The Asian DTH Market Gears Up for Netflix Competition

The television broadcast industry has undergone several rounds of radical transformation over the past few decades. Free-to-air transmissions gave way to paid cable alternatives which, in turn, had to make room for Direct-To-Home (DTH) satellite services. CRTs vanished, replaced by larger flat panel screens. The venerable standard-definition resolution standard was superseded by a new high-definition standard, which was itself superseded by a still newer ultra-high-definition standard. Traditional analog broadcast technology was everywhere replaced by computer-age digital technology. And then, of course, there was deregulation, the advent of the smart phone and tablet, and the rise of the Internet, which between them changed everything again.

The Over the Top Netflix Phenomenon: 

One of the most remarkable successes of the new age of broadcasting is Over the top (OTT) video on demand (VOD) transmission across the Internet. OTT transmission has spawned a whole new generation of “cable cutters,” who spurn traditional broadcast television with its rigid schedules and fixed choices, in favor of free or low-cost subscription services, with a virtually unlimited range of content available anytime on any connected device, be it a smart phone, a tablet, a notebook, a computer monitor, or a big-screen smart TV. Two of the most popular new OTT providers are Netflix and Hulu. Although these and other OTT companies like Amazon and You Tube have significantly disrupted Western markets, Asian DTH service providers claim to remain unperturbed, because, according to them, OTT can’t beat DTH in the foreseeable future.

Skinny Bundles & Better Transmission Quality: 

The main attractions of OTT services like Netflix and Hulu are personalization and binge watching. While these attributes can’t be brought to standard broadcast services, whether provided over air, cable or DTH, broadcasters are ditching their overwhelming and confusing 400-channel lineups to go with linear bundles. These bundles provide users with less to choose from, which  is a better strategy to promote longer “view” times. Many Asian markets are going with streamlined packages that cover news, preschool children’s programming, premium factual content and lifestyle.

Just as broadcasters are transmitting less and becoming more quality conscious, fleet operators are also looking into ways to enhance the viewer experience, fully capitalizing on HD and, in some cases, 4K device proliferation.

Telairity Helps the DTH Sector Excel: 

Telairity has always lived up to its promise of providing the best SD and HD encoders in the industry. It provides key DTH components like:

• High-compression Encoders so HD transmissions won’t overload broadcast capacity.
• Professional Decoders to decompress, descramble and reformat signals.
• Premium modulators that generate L-Band and IF-Band satellite signals fully compliant with the DVB-S/S2, DSNG standards.

If you want to learn more about Telairity’s capabilities, please contact us.

Telairity Dives Deep Into 4K Technology – Part 3

In a nutshell, here is the whole technical difference between an HD display and a UHD display:
since UHD formats cram 4X the number of pixels onto a screen as HD, for screens of the same
size, UHD pixels are ¼ the size of HD pixels; conversely, for pixels of the same size, UHD
screens have 4X the viewing area of HD screens.

The Difference Between HD and UHD for a Viewer

In simplest terms, then, the whole viewing difference between an HD display and a UHD
display comes down to just one point: bigger screens with no loss of visual quality—where
“visual quality” is measured by the single metric of apparent pixel size. It makes no difference
whether you replace your old display with a new UHD display of the same size and move
closer to it; or keep the same viewing distance, but replace your old display with a bigger UHD
display. In both cases, the effect is exactly the same: the screen looms larger in your visual
space.

UHD Provides a More Immersive Viewing Experience

The ability to increase apparent screen size with no loss of visual quality is not everything, but
it is not nothing, either. The apparent size of a screen in our viewing area is a key factor in
what is generally called viewing immersion; indeed, the illusions of virtual reality are created
largely by covering our entire viewing space with a screen.

By this analysis, then, the advantage of UHD over HD is primarily its ability to create a more
immersive viewing experience, by allowing us to get closer to screens of the same size, and
view larger screens at the same distances, with no loss in visual quality. This is presumably a
good thing, at least when we want to be more immersed in what we are viewing. But, like
many good things, UHD has its own trade-offs.

The Cost of the UHD Experience

The most obvious trade-off for UHD is simply the cost quadrupling the number of pixels per
video frame, from about 2 million to about 8 million. As a viewer, you might think that doesn’t
matter, as long as advancing display technology makes new 8-million pixel UHD screens
available in the same price range formerly paid for comparable 2-million pixel HD screens.
Like an iceberg, however, the implications of multiplying pixelsrun far deeper than the visible
surface of a UHD screen. We will turn to that topic in the next part of this series.

Telairity has made a name for itself as the industry’s leading video processing solutions provider. Please write in to us at sales@telairity.com to learn more about our products and to collaborate with our team

Acquisitions Help the Industry Grow

Business acquisitions happen every day. But every so often, one happens that makes an industry sit up and notice. With the purchase of Elemental Technologies, Amazon has done just this. Once merely a helpful website for last-minute holiday shopping from the comfort of your living room, Amazon is now the leading lifestyle website. On top of what they started with, they have diversified into mobile phones, e-readers, content programming, and much more. With this latest purchase, Amazon is extending itself even further.

What Does Elemental Technologies Bring to the Table?

Elemental is a company that specializes in processing and delivering video feed, for customers ranging from broadcast television, to Major League Baseball, to ESPN, and even NASA. It is not solely concentrated on broadcasting though, and has been a pioneer in developing software for multi-screen content delivery. This includes:

•  Multi-format content that works on televisions, tablets, smartphones, and other formats.
•  App-delivered video offerings.
•  4K TV service
•  Internet device support partner for the 2012 Summer Olympics

Elemental has regularly been named amongst the best technology companies year in and year out and is also known for being innovative, always on the cutting edge of digital media.

How Does This Affect Us at Telairity?

As the leading providers of SD and HD Broadcast Encoders, acquisitions such as this give us hope for continuing growth in the industry, which equates to continuing growth for us as a business. While Elemental brings the software to the multi-screen world, both Amazon and Elemental need hardware providers to handle the demanding up-front task of real-time encoding. This is where Telairity looks to come in, by using our expertise in providing real-time hardware encoding solutions to capitalize in this growing field. After all, if Amazon is looking to invest in the multi-screen field, there are sure to be others not too far behind.

Wither HVEC Continued: Adoption of New Encoding Technology

In the USA, the transition from MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC encoding was further encouraged by the 2009 official switchover from analog to digital television (DTV). Worldwide, however, the DTV switchover has yet to happen in many countries (e.g., Brazil, China, and Russia are not scheduled to switchover until 2018), and the final country on the current schedule (Cuba) will not join the DTV “revolution” until 2024. In pre-DTV countries, both SD television and MPEG-2 encoding technology retain strong holds.

If we apply this lesson about the adoption of new, 2X more powerful, but also more costly and less proven encoding technology to the new H.265/HEVC encoders that are now starting to appear commercially, following 2013 finalization of the new 3^rd generation MPEG encoding standard, it seems probable that any significant uptake by broadcasters of new H.265 systems will be slow to materialize. Just as inexpensive MPEG-2 technology remains in widespread use today for SD television, despite a 2X bitrate advantage for H.264/AVC technology, less expensive and better established H.264/AVC technology is likely to remain the popular choice for use with HD television, despite its 2X bitrate disadvantage compared to the latest H.265/HEVC encoders.

Judging by the historical lesson of the MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transition, the driver for H.265/HEVC technology will not be any mere technical advantage in bitrate reduction over the decade-older H.264/AVC technology, but rather the widespread adoption of a new, higher-resolution TV format that multiplies picture data by a significant number. Fortunately for the new standard, higher resolution TV formats are already starting to appear.

Relatively inexpensive 4K UHDTV sets, featuring a 3840 x 2160 resolution that multiplies 1920 x 1080 HD formats by a factor of 4, are already available for purchase, with even larger 8K formats of  7680 x 4320, that multiply HD formats by an enormous factor of 16, waiting in the wings. When the spread of UHDTV sets to households reaches critical mass in another few years, followed by the transition to UHDTV programming over the next few years on the part of broadcasters, adoption of better encoding technology to cope with the rising tide of bits generated by UHDTV will become essential. But the transition to UHDTV will not be quick, let alone immediate. As a result, widespread use of H.265/HEVC is far more likely to occur towards the end of the current decade than near its middle.

Although the multiplication of video data due to the rise of 4K programming will make H.265/HEVC encoding technology essential before the end of the present decade, this latest encoding standard, able to halve the number of bits needed to generate a picture (compared to H.264/AVC technology), is obviously not sufficient in itself to cope with a 4X multiplication of bits. Even postulating another 50% reduction in bits from the introduction of still-to-be-developed H.266/MPEG-6 technology in 2023 will not help—assuming another 4X increase in bits during the 2020 decade from a move to 8K programming.

To the contrary, 21 years after the introduction of the first MPEG-2 standard for broadcast encoding, we appear to be locked into a losing race, where our best efforts to push encoding technology forward to new generations increasingly fall behind a growing flood of bits generated by the market’s appetite for higher and higher resolution pictures. We will consider this problem in our next blog.

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