WASHINGTON—If you think about the conveniences of modern life, you will quickly realize that our lifestyle is dependent on regular, reliable utility service: Water when we twist a tap; electricity when we plug in an appliance; sewers that handle waste effectively, and natural gas for our furnaces, stoves and water heaters—our modern comfort and safety would be impossible without these things.

In the past 25 years, without much fanfare, another utility has crept up on us to the point where modern life would be nearly unthinkable without it: high-speed internet connectivity. Whether it is wired or wireless, connection to the internet—especially a high-speed connection—is generally considered a necessity today. And today is different than it was a year ago.

Akamai Technologies maintains a major international content delivery network, including cybersecurity and cloud services. The company is at the epicenter of the recent streaming explosion.

“Though we’re not breaking out traffic by type, Akamai has seen a marked increase in overall traffic volume delivered globally as the pandemic spread,” said Alex Balford, Akamai’s senior manager for media product marketing. “Traffic increased 30% between the end of February and end of March, 10 times greater than the normal month-to-month growth rate that we normally see. To put that into perspective, we saw roughly a year’s worth of growth in a month’s time frame.”

In addition to sharply increased traffic, Balford noted something else about COVID-19 data traffic.

“Beyond just the sheer volume of traffic is the fact that the increases are both downstream and upstream,” he said. “Normally, when we talk about a big traffic event, it’s a big sporting event or game download being distributed to large audiences. In the case of the pandemic, with so many people working from home in general and people socializing via videoconferencing, traffic is flowing at heightened volumes both ways across the internet.”

STILL GROWING

Other providers mentioned the same sort of increases.

“We discovered we are now doing more events in one day than we did in a couple of weeks’ time earlier in the month—and it’s still growing,” said Mike Schabel, CEO of Kiswe Mobile. “Within the first week [of the recommendation to stay at home], we saw not only a change in use of our cloud-based production platform, Cloudcast, but also a 30-fold increase.”

Kiswe Mobile is a New Providence, N.J.-based startup that makes streaming technology for watching live sports and video. Its cloud-based production platforms enable multiple-camera streams of live events to be delivered to mobile devices.

“Before, our customers were making live content available for individual audience communities. This is like personalized digital TV content to expand their audience,” Schabel said. “Today, they can’t get into their control rooms and studios, but still need to make new content, make it professional, and reach just as many people, if not more. The video industry has two bookends: There’s the camera on one end and the consumer on the other, everything else in between is hardware-based middleware housed in control rooms, studios, and trucks and supported by established production and distribution workflows.”

Vitec is one of several companies that makes professional encoding/decoding products for broadcast streaming applications, and it has seen a jump in business.

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“We are seeing a large uptake on low-cost OTT streaming applications as customers look to expand their reach,” said Kevin Ancelin, vice president of worldwide broadcast sales for Vitec. “Along with the need for more streaming encoders and decoders, there’s been an increase in demand for extending our EZ TV IPTV Enterprise platform to deliver content over the web to employee’s remote desktops via our EZ TV Lite HTML5 browser-based player.”

NO SYSTEM OVERLOAD

Internet service providers are the ones that deliver the last mile of data to homes and businesses, so there has been a lot of concern about their systems being overloaded with the sudden increase in work-at-home traffic and streaming of high-quality broadcast programming to homes.

In a conference call with reporters last month, a technology specialist with Comcast said that his company’s network is performing well.

“Nobody saw this coming,” said Tony G. Werner, president of the Technology, Product, Xperience organization within Comcast Cable. “[However], I don’t think we were too blindsided. I can’t speak for others, and I can’t speak for the globe, but our networks are engineered for great fluctuations. We engineer them for peaks.”

Werner said that Comcast has increased its network buildout activities, with 1,700 system work orders one recent week compared to a typical 400-500. These activities include installing more fiber and adjusting system settings to max out the capacity of the network.

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Access to the internet has become so important that the FCC recognized early in the COVID-19 emergency that the public needed to be protected from disconnections and loss of service. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai asked ISPs and cellular providers to sign the “Keep America Protected Pledge,” which promises that no data user will be disconnected in the next 60 days for nonpayment. It also states that ISP- and telco-owned WiFi hotspots will be open to the public and free for the same time period.

At press time, Pai said that more than 700 companies have signed the pledge, including all of the nation’s largest service providers. Many of these companies went beyond the minimums in the pledge by upgrading speeds at no cost and offering free service for students and low-income families. Some companies have also donated connectivity to healthcare workers and facilities.

The solid broadcast news coverage of the COVID-19 emergency was also acknowledged by Pai.

A NEW NORMAL?

With so much changed in the industry as a result of the COVID-19 emergency, some are  thinking about what the “new normal” will be once the crisis has ended.

“There were lead-adopting companies that were already moving toward software-based production and using it extensively,” Schabel said. “For them, this only serves to cement the value of a cloud-based solution. There were other companies that had software/cloud-based production on their one-year roadmap. Now it’s become a digital mandate, and the COVID-19 crisis has pushed them through the testing phase right into their workflow.”

Schabel pointed out that, once a content company has a good plan for cloud-based workflow, there are cost savings for travel and production expenses.

“In addition, they create not only more content, but also highly personalized content, which has awesome value in the market,” he said.

With all the streaming going on, how does a manufacturer support its customers, including both sales and after-sales support?

“Support is our core competency, and we’ve worked hard to ensure any changes to that workflow is seamless,” Ancelin said. “We use Microsoft Teams extensively for sales and service calls. We also can remotely access products for further support and training.”

The COVID-19 emergency has been a big shakeup for everyone in all industries. Within the television and related entertainment industries, it has meant the forced pause of virtually all scripted and reality program production.

On the other hand, news organizations are going flat out and using every trick in the book to maintain quality and content. Even “Saturday Night Live” adapted to the emergency by producing an episode in which all the cast members were each in their respective homes. If you want to stay relevant, you have to adapt to the times.

As this is written, governors around the country are starting to talk about relaxing various coronavirus-related restrictions, so things may creep back to normal over the next few weeks. In the meantime, the nation’s streaming infrastructure seems to have survived the surge in activity and broadcasters have found a way to stay on TVs in bedrooms and living rooms.

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—There is an old saying that goes, “‘Tis impossible to be sure of anything but death and taxes.” I’d like to propose an extension of that quote to include “faster internet speeds,” whether they be wired or wireless.

In the past 20 years at my home, I have literally gone from dial-up speeds that were limited to 28 kbps, to the availability of gigabit Ethernet. Yet for some, pure connection speed is not enough without improved reliability.

Greater reliability and improved security are the goals of the Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) Forum, which has members that include many of the television industry’s best-known companies. Experts at these companies will tell you that the ability to watch streaming 4K content at home is no guarantee that the internet is reliable enough for broadcast origination or contribution.

“For lack of a better word, internet service is ‘bursty’ at best,” said Jacob Kinsey, chief development officer for Cobalt Digital and RIST Forum co-chair. “Internet speed ebbs and flows—sort of like the tides, except internet speed is unpredictable. Because bandwidth access goes up and down with the number of users and the content being accessed, it becomes very important to have a retransmission methodology for video content.”

RIST is one function of the Video Services Forum, which has played an important role in the development of the SMPTE-2110 video over IP transport standard. The international association is comprised of service providers, users and manufacturers that focus on interoperability, quality metrics and education for media networking technologies. The VSF’s activities include:

• Providing forums to identify issues involving the development, deployment, operation and security of media networking technologies;
• Promoting interoperability by contributing towards the development of standards.

The driving force behind RIST is the overall growth of the television industry. There are more content creators on more networks than ever, and this will only continue to increase.

“We know live video transport over the internet will grow 15 times or more by 2022, so having a cost-effective solution to transport that video for contribution or distribution applications is essential,” Kinsey said. “RIST offers the key to unlocking video transport interoperability over the internet, and it can be used to transport PTZ control and other communications as well as video and audio signals.”

NATURAL GROWTH?

Won’t the natural growth of faster speeds and technology like 5G be enough to get us the bandwidth and reliability we need?

“The internet is unreliable,” Kinsey said. “Video requires packets of information be delivered in order and in a timely manner. When transporting video over unmanaged networks (as opposed to a private network), reliability is even more difficult to achieve. Reliability is the key to the success of RIST.”

A definition of the term “broadcast quality” is elusive, but it means absolute reliability and the highest quality to many people.

“RIST is designed to deliver broadcast-grade live video transport over any type of connectivity,” said David Griggs, senior product manager for media services at AWS Elemental. “It leverages standards-based quality-of-service [QoS] techniques to ensure that a high-quality, live video stream can be delivered over both managed and unmanaged networks, such as the internet, and at bitrates suitable for professional broadcast applications.”

The potential audiences out there are huge, so the stakes for reliable internet delivery could not be higher.

“More than an estimated billion viewers tuned into coverage of Women’s World Cup this summer, a testament to growing consumer appetite for live video and its importance in modern broadcast programming,” Griggs said. “Whether delivering a premium live sporting event or 24/7 linear service, ensuring reliable, high quality video distribution is essential for customers who want to deliver great viewer experiences.”

OPEN STANDARD

One of the driving forces behind the RIST Forum is interoperability based on an open standard, which is the reason why the RIST Forum is populated by manufacturers. There are some proprietary and semi-proprietary networking protocols targeted at the broadcast industry, and RIST promises to replace them with an open standard along the lines of RS422.

“In the past, internet transport content distribution models were manufacturer-specific and did not allow for implementation without requiring uniform deployment of identical-brand hardware or software at each location,” said Paul Atwell, president of Media Transport Solutions and a RIST Forum member. “RIST allows for the transport and exchange of content by applying a uniform set of existing practices manufacturers can implement in order to allow interoperability between unrelated sending and receiving devices.”

Atwell said that RIST will let customers keep existing hardware (encoders, decoders, multiplexers, integrated receivers, etc.), without requiring a wholesale replacement or writing off a previous capital expense.

Although the ever-increasing internet bandwidth to the home is fine for watching streaming content in living rooms, Atwell and others pointed out that occasional lags and dropouts seen at home are unacceptable to content creators, distributors and broadcasters.

“Occasional bandwidth congestion or brief loss of service is somewhat acceptable or even anticipated by the average user of the internet,” Atwell said. “For the delivery of high-quality source material, such as HD cameras located at a remote sporting event or returning broadcast content for network distribution, interruptions in the contribution stream are unacceptable.”

One relatively low-cost way that RIST plans to build in more reliability is to incorporate reliable bonding of multiple IP connections to sustain the required transport bandwidth. Not only does this provide a wider pipe when all the circuits are working, it allows for failure of one or more circuits without killing the entire feed.

MORE EFFICIENT COMPRESSION

Another way to improve the reliability of contribution feeds is to use more efficient compression of the video signal. Since compressed video is sent as packets, more compression means that fewer packets need to be sent—however, the loss of a packet results in a greater breakup of the transmitted signal.

Still, the inherent improvement in reliability by sending less data (i.e., using more compression) is significant.

“Applying RIST to transport streams with greater compression increases reliable delivery of valuable payload packets, plus the added benefit of a reduction in allocated bandwidth,” Atwell said.

RIST technical recommendations will continue to evolve as Forum members weigh in and incorporate preliminary recommendations into their hardware. Meanwhile, manufacturers and other interested parties will continue to refine the standards and practices through the Video Services Forum.

What has happened so far in the industry is that a couple of companies recognized the benefits of IT infrastructure early on and developed proprietary network devices specifically for broadcast transport. These worked great within a facility, and didn’t really need to connect to the wider world since commercially available networks did not have the sort of bandwidth and reliability required for content distributors. Still, these were proprietary solutions that meant you had to get a bunch of “Brand X” boxes to make everything work.

The RIST Forum is focusing on building that reliability into each connected component, and also adapting them to work with the wider internet with increased reliability. And since the content is valuable, encryption should be built in from the start.

RIST was established in March 2019 with 21 founding members, which has since grown to 36, according to RIST Forum co-chair Kinsey.

“Our industry association has a presence at every major trade show, and we’ve sponsored programs at NAB and IBC. One of the concerns with using the open internet for video transport is security, so RIST has added encryption and VPN tunneling, which was part of our RIST Main Profile demo at IBC in September. Our goal is to make IP transport over the internet as ubiquitous and reliable as SDI cabling within a facility.”

For more information, visit www.rist.tv.