In a notable leap forward for broadcasters planning to monetize their NextGen TV broadcasts, Sinclair has announced the launch of its “Broadspan” datacasting platform. 

The platform enables data distribution in all the current markets where Sinclair stations are offering NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0, broadcasts. 

In making the announcement, Sinclair’s president and CEO Chris Riply said that the platform would be open to all other broadcasters and that they had signed up their first user, Edgio, a leading content delivery network. 

During last year’s NAB, Sinclair had promised to build "the NextGen TV infrastructure" that would open up new "datacasting opportunities for broadcasters," Ripley said. “Today, I'm here to tell you what we've done just that."

“This infrastructure will provide the means to intelligently use all available ATSC 3.0 spectrum from multiple stations to deliver the customer's data quickly, efficiency efficiently and securely,” Ripley said. 

He stressed capabilities of ATSC 3.0 for efficient data distribution and monetization opportunities and highlighted the infrastructure's ability to allocate spectrum intelligently, deliver data quickly, and provide a cost-effective solution for data recovery. 

Ripley and Eric Black, CTO and GM of media at Edgio also emphasized the platform's potential to offload significant video data from the internet, reduce congestion, and enhance the user experience.

Edgio’s CDN works with many companies, including broadcasters, to provide OTT delivery of content. 

Black said that the Broadspan platform “takes advantage of the unique capability of ATSC 3.0. to converge broadcast and broadband capability seamlessly. It is a game changer as you will be able to offload significant video data from the internet to reducing congestion and enhancing the user experience while allowing increased bit rates without the loss of any service.”

Black said that “by leveraging ATSC 3.0’s convergence of broadcast and broadband, we are delivering a true 4K experience. Broadspan isn’t just a game changer; it is a paradigm shift in defining immersive entertainment.”

Black also said that the bandwidth provided by NextGen TV broadcasts will dramatically expand the ability of streamers to provide 4K content. “This provides a path to the deliver of 4K content to 100 million, 150 million viewers,” he said. 

In announcing the platform launch, Ripley also discussed some of the upcoming developments and opportunities for 3.0 services. He noted that BIA advisors has issued a forecast of $10 billion in potential datacasting ATSC 3.0 revenue for broadcasters and said that the launch of their service “will put the industry on the path to achieving those projections.” 

Ripley said that the excess bandwidth available for datacasting on the Sinclair stations is about 9Mbps, which would be sufficient for many services, including the delivery of 4K content by CDNs like Edgio. 

However, the capacity is limited by the current system of using a lighthouse station to deliver the 3.0 signals from the local network affiliates, who continue to deliver ATSC signals. 

To expand that capacity, Ripley said that broadcasters and the NAB are working with the FCC to come up with a sunset date for ATSC broadcasts. 

“One of the main topics in collaborating with the FCC is how do we get out of the lighthouse model when we sunset ATSC 1.0” he said. “As an industry, that is a major objective for just about every broadcaster that I know. It's a major objective for the NAB. It is something that we're going to be pushing forward with the FCC to figure out when that date be and when we can turn off the lighthouses and convert the rest of the stations.”

NEW YORK — Even though the price of UHD/4K TV sets continue to fall, the fact remains that there’s still a dearth of available ultra-high resolution content and what content is — even in 2018 — is reserved for high-profile events such as the FIFA World Cup.

Except when it comes to over-the-top streaming services.

“4K streaming is leading the way right now,” said Will Law, chief architect of media cloud engineering at Akamai. “Satellite is bandwidth constrained at the present, and while cable is less constrained, these are still fixed infrastructure.”

Streaming services don’t have the same fixed infrastructure, even if the content is delivered via cable broadband, and as such it can reach a wider audience.

“OTT makes it easier to get the 4K content,” added Law. “Netflix has hundreds of titles already, and we’re seeing the other providers steadily adding content.”

Streaming services may be ensuring that content is future-proofed, so that resolution and overall picture quality don’t appear dated to future viewers.

“Netflix is already one of the biggest distributors of 4K content and treats higher-resolution content as premium,” said Richard Brandon, CMO of Edgeware, a Swedish provider of content delivery networks. “The OTT giant’s guidelines for ‘Netflix Originals’ state that programming has to be shot in native 4K so it’s been continually investing in UHD content to add to its library. At the same time the BBC is leading the charge in the U.K., streaming all its World Cup matches in 4K and will do the same with its Wimbledon coverage.”

BEYOND RESOLUTION

To TV manufacturers — and even the media that covers the market — 4K and UHD are being used interchangeably, but in essence 4K is just part of the bigger UHD picture.

“4K is the resolution, and this is one of many parts of UHD,” explained Law. “4K really is just focusing on the number of pixels. With UHD it is important to also discuss what this means for framerate — 30fps or 60fps — as well as High Dynamic Range, which is far more perceivable to viewers across devices than just the number of pixels.”

However, HDR isn't completely tied to UHD.

[Read: “To Be Or Not To Be UHD,” Is The Question]

“HDR is not part of the current UHD specs, but the two come hand in hand,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst of U.K.-based research firm nScreenMedia. “Everything that is UHD on Netflix is HDR as well, and we’re seeing that becoming true for Amazon and the other services as well. HDR is something you can see on all screen sizes, which isn’t really the case for just the resolution.”

The biggest issue with UHD/4K delivery is not enough bandwidth.

“The ability to deliver 4K is part of the attraction of internet-delivered services — it’s one of the ways operators can deliver an OTT service that goes beyond broadcast,” said Brandon. “The extra stress it brings to the availability of network bandwidth is an issue however, especially when streams are being delivered to several kinds of end-user devices.”

The issue will become more serious as more viewers access higher-resolution content, according to Jim Defilippis, CEO of TMS Consulting in Los Angeles.

“UHD content doesn’t represent a big cost increase to OTT services,” he said. “The costs are related to the number of customers, so when you have only a few customers it really doesn’t cost much. The bad news is that the costs will go up as you gain customers.”

DATA LIMITS

In addition to availability of UHD content, another limiting factor is data limits.

“You are good to go if you are streaming a movie or two a week, and in that case you won’t reach your ISP’s bandwidth limit,” said Dixon. “If all of the content you are watching is in UHD you’d have a problem.”

Dixon estimates that no more than 20 percent of the current U.S. market that regularly watches streaming services is consuming UHD content. “That market is growing, and if 100 percent of the audience suddenly embraced UHD, the broadband providers would have to build up the pipes,” he said.

“4K streaming is leading the way right now.” —Will Law, Akamai

Some vendors, including Harmonic, provide solutions that handle the growth in adoption of UHD, and reduce latency. This has included its EyeQ system that is designed to reduced bandwidth consumption by up to 30 percent without requiring any additional changes in the existing H.264 delivery infrastructure or the vast array of decoders on the market.

“We are working to improve UHD streaming, especially for sporting events,” said Eric Gallier, vice president of marketing at Harmonic. “Our solution provides latency that is comparable to what you’d see in traditional broadcasts. This is not only about the encoding but also about the playout.”

At the 2018 NAB Show, Harmonic unveiled its new end-to-end UHD HDR solution for live sports streaming. The solution features Harmonic’s ViBE CP9000 contribution encoder for VOS 360 media processing SaaS for encoding, packaging, origin server capabilities and OTT distribution.

HURDLES LEFT TO OVERCOME

Bandwidth aside there are still other issues to resolve, especially as there are a lot of technologies at play.

“Streaming isn’t all unicorns and ice cream cake right now,” said Akamai’s Law. “We need to resolve the standardization of the various HDR protocols as there are currently too many. This creates fragmentation in the market and that could drive up production costs.”

Copyright protection and DRM could also remain an issue, but so too could piracy of UHD content.

“Pirated content is usually degraded in quality from redistribution and added compression, but when a stream starts in 4K, it can be degraded but still remain high enough quality to watch,” said Edgeware’s Brandon. “Content providers can overcome this by deploying solutions that allow them to add a digital watermark to each stream. This can then be used to identify where a stream was stolen from, letting users better protect their investments into 4K content.”

THE NET NEUTRALITY FACTOR

Since FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced last November that net neutrality would be repealed, many industry observers have warned that streaming media could suffer but others are now saying the issue is being unnecessarily politicized.

“We are working to improve UHD streaming, especially for sporting events.” — Eric Gallier, Harmonic

"Many are concerned about distribution equality," said Law. "Net neutrality can impact the economics of how content is delivered from source to the last mile."

High-bandwidth content, however, could end up costing more just to get to that last mile.

“When there is an outlay from a service such as Netflix that is delivering a lot of content to other providers, this is when it becomes an issue,” said Dixon at nScreenMedia. “If a lot of 4K content crosses the wires from any internet company there will be an outcry from the ISPs for the transit cost. That is where some companies have had to buy ‘preferential pipes’ — that is in essence what Netflix is already doing.”

Part of this ongoing issue reaches back decades to how the internet was developed as an interconnected “network of networks,” where content passes through from one provider to another.

“Net neutrality is the key to the operation of gateways between internet providers and the peering agreements that insure equal treatment for traffic as long as the traffic is balanced between the providers,” said Defilippis. “In a non-net neutrality situation, an internet provider is free to charge for improved gateway performance (bandwidth and latency). 4K content is sensitive to these increases due to the size of the files and the bandwidth required.

“UHD will amplify the throttling issues which are bound to happen with the change to net neutrality,” Defilippis concluded.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW and SAN JOSE, CALIF.—4K streamer UltraFlix said it selected Hybrik for cloud-based transcoding. UltraFlix noted that its 1,400-title 4K library needed to be transcoded into a variety of bitrates and codecs. By leveraging Hybrik's cloud-based services, UltraFlix said it could rapidly on-board new content, as well as re-encode existing content using newer compression techniques and formulas such as HDR and HEVC.

One common characteristic of streaming is spikes in content flow, particularly for UltraFlix, the company said. When the company makes a new license deal, it needs to ingest hundreds of hours of new content and post it to the UltraFlix network, which runs on a variety of platforms. Hybrik is said to enable “near-infinite scalability at the lowest possible cost by taking advantage of the Amazon Web Services spot market.”