The papers in the 2023 NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology (BEIT) Conference Proceedings offered here were presented at the 2023 BEIT Conference at NAB Show. The program was developed by the NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference Committee, a rotating group of senior technologists from NAB members and partner organizations.
The content available in the 2023 BEIT Conference Proceedings is covered under copyright provisions.
2023 Proceedings Topics
- AI and Data Analytics in Media
- Broadcast Facility Design
- Cybersecurity and Trusted Content
- Innovation in Radio
- Media and Cloud 1
- Media and Cloud 2
- Media Workflow
- National Security Applications of ATSC 3.0
- Next Gen TV Adoption
- OTT / Connected TV
- Radio Technology
- RF Technology and Spectrum Issues
- Sustainability and 5G
- Video Coding Techniques
Previous Proceedings
Cybersecurity “Proof of Performance” for the Broadcast IT System - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, Cybersecurity and Trusted ContentThe broadcast station today relies on an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) whether a small radio station or a state-of-the-art ATSC 3 TV facility. Protecting the infrastructure against cyber threats grows more challenging each year for the broadcast IT engineer. Threats are constantly evolving and the cybersecurity precautions implemented must evolve as well. New Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations will likely add EAS focused cybersecurity compliance requirements in 2023.
It is essential to know your vulnerabilities and potential exposure to cyber criminals before implementing the necessary precautions. Penetration testing or pen testing provides a proof-of-performance of the broadcast IT infrastructure through proactive identification of cybersecurity holes and vulnerabilities. Precautions thought to be in place can be verified and any missing protections implemented before exploited by the cybercriminal.
This paper and presentation will explore the concepts of penetration testing, the value of use and tools available to apply to the broadcast IT environment as an approach to validating the cybersecurity readiness of the broadcast IT infrastructure against cyberattacks.
Wayne Pecena | Texas A&M University – KAMU TV & FM | College Station, Texas, United States
Delivering Broadcast Quality, Fully Automated Sports Production Through AI Powered Sports Action Tracking and PTZ Cameras - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, AI and Data Analytics in MediaWith consumer expectations of viewing experience set through watching tier 1 sports productions, sports programmers are searching for solutions that deliver an engaging experience for a cost that reflects the budgets available.
Artificial Intelligence-driven sports production solutions have been available for some time. But to date, the ability to accurately track the sporting action combined with visual clarity has been a challenge.
This paper describes how a panoramic camera system can be implemented to monitor the entire field of play, to feed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that identifies the sporting action. Further, this paper describes how the AI engine can drive a high-quality pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera to follow the action to deliver the program feed.
The paper will also discuss how the AI engine can accurately point the PTZ camera – taking into account video and AI processing delays, how those processing latencies can be measured, to forward predict directional vectors and correctly point the program feed camera irrespective of distance from the camera and the variation in angular velocity realized.
David Edwards | Vislink | Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom
Siddhi Imming | Vislink | Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom
Delivering Traceable Reference Time for ATSC 3.0-Based Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, National Security Applications of ATSC 3.0Delivering accurate and traceable time is important for the operation of critical infrastructure industries. A BPS-enabled ATSC 3.0 TV station can meet the requirements of critical infrastructure industries by transmitting precise time. One of the requirements to do so is to have reliable, robust, and accurate timing sources at the TV stations. This paper describes how a variety of timing sources can be used at TV stations for reference. The paper also outlines how BPS-enabled ATSC 3.0 TV stations can evolve into a self-synchronizing mesh network for timing signals.
Patrick Diamond | Diamond Consulting | Ayer, MassachUnited Statesetts, United States
Tariq Mondal | National Association of Broadcasters | Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Robert D. Weller | National Association of Broadcasters | Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Andrew Hansen | Volpe Center | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Elastic Frame Protocol: An Open-Source Alternative to MPEG-2 TS - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, Media WorkflowThis paper looks at the use of framing and multiplexing protocols in broadcast media. In it, we identify several inefficiencies that have arisen from using MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) in some areas of modern IP-based media transport and discuss how the new open-source Elastic Frame Protocol (EFP) attempts to avoid these issues. Areas discussed include protocol overhead, timeline and time stamps, error detection and recovery, (de)multiplexing, complex transport architectures and flexibility. MPEG-2 TS has the advantage of being almost universally supported in broadcast media transport. But we found that EFP provided significantly lower overhead, 64-bit timestamps and much improved possibilities to detect packet loss and correct packets that are delivered out of order.
Mikael Wånggren | Agile Content S.A. | Stockholm, Sweden
ENG & DoD: Update On 2 GHz Sharing - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, RF Technology and Spectrum IssuesBroadcasters’ spectrum is valuable. In the run-up to the AWS-3 auction, Congress, NAB, SBE, the Pentagon, NTIA, and the FCC reached a handshake agreement to share the band 2025–2110 MHz, provided broadcasters and the military could reach agreement on the technical details. As a result, nearly $45 billion was raised from auction of spectrum freed by military and other Federal users. In May 2022, DoD, NAB, and SBE concluded a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that allows routine military access for terrestrial and airborne systems at certain locations as well as procedures for coordinated access at other locations. Bench and field testing were conducted of compatibility between military and ENG systems to determine sharing parameters. Technical negotiations have set interference thresholds and coordination mechanisms. A web-based system for tracking military frequency coordination requests has been implemented. This paper summarizes the current state of ENG/Military spectrum sharing in this band.
Robert J. Russell | Technical Broadcast Solutions Inc. | Dover, Delaware, United States
Robert D. Weller | National Association of Broadcasters | Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Fighting Misinformation with Authenticated C2PA Provenance Metadata - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, Cybersecurity and Trusted ContentOver the last three years, teams from Microsoft, The New York Times, CBC/Radio-Canada and The BBC have come together as Project Origin. This group has participated as part of a wider community in the standardization of provenance signaling technologies to attach authenticated metadata to media content. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) specification was the result of these collaborative efforts. This paper will outline the features of the C2PA specification, and the work being undertaken to add this functionality to existing media production workflows to add transparency and counter disinformation and malicious use of synthetic media.
Nigel Earnshaw | The British Broadcasting Corporation | London, United Kingdom
Jonathan Dupras | CBC/Radio-Canada | Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Bruce MacCormack | Neural Transform | Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada
Filling the Gaps in Video Transcoder Deployment in the Cloud - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, Media and Cloud 2Cloud based deployment of content production and broadcast workflows has continued to disrupt the industry after the pandemic. The key tools required for unlocking cloud workflows, e.g., transcoding, metadata parsing, streaming playback, are increasingly commoditized. However, as video traffic continues to increase there is a need to consider tools which offer opportunities for further bitrate/quality gains as well as those which facilitate cloud deployment. In this paper we consider pre-processing, rate/distortion optimization and cloud cost prediction tools which are only just emerging from the research community. These tools are posed as part of the per-clip optimization approach to transcoding which has been adopted by the large streaming media processing entities but has yet to be made more widely available for the industry.
Vibhoothi | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin | Dublin 02, Ireland
Daniel Joseph Ringis | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin | Dublin 02, Ireland
Xin Shu | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin | Dublin 02, Ireland
François Pitié | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin | Dublin 02, Ireland
Zsolt Lorincz | Overcast HQ | Dublin 02, Ireland
Philippe Brodeur | Overcast HQ | Dublin 02, Ireland
Anil Kokaram | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin | Dublin 02, Ireland
Generative AI: Supercharging Humans, Transforming Creativity - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, AI and Data Analytics in Media“Generative AI” is the next-level process of using machine learning algorithms to create new content based on “intelligence” gathered through training on a large corpus of text (even code!), images, audio, and video files. The broad category of Generative AI utilizes many different types of models, including Large Language Model (LLM). LLM is an AI model trained on a large corpus of text to predict the likelihood of a given sequence of words using statistical techniques. Companies such as OpenAI and Midjourney or open-source communities such as Stable Diffusion have invested millions of dollars in productizing groundbreaking AI papers and pre-training on large datasets available on the Internet. Once available, individuals and companies can utilize these large, pre-trained models to solve domain-specific problems, through transfer learning, without the significant computational overhead.
This paper describes some of the early applications of Generative AI and LLMs models in media broadcasting and streaming. One of the demonstrated applications is the ability to generate actionable video descriptors/tags, such as identifying a scene where a woman is standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or on a moving train.
Naveen Narayanan | Quickplay | Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Hands On Towards Next Generation Media Distribution with the 5G-Mag Reference Tool - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, Sustainability and 5GThe 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has defined multiple specifications for 5G Media Streaming, allowing operators or third-party service providers to build media services and applications on top of 5G systems. With 3GPP Release 17, these specifications are expanded into the domains of dynamic QoS policies, event exposure, Multicast Broadcast Services, Edge applications, or XR.
3GPP is lacking a reference and conformance program to validate and prototype these specifications. The 5G Media Action Group (5G-MAG) has undertaken the task to accelerate the creation of 5G Media applications by providing the open-source 5G-MAG Reference Tools development program.
In this paper we focus on the implementation of 5G Media Streaming (5GMS) components in the 5G-MAG Reference Tools. Based on a set of industry relevant use-cases, we identify four minimum viable products (MVPs). Starting with a simple implementation of the 5GMS Application Server (AS) and 5GMS-Aware Application for media playback, we move to more advanced features such as media session handling and dynamic configuration of the AS by the 5GMS Application Function (AF). The presented features serve as a foundation for contributors to add more advanced functionalities. An example is a DVB-I Hybrid Service delivered over 5G Broadcast and 5G Media Streaming, enabling the insertion of Premium and Targeted Content on top of it.Daniel Silhavy | Fraunhofer FOKUS | Berlin, Germany
Richard Bradbury | British Broadcasting Corporation | London, United Kingdom
David Waring | British Broadcasting Corporation | London, United Kingdom
Dev Audsin | British Broadcasting Corporation | London, United Kingdom
Thomas Stockhammer | Qualcomm CDMA Technologies | Munich, Germany
Aytac Biber | Qualcomm CDMA Technologies | Carlsbad, California, United States
Kurt Krauss | Dolby Germany GmbH | Nuremberg, Germany
JordiJoan Gimenez | 5G-MAG Association | Geneva, Switzerland
Johann Mika | ORS | Vienna, Austria
High-Power Digital FM Field Test Project - $15
Date: April 14, 2023Topics: 2023 BEITC Proceedings, Innovaton in RadioA petition for rulemaking filed at the FCC in October 2022 by NAB and Xperi requests that the FCC adopt an updated formula to determine FM power levels for stations seeking to exceed the currently authorized FM digital ERP of -14dBc. The proposed new formula, which is based on real world, operational experience gained since the FCC last approved a power increase in 2010, will allow more stations to increase digital power above the existing -14 dBc level, without the need for separate FCC authorization. Included in the joint NAB-Xperi filing is information on a field test project conducted by NAB, Audacy, New York Public Radio and Xperi in 2021 to assess the impact on first-adjacent channels of increasing the digital power level from -14 dBc to -10 dBc. The results of this field test demonstrate that the new formula being proposed should adequately protect first-adjacent channels, and are the topic of this paper.
David Layer | National Association of Broadcasters | Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Alan Jurison | iHeartMedia | Syracuse, New York, United States
Russ Mundschenk | Xperi, Inc. (retired) | Columbia, Maryland, United States
Steve Shultis | New York Public Radio | New York, New York, United States
E. Glynn Walden | Audacy, Inc. (retired) | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States