WWW.FKT ONLINE.DE FACHZEITSCHRIFT FÜR FERNSEHEN, FILM UND ELEKTRONISCHE MEDIEN JOURNAL COVERING TV, FILM & ELECTRONIC MEDIA NAB SPECIAL Image: NewTek Business news, expert opinions, product highlights ##SUS##mnertd##1946##SUS##2013##HP_PORTAL## NAB_BEILAGE 04.indd 1 19.03.18 10:21 2 NAB Special_News 2018 FKT Editorial CONTENTS EDITORIAL INTERNATIONAL NEWS the author Source: TECH ACROSS AMERICA The future is micro services Dear readers, MICHAEL GROTTICELLI With the transition to IP becoming more and more immi- EXPERT OPINION nent, many industry discussions today focus on how to best defi ne processes and adapt workfl ows to make media Empowering gamer‘s passion in Beijing, organizations profi t from the seemingly endless possi- FRANCIE ZHANG bilites coming along with the use of COTS hardware in production, contribution and distribution. PRODUCT NEWS Virtual reality, artifi cial intelligence, HDR, targeted ad- vertising, personalized content or simply “the cloud” — to name but a few buzzwords looming on the horizon for many decision makers in the fi eld: What to address fi rst? Which technologies to opt for? And how to know what formats will survive in the rollercoster ride of changing viewing habits? The correct answer to the latter is simple: nobody knows. Change will be the constant companion of the broadcast industry in the years to come, as of many other industries struggling with the great speed at which new technologies come and go. That being said, the solutions we will see at NAB 2018 are expected to tackle the challenges we have today while giv- ing a glimpse into the future. In this FKT NAB special we have summarized a few of them to give you a brief insight into some of the new products on display. In addition, a case study on eSports in China shows one of the potential new “playing fi elds” of the media industry in the future. For more information on this year‘s NAB in both English and German please visit www.fkt-online.de/themen/ nab/. Happy reading, ##SUS##mnertd##1946##SUS##2013##HP_PORTAL## NAB_BEILAGE 04.indd 2 16.03.18 10:20 FKT 2018 NAB Special_International News 3 DeltaLive and Riedel cooperate New specification for broader use of IMF MPTE and the Digital Production S Partnership (DPP), the international business network for the media industry, have announced the success of a first-of- a-kind pilot project to define a prototype SMPTE Specifications process. SMPTE and DPP have delivered the first draft SMPTE Specification, which focuses on the use of the Interoperable Master Format (IMF), or SMPTE ST 2067, for broadcast and online applications. The DPP delivered the working drafts of the IMF Requirements and IMF Speci- fication for broadcast and online applica- Image: DeltaLive tions to SMPTE at the HPA Tech Retreat in Palm Desert, California. The documents ritish company DeltaLive has taken that process. It’s a great fit for us and we’re represent input by the DPP, SMPTE, the B delivery of a substantial stock of really looking forward to supporting both North American Broadcasters Association Riedel’s range of products, which it has existing and potential Riedel users around (NABA), and the European Broadcasting immediately added to its hire stock inven- the world. Union (EBU), as well as manufacturers tory, as per their statement. Delta now stocks the majority of and end users across the media industry. “We have had a specialist in-house Riedel’s product line, including the Artist Now out for public comment, the communication department for over 20 Communications Platform, Bolero wireless draft specification for IMF for broad- years now,” says Delta’s Paul Keating. intercom and MediorNet. Separately, Delta cast and online applications will address “As live events communications have has also invested in the latest Tier 3 radio constraints including MXF Track Files, grown and clients’ needs and expectations products. composition playlists (CPLs), output pro- have changed, we have anticipated their ø www.deltalive.com file lists (OPLs), and IMF packages. The requirements and adapted and invested ø www.riedel.net specification will reference other activities accordingly. Investing in Riedel is part of as well, such as the EBU.io/qc project for carrying quality-control metadata and EBU-TT, and it includes optional methods for carrying traditional EBU-STL subtitles in Europe and CTA-608/CTA-708 cap- tions in North America. Built upon the IMF standard, this first SMPTE Specification is supposed to play a critical role in enabling broadcasters to use IMF workflows with their existing content archives, and to facilitate the re- alization of file-based interoperability on Image: Ateme a large scale. By providing manufacturers with the guidance they need to move forward in designing and building readers, writers, and analyzers, the specification OTT codec as alternative to HEVC is hoping to bring the benefits of IMF into the broadcast and online realm. The prototype SMPTE Specifications ith the AV1 standardisation immi- able and open standard support by video process will be exercised with these W nent, video infrastructure provid- content and service providers. documents, and the process itself will be ers have a new codec option optimized for In addition to the existing and widely documented and reviewed by the SMPTE OTT services. The prospect of a royal- deployed MPEG-2, H-264 and HEVC, Board of Governors before being offered ty-free alternative to HEVC is expected Ateme has integrated AV1 in its pure to the industry as a specifications service to be interesting especially for those software Titan, with the intention to make open to all. addressing streaming applications. it an all-codec solution for converged hea- Once finalized, the new SMPTE doc- Initiated by the web industry and en- dends. Mozilla, member of the Alliance for uments will join other SMPTE technical dorsed by Google, Facebook and Open Media (AOM), is bringing AV1play- publications, including standards that Broadcom, AV1 has the support of both back with HTML5 to Firefox as the first help manufacturers, engineers, and streaming and broadcast players. Ateme’s browser to play AV1MPEG-DASH/HLS technologists to develop new products support of AV1 is delivering some benefits, streams. and services in broadcasting, cinema, and as the company stated, such as interoper- ø www.ateme.com online video. ø www.smpte.org ##SUS##mnertd##1946##SUS##2013##HP_PORTAL## NAB_BEILAGE 04.indd 3 16.03.18 10:20 4 NAB Special_Tech Across America 2018 FKT The future is micro services s equipment suppliers continue to add new types checkbooks, of trade show attendees around the world. A of IT-centric functionality to their signal distribu- They are being joined by a series of smaller established tion and playout platforms, new broadcast and produc- and new companies to the space that all see the future tion facilities are beginning to take advantage of the in deploying traditional video processing and playout cost and operational benefits of COTS hardware and functionality as easily as opening an application on a Software Defined Networks (SDN) in order to distribute mobile phone. content to multiple platforms and consumer devices. So, what is a micro service? The answer to this ques- In today’s competitive world and going forward tion is different, depending upon whom you ask. Every Source: the author Source: into the future, content (media files) has to be dis- company has their own way of deploying virtualized tributed to linear TV channels and internet streams workflows in the most affordable and efficient way. Most Michael quickly while simultaneously being converted into experts agree that’s it’s not a virtualization of a piece of Grotticelli various encoded formats that target the wide spec- hardware. Micro services get the most efficiency and trum of mobile devices that consumers are increas- economy out of a network by building to open standards is an experi- ingly migrating to as their primary video viewing and putting the absolute minimal function possible that enced editor platforms. With sometimes thousands of on-demand delivers the business value those facility designers are and regular sessions for the same content coming in at the same seeking. contributor time, this needs to be a highly automated and seam- There are two “ideals” in micro services: one is to put to FKT‘s Tech less (to the content distributor and the end user) pro- the minimum amount of functionality into the network Across America cess in order to be successful. that returns real business value, and the other is to pro- column. For several years the answer thus far has been the vide abstraction from the underlying system such that growing infiltration of Internet Protocol (IP) technolo- all communications is against a native IP and services gy into the Broadcast plant that has ena- fabric. bled distributors to deploy cloud-based Already deployed for years by big conglom- infrastructures, leverage SDNs and The industry erates like Amazon Web Services, Facebook, establish the virtualization of tradi- Google, Microsoft (Azure) and other online tional hardware. These cloud-based needs giants, the concept of serving many simul- services — that is, the handing and to catch up to its taneous sessions quickly via microservices processing of signals at a remotely enables these consumer-facing companies based facility to reduce OpEX and OTT competition, to compete on their myriad of service of- human resource costs — allow and fast. ferings. It simply could not be done without customers to scale up or down their provisioning their massive hardware and hardware and software processing software processing requirements to run across requirements (e.g., transcoding, storage and thousands of machines in the most efficient way. automated playout), depending upon the need at As they see it, a single compute server can be utilized by hand, without incurring significant CapEX costs.