Reaching Multiple Screen Convergence: Streaming to the PC, Mobile, Television, and Gaming Devices, Panel Discussion

Track A: Technology
16:00-17:00

Moderator:
Martin Sutherland, Director, European Sales, Vantrix
Panel:
Pierre-Yves Le Berre, VP Business Development
AneviaMr James A Neufeld, Product Specialist, never.no
Jim Taylor, Chief Technologist, Sonic Solutions International Digital Media Alliance (IDMA)

The panel discussion touched on topics that relate to multi-channel distribution, or "Three Screen Convergence" how it was called.
There was talk about three sides that are involved in the distribution: Content provider, technology provider and bandwidth provider. Another (perhaps golden) triangle there.

DRM seems to be a big issue for video service implementations nowadays, that is of course especially true for the three-screen case, as missing standardisation makes multi-channel distribution especially expensive. DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) is an initiative that tries to achieve an ecosystem based on a common DRM standard, compared to the ecosystem around formats like DVD. Read about it this Digital Beat blog entry.

Using different but synchronized representations of the same content for the different target devices is seen as good practice. Concentrating on the strengths of the different devices this can make the devices complementary and stimulate even viewing the content on several devices simultaneously. Secondary devices like mobile are preferred for interaction and community-building around the content shown on the big screen.

The requirement of a convergent software platform that makes it easy to synchronize all the screens was brought up. It was agreed that the technology is actually there as of today, but problems are missing business models, low adaption and especially lack of standardisation (which would reduce cost vastly). So currently the convergence is more on the network level and in the possibility to synchronize the content between the screens on an application level. The next step has to be format standardisation, but it was agreed that as of now a format war coming up is unavoidable, that of course will hinder market growth in the a couple of years to come.

One general problem was brought up by Mr. Le Berre: Telcos are generally having a problem with any of the video or high-bandwidth phenomena in the sense that they see themselves as the losers in the equation, having to build up their bandwidth without making money with that. Interesting in conjunction with the unwillingness to embrace Multicasting. As a Telco employee Mr. Le Berre wants to see IMS as the next step towards convergence giving the ISPs control over the different content types, so that video, gaming or voice-over-ip traffic can be charged at different(higher) rates than the rest of the data traffic.

IP Multicast and Content Delivery, Panel Discussion

Track A: Technology
13:45-14:30

Moderator:
Tony Ballardie, R&D Director, Global-MIX
Panel:
Michael Cooper, Head of Global Banking & Financial Markets Product Technology, BT Global Services
Andreas Heidoetting, Global Head of Webcast Technology, Markets Division, Thomson Reuters
Jonathan Rackowe, Managing Director / CEO, NetVue
Greg Shepherd, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco

The panel discussion gave an interesting overview of how Multicast is used in production nowadays. Still the session was not heavily frequented, perhaps an indicator for the awareness around this topic?

Multicast specially in video delivery has the ability to significantly reduce bandwidth requirements for large-scale live-broadcasts and thus offers a solution to possible bandwidth problems imposed by high-bandwidth video streaming. The UDP-based Multicast offers superior delivery performance, but has some disadvantages in network-level reliability and control about the distribution to every single endpoint.

The already aged multicast standard has so far been largely overlooked, even though modern multicast routing protocols like PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast), it is possible to route multicast traffic between networks and hence over the internet. The great lack of multicast on the global internet is also caused by the conflict of business interests especially with ISPs. The classic unicast-based billing models might not hold up when a customer tunnels only one multicast through the ISPs network instead of hundreds of unicasts.

The internal networks of large corporations still seem to be the main places where multicast is deployed. E.g. it was said in the CDN session earlier today, most CDNs do use multicast internally. Another interesting example brought up is the widespread use of multicast in CCTV to distribute the surveillance camera data to the viewing points.

In my opinion it would be up to the ISPs to make a proper business model around multicasting that works for everyone. In the end it's them who are moaning about their bandwidth problems. Of course there are other ways of solving the problems Peer-to-Peer delivery of video would reduce bandwidth usage due to node proximity, a thing that is anticipated my e.g. Adobe. But we can be sure that the ISPs won't like that one either, as it takes them out of the business equation even more.