Packet Ship Quarterly Newsletter: July 2008

In this newsletter:

Captain's Blog: The outlook for IPTV

H.264 is coming - are we ready?

One of the things that always strikes me at shows like IBC, NAB and IPTV World Forum is how surprisingly slowly our market moves. I first exhibited at IBC and NAB with a previous company in the late 1990's, showing MPEG-2 IPTV set-top boxes and video servers, streaming at around 4Mbit/sec. This has obviously been a stable and successful model because it remains the primary technology both for residential and vertical IPTV systems ten years on.

However, H.264 has been waiting in the wings for a while now. While it was originally positioned as a way to drive down bitrates at the same quality, the movement now - certainly in the vertical market using local networks - seems to be towards using H.264 to enable High Definition services. This has been led by the rapid fall in price of HD-ready LCD TV's, and the beginnings of a consumer move to Blu-ray (watch out for Blu-ray players this Christmas!). The consumer's expectation of quality is increasing, and where the consumer leads, we need to follow...

The hardware required for a shift to H.264 is falling into place: In the last year we have seen a broad range of H.264-capable set-top boxes coming to market. Video server providers have added support for H.264 content - including Packet Ship, with our "Corunna" release. We have already tested against a number of partners' H.264 set-top boxes with great success, and are always happy to test more.

So what are the barriers left towards a shift to H.264 and HD, particularly in vertical markets such as hospitality and healthcare?

Firstly, in many vertical markets there is a large installed base of standard definition TVs. This is dwindling over time as CRTs are replaced with HD-ready LCDs, but for now an HD service would mostly be aimed at completely new installations.

Secondly, even with the improved compression in H.264, the increased bandwidth and file sizes (2-3 times faster and bigger) of HD content put additional strain on internal and external networks. The bandwidth required is likely to be too high for many xDSL and Coax retrofitted network technologies; sites that invested in Cat5 a few years ago will reap the rewards now. The sizes of the files (10GB+) will cause problems for anything but the most efficient content delivery system - something we believe we can help improve with Gridline and SEED - see below.

Finally, we need a supply of HD content. This is both a commercial issue (is HD sold at a premium? Does it fit within existing contracts or require new ones?) and a technical one (are the encoding houses set up for it? What are the exact parameters needed? What about CA/DRM?). This is something that will evolve over time, although the studios, encoding houses and DRM providers could usefully be proactive here.

Overall, it would seem the IPTV industry is technically ready for H.264; it now requires the commercial impetus to deliver it. I look forward to working with our partners to bring H.264 solutions to market over the coming months.

Best wishes, and I hope to see you again at IBC!

Paul Clark

MD, Packet Ship

PSPS: Bespoke design and development services

We are critically aware that we are only successful if our customers are successful in bringing their products and services built using our technology to market. We've realised we may be able to help with that, by offering some of our in-house design and development skills to our partners. Hence we have created Packet Ship Professional Services (PSPS).

We have a wide range of skills in creating digital media products and services, from top-level system architectures and high-performance back-end servers to TV-based graphic design. Our in-house expertise is in C++, C, Java, PHP, Javascript and Unix scripting. We have a deep understanding of digital media, IP networking, set-top boxes and high-performance server systems.

Can we help you deliver your new product or service, beyond our standard software? For more information on PSPS, please visit http://www.packetship.com/services.php

Gridline: Content management and delivery

Our video server technology is usually used in private local networks to deliver video streams from a local server to set-top boxes. But how do the video files get onto that server in the first place? How are the content catalogues and metadata kept in sync? How does the user interface find out what content is available?

Packet Ship's content management and delivery technology, Gridline, provides the answer to these questions.

Integrated management and distribution

Gridline firstly provides a central content management system allowing creation of complex hierarchical structures of any type of content, optimised for large media files. It then allows efficient, resilient distribution and caching of the content to multiple sites, and/or to large numbers of consumers.

Multiple delivery technologies

Gridline can use a combination of unicast, multicast and peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers to ensure reliable delivery whatever the network topology, whilst reducing the central bandwidth overhead to the minimum.

Powering the user interface

Any attached metadata is distributed along with the content, and category and keyword indexes are created automatically from the metadata at each local server. An XML interface is provided for local or centralised Web servers to navigate the content database and produce the customer user interface. In addition, the video server can obtain the information it needs for streaming directly from Gridline.

Desktop/STB delivery

As well as delivery to video servers, some Web-based "Push VOD" applications require direct delivery to PCs. The Packet Ship Gridline Player is a downloadable client application for Windows which enables background delivery and local caching of large media files on the desktop, enabling delivery of very high quality video over existing broadband infrastructure.

We are also porting Gridline onto the latest set-top boxes with hard drives to enable Push VOD services for TV consumers as well.

Please contact us for more information on Gridline, or read more about how it all fits together in our Media Delivery Platform White Paper: http://www.packetship.com/Packet-Ship-Media-Delivery-Platform.pdf

What's new: Latest product releases

Packet Ship Streamline 2.2 "Corunna" released

The latest release of our Linux video server software adds support for RTP and trickplay in H.264, along with a significant performance improvement when serving large numbers of streams. It also provides a number of features for compatibility with VLC-based clients. In addition, it provides integration with the Gridline content management and distribution system described above.

Existing fully licenced customers have already been provided with the new software as a free upgrade. If you would like an evaluation package of the new release, please contact us.

Packet Ship Sightline 1.1 beta

We are currently trialling a beta release of a new Sightline display controller. This release adds better feedback to posted operations and a rolling log of recent operation results and errors to aid in debugging network and client device issues.

On the radar: What's coming up next

SEED: Secure End-to-End Delivery

We are currently preparing for release our Secure End-to-End Delivery platform, SEED. This is a Web-based user interface and management database which builds on Gridline to provide a seamless way of managing and distributing content from multiple content providers to large numbers of sites.

Our vision is a true end-to-end system where content is ingested and encrypted at the encoding studio and delivered automatically all the way to the set-top box, where it is decrypted for playback. We are working with our Conditional Access/DRM partners to do the necessary integration at each end of the process.

Because of our experience in hosting and managing large-scale online services for some of our Professional Services customers, we will be offering SEED as a fully managed service as well as through our normal software licensing route. Please contact us for more details.

Survey: Network Video Recording

A number of partners have recently expressed an interest in Network Video Recording (NVR/NPVR), where the video server would capture broadcast content from a multicast stream and make it available as on-demand assets. This is already on our roadmap for late 2008/2009 and we are now beginning to define requirements for this development.

There appear to be two slightly differing, but complementary, requirements in this area:

  1. Capture the entire stream on a rotating buffer of 1 hour, 24 hours, or however much disk space and rights issues will allow. This would then allow pausing and rewinding live TV, and (if the buffer were long enough) a limited VOD offering of recent programmes.
  2. Capture individual programmes from a preset list, and present them as individual assets within the VOD system, to be kept for a configurable length of time (again, subject to disk space and rights).

The core technology of capture, storage and replay fits easily into our existing architecture; however we need to know how how VAR and integrator partners would want it presented. Hence we would appreciate any views on:

  1. Which of the two models above is more important to you (or both?)
  2. What sizing do you see being required - number of streams; total storage?
  3. What rights issues do you forsee in your market?
  4. To what extent would our solution need to integrate with or store EPG data?

If you have any comments on this, or any other future development you would like to see, please contact us.

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