AMSTERDAM—Ateme has unveiled its plans for IBC, where it will be returning to the RAI between September 15 and 18 to showcase end-to-end solutions from contribution all the way to the CDN for OTT streaming services and other outlets. 

The new solutions include what Ateme is billing as the world’s first solution for operating a cloud DVR in the public cloud. 

The provider of video compression, delivery, and streaming solutions will also demonstrate new ways of offering state-of-the-art quality of experience on any screen, monetizing audiences, and engaging sports fans in-venue and beyond while respecting green streaming strategies 

“This is an exciting time for our industry,” said Rémi Beaudouin, chief strategy officer at Ateme. “Audience expectations are being shaped by new entertainment experiences such as gaming and social media. Meanwhile, new technologies are enabling innovative ways of consuming and monetizing video content. We are thrilled to go to IBC this year and present the pioneering work we’ve done to help broadcasters and service providers leverage these changes.”

Demos will be on display at Ateme’s booth at the RAI in Hall 1, booth D33. 

These include demos in the following areas: 

• Fan Engagement. Ateme will showcase a complete workflow including automatic detection of the most important moments of sports content and enriched push notifications to smartphones. This will enable sports content rights holders with D2C services to enhance fan engagement, attract more viewers to their OTT apps, and increase monetization by connecting next-generation video experiences with other verticals such as e-commerce.
• Enhanced Stadium Experiences. Ateme will demonstrate how sports teams and leagues can attract more fans to stadiums, increase digital engagement, and enable new platforms for monetization. With a premium enhanced-reality solution using 5G multi-access edge computing, fans can enjoy an immersive look into the game from their smartphones and/or headsets with real-time access to stats and multi-angle live and replays.
• OTT: Enhanced QoE. Ateme will highlight a variety of features that optimize the Quality of Experience for OTT subscribers. In addition to showcasing Ateme’s industry-leading video compression solutions that enhance viewing of linear and VoD content, Ateme will also showcase features that enhance the OTT experience, including fast zapping, video scrubbing, and low latency.
• Ateme+: SaaS. Ateme will present the latest features and use cases of Ateme+, its cloud-agnostic SaaS offer. This will include a new packager feature for OTT, supporting all use cases already live today: MCR in the cloud for sports, news, and live production; business continuity with effective disaster recovery; 24/7 contribution and distribution; and on-demand file transcoding.
• Green Streaming. Ateme will showcase the continuation of its optimization efforts that have resulted in a 66% reduction in energy consumption over three years, all while simultaneously improving the user experience. The latest strategies include audience-aware streaming, elastic CDN, per-title encoding, and CMAF chunk sharing for OTT content.
• Converged Hybrid Headend. Ateme will showcase its complete, feature-rich hybrid headend to address both traditional and cutting-edge workflows. Based on Ateme’s TITAN compression and processing solutions, the converged headend can address all applications, from traditional broadcast and OTT to manifest-based playout and linearization workflows. Running on any infrastructure — from appliance deployment to private and public clouds — it provides a proven, efficient, and flexible solution for the workflows of today, while enabling a smooth transition to cloud-native IP workflows.
• Beyond Contribution. Ateme will showcase its future-proof software contribution solutions, adding ultra-low latency inter-connection capacity to its universal gateway, as well as raw content manipulation with features such as premium framerate conversion. This offers content owners richer cloud processing offload opportunities.
• Advertising. Ateme will showcase its versatile end-to-end content manipulation solutions for DAI as well as FAST and personal channels. These help providers boost monetization and enable increased revenue and inventory value through data collection and activation.
• Media Supply Chain. Including its innovative management and enrichment features, Ateme’s Media Supply Chain solution focuses on efficiency, resilience, agility, and metadata-aware orchestration for optimized operations. Providers will gain greater insight about how to reduce operational costs and enhance supply chain workflow and security. 
• Next-generation Cloud DVR. Ateme will highlight its Cloud DVR solution, allowing service providers to streamline operations, optimize their hardware pool, and achieve greater scalability by leveraging the public cloud, without being capped by on-premises investments. Because it enables resources to be shared across services, it is also expected to reduce the carbon impact of video delivery.
• The Ultimate Viewing Experience. Ateme will emphasize the highest quality of experience using HDR and a wide range of video codecs (HEVC, AV1, VVC), resulting in pristine video quality and immersive, personalized audio for any type of content including sports and other high-profile events. 
• Beyond the booth. Two demos showcasing Ateme's VVC solutions and partnerships with Qualcomm and InterDigital will also be presented.

DALLAS—DirecTV Now appears to be on the recruiting path to bring in beta testers for its cloud DVR feature. Eyeing a fall debut, reports indicate that DirecTV Now has emailed invitations to join the beta trial that is set to begin this summer. AT&T confirmed that beta testing was set to begin this summer, but as of now no details are known about how much storage the cloud DVR feature will offer in either the beta trial or when it is released commercially, or at what price point.

The full story is available on TVT’s sister publication Multichannel News.

NEW YORK—AT&T is launching beta tests of a new software-forward “next-generation” video platform that delivers many of the features a virtualized distribution architecture—4K, cloud DVR, several live channels and 30,000 titles on demand in this case—across “satellite, mobile or your own wired internet connection.” AT&T provided few details about the platform architecture other than its capabilities, and that it would be beta testing this summer with DirecTV Now streaming customers and launching commercially in the fall. 

“We all want easy and quick access to our content, regardless of where, when or on what device we watch it,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer of the AT&T Entertainment Group. “By developing for a single video platform, we’ll deliver new features and platform innovations in a faster, more efficient way. And it will be simple and consistent wherever you watch—TV, phone or tablet.”

This is where AT&T described characteristics of a virtualized platform without employing the term: “AT&T has been transforming over the last several years into a software-led company in how we design and manage our network. We’re bringing that same approach to video and entertainment by incorporating principles of agile development, open systems, collaboration with developers and public beta programs to more quickly bring new and enhanced experience to customers. Our next-generation video platform is a key component of this ongoing transformation.”

The carrier is at the forefront of virtualization. It developed a network operating system dubbed “ECOMP,” for “Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy,” that AT&T Labs vice president of technology, Mazin Gilbert described as “a software-centric network running on a cloud environment.” (See theECOMP White Paper.)

The company offered up ECOMP for open-sourcing last March, which has evolved into the Open Network Automation Platform group comprising the likes of Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, IBM, Orange, VMWare and others along with AT&T. Earlier this month, carrier more recently invested $200 million to a venture-cap fund to invest in technologies that will run on ONAP.

“We believe [ONAP] is going to be the network operating system for the majority of the network operators out there,” AT&T’s Igal Elbaz said, according to Light Reading. Elbaz is vice president of Ecosystem and Innovation for AT&T Services.
A Bit of the ONAP Wiki
ONAP is an open source software platform that delivers capabilities for the design, creation, orchestration, monitoring, and life cycle management of...
...Virtual Network Functions;
...The carrier-scale Software Defined Networks that contain them;
...Higher-level services that combine the above.

ONAP—derived from the AT&T ECOMP—provides for automatic, policy-driven interaction of these functions and services in a dynamic, real-time cloud environment. ONAP is not just a run-time platform; it includes graphical design tools for function/service creation.
AT&T said it would start rolling out this new TV platform in the fall, beginning with DirecTV Now subscribers and DirecTV companion app users. The carrier said the platform would eventually “look and feel” consistent throughout the United States.

Beta testing will involve invited DirecTV Now subscribers who will test drive the cloud DVR and other features. Things like live TV pausing and parental controls are on deck for when the platform comes out of beta later this year. Other features, such as user profiles, download and go, and 4K HDR are planned for 2018.