The Digital Water Cooler

Over the next several years, as more and more professionally produced video becomes available over the Internet, media companies will lift their service expectations for the CDN partners with whom they work. Because positive viewer experiences reflect directly on the media brand itself, the new expectation will be that CDNs must be responsible for end-to-end delivery, managing and measuring quality all the way through the viewer experience. Consequently, the notion that the extent of a CDN’s responsibility ends with the edge of their network will soon be outdated and CDNs will need to extend their reach downstream to last mile networks, in-home networks and WiFi networks. This shift will have a dramatic impact on the CDN landscape and will likely give way to a new order of leaders. The resulting consistency in viewer experience will truly enable Internet-video to become a peer with what we currently recognize as television and will usher in a new era of targeted, measurable and high brand-value advertising.

What does end-to-end delivery responsibility mean? Imagine a parcel delivery service like FedEx or UPS where the only quality of service metric that they managed and measured was delivery to the local depot, not to the final house or office destination. And let’s say that they could tell you that “most of the time” delivery from the local depot to the destination would happen within a day but not always and that after delivery they were unable to report to you when the package was actually delivered or its condition. Would that be a competitive service today? Of course not. But 25 years ago, when the US Postal Service delivered most packages, this was the quality of service norm. Only by adding “receipt required” service and priority delivery could you expect any better. Today’s CDNs operate largely according to this dated model of delivery.

This is an excerpt from a whitepaper written by Charlie Oppenheimer. To get the paper in its entirety visit: http://www.digitalfountain.com/landing13.asp

Mobile operators constantly seek revenue opportunities, and the coming rollout of multicast and broadcast networks will create new opportunities for non real-time content consumption.

Micro-personalization represents the most intimate personalization of content, and also the prevalent form of content consumption in mobility. Today, micro-personalization occurs through unicast delivery of video-on-demand and downloadable forms of mobile content. Micro-personalization offers consumers the broadest choice of content—the level of supportable content is limitless, allowing for even the smallest demand niches to be satisfied—users can stream videos about emerging fashion trends or download the their favorite ringtones of the ‘60s, among the infinite sea of choices.

However, as consumers take advantage of the available content offerings, operators need to scale their networks, and broadcast/multicast represents a significant opportunity—not only to achieve scale, but also to create new applications and revenue opportunities. Macro-personalization takes advantage of multicast and broadcast to push content to consumers. Rather than having 24 users in a cell pulling the latest 2 minute video new update via unicast (and congesting the network), operators will push that video out as a video file that is cached to device memory or a memory card. Sports fans can receive highlights of their favorite teams in time for a morning commute, pop culture fiends can get updates on the latest exploits of Young Hollywood, and traffic updates can be pushed out to commuters, all customizable through preference settings.

The applications and revenue possibilities of macro-personalization are substantial, and we expect those to become common as multicast and broadcast networks such as MBMS, DVB-H, and MediaFLO rollout.

In the past six months, we’ve heard of streaming-related pains in DVB-H, and have been approached by some of the largest players in mobile broadcast to evaluate if Digital Fountain’s technology would prove beneficial in streaming video over DVB-H, with a specific focus on the most prominent pain points: infrastructure costs, QoS, legacy equipment support, and migration. The answers are all an overwhelming yes, and I want to preview the findings of a white paper that we’ll publish in late January leading into Mobile World Congress.

Digital Fountain’s research team created DVB-endorsed simulators to emulate a DVB-H system, and the results were astounding. Link margin gains using Digital Fountain technology (compared to the status quo) were 2dB – 8dB, depending on the accepted latency varying from DVB-H typical latencies up to several seconds too translate those dB gains into meaningful numbers, we were informed by DVB-H operators:

Using Digital Fountain’s technology, and assuming a realistic link margin gain of 5dB, would allow an operator to deploy a broadcast network with half the investment in transmission towers, or to achieve a substantially better QoS with the same number of towers. In an instance of say, Italy, where the DVB-H rollout has cost upwards of 300m EUR, Digital Fountain solutions could yield a start-up infrastructure savings of 150m EUR, and that’s gathered the attention of a number of operators developing DVB-H solutions.

So the immediate question we always receive: Why does DVB-H streaming not include Digital Fountain’s technology? This is also quite simple, because DVB-H specifications were completed before Digital Fountain’s technology was available. But with our flexible software based solution, it is never too late – upgrade today, save from tomorrow on.

Of course, the same principle applies to other networks as well—MBMS, DVB-SH, MediaFLO, DMB, et al. It’s an interesting development and Digital Fountain will be working with operators globally to share the data in the coming months.

Fifteen years ago, I remember talking with colleagues about a future world of multimedia where our TVs, video disc players, computers, camcorders, and portable media players would all share video using common digital formats, media, and connections. Today, we’re finally at a point where we can see the pieces coming together to form a naturally expanding ecosystem based on a common digital video encoding format: H.264.

The Benefits of a Common Format
A common encoding format enables content created for one type of device to be easily delivered or adapted to another. A standard open format drives competition and reduces the cost of devices, thereby expanding the addressable market in a virtuous cycle. With a common format, consumers and businesses are encouraged to create and share more media, knowing that broad distribution and consumption is possible. Because of this, consumers, media companies, and vendors alike all benefit from increased growth, innovation, and choice.

This is an excerpt from an article published in the Oct/Nov edition of Streaming Media Magazine. To read this article in its entirety, please visit: http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9695

I’ve just returned from CTIA Entertainment ’07 in San Francisco, and there’s not much to talk about. Very little hype this year all around. Sure, people were still talking about mobile marketing and mobile advertising, but there’s a realization that this is going to take a little time to develop—it’s still merely hype.

Last year at CTIA Entertainment in LA, mobile TV was a hot topic, and it returned again this year, but with more of a focus: what content should utilize mobile broadcast networks (like DVB-H, MBMS, or MediaFLO) and which content is better suited for unicast streaming. There’s no consensus other than the notion that streaming network video (traditional TV) is better suited for broadcast. I suspect that over the next 6-12 months, this conversation will intensify as the mobile ecosystem establishes business models that work for mobile video and mobile broadcast, and the differences between mass personalization and micro-personalization of content and consumption (to be covered in a future post).

The Digital Fountain team just returned from a great DEMOfall event in San Diego, CA, where we presented our new video CDN offering – DF Splash. Digital Fountain was one of 69 companies that were invited to participate, and we kicked things off in style as the first presenter of the event. We were immediately overwhelmed by the response we got from content providers, press, VC’s and even other participants anxious to find out more about our unique technology and business approach. In fact, our PR team received numerous press inquiries during our presentation. We also announced that DF Splash will leverage Amazon Web Services to offer a TV-quality viewing experience without relying on costly edge network infrastructure. We received a lot of coverage from such blogs as Blognation, Network World, Information Week, and InfoWorld.

We saw a lot of interesting new products and ideas at DEMOfall, and it was great to be in such exciting company. It was also a nice way to kick off DF Splash, which will be available in January of 2008. In case you missed it, here’s our presentation:

I’ve just returned from a great week at IBC Exhibition and Conference in Amsterdam, September 7-11. We were universally impressed by the event, which not only smashed attendance records (the old record was broken on the morning of the 10th), but also featured the leaders in mobile, IPTV, and content delivery. The traffic through the IPTV and mobile zones was particularly impressive in both quantity and quality.
Reflecting on our time at IBC, a few items really stand out:

1) HD is everywhere! A few years ago, and even last year, HD—and the necessity of supporting it—was questioned: “Do we really need it?” Today, supporting HD is simply a must have—consumers are demanding more and more HD content and, consequently, service providers are planning for HD support in their next upgrade, and specifying HD as a requirement with their vendors.

But this does raise an interesting question: will HD support be a pillar of future profits, or is HD a means to survive. Standard definition head-end equipment itself is quite an investment, but the additional requirement to support HD doubles or triples that up-front investment. As a result, we have a situation where service providers are making significant incremental investments in their systems, but without a commensurate opportunity on the revenue side to match that investment boost.

All this creates a situation that will likely separate successful service providers from those that will not be: those that are to be successful will find innovative ways to boost revenue, turning HD content into a profit center, while those providers that view HD merely as a means to survive may ultimately suffer.

2) DVB-H and DVB-SH After the European endorsement of DVB-H, we fully expected to see noticeably increased momentum in mobile broadcast TV, and that’s precisely what we found. European operators have consistently shifted their mobile TV strategies to focus on DVB-H over alternatives in the market.

A notable exception, there were a surprising number of companies promoting and demonstrating DVB-SH, the venture lead by Alcatel-Lucent, Eutelsat, and SES Astra to provide broadcast mobile services, both streaming and file-based, to Europe. We’re intrigued by the idea, especially given the inconsistent nature of spectrum regulation in Europe. By leveraging satellite technology, service providers will be able to swiftly overcome the national spectrum issues that have thus far held back DVB-H deployments.

3) Mobile data services While DVB-H and MediaFLO garnered the attention for broadcast streaming video services, mobile operators are beginning to plan broadcast data services offerings that will really take advantage of what we believe the best mobile use cases to be – datacasting, clipcasting and push-VOD. More on these mobile use cases in a later entry, but operators are more openly discussing using these push services to drive greater revenue gains, much as Digital Fountain licensee KDDI has done in Japan with services like EZ News Channel

IBC also continued a trend of an increased awareness and push on the part of satellite radio service providers (and automotive OEMs) to use their satellite services to broadcast data to vehicles, whether navigation updates, push-VOD, or other infortainment services. Digital Fountain firmly believes that these services will prove to be a boon to satellite service providers who understand that they can provide much more value that merely streaming audio.

All in all, IBC was an outstanding show! We’re excited about all the new technology, the developments in IPTV and mobile, and we can’t wait until next year’s event.