Asia-Pacific Broadcasting (APB) Satellite Special 2017 | Page 8

2017 SPECIAL

Making OTT deliver on its promise

The explosive growth of online media is challenging the business model of broadcasting and cable television . Robert Bell , executive director of the World Teleport Association ( WTA ), tells APB Satellite Special what satellite service providers are doing to help their customers in the media & entertainment industry to adapt and prosper in this new world .
What are the trends shaping the future of online programme distribution ? Robert Bell : The venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andressen likes to say that “ software is eating the world ”. He means that the accelerating technology revolution may still need hardware — but it is software that ultimately provides the value , while the hardware becomes increasingly a commodity .
There is no better example of this trend than online or over-the-top ( OTT ) TV distribution . It is quickly eating the world by delivering high-quality video to any device over the public Internet . This is the same content that has always travelled through a TV or set-top box ( STB ) over pristine , custom-engineered series of fibre , satellite and coaxial networks or transmission towers .
It is also eating a hole in the pocket of content owners . Nearly every channel is compelled to make its content available through an Internet-based service but those services do not offer the revenue model that has made broadcasting such a successful business . Specifically , advertising online is still a matter of trading linear dollars for non-linear pennies .
Fortunately , a lot of good work is going into solving this problem , and much of it takes place within the teleport industry , whether it is the service provider on the ground or the technology partners they work with . Teleports are the plumbers of the B2B transmission business . They are the gents to call when your pipes spring a leak — and the advertising pipe is definitely leaking .
What are teleport operators doing to solve the OTT advertising problem ? Bell : There are two fundamental problems that get in the way of the advertising model translating properly into OTT . The first problem has to do with encoding and compression of the video .
A finished programme is assembled and made ready for playout . It is ingested into a content management system , where it is encoded for security and compressed to reduce the amount of bandwidth required for distribution . The problem is that , once it is inside those digital “ containers ”,
With IP media devices , metadata is king … Metadata is already heavily used in production , post-production and distribution , and it is what lets automation systems assemble programmes on-thefly from assets in a content management system .
Teleports are the plumbers of the B2B transmission business - they are the gents to call when your pipes spring a leak .
the management and distribution systems can no longer access the information that allows frame-accurate clips of the file .
The ability to add or change adverts and make other customisations to the file depends on being able to find precisely where a sequence starts and ends . Take that away , and you risk having programming stop and start in the wrong places whenever you try to do something with the file other than just play it in its entirety .
Encompass Digital Media is a teleport operator headquartered in the US with a major facility in Singapore . Encompass has worked with technology vendors to create a service called Channel Mark . It can provide industrystandard markers defining exactly where sequences start and end that are accessible even within a compressed and encoded file .
How does that help solve the problem ? Bell : Channel Mark , and similar innovations by other teleport operators and technology companies , make it possible to automate what is currently a laborious manual process .
That is huge when it comes to online , because it creates
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