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 The venerable standard-definition resolution standard was superseded by a new high-definition standard, which was itself superseded by a still newer ultra-high-definition standard.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.

Adaptive Bitrate Streaming – An Overview

In an age of rapidly increasing mobile computing, tablet use, and internet video streaming, adapting to user preferences relative to their current device and providing a great user experience on that device has become a chief objective within the technology community.  With the sharp increase in mobile use, wireless connectivity has been steadily improving, whether for mobile (LTE) or wireless internet (wifi and some other interesting protocols).  However, the problem with wireless connections and mobile usage, as many users know is that they are inconsistent.  With an inconsistent connection, a streamlined user experience becomes more difficult to attain.

The answer to this problem is adaptive bitrate streaming.  The basic premise is that the video is encoded at several different rates, and adjusts in real time to the quality of the user’s connection to change the quality or resolution of the stream, depending on the bandwidth available to the user at a given time.  The burden of this technological advance comes down on the encoders – it is a much more complex technology than previous fixed-rate streaming protocols.  However, the results for user experience make the technology much more desirable – so much so that there are several different adaptive protocols on the market, from Apple and Microsoft and other businesses that create proprietary solutions for their own products , as well as a new industry-standard protocol called MPEG_DASH (for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). 

Whether a universal standard is eventually adopted or not, adaptive bitrate streaming is an exciting and still-evolving topic of conversation that affects consumers and technology companies alike.  The task here for encoder manufacturers like Telairity here is not to dictate the standards that will be used by the industry to dynamically adapt video to fluctuations in bandwidth, but rather to support the standards that emerge for this purpose as quickly and efficiently as possible.