT. And Wheeler pointed out that cable companies have already recognized the danger and begun to redefine themselves from video transmitters to telecommunication companies. At the same time, Wheeler said he doesn't see broadcasting's importance changing. In fact, he sees the industry as having a "powerful opportunity" to continue to be relevant and profitable, and offered a few suggestions as to the tack broadcasters should take--leveraging local broadcast content, participating in spectrum sharing, or taking advantage of a new broadcasting standard, ATSC-3. "Broadcasters have two of the most important components of digital strategy: compelling content and the ability to promote it. Even better, you can leverage off those advantages at only incremental cost," he said. Wheeler and the FCC have increasingly locked horns with broadcasters over a few issues, most recently joint sharing agreements. While both the chairman and NAB President Gordon Smith, who introduced Wheeler and interviewed him after the presentation, played the situation for laughs--"Gordon Smith & Tom Wheeler: mano a mano live in Las Vegas. It would be a great UFC paid event," Wheeler said--broadcasters' concerns about FCC rulemaking is deadly serious. Wheeler addressed those issues directly in his keynote, stepping out from behind the podium to speak to the audience. "Here's the former head of the cable and wireless industry at NAB telling you he's your friend. That's crazy. … I realize the challenge," he said, pointing out that he "led the charge" to convince the Obama administration to delay the transition to digital television "so it would go as smoothly as it did." He also mentioned his efforts to make mobile TV a reality. "I put my money on the future of broadcasting." Still, he said, the FCC has a bigger responsibility. "Today, I have the American people as my client, and the actions of the FCC are built around that client." With that footnote constantly informing his speech, Wheeler touted FCC initiatives like its in-progress revamp of the Open Internet Order, and laid out the opportunities available for broadcasters, particularly in OTT. Licensing local content and providing it over-the-top to their audience is a key opportunity for broadcasters, he said--but that window is closing rapidly. Yahoo acquired NDN (News Distribution Network), an Atlanta-based company that syndicates local news content, paying $300 million for the opportunity to stream that content to its subscribers to leverage its CPM model, Wheeler said. And Verizon and AT&T are reportedly exploring new lines of business based on LTE, he added, saying that the carriers are very aware of history and the danger of not adapting to a changing technology landscape. In the post-keynote chat, Smith asked for the FCC's position on the ongoing issue of sports blackout controversies, and where such problems intersect with retransmission consent issues. "The key to retransmission consent is dealing in good faith. In absence of that, our authority is limited," Wheeler replied. Both Smith and Wheeler sounded reconciliatory notes, with Wheeler reiterating that the FCC is trying to help broadcasters, not hinder them, while meeting the mandates of Congress. "We're pro-competition; you are an important competitive component… Let's focus on going there rather than fight yesterday's battles," he said. Related articles:
Wheeler takes 'prism' view on net neutrality, retrans, process reform
FCC's Wheeler lays out vision for 3.5 GHz band, incentive auctions
Distributors cheer proposal to prohibit coordinated retrans negotiations
FCC to rework existing net neutrality rules, won't appeal Verizon ruling
Yahoo, Google reportedly plotting more 'conventional' TV plays Read more about: NAB14, Gordon Smith
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LAS VEGAS--Set-top box manufacturers have the ability to make multiple services available through a single consumer premises unit, but when it comes to the approaching 4K storm, they "ought to be worried," according to Benoit Fouchard, ATEME's chief strategy officer. Alternatives to STBs are being developed to meet the 4K demand, particularly by smart TV manufacturers, and a new 4K cable channel launching in Korea on Thursday bypasses the set-top box for a 4K-ready TV. Fouchard told FierceOnlineVideo here at the NAB Show that the growth of 4K is being driven by television manufacturers more than any other segment of the industry. The global market for TV sets is down, he said, and so manufacturers like Samsung are pinning their hopes on 4K to kick sales back into gear. To do that, Samsung and LG Electronics, working with ATEME--which provides encoding and decoding services for a number of compression protocols including HEVC and MPEG-DASH--collaborated with Korea's cable operators--including TBroad, C&M, CMB, CJ Hellovision, and Hyundai HCN--to help them launch a 4K cable channel serving much of the Seoul metro area. UMAX will go live on Thursday, Fouchard said in the interview, and is available to cable subscribers in the area at no additional cost. (Korea's terrestrial broadcasters, KBS, MBC, and SBS, are participating in a plan announced in 2012 to bring a free over-the-air 4K channel to the area. Licenses for the channel will be issued from May 2014.) The 4K, 60 frames-per-second HEVC channel will have another striking feature: It will have "no set-top dependency," Fouchard said. Instead, viewers will access the channel using a USB stick inserted in a Samsung or LG 4K-ready television set. The channel will have 40 programs initially, expanding to 100-plus programs. Sports programming is planned for September, he said, with broadcast of the Asian Games a possibility. ATEME was selected by the cable operators because of the picture quality its TITAN encoding solution brings, and because its decoder is "bolted" to Samsung and LG televisions, Fouchard added. Past 4K tests have been done primarily for broadcasting professionals, making UMAX the first channel specifically developed for consumers. Beyond the UMAX test, LG and Samsung are also looking at decoding 4K signals directly through a 4K-ready television, without a USB dongle. In fact, LG demonstrated a television at CES that had embedded HEVC decoding capabilities. That's "the way to go in the short term for 4K television," Fouchard said. Meantime, a set-top box that can specifically decode 4K protocols has yet to hit the U.S. market, although ST Microelectronics is showcasing an STB that uses the HEVC protocol. Additionally, Broadcom's BCM7445 video decoder is the first system-on-chip product that can be installed in set-top boxes. ATEME is working with both manufacturers to make sure its TITAN encoder is compatible with their hardware. ATEME has also announced a new partnership with Deluxe Media "to fulfill multiple major commercial contracts for Ultra High Definition video for distribution in both Video-on-Demand and physical formats," according to a company release. Deluxe is putting together a catalog of 4K content from several unnamed major Hollywood studios and will work with ATEME to create compression masters for UHD distribution. The content will rely on HEVC decoding capabilities built into 4K-ready TV sets, making an HEVC-capable set-top box unnecessary. For more:
- see this ATEME release
- and this January release Related articles:
IPTV: Japan's NTT Plala trying 4K; Swisscom deploying Android boxes
4K vendors head to NAB but demand remains tepid
Making the CDN easier: Akamai, Wowza look to ease OTT delivery pain Read more about: HEVC, 4K
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LAS VEGAS--Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) independent subsidiary thePlatform is teaming with Adobe to integrate its video management system with Adobe Primetime. The companies will jointly sell the combined product to clients. The conjunction of the two companies is not too surprising. thePlatform recently provided its white-label video management services to NBC Sports for its live stream of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, working in concert with Adobe Primetime, which supported authentication and playback of NBC's Live Extra streaming app. They've also worked together on past projects. "Behind the scenes, our two companies are often at the table together for the biggest initiatives in online video. Today's announcement strengthens that alignment," said Ian Blaine, thePlatform CEO, in a joint release. "We expect great things from this deep product integration and joint-selling relationship." In addition to thePlatform's mpx video management services, such as ingest, video publishing, custom playback and metadata, Adobe Primetime's part in the collaboration will include ad insertion and ad decisioning as well as viewer analytics. Adobe is building on that ad insertion technology with the release of Primetime 2.0, a completely cloud-based ad insertion service. The company said in a release that Primetime 2.0 enables ad insertion in linear, live and on-demand content "across any platform." The new service also offers Concurrency Monitoring--an extension of its PayTV Pass. Pay-TV operators using the monitoring service can, for example, limit the number of streams accessed by subscribers on any device. "Today, it's impossible to know if, for example, one account is powering 500 streams," Ashley Still, manager, Adobe Systems, told FierceOnlineVideo. Using Concurrency Monitoring with PayTV Pass, an operator can limit a subscriber's streams, or offer a different business model to the subscriber, such as paying a slightly higher subscription price to have more video streams available to more devices. "We want to give the [customer] ways to think differently about their business models," Still said. For more:
- see the release
- and this Primetime 2.0 release Related articles:
WWE grows Q4 revenue; thePlatform powering NBC Olympics online video
Streaming the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics: The vendors and technologies making it happen online
Ooyala, Microsoft form strategic partnership for managed video services Read more about: Theplatform
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LAS VEGAS--Skype, the VoIP video service purchased in 2011 by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), unveiled Skype TX, a broadcast-quality online video service, at the National Association of Broadcasters trade show here. Skype built TX using technology from its recent acquisition of studio graphics and interactive software provider Cat and Mouse. The product offers full-frame audio and video in broadcast-standard HD-SDI. While Skype is actively demonstrating the product at the NAB show, a release date and pricing have not yet been specified. Radio and online video programs often use Skype to speak directly with guests or their audience, according to engadget. TX boosts the quality of the video and audio and offers higher reliability than Skype's consumer product, along with technical support from Microsoft. According to a Skype blog post, the service still contains the most attractive elements of Skype's video calling service, such as the ability to connect almost anywhere an Internet connection exists, regardless of the network's quality, and being able to connect via Skype with no transmission cost. The provider is profiling the TX service on its Skype in Media site, which offers additional specs on the product and use cases such as linking the Jimmy Kimmel Show across the country with boy band One Direction. For more:
- Skype has this blog post
- engadget has this story
- B&C has this story Related articles:
Facebook's WhatsApp to offer voice calling in Q2
Juniper Research: Mobile video calling users to reach 130M by 2018 Read more about: Streaming Video
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The amount of time spent staring at a spinning circle instead of the OTT video a viewer wants decreased last year by 12.4 percent, from 39.3 to 26.9 percent, according to a Conviva report. But viewers' patience for buffering is wearing much thinner, much faster, especially if they're streaming live sports.  | | Buffering has a significant impact on OTT viewership. (Source: Conviva) | "Viewing time for live action television plummets from over 40 minutes in HD to just one minute if the viewer encounters buffering" during a live sports event, a Conviva release said.
Even worse, 2013 saw an increase in video start failures, from 4 percent to 4.8 percent. While that doesn't seem like a huge gain, Conviva put it into perspective in its report. "One in 20 times, when a consumer decides to watch something online, the video simply doesn't start." Quality is also becoming a big issue for viewers, who clearly want their HD, according to the study. For long-form content like movies, viewers watch high definition over 2.5 times as long as they do standard-definition movies. Live news and short-form video fare a bit better in standard definition, but viewers still prefer high-quality video, the report said. The report concluded that online video providers must not only resolve buffering issues but make sure viewers get a high-quality experience on every device, from TV to tablet. "Doing a great job on the iPad is not good enough if a user wants to stream to the TV. Simply put, it's not about a particular screen, it's about all of them. If you disappoint your viewer on one screen, you'll miss the opportunity to engage with them during other parts of the day, and risk losing them on all screens with a bad experience on a single device." For more:
- see the release
- DSL Reports has this story Related articles:
Aereo CEO Kanojia warns of 'chilling' consequences for cloud industry
To cut the cord or not: Is OTT ready for prime time?
Heitzmann: Infrastructure, security vendors will benefit most from online video growth
Report: Poor quality costing content providers billions Read more about: adaptive bit rate streaming
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