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cover.indd 1 17/08/2012 16:10:14

CSI magazine is now available as a digital-edition across all tablet and smart-phone devices

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www.csimagazine.com May-June 2014 03

Cloud TV

Spo

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ed b

y:

When I joined Harris

Broadcast nearly a

year ago, I was

surprised at the state

of an industry which

remains fragmented,

proprietary, hardware-

dependent, lacking in technology reference architectures,

and without an ecosystem-friendly supplier community. The

IT and Communication Service Provider world had

substantially migrated to IP-based technologies. Open

standards and reference architectures have been adopted –

accelerating application development, all of which have

resulted in a mobile network that has grown from 1 to 6

billion subscribers in less than a decade.”

So wrote new CEO Charlie Vogt in March as he split

what was once Harris Broadcast into two entities, one of

which – Imagine Communications – is looking to a future

firmly defined by IP, software, TV Everywhere, multi-screen

and the cloud. A sign of the times if you will.

Many of these developments go hand in hand. For

instance, cloud-based solutions are now tightly associated

with high-quality multi-screen and over-the-top delivery.

Managing and manipulating video in the cloud simplifies

some requirements and a host of vendors such as Cisco,

Ericsson, Harmonic and Envivio are responding to trends

by adopting virtualised encoding and processing capabilities.

The idea is to bring the QoS and robustness of payTV

combined with the personalisation and interactivity of

multi-screen propositions seen in the OTT world.

Pressured by OTT players and other new entrants,

operators are looking at ways to speed new services

(‘service velocity’ or ‘service agility’ as companies like to

call it) and cloud-based approaches

often mean these services can be

introduced or enhanced more

quickly and at lower cost. In many

cases, it allows operators to use

standards-based technologies to

further simplify deployment and

development. The traditional

headend is moving onto software

platforms running in standard-issue

IT-scale production servers rather

than specialist broadcast video hardware,

which is pushing costs down.

The cloud also gives operators previously

unattainable levels of flexibility by reducing

silos and offers a way of reducing device-side

complexity and fragmentation.

so many options…

Of course, good broadband connection are not available

everywhere and worth bearing in mind too are issues such

as security/privacy, performance and scalability - especially

relevant given TV’s peaky nature. Service providers also

have to ask themselves how much they put into the network

or data centres and how much into controlled devices such

as set-top boxes or advanced home gateways. Moreover, they

have to choose or mix between public, private, hybrid and

emerging community forms of cloud. The good news is

there is room for each model and choosing between the

various options depend on migration scenarios.

Large operators like Liberty Global, Deutsche Telekom,

Time Warner Cable and Comcast are well underway with

their migration strategies, moving features like UIs,

middleware and traditional headend functionality into

virtual data centres. Liberty has credited its cloud-based Pan

European Central Head End (PECHE) as accelerating its

Horizon TV platform’s time-to-market from 12 months

down to under three months. Those developing smaller

apps, meanwhile, can do so in weeks.

Ziggo has been tapping the cloud for a while now,

becoming one of the first European MSOs to deliver an

advanced VoD user interface entirely from the network

cloud. The initial deployment included VoD navigation and

guide functionality to existing boxes, and Ziggo said the

cloud-based streaming graphic (SGUI) contributed to a 56%

year-to-year growth in VoD transactions. Virtualising the full

EPG is the next step, Ziggo said at a Verimatrix organised

breakfast event at last year’s IBC.

Cloud technology can also act as a very useful way to

gather sources of content into a network DVR service. It is

also worth mentioning here that localised caching, whereby

the most commonly viewed content is being stored closer to

the network edge, is becoming increasingly popular,

resulting in better quality content.

Finally, the promise of the cloud could also extend into

new areas of big data & analytics (something that Channel

4 in the UK is trailblazing) although for the large part this

remains a largely untapped field in the TV space.

Ultimately, the rise of cloud services and associated

technologies like IP, HTML5 and so on should benefit

consumers as much as media companies, irrespective of

how we choose to define TV going forward.

editor’s introductionGoran Nastic looks at what’s driving broadcasters

and payTV operators to the cloud, and what it means for the future of TV

Multi-screen and OTT go hand in hand with the

cloud

Goran Nastic CSI Editor

The many faces of the cloud

pretty much wherever you

look at the moment, across

every industry sector,

companies are using cloud

technologies, to reduce cost

and increase operational

flexibility. So why should

the TV industry be any different? Most operators

use the cloud either to assist in the streaming of on

demand or live content to multiple devices, or to

virtualise video processing.

Luke Gaydon, VP of media of EMEA at

Brightcove, says the rate of cloud adoption across

the industry during the past five years has been

startling. He points to the number of TV industry

figures now to be found at Amazon’s ‘re:Invent

web services’ event as one indicator. “Three or

four years ago it was just developers,” he says.

“Last year there were representatives of pretty

much every broadcaster.”

That interest is translating into action. Later

this year, Sony will launch a new US TV service

that will provide live TV, VoD and DVR in the

cloud. Consumers will be able to search through

all content and store it in Sony’s cloud, then

access it using any Sony device, including

PlayStations, smart TVs and Android devices.

Last autumn Liberty Global announced it was

using Active Video’s CloudTV software to extend

its Horizon platform to additional devices and

older set-top boxes.

“The move to put what were the essential

functions of the set-top box in the cloud is being

driven by multi-screen,” says Jeff Heynen,

principal analyst, broadband access and pay TV,

at Infonetics. “There’s really not an efficient way

to provide a unified programme guide or interface

across all those devices unless you move the

traditional functionality of the headend into the

cloud.

“And in markets where pay TV providers were

locked into a proprietary conditional access or

digital rights system they don’t move fast enough

to support all these new devices. Putting it in the

cloud so that a change in the agreement with the

content owners can be supported for all the

customers and devices they support makes sense.”

He cites the work both Liberty and Comcast

have done in this area as leading the way, in

strategy terms. “Comcast is trying to break free of

the traditional set-top box environment. It is

focused on their customers wanting to watch TV

or content recorded at home anywhere, with

whichever devices they like to watch. They’ve

moved the UI and the EPG into the cloud.”

Technology providers have responded to this

trend by developing a host of supporting

technologies. “Operators are increasingly

pressured by Netflix and OTT

competitors and the more

forward-thinking ones are asking

‘What are we good at?’” says

Fredrik Andersson, co-founder

and sVP of business development

at Accedo. “They are deciding

that some of the play-out issues

could be managed by someone

else – it’s not something that sets

those companies apart from their

competitors.”

Cloud can also help consumers find content

across multiple platforms. Joshua Danovitz, VP of

innovation at TiVO, points to the services TiVO

has developed with Virgin in the UK as a good

example of how these technologies can help. “A

cable customer with Virgin who has TiVO and a

single remote control can do a search that goes

across linear TV, VoD, iPlayer, Netflix, YouTube,

Spotify... the list goes on. For the consumer, to be

able to have a single search and user experience

makes their lives so much easier.

“The difficulty for a service provider is

integrating all these services so that you have the

platform to find the content, then attaching the

client securely to deliver the content,” he says.

Cloud technology could also act as a very

useful way to gather sources of content into a

network DVR service. Danovitz says this will be

an important area for development in future. He

believes that falling cloud storage costs will have a

With media companies old and new moving cloud wise, what exactly is happening and what is the logical conclusion of this migration? Dave Adams investigates

04 May-June 2014 www.csimagazine.com

Cloud TV

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y:

www.csimagazine.com May-June 2014 05

Ziggo’s cloud UI, powered by ActiveVideo’s CloudTV H5 virtual STB platform

bearing on commercial developments, because

cheaper storage means operators seeking to

develop network or cloud DVR will not

necessarily be set on using shared copies of

content for multiple nDVR users, often a source

of difficulties in negotiations with content owners.

Cloud could also be used to bolster live TV

services, particularly for ‘event’ linear TV like

sports. Keith Wymbs, chief marketing officer at

Elemental Technologies, is sure we will see more

of these services in future. “I think you’ll see

some more of this around the World Cup and we

saw some of it for London 2012, where you have

a live feed going into a cloud environment, you do

the replication there and then it goes to the

CDN,” he says.

Cloud could also help drive dynamic ad

insertion technologies too – which might appeal

to operators contemplating tight margins on

multiscreen services.

Virtualised video processing

Use of cloud may also lead to significant changes

when used for transcoding or virtualised video

processing. For several years now, some

companies have argued that it is theoretically a

cheaper place to perform multiple transcodes in

the cloud versus devices such as gateways but that

this approach is still in many cases held back by

rights issues. It is gaining in traction now,

however, with this year’s NAB swarming with

virtual encoding announcements.

Harmonic and Encoding.com have joined

forces to offer a cloud-based transcoding service,

which can be used on a pure cloud or a hybrid

basis. Gaydon says the company’s clients,

including BBC Worldwide and Channel 4 in the

UK, are attracting to the platform for cost and

efficiency reasons.

“If you’re managing an on-premise, hardware-

based encoding platform you have to plan for your

peaks, so you will be paying for a lot of

infrastructure which may not be utilised,” he says.

“If you are a Zencoder customer you pay for what

you use at that point, so it is significantly more

cost-efficient.”

Security remains a concern for some content

owners, but Gaydon believes these concerns are

fading as cloud proves its strength. He points to

the trust placed in Netflix, a largely Amazon web

services-based platform, by content owners.

Another provider, Elemental, offers cloud-

based Platform as a Service (PaaS). End users

include the BBC iPlayer, for which Elemental

provides the underlying infrastructure. iPlayer is

moving its video processing environment to the

cloud. Wymbs explains how the cloud solution

helps the BBC deal with spikes in demand at

certain times of day and deal with the challenge

of processing video for the iPlayer under tight

time constraints, sometimes turning a 30 or 60

minutes programme into an iPlayer asset within

30 or 60 minutes. “In the past that would have

taken ten plus hours,” he says.

“If they wanted to build the system themselves

to cope with the peak demand they would spend a

lot of money on infrastructure and 85% of that

infrastructure wouldn’t be used for most of the

day. So for an hour or two every day they spike

into the cloud to meet those business

requirements.”

Another provider, Envivio, announced two new

cloud releases at NAB: integration of its core

software Muse encoders and its Halo network

media processors into the OpenStack cloud

software initiative; and a partnership with the

OTT streaming specialist 1 Mainstream to provide

a turnkey end to end cloud-based video service.

“One of our cable customers asked us to

virtualise the services we gave them, with the goal

of making their operations easier and being able

to easily provision instances of our software

products on their data centre resources, turning it

on and turning it off as needed,” explains Arnaud

Perrier, VP of strategy and corporate development

at Envivio. “We have some clients who have told

us that they don’t want to use any CapEx at all.

They say to us, ‘you have the expertise in video,

can you run that service for us, end to end?’”

The Ip end game

An increasing number of both operators and

content owners now appear to be more

comfortable with the use of cloud than ever

before.

However, the success of many of these services

will rest ultimately on the speed and reliability of

the consumer’s broadband service.

“In the end all cable operators and pay TV

operators are going to move to the cloud – but it

certainly depends on whether they also offer

broadband. Satellite will have to find a way to

partner with others to provide this type of

environment to all their customers – and at a

quality they can control,” says Heynen.

Brightcove’s Gaydon believes we heading

towards a wholesale move away from traditional

broadcast infrastructure into IP-delivered linear

transmission. “We say that’s about five years away.

The rate of change will surprise everyone. It will

not be long before we see broadcasters move to a

fully IP-delivered platform.”

“For an hour or two every day the BBC iPlayer spikes into the cloud to meet those business requirements.”

Cloud TV

Spo

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ed b

y:

elevating revenue security to the cloud

What really

defines a

“cloud TV”

service? The

terminology

used to

describe this

phenomenon is quite broad as the video industry

looks to retool itself and become more software-

empowered.

Consider the approach to cloud TV in practical

terms – a video service delivered all or in part

over unmanaged internet connections (wired or

wireless). But at a higher level, it becomes

apparent that implementing delivery of such a

service is emblematic of broad trends in our

industry: namely, the shift of an increasing

number of aspects of the video preparation and

delivery infrastructure towards software

subsystems, which are fundamentally dependent

on IP connectivity.

As this software shift reaches down into the

client device design and implementation, the

devices become less specialised in architecture as

they increasingly rely on the software resources

on the head-end or server side of the delivery link.

In other words, more device functionality is

moving to the cloud, including user interfaces,

DVR storage, preference management and,

perhaps most important from our own

perspective, a greater share of the core rights

management logic.

The best of these new cloud-centric or hybrid

network services can offer their subscribers a

highly integrated user experience across a wide

range of client device types. Yet these services

also demand carefully architected security features

to protect revenue streams, particularly when the

physical boundaries of a head-end become less

well defined.

navigating the path to a unified head-end

Harmonizing the back-end systems makes the

unified service paradigm of cloud-centric and

hybrid services possible. As operators work to

deploy such an approach, they should pay special

attention to the following:

• Stream/file transcoding and grooming

resources that are flexible enough to deal with

the full range of today’s content delivery

protocols – from MPEG-TS to HLS to DASH

– and that can be re-programmed to deal with

those of the future;

• Workflow and content management support

that can accommodate the full range of live

and on-demand content preparation

requirements and treat the results as a unified

suite of related assets;

• A security solution that can protect the full

range of media delivery protocols and mange

rights in harmonised fashion across the

delivery networks; and

• A suite of delivery instrumentation and analysis

tools that can treat complex multi-network

service delivery as a unified entity and provide

insight into consumer behavior in switches

from client type to client type.

Clearly the operator not only has to consider the

security of content delivery via the cloud, but also

the security of content ingest links, content

storage in various formats and

subscriber databases. A

technology partner ecosystem

within the multi-screen

workflow is of significant

benefit to those service

providers seeking to deploy

such a unified security

approach.

The fact that the various

individual technologies often

employ open standards makes

it easier for operators to

integrate at least the security

infrastructure into whatever multi-vendor

workflow might be considered. Verimatrix is a

case in point where teaming with specific vendors

facilitates the deployment of solutions with a full-

scale security infrastructure built in.

The power of analytics

Greater visibility into the usage patterns and

operational data on the client devices is of

growing importance for video services. Operators

and content owners gain valuable insight into

subscribers’ preferences and activities when

consuming content. Integrated multi-network

analytics also affords operators the opportunity to

generate new revenue streams, increase subscriber

loyalty and reduce costs through:

• Real-time performance, issue identification and

resolution – Operators can greatly enhance

QoE and subscriber satisfaction through

proactive response to adverse performance

trends and traffic patterns;

• Historical media usage and subscriber pattern

analysis – Operators can implement better

network planning, based on customer

preference and service targeting data;

• Network optimisation – Operators can push

targeted information more efficiently to the

point of consumption with better visibility on

performance; and

• Social networking integration – Operators can

capitalize on popular social media features

where subscribers can opt-in and create

personal profiles that enable real-time flagging

of “now watching” content, with preferences

and recommendations to friends and contacts.

The shift to cloud TV is part of a broader trend in the video industry towards IP and software systems, says Steve Christian, VP of marketing at Verimatrix, who looks at the security implications of this evolution

06 May-June 2014 www.csimagazine.com

Cloud TV

Spo

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y:

security optimisation through unification

With a diverse mixture of set top boxes (STBs)

and CE devices as clients of a cloud-centric

service, it is almost impossible to rely on any

specific client being equipped with more than the

most basic of hardware subsystems that can be

leveraged to support comprehensive client

security logic. The legacy Conditional Access

approach of relying on dedicated security

subsystems at each and every device is clearly

outdated but legacy implementations that still rely

on extensive client side logic, key manipulation

and persistent storage encourages an environment

where threats are focused at the weakest links in

these diverse client implementations.

The natural response to this – especially given

the broader system architectural trends identified

above – is to ensure that the core security

functionality and content rights management logic

resides as much as possible in the head-end cloud

subsystems. When business rule decision-making

and entitlement management become cloud-

centric for security reasons, the opportunity also

exists to make the systems much more responsive

and dynamic to usage patterns and asynchronous

events. Unification of security also offers the most

seamless experience for consumers.

As an example, domain-based entitlement

management enforces business rules to a logical

group of devices (as opposed to an individual

device) to ensure that entitled content is

automatically available to all the subscriber

domain’s devices. Such dynamic entitlements

support more flexible and Web-like business

models than historically seen in the pay-TV world.

Unifying security infrastructure across

networks and devices offers many benefits,

including the ability to revoke clients and renew

client security on the basis of knowledge or

suspicion of threats on particular kinds of devices.

It seems that the device that is most significant in

terms of revenue streams is often attacked first;

being able to revoke and renew security on that

device in order to sufficiently address any threats,

can help significantly protect an operator’s

bottom line.

The foundation of this renewability and

revocability is software-centric communications

logic built on the firm foundations of hierarchical

certificate structures – the very foundations of

Internet security. In each client device, there is a

minimum set of subsystems that are needed to

ensure an adequate revenue security, including a

hardware root-of-trust. Traditionally, hardware-

based roots–of-trust can provide cryptographic

keys, code verification keys and secure device IDs.

Recent advancements include hardware

security cores inside STB chipsets/system-on-chips

(SoCs) that perform highly sensitive content

protection functions on a personalized basis. This

hardware security core approach brings

significant security and architectural advantages.

When such a hardware root-of-trust is combined

with a proven software security environment, a

robust revenue security regime is created.

The increasing proliferation of cloud-based

video services will push operators to re-think their

security strategy in order to optimise revenue

security while reducing operational costs.

Security, in all its forms, is a continuing concern

for video operators as they move towards a

software-empowered model. An even greater

concern is that the introduction of higher

resolution, more valuable content services, such

as UHD/4k, are matched by enhanced security

approaches that must employ as much next-

generation techniques as commercially

reasonable.

It is clear that the software-empowered video

operator model requires a new vision of revenue

security that is a substantial leap forward from

most of the current offerings.

The new generation of software-based,

IP-centric security solutions, where control and

integrity can be managed at the point of service

origin, are especially well aligned with the vision

of a more dynamic, flexible and extensible value

proposition that will drive the new marketplace.

The end is in sight for the single-vendor

monolithic video solutions that we have seen in

the past. The landscape is much brighter for

specialist vendors that have proven component

integration points — often standards-centric —

with other members of a deployment ecosystem.

The result is less vendor lock-in and a promise of

significant reduction in deployment cost.

For more information, download the ‘Rise of the

Software-Empowered Video Operator’ e-book at

www.verimatrix.com/swempowered and attend the

‘Multi-network Forum’ at ANGA COM at

www.verimatrix.com/anga2014

www.csimagazine.com May-June 2014 07

Cloud TV

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y:

Multi-network revenue security enables you to cost-effectively reach your subscribers across different networks, devices and geographic boundaries. The Verimatrix Video Content Authority System (VCAS™) and ViewRight® solutions offer the flexibility to match any hybrid network combination and keep pace with the latest connected devices. Discover how Verimatrix is working with global digital TV operators to build a single harmonized rights management platform that protects and enhances revenue.

BUILDING A WORLD OF SECURE MULTI-NETWORK SOLUTIONS

Visit us at ANGA COM 2014 Hall 10.1 • Booth #M10

Join us forMulti-network Solutions in the Real World Forum Wednesday • 21 May8:00 am to 9:30 amwww.verimatrix.com/anga2014