Re: Webcasting as a replacement for traditional broadcasting (was Re: Wackie 'ol Friday)
I was at an incentive auction discussion earlier in the week where it was suggested that the broadcasters see a rosy future with ATSC beaming to mobile, but there is still work to be done.
They might wish, after many years there has been little take up of the various systems created to do this (we've spent quite some time working on the standards). Nobody wanted to pay for it to be in handsets, other features were seen as more important uses of the space/power. The next try is LTE Broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMBMS brandon
On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 3:08 AM, Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
I was at an incentive auction discussion earlier in the week where it was suggested that the broadcasters see a rosy future with ATSC beaming to mobile, but there is still work to be done.
They might wish, after many years there has been little take up of the various systems created to do this (we've spent quite some time working on the standards). Nobody wanted to pay for it to be in handsets, other features were seen as more important uses of the space/power.
The next try is LTE Broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMBMS
Without going into painful detail on the policy, technology or economics, i really don't see EMBMS being widely deployed and successful Not to say some folks won't try to make pigs fly. Vendors make a lot of money at the "pigs flying" BU. I do imagine the invisible hand of tariffs guiding users to better use broadcast TV and Radio for live events. CB
brandon
Japan has been doing this exact thing for close to 10 years.. Why is it hard to do? Buffer the video 30 seconds or use a codec that doesn't blow? I use my phone via "4G"and stream media constantly. If you take a look at Charlie Ergen's behavior lately, there won't need to be a lte tv.. Lightsquared is about to be murdered for breaking the Gps and dish will take over as largest provider in the US. Now taking bets. Sent from my Mobile Device. -------- Original message -------- From: "cb.list6" <cb.list6@gmail.com> Date: 06/08/2013 9:52 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Webcasting as a replacement for traditional broadcasting (was Re: Wackie 'ol Friday) On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 3:08 AM, Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
I was at an incentive auction discussion earlier in the week where it was suggested that the broadcasters see a rosy future with ATSC beaming to mobile, but there is still work to be done.
They might wish, after many years there has been little take up of the various systems created to do this (we've spent quite some time working on the standards). Nobody wanted to pay for it to be in handsets, other features were seen as more important uses of the space/power.
The next try is LTE Broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMBMS
Without going into painful detail on the policy, technology or economics, i really don't see EMBMS being widely deployed and successful Not to say some folks won't try to make pigs fly. Vendors make a lot of money at the "pigs flying" BU. I do imagine the invisible hand of tariffs guiding users to better use broadcast TV and Radio for live events. CB
brandon
On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Warren Bailey <wbailey@satelliteintelligencegroup.com> wrote:
Japan has been doing this exact thing for close to 10 years.. Why is it hard
Japan has been doing what exactly? Can you cite it? I am pretty sure by "exact thing" you do not mean EMBMS.
to do? Buffer the video 30 seconds or use a codec that doesn't blow? I use my phone via "4G"and stream media constantly. If you take a look at Charlie
Yes, and by "streaming", you mean downloading discrete video chunks with http. That is the state of the industry today video over unicast TCP / HTTP. It is not EMBMS A very large percentage of mobile data traffic today is video via HTTP http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns82... I do not know of any EMBMS deployments. CB
Ergen's behavior lately, there won't need to be a lte tv.. Lightsquared is about to be murdered for breaking the Gps and dish will take over as largest provider in the US. Now taking bets.
Sent from my Mobile Device.
-------- Original message -------- From: "cb.list6" <cb.list6@gmail.com> Date: 06/08/2013 9:52 AM (GMT-08:00) To: Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Webcasting as a replacement for traditional broadcasting (was Re: Wackie 'ol Friday)
On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 3:08 AM, Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
I was at an incentive auction discussion earlier in the week where it was suggested that the broadcasters see a rosy future with ATSC beaming to mobile, but there is still work to be done.
They might wish, after many years there has been little take up of the various systems created to do this (we've spent quite some time working on the standards). Nobody wanted to pay for it to be in handsets, other features were seen as more important uses of the space/power.
The next try is LTE Broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMBMS
Without going into painful detail on the policy, technology or economics, i really don't see EMBMS being widely deployed and successful
Not to say some folks won't try to make pigs fly. Vendors make a lot of money at the "pigs flying" BU.
I do imagine the invisible hand of tariffs guiding users to better use broadcast TV and Radio for live events.
CB
brandon
----- Original Message -----
From: "cb.list6" <cb.list6@gmail.com>
On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 3:08 AM, Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
The next try is LTE Broadcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMBMS
Without going into painful detail on the policy, technology or economics, i really don't see EMBMS being widely deployed and successful
Isn't it a shame that the fix was in when ATSC was locked as 8VSB, instead of the much easier to receive while mobile COFDM... which would have cost broadcasters more because it's average transmit power is higher? So anything that costs broadcasters more to do to serve mobile users, I'm fine with, as long as they don't try to charge us for it. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
From what I've been led to understand in my time in broadcast*, the decision wasn't made because of power costs but because they (the Grand Alliance and the FCC) believed that 8VSB would work better over the US both due to terrain and propagation differences and due to our markets of television transmitters and need to place co-channel (same frequency)
The view from my side, as both a broadcaster and a consumer of both broadcast and 'webcast' content: transmitters relatively nearby with minimal interference. Some argue that (C)OFDM would have been a better choice even taking those things into account. Which should have been chosen based on what criteria is a long discussion in and of itself but we've got 8VSB (at least for now). As for the mobile thing, I don't know if anyone had thought that far ahead. It seems silly now since I had a 2" rear-projection portable NTSC TV that was made in the mid-to-late 1980s (Sony Watchman) and now they are trying to 'solve' the mobile delivery 'problem'. ATSC M/H adds a lot of error correction as well as 'training data' to make the M/H stream 'easy' to detect and decode, even with Doppler and multipath effects (see ATSC A/153 part 2 for detail) - this reduces the data rate available for the 'main' (A/53) data significantly and does not create nearly as much available for the M/H (A/153) data. This sounds even sillier when you realize that ATSC standard A/49, first published in 1993, was a "Ghost Canceling Reference Signal for NTSC" (ghosting on NTSC is a symptom of multipath). As for 'webcasting' replacing RF broadcasting, I think we're a ways out if it will even ever happen in the general case yet alone every case. RF broadcast is very efficient, as previously mentioned. As a broadcaster, I push 19.393 Mbps of content 'into the air' for everyone around to receive at once. As a consumer, I have four tuners attached to what amounts to a few pieces of wire and I can receive roughly 80 Mbit of non-blocking data 'through the air'. My ISP provides me a downlink speed of roughly 10 Mbps. If I were in a larger market, I'd be able to receive even more data (non-blocking with more tuners or blocking from my POV if I didn't have enough tuners for every channel); even if the ISP provided downlink speeds scaled up similarly, there would be much more data available 'through the air'. The people who live near me have the opportunity to receive that same 80 Mbit of data without any transit costs. Can CDNs replace some of what is now broadcast? Likely. By reducing data rates (with better compression technologies as well as simply compressing more) and providing content that viewers want, they could (Netflix and others are already doing this with some content). There is, of course, a lingering societal question about "shared viewing experiences" for shows having set delivery schedules by broadcast. Live content and local content, however, will still be (in my opinion) best served by RF broadcast for some time to come due to both the inherent efficiencies in the system and the ease of localization for end-users. * The ATSC Digital Television Standard (A/53) was developed, documented, and formalized from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s (A/53 Part 1, Annex A describes the history). I wasn't working in television until 2000 or so and I wasn't doing television broadcast-related work until 2008. - Eric Eric Adler Broadcast Engineer
On 13-06-09 12:47, Eric Adler wrote:
TV that was made in the mid-to-late 1980s (Sony Watchman) and now they are trying to 'solve' the mobile delivery 'problem'.
Qualcomm is working on adding "broadcast" capabilities to LTE (this was from recent at a conference (Telecom Summit in Toronto), so I suspect they would implement as multicast). Right now, there is negative incentive for large ISPs to deploy multicasting on their ISP service because the large ISPs are also legacy TV distributors (aka: cable TV) and that business is highly profitable and they aren't about to help lower cost competitors eat into their cable TV business. However, once internet distribution realy takes off, you'll find the motivation to deploy multicasting will grow because ISPs will want to cut their costs (and that may also be the big incentive to really move to IPv6). But when you think about it, the only time multicast becomes useful is for live broadcasts (sports, sometimes news). For the rest, the world is moving to on-demand viewing where multicast does not provide any advantage. And something to consider: while legacy TV is on /24/365, there is not enough programming to fill all the time, hence the many reruns. Same with infotainment networks like CNN who reruns their stories multiple times per hour throughout the day. In an on demand world, the bandwidth will be relative to the amount of content actually being produced, not the number of hours per day. If you have already seen a CNN reprt on its web site, you're not going to watch it again 5 times during the day. But if you are watching CNN on linear TV, you have to keep watching just in case there is something new that is shown. I predict big changes in viewing habits. And this would have implications on how your guys architect your networks. What used to be TV Networks with stations in every city is likely to become cache servers distributed in every city. (some would call them CDNs :-)
Eric Adler wrote:
The view from my side, as both a broadcaster and a consumer of both broadcast and 'webcast' content: [snip]
Thank you Eric...your comments are very much appreciated. --Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Adler" <eaptech@gmail.com>
The view from my side, as both a broadcaster and a consumer of both broadcast and 'webcast' content:
My own comments were, and are, from the outside, following along cause I'll have to deal with it after they make the choices.
From what I've been led to understand in my time in broadcast*, the decision wasn't made because of power costs but because they (the Grand Alliance and the FCC) believed that 8VSB would work better over the US both due to terrain and propagation differences and due to our markets of television transmitters and need to place co-channel (same frequency) transmitters relatively nearby with minimal interference.
Indeed. The impression I acquired at the time was that that was the publicly promulgated reason, but the real one was that the people who had to pay the power bills were putting their foot down.
Some argue the (C)OFDM would have been a better choice even taking those things into account. Which should have been chosen based on what criteria is a long discussion in and of itself but we've got 8VSB (at least for now).
As for the mobile thing, I don't know if anyone had thought that far ahead.
Yup. There was a substantial amount of screaming from the engineering community, *precisely on this point*: 8VSB was *substantially* harder to receive, enough so that it wouldn't be practical to receive it mobil-ly at all, while COFDM wasn't bad at on on mobile receivers. As has been the case in nearly every such argument I can remember in the last 40 years, the engineers lost to the money men, and now all we can do is say "I toldja so". But they were, in fact, told so. TTBOMK.
It seems silly now since I had a 2" rear-projection portable NTSC TV that was made in the mid-to-late 1980s (Sony Watchman) and now they are trying to 'solve' the mobile delivery 'problem'. ATSC M/H adds a lot of error correction as well as 'training data' to make the M/H stream 'easy' to detect and decode, even with Doppler and multipath effects (see ATSC A/153 part 2 for detail) - this reduces the data rate available for the 'main' (A/53) data significantly and does not create nearly as much available for the M/H (A/153) data. This sounds even sillier when you realize that ATSC standard A/49, first published in 1993, was a "Ghost Canceling Reference Signal for NTSC" (ghosting on NTSC is a symptom of multipath).
Yeah.
As for 'webcasting' replacing RF broadcasting, I think we're a ways out if it will even ever happen in the general case yet alone every case. RF broadcast is very efficient, as previously mentioned. As a broadcaster, I push 19.393 Mbps of content 'into the air' for everyone around to receive at once. As a consumer, I have four tuners attached to what amounts to a few pieces of wire and I can receive roughly 80 Mbit of non-blocking data 'through the air'. My ISP provides me a downlink speed of roughly 10 Mbps. If I were in a larger market, I'd be able to receive even more data (non-blocking with more tuners or blocking from my POV if I didn't have enough tuners for every channel); even if the ISP provided downlink speeds scaled up similarly, there would be much more data available 'through the air'. The people who live near me have the opportunity to receive that same 80 Mbit of data without any transit costs.
Yupperoni.
Can CDNs replace some of what is now broadcast? Likely. By reducing data rates (with better compression technologies as well as simply compressing more) and providing content that viewers want, they could (Netflix and others are already doing this with some content). There is, of course, a lingering societal question about "shared viewing experiences" for shows having set delivery schedules by broadcast.
And, quite aside from broadcast networks protecting the ad revenues of their contracted affiliates -- the primary reason for most of the (from an engineering standpoint) stupidity surrounding the intersection of broadcasting and new technology -- social networking is beginning to drive this aspect, to the point where the Golden Globes stopped tape-delaying the west coast broadcast so those viewers didn't get spoiled on twitter.
Live content and local content, however, will still be (in my opinion) best served by RF broadcast for some time to come due to both the inherent efficiencies in the system and the ease of localization for end-users.
You bet.
* The ATSC Digital Television Standard (A/53) was developed, documented, and formalized from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s (A/53 Part 1, Annex A describes the history). I wasn't working in television until 2000 or so and I wasn't doing television broadcast-related work until 2008.
My production history started in 1983, though with a few years exception, I didn't have much direct connection with the transport; I was merely an (informed) observer. Thanks for your views, Eric. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
Jay Ashworth wrote: sniip
And, quite aside from broadcast networks protecting the ad revenues of their contracted affiliates -- the primary reason for most of the (from an engineering standpoint) stupidity surrounding the intersection of broadcasting and new technology -- social networking is beginning to drive this aspect, to the point where the Golden Globes stopped tape-delaying the west coast broadcast so those viewers didn't get spoiled on twitter. Thanks for your views, Eric.
Cheers, -- jra
The Sportsbar I deal with has purchased every one of the Ultimate Fighting Championships PPV events (161). Now, after UFC's deal with FOX, the prelims for any fight on FUEL are only shown on...FACEBOOK. Bad Craziness as Hunter Thompson would have said. Thanks for everyone's comments. --Michael
This is very interesting and insightful. While the broadcasting would seem more efficient (and cheaper in many respect) than webcasting for the live content, the former can't quite serve multiple devices with varying form-factors with the same efficiency. The latter can. Isn't that a key differentiation? Cheers, Rajiv Sent from my Phone On Jun 11, 2013, at 1:03 AM, "Michael Painter" <tvhawaii@shaka.com> wrote:
Jay Ashworth wrote: sniip
And, quite aside from broadcast networks protecting the ad revenues of their contracted affiliates -- the primary reason for most of the (from an engineering standpoint) stupidity surrounding the intersection of broadcasting and new technology -- social networking is beginning to drive this aspect, to the point where the Golden Globes stopped tape-delaying the west coast broadcast so those viewers didn't get spoiled on twitter. Thanks for your views, Eric. Cheers, -- jra
The Sportsbar I deal with has purchased every one of the Ultimate Fighting Championships PPV events (161). Now, after UFC's deal with FOX, the prelims for any fight on FUEL are only shown on...FACEBOOK.
Bad Craziness as Hunter Thompson would have said.
Thanks for everyone's comments. --Michael
participants (8)
-
Brandon Butterworth -
cb.list6 -
Eric Adler -
Jay Ashworth -
Jean-Francois Mezei -
Michael Painter -
Rajiv Asati (rajiva) -
Warren Bailey