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2024 BEITC Proceedings

  • Making Your Assets Mean Something: Evolving Asset Management Systems Using Semantic Technologies - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    Produce more content! Faster! Cheaper! Make it available in different places! And never throw anything away! It is seemingly impossible for media enterprises to keep up with these escalating and often conflicting business pressures. How can media asset management systems evolve to provide the right content based on the intent of the user? Can a creator produce content faster using knowledge hidden within the content? How can assets be easily accessed from distributed locations to enrich the experience? And does content growth exist without exploding costs? The answer to all these questions is yes. It is derived by leveraging tools that provide contextual meaning to the content, so that more effective utilization of the content can be performed. It goes beyond providing rich searching mechanisms to now providing the ability to get insights into the content. It relies on tapping into richer information sources that go beyond logged metadata for a piece of content, to now harvest knowledge from scripts, stories, and dialogue. The answer lies in creating a connected environment between data silos where a central brain has knowledge not just where content is located, but of what is in the content. The answer is in the ability for a Creator to use their native language and express in natural conversational form what they want to achieve when searching for, analyzing, and manipulating the content. The answer lies in tools understanding a user’s creative intent to perform appropriate actions, versus the creative having to learn and manipulate complex user interfaces to achieve the same intent. This paper discusses how certain artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as Semantic Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, and Multimodal Large Language Models are coming together under the umbrella of Knowledge Management to solve this problem of meaningfully extracting and using information from content that takes us beyond what we can do today with Asset Management systems.

    Shailendra Mathur | Avid Technology | Montreal, Quebec, Canada
    Rob Gonsalves | Avid Technology | Burlington, Mass., United States
    Roger Sacilotto | Avid Technology | Burlington, Mass., United States

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  • MC-IF VVC technical guidelines  - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    Versatile Video Coding (VVC or H.266), standardized by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG in 2020, offers best-in-class compression performance and has been selected (or is currently being considered) for use in next-generation broadcast and streaming standards around the world. These standards typically define VVC-based profiles and corresponding receiver capabilities. How the service is realized and the impact of the codec’s operational parameters on delivered compression performance is not in scope. The Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF) has developed – with input from broadcasters, encoder vendors and others in the community – technical guidelines that serve as a reference for VVC configuration choices to address operational, interoperability, and regulatory needs while achieving optimal compression performance. A community review phase concluded in late 2023, and the guidelines were made publicly and freely available at the start of 2024. This paper provides an overview of MC-IF VVC technical guidelines version 1.0. It gives an overview of the guidelines development process, scope, and contents. The paper provides a summary of VVC’s support in media transport and systems standards and follows with VVC adoption status in broadcast and streaming application specifications. A review of VVC-based profiles and receiver capabilities is presented. The paper concludes with an analysis on operational bitrates which can be expected with VVC for selected service deployment scenarios.

    Lukasz Litwic | Ericsson | Gdańsk, Poland 
    Justin Ridge | Nokia Technologies | Dallas, Texas, United States
    Alan Stein | InterDigital Communications, Inc. | Princeton, N.J., United States

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  • MV-HEVC: How to optimize compression of immersive 3D content - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    Multiview High Efficiency Video Coding (MV-HEVC) is an HEVC extension focused on efficiently coding spatially related images, such as left eye and right eye views of 3D stereoscopic content. MV-HEVC was released in the second version of HEVC back in October 2014 ​[1]​. MV-HEVC was created alongside another extension named SHVC, which is already employed in ATSC 3.0 use cases since 2018 ​[2]​. The two extensions share many fundamentals, codified in an annex for common specifications for multi-layer extensions. Their base principle is scalability: A traditional HEVC decoder can rely on the base layer only, hence providing backward compatibility, but a more elaborate decoder can use the second layer as well to improve the rendition.

    The MV-HEVC format gained widespread attention with Apple announcing support for 3D movies on the Apple Vision Pro at WWDC23 ​[3]​​ [4]​. Apple provided public guidelines on stereo video encoding ​[5]​, packaging ​[6]​, and streaming ​[7]​ as well as on providing parallax information to improve caption placement​ [8]​.

    This presentation will describe the MV-HEVC standard and how it works in theory. An implementation of MV-HEVC [9] will also be studied to assess performance in practice in industrial settings. Deployment aspects such as packaging and captioning will be discussed. Finally, 3D-specific optimization strategies will be analyzed, including software architecture and rate control.

    Thomas Guionnet| ATEME | Rennes, France
    Khaled Jerbi | ATEME | Rennes, France
    Thomas Burnichon| ATEME | Rennes, France
    Mickaël Raulet | ATEME | Rennes, France

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  • New Data Management Techniques and Technologies to Accelerate Live Broadcast Events  - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    Today’s live event broadcast workflows present unique challenges for storage solutions and data management. These multi-camera environments need high performance storage to keep up with the high bandwidth of streaming data, which can total anywhere from 30TB to hundreds of TBs per event. Not to mention that data then needs to be captured in real time, stored, and moved to different locations, throughout the post-production and delivery process. Factor in ever-increasing video capture resolutions and frame rates, as well as infrastructure and bandwidth variations from location to location—it’s no surprise many professionals in the industry are finding data management an increasingly difficult task. Especially as this type of production environment has rigid and often short timelines that the crew has to operate within. In short, a new kind of data storage solution is long overdue.

    To address this need, broadcast teams are turning to Data-Transfer-As-A-Services (DTaaS) to support these live environment productions.

    Competitive DTaaS services with enterprise removable storage options enable customers to pay for high capacity, 100 terabyte storage arrays with high performance that meet data challenges head on, enabling users to store data anywhere – while only paying for the hardware each specific project needs – and physically transport that data securely to their post-production landing destination of choice, allowing users to choose secure physical transport or rapid ingest to any S3 destination. Not only does an on-demand, consumption-as-a-service model simplify users’ device management, preventing unnecessary on-set IT costs, it also gives video production teams the flexibility they need to alter the numbers of devices they deploy to complete certain projects, as storage needs change. By circumnavigating the headaches that come with owning data storage infrastructure outright, like maintenance fees and technology upgrades, DTaaS-based strategies give users the freedom to expand their production, accelerate their timeline, and even reallocate their budget without having to worry about your data.

    This technical paper will explore how DTaaS accelerates live capture workflows resulting in cost savings and streamlined content collaboration.

    Preliminary research and application results include:
    DAS performance can enable in-field, direct editing and transcoding when logistics prevent the standard workflow
    Cloud import services quickly and securely move event media from camera to the cloud of choice for collaborative post-production workflows
    Secure, encrypted, rugged solution, ensure customers won’t lose or leak content during transport for greater peace of mind
    Transfer content in days, not weeks: high-performance storage arrays on-set can save up to 12-15 hours per week of overtime costs across multiple departments

    In an industry as fast paced as broadcast streaming, data storage capacity, security, and mobility should be the least of a production team’s concerns. With DTaaS, IT professionals can trust their enterprise-level video media will get where they need to go, right on time.

    Jonathan Bauder | Seagate Technology | Fremont, Calif., United States

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  • Next-Generation Token to Fight Piracy and CDN Leeching - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are widely used to stream video efficiently across the Internet, but they face persistent challenges from unauthorized access attempts and content piracy, a phenomenon known as CDN leeching. Traditional token-based authentication mechanisms, often relying on long-lived tokens with fixed expiration times, have proven inadequate in addressing these security threats. In response, we propose a novel randomized token rejection mechanism to bolster the security of CDN architectures against unauthorized access attempts. By dynamically adjusting rejection probabilities based on token properties and operational policies, our mechanism enhances CDN resilience while minimizing operational overhead. Furthermore, we present refinements to our approach, including geographic probability of rejection, content-sensitivity, and frequency analysis, to tailor security policies to specific content access patterns. Evaluation results demonstrate the efficacy of our randomized token rejection mechanism in mitigating piracy risks while maintaining operational efficiency. While further research is needed to implement fully transparent token renewal schemes, the current technologies, typically based on the Common Access Token (CAT), already enable the implementation of the randomized token rejection mechanism.

    Gwendal Simon | Synamedia | Rennes, France
    Gwenaël Doërr | Synamedia | Rennes, France

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  • Objective Evaluation System for 2K Video Quality Transcoded from 4K Source using Dynamic Thresholds and Statistical Methods - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    Objective evaluation methodologies can be applied only to comparing images of the same resolutions, leaving several problems in assessing video quality across different resolutions. Our proposed method employs a spatial two-dimensional filter to enable pixel-by-pixel comparisons for automating the evaluation of 2K video quality transcoded from 4K. Detection thresholds are adapted for spatially and temporally complex videos, minimizing false alarms. For noise detection in specific regions, a small-area PSNR metric is applied with a statistical approach for enhanced accuracy. This automated approach matches or exceeds human review accuracy, offering cost reduction and improved quality assurance in 4K/2K productions.

    Nariaki Takahashi | Japan Broadcasting Corporation | Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
    Keita Kataoka | Japan Broadcasting Corporation | Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan

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  • Satellite/Internet Hybrid Content Delivery (Ku-Band Without Rain Fade!) - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    Satellite distribution is the ideal way to send the same content to many locations that are geographically distributed. However, the traditional C-band distribution is now impacted by the new 5G cellular network, which operates mostly in the 3.3 to 3.6 GHz band (which partially overlaps with the Space-to-Earth spectrum). Ku-band is not impacted by 5G, but unfortunately it is subject to rain fade. One possible approach to solving this content delivery problem is to augment satellite delivery using the Internet. The basic idea is to use the satellite for the “heavy lifting” (transmitting as much data as viable), with the Internet to “fill in the gaps”. In other words, any data that is corrupted or lost in transit is retransmitted over the Internet, and only to the locations that need it. This way, if a region is experiencing any sort of fade or interference, only the receivers in that region need to use the Internet. Any solution to this problem needs to be designed in such a way that it can co-exist with current receivers. This means that the signal transmitted to the satellite either cannot change, or any changes to it must be backward-compatible with existing receivers. Broadcasters utilizing this solution can then gradually deploy the solution as needed, with high-priority sites being upgraded first. The Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) Activity Group in the Video Services Forum (VSF) has been working on this problem, to create a common industry Specification for addressing it. Having such a Specification will allow interoperability between solutions, and not lock broadcasters into a single vendor. This Specification is expected to be published as VSF TR-06-4 Part 6, sometime in 2024. This paper is a technical overview and discussion of the techniques and algorithms which are being considered for inclusion in the VSF Satellite/Hybrid Specification.

    Ciro Noronha | Cobalt Digital Inc. | Champaign, Illinois, United States

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  • Solving Chaos in the Newsroom - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    This presentation explores how implementing cloud-based news storytelling can streamline news operations to manage chaos and optimize ROI. It will cover trends in technology and newsroom working practices.

    Stephane Guez | Dalet | New York, N.Y., United States

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  • Solving Localization & Compliance Pain Points with AI - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    This paper investigates the challenges of meeting localization and compliance needs in the global video streaming industry. It highlights the complexities of managing multiple languages, regulations, and cultural nuances. It introduces AI as a game-changer, highlighting its potential to automate processes, enhance quality, and assist with accessibility. The paper presents a comprehensive overview of the benefits of AI, including improved translation accuracy, faster content delivery, synthesized and cloned voice technologies, cost savings, and enhanced viewer engagement. It also discusses the challenges and considerations associated with implementing AI solutions, such as data privacy, regulatory compliance, and the need for human oversight. Overall, the paper provides valuable insights for content owners and video streaming providers seeking to optimize their localization and compliance strategies in a rapidly evolving global market.

    Bill Admans | Ateliere Creative Technologies | Century City, Calif., United States
    Dan Goman | Ateliere Creative Technologies | Century City, Calif., United States

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  • Speech Intelligibility and Audio Monitoring in OTT - $15

    Date: April 3, 2024
    Topics: ,

    The paper details ways of controlling speech intelligibility in OTT and broadcast production, primarily based on a new metric, Loudness to Dialog Ratio (LDR), and on calibrated sound monitoring at a moderate listening level. Principles of Loudness normalization are described; as is a study to define and quantify LDR for use in broadcast and OTT. Findings may be applied during mixing or dubbing, used for default settings in NGA delivery, and in automated QC as a key machine learning parameter. The article is facts-based and free of commercial bias.

    Thomas Lund | Genelec Inc | Natick, Mass., United States

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