Désolé, cet article est seulement disponible en Anglais Américain. Pour le confort de l'utilisateur, le contenu est affiché ci-dessous dans une autre langue. Vous pouvez cliquer le lien pour changer de langue active.
Q: As an operator, how do you choose the right CDN? A: You don't!
Instead look into CDN selector approaches or consider CDN (con)federations to always gets what's best at the right time.
This White Paper co-sponsored by Broadpeak takes a deep dive into the issue.
Désolé, cet article est seulement disponible en Anglais Américain. Pour le confort de l’utilisateur, le contenu est affiché ci-dessous dans une autre langue. Vous pouvez cliquer le lien pour changer de langue active.
It's easy after the fact to say "I told you so", but 3D never happened in the living room as we pointed out four years ago here.
Looking at the world though the same prism, here are my seven bullet points summarizing why UHD/4K will happen. If you're not sure what UHD/4K really is, see this quick guide here.
I. 4K doesn't require special glasses.
II. Almost any content can be up-scaled, making it look better in higher resolution.
III. 4K/UHD improves viewing experience all the time, not just during the wow! moments of a 3D movie, and never makes you seasick.
IV. Four times the resolution makes the viewing experience more immersive reducing the need for 3D content in the first place, and 8K will just do this again.
V. 4K/UHD will make 3D catalogues look insignificant in size as easy re-mastering of movies means UHD/4K VoD will be here before we even notice, which is what Netflix seems to be betting on.
VI. Workflows and post-production may indeed be tough in 4K/UHD, but they’re a piece of cake compared to 3D ones.
VII. Business models and device penetration are still holding back live 4K/UHD streams and the ink still needs to dry on HEVC. But the reason for being and value proposition oh live UHD is clear. What was a live 3D stream going to be used for?
I'll add-to or amend this list. Let me know your thoughts.
I came to TMForum’s Big Data In Focus Summit in Amsterdam today expecting one of two things: either that hype would still be the main driver behind this market, or that we’d finally moved forward and fallen into the trough of disillusionment.
For Rob Rich, TMForum’s Managing Director of Research, it’s clearly the latter, which made him all the more proud that attendance was on a par with last year. But I think something else may be happening on the Big Data scene. Last year’s conference was still all about building the infrastructure for collecting and storing all that data. This year, Jessica Rausch, TMForum’s conference producer, set it up to be bullish with as many real world success stories as possible. As Rob pointed out to me nobody really wants to talk about failures, at least not their own. This positive feeling, during day one at least, was furthered by a move away from setting Big Data up, towards Big Data Analytics, which means really using it.
On the down side though, I was disappointed with the actual use cases described on the podium this year. Despite being interesting to listen about and the fact that Big Data made them more accessible, none were really new.
I mean, Big Data for Fraud detection, really? Credit card companies have been using algorithms since the 1980s.
I was also a bit startled by some of the revelations given about data collection with vendors easily spliping into the “I’m just doing what I’m told” roles while their operator clients don’t necessarily take the responsibility either. I couldn’t help thinking that it’s as if the Snowden affair never happened and Big Data is here to give the NSA a new lease of life.
I had a passing feeling of déjà vu with Big Data in the 2010s reminding me of Objet Orientation in the 1990s: it’s probably hugely important and underpins the future of much of IT, but may not ever become a market in its own right.
To counter this, a characteristic of Big Data that came up as much as last year was the strong linkage between process, organization and Big Data projects or as @yifatkafkafi tweeted: “People-driven transformation was key to Big Data success at Skype - @DvirYuval #bigdatainfocus” (you can find other tweets with the #bigdatainfocus overly long twitter hash tag).
Nobody used the term “Machine Data” last year, so Alice Crook of Splunk’s Marketing team put my out of my ignorance telling me that it’s “anything unstructured, created by machine”. I’ll come back to this and dig a bit deeper to get to a clearer conclusion in the next blog, where I’ll also write about the three companies I met: Cvidya, Splunk and Ontology and give TMForum’s view after my interview with Rob Rich.
Let’s wind back the clock.
70’s – France’s young president elect Giscard d’Estaing comes to office and realizing that the French Telephone system is years behind those of other countries. Huge investment is ploughed into the state owned PTT. During the decade, France moved from an antiquated system to a state-of-the-art Signaling System 7 (SS7) Telephone network.
When I came to France as a boy in 1974 it took months for our family to get our first phone line installed – that was already a vast improvement over the previous decade’s standard 2-year waiting list. By our second move in 1977 it was just a few days, which seemed a bit like science fiction at the time and vastly impressed family and friends back home in the UK.
Before most people had heard of the Internet or IP, we were busy in France discovering online services with the Minitel system which saw it usage boom in the 80s and early 90s. The leading edge was taken off French Telecoms as there was then much hesitation of how to best react to the emerging Internet in the 90’s, embrace it or try to impose that national Mintel standard? By the time it became clear that the Web would replace the Minitel, other countries got to catch-up with the network savvy French and the European ISP business from the mid-90’s seemed relatively balanced although we were all trailing behind the US.
A combination of a sound regulatory approach and French business acumen the French Telco sector back on track in the second half of the 90’s.
Competition was introduced effectively without bringing the incumbent to its knees. Compared to the UK where BT was almost killed off by Thatcher or Germany where DT’s stranglehold on access networks is still to be fully broken, the French seemed to have got a pretty good balance.
So when Free, a new entrant in the ISP business built from a Mintel empire (ILIAD) aggressively launched their first triple-play offer in 2003, France Telecom was able to reciprocate and the other challengers like 9-Cegetel and Club Internet were also able to follow suite.
The French Telecoms subscribers saw the most incredible decade until about 2010 with always more services for a fixed price of about 30€. But Iliad/Free surreptitiously broke the 29,99€ rule it had forced on the industry, by removing a few standard features that became add-ons (like €1,99 for TV service). This improved ARPU and although detailed figures are hard to come by, it is no secret that ILIAD/Free make significant profit from their ADSL ISP-Business (a 40% margin is often cited).
This profit and a favourable regulatory approach (Free bought the 4th mobile 3G operator licence at a discount in 2009 paying just 240 M€ where the other 3 operators had paid 619M in 2000) meant that Free was able to launch a very aggressive mobile offering in January 2012. The success was immediate with about a million clients by the end of that month alone.
Despite being a free market economy, most French commentators agree that the 1000 layoffs competitor SFR announced in 2013 can be clearly attributed to Free’s price “dumping”. As an independent consultant based in Paris and focussed on new services, I’ve seen I’ve seen many operator projects canned this year due to innovation budgets being cut at Orange, Bouygues Telecom and SFR. French 4G is at least a 2-year behind what US operators have already deployed.
So what’s going wrong?
Too much of anything – even a good thing – can be bad. After proving that a balanced approach to (de)regulation really does work, France seems to have lost its unique touch.
The three incumbent Mobile operators were hoping that 4G would help fight off the low-cost battering from Free. But Free has entered the 4G market with a bang, announcing that 4G services would be provided at the same price as with 3G. All operators have had to follow suit ruining the basic tenet of Telco strategy, where superior services requiring significant Capex can bring in extra revenues. The only way forward seems to be lowering costs.
This situation of all-out war has led Bouygues Telecom to announce seriously low-cost ISP services to be detailed in January 2014, with as-much-as-you-can-eat triple-play offerings going for 15€ per month (compared to Free’s current 30-37€).
The price war has got out of hand to the extent that the French government has become involved in the industry-wide slanging match, although it’s not at all clear what it can actually do except maybe give the regulator some more power. If the situation keeps on escalating, subscriber glee will be short-lived in 2014 as one of the 4 operators is bound to go bust and maybe two other merge.
But if subscribers have so far only won out from this situation, shareholder prospects are less clear.
The situation is almost reversed if you look just at the last 6 months
I met up with Albert Lai who is CTO of Media and Broadcast Solutions. He told me that Brightcove has “traditionally been a big end-to-end black box”. But that is changing as more and more requests come in for just a part of the workflow.
Brightcove has seen the Software As a Service (SaaS) model move to a Platform As a Service PaaS (platform) one, but where modularity and Flexibility have become the key criteria.
All this modularity has come about because of the very different use cases Brightcove now caters for, ranging from the Cloud transcoding services for HEVC to the Viacom native apps including the Nikelodeon one that just recently won an Emmy.
Brightcove was founded in 2004 and IPOed in February 2012. As of December 31, 2012, Brightcove had 335 employees. It is headquartered in Boston with offices in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, London, Paris, Barcelona, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo and Sydney.
The leitmotiv of my interviews this year was 4K and Albert told me that the Cable Show 2012 was when Brightcove first started getting requests about 4K.
Brightcove has conducted internal tests on 4K content management and has concluded that it’s a very promising approach. At present it is “less a technology issue than a general marketplace one, where availability is still an issue”.
I pointed out that Cinema content was already widely available in 4K but Albert responded, “Sure cinema content is there, but its just a small amount”.
Albert sees 4K representing a 100% to 400% increase in storage and transmission costs although he thought that HEVC will alleviate some of the pain by doubling the quality within the same bandwidth and providing for a better experience. The monetization question must however be addressed, so Brightcove is listening to the market and is ready for, but not pushing 4K right now.
The Zencoder purchase of last year is probably part of that readiness campaign. Zencoder is a pure-cloud software based encoding solution for live and on-demand content.
This year I spoke to Jean-Pierre Henot the company’s CTO based in Rennes.
I went straight to the point in asking about HEVC so Jean-Pierre first explained the main demos at the front of the booth. Three screens were showing an HD demo of live content at 24 frames per second and all looked identical. One screen was showing MPEG2 at 8 Mbps, the centre screen displayed MPEG4 at 4 Mbps and the last one was showing HEVC decoded content, currently at 3 Mbps but expect to be reduced to 2 Mbps by EOY 2014. Note that the latter still has a CPU power requirement four times greater which really is an issue in the short term.
All the demos used software encoding.
Jean-Pierre noted that the hardware decoding part of HEVC is stable already for HD content, but that for 4K HEVC decoding is still only available in beta versions as the protocol is still a bit new. Fully compliant reference designs are expected for CES 2014.
This is inline with some minor issues still pending with the specifications for HEVC transport, which is otherwise ready for HD.
Like a decade ago with MPEG4, the situation regarding royalties is still being sorted out.
We discussed the cheaper 4K sets available today and Jean-Pierre scoffed at the 30HZ limit as Envivio sees 60fps as a requirement for sport. The hardware limitation of HDMI should be gone thanks to the new 2.0 specification. This should also be available at the beginning of 2014.
All in all, Henot confirmed the general industry view that royalties, devices, frame-rates and HDMI 2.0 have been the stumbling blocks so far for 4K.
As these are gradually removed, HEVC will take off but start initially below 4K.
HEVC has no noticeable impact on ABR, which is the key enabler for many OTT services.
There seems no doubt that HEVC will be next “best solution” available for video compression and with the shorter lifecycles all round, it will take less time than MPEG4 did to penetrate market.
Although OTT has been an IBC topic for a few years, we actually saw a plethora of end-to-end platforms that actually worked, often purely in the cloud. The range of supplier was impressive from Israeli start-ups like Vidmind to multinationals like Siemens or the pioneer Kit digital, now reprendre Piksel. There was also much more talk of real world deployments. Underlying technologies are of course needed to enable OTT and adaptive bit rate (ABR) was omnipresent with most - but not all - stakeholders betting on the convergent MPEG-DASH flavour. OTT ecosystems can still be daunting and as we predicted in last year's white paper written for VO, Broadpeak and Harmonic, multi-vendor pre-integration was a trending theme. This year's IBC was, as expected, all about the forthcoming Ultra HD/4K resolution, which will now be enabled by the new HDMI 2.0 announced at IFA and HEVC. HEVC was shown in a few real world setups as oppose to last year's lab demos, although there wasn’t yet any consumer-grade decoding solutions. Many demos painfully showed that frame-rate is an issue as Thierry Fautier pointed out to me here. The jerky 25 FPS demos clearly made the point that it's going to be at least 50 FPS or higher resolutions just won't take off. The 8K, Super Hi-Vision demo by NHK in the IBC's future zone blew my mind. With such an immersive experience, I doubt we’ll be wasting any more time with 3D in the living room. Although less prominent, but nevertheless significant, like the tip of an iceberg, the Smart Home continued its slow forward march with for example a demo of Cisco's Snowflake that dimmed the lights during a movie's night scenes. Several vendors like ADB or Nagra were talking about media hubs in the home. Big data was in a lot of discussions and I was pretty amazed by the power of solutions like Genius Digital's analysis of viewing statistics and how they can being immediate gain. Of course I too loved Wyplay's huge blue frog in hall 5, representing their new open source initiative, which needs to be analysed in the light of the US centric RDK project pushed by Comcast. As every year, I spent some time with a company slightly out of my usual focus, this year Livewire Digital showed me how professional newsgathering can meet BYOD. Some things I had expected (described here), but didn't see much of, included HTML5 that wasn't promoted as the mother of all UI technologies as I thought it would be. Also, despite Google’s recent successful Chromecast launch, dongles were not really visible at IBC (I’m told Qualcomm had one on their booth). Finally, it occurs to me tidying up my notes, that the true implication of the BYOD phenomenon hasn’t really been addressed head-on. Of course the show and conference were full of things to say about tablets and smartphones, but nobody seems to be looking at the deep business model transformation underway. When I learnt to do a TV launch business model, barely over a decade ago, the STB represented 70% of the project CAPEX if you hit a million subs. So in the future will a TV rollout cost 30% of what it used to, with the subscriber subsidising the operator for the other 70%? This is about my tenth IBC. In the jury for best booth, to which I was invited again this year (thanks Robin Lince), we realised that as IBC matures in the age of Internet and social media, the show is less about learning what the latest trend or product is or even what people think about them, we usually know all that before even coming. Face to face networking and building relations are the deeper motivation. In follow-up posts I’ll report on the 17 companies I spoke to this year at IBC: Brightcove, Envivio, Axinom, Visiware, Vidmind, Wyplay, Genius Digital, Astec, Axentra, Gravity, Akamai, Rovi, Cisco, Livewire Digital, Tara Systems, Verimatrix and SofAtHome.
