By Einat Cohen
When thinking about 3-Screen media, content owners and service providers consider how to benefit from audience media consumption across TV, Internet and mobile devices. Does it involve simply simultaneous consumption of content via these different media forms? What kind of blended services will increase service loyalty and revenue generation? Media service providers want to utilize this multi-screen combination to improve their understanding of the audience, extend their audience engagement, increase loyalty, and viewership ratings. Therefore, they are interested in boosting their service consumptions and increasing their ARPU with the 3-Screen usage scenarios and the right combination of converged content .
When we, at RayV R&D, started considering what will be the usage scenarios, we reached a conclusion that media owners and service providers should, mainly, be concerned with how to creatively adjust their content to be suitable for 3-Screen consumption. We focused on providing them with the tools needed to build a 3-Screen service that is compelling for consumers. This means we completely released the service providers from concerns regarding technology challenges such as:
- The business packaging challenge: unifying the storefront for content packaging and bundling, available for the various devices.
- The content management challenge: content ingestion, indexing and profiling for the various devices.
- The challenge of Personalization across devices: keeping a unified experience of content ownership across the devices.
- Finally, the content delivery challenge:
- Content ingestion and delivery – the various streaming protocols on each device is really a headache. Service providers should only need a single source in any standard format and we should handle the rest.
- The various encoding formats – adjusting the optimized video resolutions and bitrates suitable for a variety of devices in different screen sizes is, again, a technological concern. So in this case, as well, service providers should need only a single source in any standard format and our platform should handle the rest.
- Content protection and encryption – this is an unavoidable requirement by many content owners. Our platform should make sure that digital content management rights are followed strictly.
- Retaining video and audio quality in dynamic network conditions – for example viewers can either be on the move, switching from Wi-Fi to 3G/4G networks, or at home, when several family members share the same Internet line.
Here at RayV R&D we are faced with these technology challenges every day. Our goal was to build a 3-Screen service delivery platform that will handle all the technical challenges of service personalization delivery across all of the various devices and possible use cases. In this blog post, I will address our streaming and delivery challenges, mainly on changing network conditions.
The streaming and delivery hurdles call for different video streaming architectures and delivery mechanisms for each device type. For example, in a very basic case of 3-Screen streaming – four different video delivery systems should have been used: delivering RTMP streaming (Adobe’s Real Time Messaging Protocol aka flash streaming) for PCs and Macs, HLS (Apple’s Http Live Streaming) for iOS devices, RTSP (IETF’s Real Time Streaming Protocol) for Android devices and MPEG-TS (standard MPEG Transport Stream) over IP for Setopboxes. Add on top of that the various DRM technologies for content protection and encryption and a simple 3-Screen service delivery task turns into an acute technological challenge. Luckily, our platform is designed so that all of this is hidden from the service provider. Our platform is unique in its handling all these protocols by a single unified protocol that is robust, resilient and consistent during dynamic Internet conditions.
Our recent lab tests, conducted with some of the largest Telecommunication operators in the US, have shown perfect video and audio quality during changing network conditions (reaching up to 25% IP packet loss), on a variety of devices, and on varied screen resolutions (from HD 1080p to lower than 360p). All during various use case scenarios from sitting at home, to watching on the go.
For handling video quality across dynamic network connectivity conditions, our platform uses sophisticated backend rules that are retrieved dynamically by the connected devices. Thus ‘they’ simply understand what is permitted for them to consume and what is beyond the device’s capabilities. Our backend is so sophisticated, that it can even change the instructions dynamically based on the networks condition or the use case. For example, if a consumer was using their tablet at home with the Wi-Fi connection and then, had to leave for work – they can still continue watching their favorite news or game program on the go. They don’t even need to take the tablet with them. All they need to do is simply log into their other smart phone device and continue to watch their favorite show. Our platform is making sure that the user experience on the go is just as appealing as watching from home, so users don’t have to miss their favorite shows.
Our 3-Screen service delivery platform is now handling all of these issues and many more, which will be discussed in the next blog posts. We are already excited about sharing it with our existing customers and with new service operators and media owners in the very near future.
