Epic Labs, a proud member of the DASH Industry Forum and Digital Production Partnership (DPP), announces the release of version 2.6.8 of dash.js that incorporates major improvements such as low latency Chunked CMAF support.
Several enhancements have been incorporated in this new version such as fixes that improve captioning and DRM handling. But above all, two implementations are extremely important, one of them is the support of persistent licenses (DRM), while the other is the introduction of Low latency chunked CMAF over HTTP, which enables 2-4 second latency for live streams keeping a smooth playback experience. Supporting this feature in a scalable manner is enabled by major CDNs such as Akamai.
The development aims to provide an alternative to older protocols like RTMP whose main advantage over HTTP streaming ones was its lower latency.
In the client side, part of the solution is based on the use of the fetch API offered by browsers, which allows reading incoming chunks as they arrive, instead of waiting for them to be completed. Dash.js analyzes the byte stream representing each chunk and pushes it to the video decoder as soon as it has enough information to start playback stably. Every player based on dash.js is able to benefit of this new feature by doing nothing but updating to the latest version.
Jesús Oliva, Epic Labs Media Engineer Lead & Founder: “This is an exciting achievement because it provides a low latency chunked solution based on open standards, protocols and source code. A real alternative to proprietary or custom solutions that require to package content in a strange manner or exceed the norm. This is a great deal for the industry.”
Dash Industry Forum Dash.js
The DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) establishes interoperability gui- delines on the usage of the MPEG-DASH streaming standard. MPEG- DASH simpli es and converges the delivery of IP video, to provide a rich and enjoyable user experience, to help drive down costs and ultimately to enable a better content catalogue to be offered to consumers.
Epic Labs Media Engineering Services
Epic Labs, proud member of the DASH Industry Forum, is a software engineering center that helps companies to innovate in Media, offering advanced video solutions and several collaboration proposals in digital transformation.
La inteligencia artificial aplicada a los archivos de televisión
Presentación Power Point de Epic Labs en las II Jornadas de Archivo y Televisión organizadas por RTVE el 16 de abril de 2018, dentro del panel “Metadatado automático y herramientas cognitive en archivos de televisión”.
Álvaro González. Epic Labs AI Lead Engineer.
Ignacio Peletier. Epic Labs AI Engineer.
In 2004, Chris Anderson presented his article “The Long Tail” in Wired magazine, explaining how the future of digital businesses would focus on a lot of niches in front of mass markets. This is one of the most important things that allows video in the internet era, where each person can search and find content that fits perfectly to their likes, finding it either within the user generated content. And that is exactly where the qualities of artificial intelligence can help.
“It is not about doing the same things by replacing people with machines, it is about doing business as unusual, doing something that is not usually done.” Álvaro González. Epic Labs AI Lead Engineer.
There is a lot of talk these days about how AI can simplify workflows and perform tasks that are repetitive and automatic to achieve more efficiency. But what if instead of focusing on resource optimization, what we do is think about those things that are not done because there is not enough people or budget for it? It is then when machine learning, video and long tail enable new and interesting use cases that can be undertaken through artificial intelligence tools, either in a 100% automated process or requiring some kind of supervision.
In sports, we have the case of those that have a local interest which are minority, or smaller leagues. Thanks to the commoditization of content generation and delivery technologies, it is possible to organize productions operated by artificial intelligence. Focusing on football, a machine learning system can enable a local football match to be made automatically and broadcast it over a streaming channel. You can even train to do replays and include graphics. It is not a question of whether the production is as good as a handful of technicians could have made, it is about having a product where there was nothing before, which among other things, allows monetizing that long tail through dynamic advertising or a unique Sponsorship.
This technology can also be applied to recognize and cross-reference material to create content. As we continue to talk about football, this can be applied in parallel to the cameras on the air to all those that are being ingested on some server, taking advantage of material that is usually discarded because no staff is available to review and classify it. In this way, new content can be created, looking for this niche once again, as can be a summary of everything a player has done in a football match, at the choice of the user.
Álvaro González, Epic Labs AI Lead Engineer: “This also applies to any other sport, personal hobbies and much other cases. We are living in an era where the end-user is able to generate their own content if they cannot find it, and the artificial intelligence can help us to get and retain that people. More than ever, unusual content requires unusual business.”
Epic Labs, proud member of the DASH Industry Forum and Digital Production Partnership, announces that version 2.6.7 of the dash.js player has been released.
Several new features have been added in this new version, three of which are particularly important like the new multi-key DRM support, this means that the various tracks that make up a stream, such as video and audio, can each have their own unique DRM systems and/or keys.
A new pre-load feature has also been added, providing a great benefit to end-users. This new functionality enables the stream to be loaded despite the fact that there is not yet a place where it can be shown or played on the screen. This is especially helpful because although the user doesn’t know where the stream is going to be played, it has already started to be loaded, so when it gives play to the video it will start instantaneously, improving the usability.
At last, dash.js has been equipped with methods to allow the player to run without any problem when playing incorrectly formatted material. In many cases, the players must deal with streams with badly created segments or incorrect internal timing, which causes undesired results or the impossibility to play video. Many automatic features have been introduced in version 2.6.7 to guarantee better tolerance to poorly formatted contents so that dash.js can guarantee optimal playback.
The DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) establishes interoperability gui- delines on the usage of the MPEG-DASH streaming standard. MPEG- DASH simpli es and converges the delivery of IP video, to provide a rich and enjoyable user experience, to help drive down costs and ultimately to enable a better content catalogue to be offered to consumers.
Epic Labs, proud member of the DASH Industry Forum, is a software engineering center that helps companies to innovate in Media, offering advanced video solutions and several collaboration proposals in digital transformation.
Discover how is a day at Epic Labs with one of our engineers. Enjoy our talent culture and don´t hesitate to send us your resume if you like what you see in this video. We´re always looking for talent! We´re always HIRING!
An interview with Mark Harrison, Managing Director, Digital Production Partnership.
How can an association like DPP be helpful in this changing scenario?
One of the defining characteristics of the industry right now, is that it’s no longer possible for any organization, any content provider, or any supplier, to have all the expertise and all the capabilities that are required to be successful in a very complex and fast moving environment. So, it becomes essential to establish relationships and to understand who you will need to partner with and how that partner could help. it’s very important to have an organization like the DPP which is not attached to any part of the supply chain, to help this process. We are not advocating for anyone, we are entirely neutral.
All we do is to coordinate the conversations that need to happen in order for companies to understand the kind of relationships that they need to have in order to manage change. And also, to be a place where the supply chain can tell us if there are particular obstacles we can help to solve. An example of this is the way we by assist with interoperability, through the creation of new industry specifications, or how we establish best practices that would be helpful to everyone. We are here to help.
What are the main goals for DPP in 2018?
This year we have two principal goals – one related to technical work and the other related to our engagement work. We finished 2017 with many member companies appreciating the way we create high quality, targeted engagements – by bringing together decision makers from suppliers and customers to talk in environments that feel safe. So this year we will create many more of those moments involving very high quality senior engagement. That’s one goal. The other goal is that we have some important pieces of technical work, particularly our mastering format specification called IMF for broadcasting and online; our news exchange format which is a way to exchange metadata in a news environment; and also our security program. So we want to land and implement all of those technical pieces in the first half of this year. And when those are done we can focus on a new technical target – such as our plan to define best practices for the exchange of content in cloud environments.
We’re living with an unprecedented and expanding range of competitors in the broadcast industry due to OTTs and VOD consumption, will this trend be increasing in the upcoming years? How do you think this situation will evolve?
I think the picture in the next couple of years will continue to be extremely unstable. I’m a great believer that change never proceeds in a straight line. Now it’s very easy to say that the online players like Amazon, Netflix, Facebook or Google are so strong and so effective, so they will get bigger and bigger and everybody else will suffer and die. But it won’t be like that because it’s never is like that! And although the new giants in the OTT space are absolutely certain to continue to be very important in this changing industry, I also expect that we will see several new relationships and partnerships emerging. Something we must never forget is that now it’s the consumer that decides; and there are bound to be certain needs that consumers will have around media. There is so much content in the world and consumers need to find it and discover it more easily. The drive to aggregate searchable content will be very important for any content provider that seeks to retain consumers.
Will broadcasters disappear or be transformed into another kind of company because of the broadband and OTT ecosystem success?
It could be a re-shaping of the broadcast community like Fox and Disney. We hear of a lot of discussions going on between major broadcasters, and it makes a lot of sense for them to begin to work together. The broadcast community has a huge back catalogue of content, and that has enormous value. And also of course they really know how to commission and make content, because they have decades of experience doing it. So this means they are still in a very strong position. It would be interesting if broadcasters began to focus on the editorial side, with their content making strength, and began to outsource some of their technology infrastructure.
The new players are focusing on Live Sports production as a main topic for their strategy in the upcoming years. Are sports the only real Pay TV Driver?
Live sports seem to have a direct line into the heart of consumers, after all its what Sky built their business on, and many others have too. So it’s something very powerful. But we must also remember that scripted content like movies and dramas are also very powerful drivers. Those two content types, drama and sports, are going to remain very powerful. What we might see is new players acquiring sports rights in order to gain a lot of share of the market and then begin to aggregate other kinds of content around it.
Google, Facebook or Amazon are moving faster than broadcasters that seem not to innovate at the same pace, why is this happening?
I think there’s a cultural challenge there. The new players are founded on the principle of innovation and of course they don’t have legacy infrastructure. Broadcasting companies have technical challenges with a lot of legacy infrastructure and long contracts with particular suppliers, and also cultural challenges that make it difficult to make decisions quickly. I used to work for a broadcaster and it pains me that it could take a year or more to make a decision about a major technology change or innovation. The competition is different, and the industry is now in a place where we need to make decisions continually. That’s why I think that broadcasters may look to partner or outsource their innovation – it’s a way to keep pace with the competition.
Artificial Intelligence is one of the main topics nowadays, there’s a lot of hype around this and we wonder how it might impact the media industry. Is it a real game changer? What specific use cases do you see this technologies can disrupt or create?
We had a conversation last week with many experts from the DPP membership while drawing up our predictions for 2018. What they told me was that they are seeing the application of machine learning in order to drive automation, and they see this moving very quickly. Automation is coming fast because it can be applied to functions that are people-heavy at a time when almost all organizations are looking to reduce costs. So it might be very interesting to see the way machine learning could reduce costs and impact the media industry over the next couple of years.
How do you see a company like Epic Labs fitting in this Media/Broadcast ecosystem?
Broadcasters in particular are beginning to look for companies that can help them to innovate, and this is where I think that a company like Epic Labs can have a really important role to play. Epic can help such companies to innovate by being agile and bringing fast thinking.
DPP (Digital Production Partnership) s a Membership-based.
The DPP is a Membership-based, not-for-profit company, founded by our shareholders: ITV, BBC and Channel 4. Uniquely, our Membership represents the whole media supply chain: production companies, manufacturers, suppliers, service providers, post production facilities, consultancies, broadcasters, distributors, and not-for-profit organisations.
Scrum is a framework for creative software development that can be successfully used into broadcasters and media companies. This methodology allows to discover new products and services in a fast changing environment.
How does Akamai see the future of the Media environment?
Our CEO said that we are at the beginning of a big change, if we focus on analyzing the consumption of live video on the Internet, a premium event with a large audience tends to reach a figure that is around tens or hundreds of thousands. In some specific cases, especially in some sporting events such as a top-level football match, it has been possible to reach a million or two million users. However, the same event watched by traditional television measures its viewers in millions. Therefore, there is still much to be done. Reaching the same audience level on the Internet is not only about the acceptance of this way of consuming content by users, it is also related to the technology that makes this possible. The fact is that the internet is not really intended for video, its structure has more to do with other forms of communication such as e-mail. There are many things that are happening and will change everything in the upcoming years.
What can architectures like P2P bring to all this change?
P2P is a well known protocol that brings many advantages. It has a bad reputation because it has been widely used in the distribution of pirated content, and this has been so because it does not need the content to be hosted on servers for distribution, but it is dispersed among different pairs that communicate with each other. It is a very suitable technology to make video live in an OTT environment. That´s why OTTs are structured as video clubs, so there will never be many people consuming the same content, while one user is in the 5th minute a movie, another is in the 20th minute of a series. And this is different from having many people watching the same content in real-time. It’s not just about the video being transported in high quality, it’s about this happening as quickly as possible so there’s no latency, and that’s not easy to achieve. At Akamai, we are putting a lot of effort into resolving this issue and we are very close to being able to guarantee a delay similar to that of a satellite or DTT, the complexity is in using networks without getting saturated so that the video can flow normally. According to our CEO, in the next two years we are going to witness the expansion of OTTs, which are going to stop being just VOD platforms and also offer linear channels, they are going to become much more complete platforms.
Will they also offer sports content?
Probably, although in this environment more things needs to be taken into account. There are many times that people in the video environment put all their effort and knowledge to make the video flow, but they don’t apply as much time and knowledge to the web that is in charge of managing it, and when users want to buy the game or event, the gateway falls. This is a recurrent occurrence and needs to be seen as a whole. If we take a short look, we see that there is a lot of evolution pending for the next few years, there are other markets where all the fashionable concepts such as Big Data, IoT, VR, etc. are like a bottle of champagne because many of them are marketing phenomena. But that doesn’t happen so much in the Media sector, here the evolution is constant but slower, and that’s a great advantage because it allows the operational and business models to settle much better.
And this is something that also affects the entire value chain.
Exactly, it affects the entire value chain and that’s why these changes are so slow. If we take into account everything that happens since a camera captures an image, we realize that there are many processes through which a content passes until it is consumed by a viewer, and each of them has its particularities. In addition, we will have many different devices at the end and each content will find its own. There will not be a winner above the rest, but it will depend on what you want to consume, with whom you want to consume and when. It’s not the same if a person wants to see something alone in bed, where a smartphone or tablet is the ideal device, as sharing a football game with friends. What is clear is that more and more people want to decide what they see. That’s why VOD keeps growing year after year and will continue to do so, we want to choose what we see above all else.
Telecoms operators are also joining this trend to round off their Internet offerings…
Exactly, there’s actually a “war” going on over the remote control. When an operator enters a home with its broadband and television offer, the remote control becomes theirs, so that they control a large part of the audio-visual consumption in that place. The weapon that the traditional TV channels in Europe have to fight against this is probably the HbbTV, with which they could try to recover control by offering additional tools. To date, HbbTV has been used by traditional channels to generate VOD with their own content, such as an OTT but through television. This is because they are obliged to have some application with this technology when they are awarded a license, but they are not taking advantage of the real potential of this technology. The red button enables a layer of interactivity on the TV that doesn’t have to be invasive, it can enable additional applications but you have to bet on them and develop them. Offer, for example, additional information about the contents offered, e-marketing, statistics, etc.
Are televisions understanding the change brought about by the Internet?
I’ve been working in media for a long time and not just on video, I’ve worked in traditional newspapers, online print media, a big TV and now Akamai, so I have a good view of what’s happened and what’s happening now. In my opinion, television sets are at the same point in time as newspapers were 10 years ago. What they are doing is trying to maintain their current position in the market, although that is not easy. There is less audience on the internet today, by far, so that advertising is sold cheaper and does not compensate them. But you have to consider what would happen if they had the same audience or even more than through their traditional channel, then the scenario would be different. They must bet on it and work hard to achieve it.
How can Akamai help with that?
There are things you can do from a CDN environment like Akamai. The transmission costs of a traditional television are fixed, that is to say, you pay the same for an audience of 100,000 people as for another one of 50,000,000, and that is something that does not happen on the Internet today, the cost of the service goes parallel to the level of audience you have, and that is something we have to contemplate in another way. Because a media is not an E-Commerce, i. e. more traffic does not necessarily mean more sales, it is another type of business. In fact, there is one peculiarity: if a programme broadcast over the Internet has a much larger audience than you thought, the operational costs of broadcasting will increase a lot. That’s why we at Akamai are investigating how to offer CDN flat rate service focused primarily on live events. For this type of approach, P2P is a great ally that also works best the more audience there is. The downside of peer-to-peer is that for live video it means generating a lot of latency, because you have to find in the different pairs the content you need. We’ve tested live football matches, with a lot of recurring users, and it looks great, but with latencies that go up to three minutes. This is where we are focusing our research, because it is not the same only P2P as the fact that there is a CDN behind it, helping everything go better, providing the necessary blocks to complete the data and the pairs that are being collected. That’s where the complication is.
How will consumption in OTT evolve?
In the specific case of OTTs we can see that the series are successful but there is not so much consumption of films however. Both Netflix and HBO, for example, are platforms that are very successful thanks to the series. This is because of a pure and hard marketing theme. Movies really do have promotion when they are in billboard, the series have a longer life though. When a movie is no longer on the screen, it seems that it disappears and falls into oblivion, so the movie that is in the mind of the user is the one that has just been released and is on the screen, which will not be on the Internet until 4 months later. This is why the VOD grows mainly on the basis of series. Platforms actually have a lot more content than that but it’s not always easy to find. A revolution similar to the one that music has already passed must occur. Consumption models that really make everything sustainable. Spotify for example, where you have everything from very old music to the latest album of a current band. Many times there are films that are not on any platform because you don’t know if you are going to make money with it, for example old films, but the truth is that they have their own audience.
Akamai is the global leader in Content Delivery Network (CDN) services, making the Internet fast, reliable and secure for its customers. The company’s advanced web performance, mobile performance, cloud security and media delivery solutions are revolutionizing how businesses optimize consumer, enterprise and entertainment experiences for any device, anywhere.
Epic Labs, proud member of the DASH Industry Forum and the Digital Production Partnership, is a software engineering center that helps companies to innovate in Media, offering advanced video solutions and several collaboration proposals in digital transformation.
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