Codebreakers

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The increasing diversity in delivery platforms may be offering broadcasters and pro-active telcos routes to additional revenues but they also add a new level of complexity for broadcast engineers, not least when it comes to encoding. Digital Broadcast looks at some of the encoding conundrums and the latest products developed to solve them.

There are two challenges facing broadcasters and their encoding workflows.

The first is the result of the ever-expanding (or splintering) body of devices, formats and bandwidths being used to view video content today.

The fact that broadcasters, telcos and other content suppliers are increasingly offering this content simultaneously, only serves to further complicate the process. Advances in video compression standards have also placed additional pressure on the encoding technology developers to keep up with their client’s needs.

“The transition to MPEG-4 has significant implications as it has been adopted more widely than any video compression standard in history,” says Peter Maag, senior VP marketing and business development, HaiVision.

Maag believes that the transition from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 has created the opportunity for those committed to the market to forge ahead.

The improvement in compression that is delivered by MPEG-4 is paying dividends for broadcasters pursuing HD. Despite the benefits of the new format, broadcasters are still required to handle larger volumes of data than previously, data which must be handled through the entire chain from content creation, encoding, transmission and storage.

“I don’t think HD is sapping broadcasters, but it is challenging those outside of the broadcast industry, such as networked video users in the enterprise sector,” says Maag. “Broadcasters are used to controlling large bandwidths. Enterprises, on the other hand, need to keep stream bandwidths below 10 Mb/s for effective deployment of internal training videos, digital signage, broadcasting video to desktops or whatever application they are using.”

The benefit of MPEG-4’s (H.264) near universal adoption is clear. The challenge now, says Maag, is for encoding technology to serve numerous consumption formats, so that broadcasters can keep up with the diversity of platforms that their audiences now demand.

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“Encoding manufacturers must offer technology that serves a variety of consumers and their platform of choice, at different bandwidths, simultaneously. Encoders must address the highest common denominator in quality and performance, and at the same time serve those with less bandwidth,” says Maag.

This sounds like a simple enough task for the industry to address, but the reality is far from it.

“The variety of consumers is the main challenge for broadcasters,” claims Maag. “Offering systems that can simultaneously serve diverse users is the main challenge for encoder manufacturers today.”

This trend has been developing for several years according to Digital Rapids’ director of product management, Brian Stevenson.

“There has been considerable interest in the ability to reach all three screens in a single encoder since we first introduced this capability many years ago,” says Stevenson. “Even providers primarily focused on reaching television sets through STBs are choosing to offer content for additional devices. This means they can reach the broadest viewing audience possible and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) in the process.”

Stevenson believes the arrival of MPEG-4 has aided this multi-format approach for broadcasters as much as it has the proliferation of HD services.

“Enabling HD services has been the main incentive for the move to MPEG-4, but it is not the only motivation – it also enables SD services to expand the number of channels offered, as well as delivery over new networks such as IPTV,” he explains.

“It offers considerable bandwidth savings over previous technologies such as MPEG-2 for the same level of visual quality. Other compression algorithms may come along with similar or even greater efficiency, but the broad adoption of MPEG-4 in set-top boxes firmly entrench it.”

The benefits of MPEG-4 for broadcasters and consumers are clear, as are the complications it has created for encoder manufacturers.

“The growing number of viewing devices is accompanied by an increase in the number of encoding formats and the parameters required for the best presentation quality and device compatibility,” says Stevenson.

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