There's life in IPTV

Secustream

There was even room at IBC this year, in the chosen DRM field of Latens, for a new approach from tiny company Secustream. This is really a three man company that hails from the University of Trondheim, in Norway, where encryption specialists have come up with what they think is a new way of arranging encryption protection for a video stream.

In essence it is an AES system with a 20 second cryptoperiod, where the private key is issued separately from a remote server. The system also carries out a random checksum, executed on the attached device, which can include both PCs and set tops. The checksum needs to be completed, and it will only be completed by the correct client configuration, which triggers the issue of a randomly generated private key. There is also an authentication every time this happens.

To us it seems no more secure than all the other AES based DRM systems on the IPTV market, but Secustream has applied for a number of patents, and who knows, its focus on protection for both PCs and TVs may mean that in a few years we visit IBC and find it has grown in the same way Dreampark emerged from a tiny player to one that is credible.

Microsoft's Interactive Media Manager

One of the core focuses of Microsoft was explained to us by Gabriele Di Piazza, Director Media & Entertainment, Microsoft Communications, which was the use of a Sharepoint derived Workflow system for managing the editing and playout of video, aimed at a distributed TV studio environment.

The system is called Interactive Media Manager and its was launched at NAB in the US earlier this year, and was being shown in Europe for the first time. Its console uses the lightweight Microsoft Silverlight to show where in the video edits are to be made, and to give a remote editor the sign-off capability to authorize final edits. Naturally, being a Microsoft system the company claims all the advantages of integration into security managed by Active Directory, and Outlook email for discussing the outputs.

"The system can manage ingest, search and browse, shot selection, distribution, transcoding, upload, review and approval workflow of any video asset," said Di Piazza, "It was developed with customers and is in use with both Warner Brothers and Liberty's Ascent Media Group, which makes about half of the TV commercials in the US, and it plugs into all the popular watermarking and security tools and uses the work on MPEG 21 for its underlying architecture," he said. MPEG 21 was supposed to be a global digital media protection and identity standard, but was never finished, with work grinding to a halt about 3 years ago, with the system part done.

As impressive as that sounded, the SAP of the media workflow world is Xytech, and although it is just a 60 person company, today it boasts 360 customers and Ron Peters, executive VP for sales and marketing there was quick to shake its head at the Microsoft claims. "Our system is a real asset manager and workflow system which works with both physical and digital media types. We are fed up with everyone writing a system which manages sign off and calling it a workflow system.

"We manage business workflow end to end. We maintain a metadata library system using 200 metadata fields, so that studios can find the tiniest piece of video from ALL of their assets. Once content is lost, it is lost forever. All the major studios, most of the newsgathering operations in the US and channels like the Golf Channel all use our system. CBS has 12 million piece of video on our system, from old files to unfinished assets, they operate playout from it, and video creation. They run their business on it. Take it away and their business would grind to a halt," said Peters. The entire system sits on an SQLServer or Oracle database.

"I don't want to say anything bad about Microsoft, we partner with then, but our only rivals are systems made up of ten components, glued together by the studios themselves. The issue is integration, and the Xytech system deals with output to any format automatically, it handles creation of the final video asset, handles cuts, transcoding and FTP into a professional content distribution system like Signiant or IBM's Media Hub.

The confusion all seems to come from the variety of definitions for the word workflow. Enterprise workflow is one thing, content creation another, distribution workflow yet another thing again.

Tandberg

Giant mobile infrastructure provider Ericsson, through its Tandberg subsidiary also entered the Workflow debate this week announcing that DirecTV will use the Tandberg WatchPoint Workflow system to manage it's new multi-platform on-demand service. The system will be used to deliver DirecTV content to set-tops, the web and to handsets in multiple formats such as H.264, Windows Media and Flash video across the US. WatchPoint is designed purely to offer crossplatform delivery.

This seems to be the first time that the workflow argument has sprawled across the floor of IBC, and it promises to be a subject that is revisited in future years. After all if Microsoft and Ericsson see a market worth going after, it must have sufficient revenue volume to attract them.

That discussion led us to a visit to the Signiant stand, where Avid legend Tom Ohanian was waxing forth on how its digital content distribution system came into existence. Essentially it is a Nortel project on securely distributing huge amounts of source code for overseas software development, which broke away in 2000 in a 50 man spin out, which decided the system was even better suited for digital media.

Signiant

Again that word workflow appears, with Ohanian, VP product management at Signiant talking about its Workflow Automatic Framework, but here he is talking about moving a piece of video to a storage volume, or to a transcoding engine, or to a distribution venue like a content delivery network. It also handles non-repudiation and proof of receipt of the media.

"The system is used daily by Cisco to back up the source code for its routers in one installation, which amounts to 12 million files and 72 terabytes of data," boasts Ohanian, "with 2 per cent to 3 per cent of that being change data every day." The system uses virtually any type of encryption from 64 bit to 156 bit keys, can use digital signatures, and PKI and X509 certificates and now it is focused on video, and it will work with Thomson Nextguard watermarking. It offers what it describes as a managed P2P delivery, with WAN accelerators, bandwidth management to ensure assets arrive on time and works from 25 Mbytes right up to uncompressed high definition files, which can be huge.

As far as we can remember it was Signiant's first time at the show, and a sure sign that Europe is ready for more and more video distribution as fragmentation in video markets heats up and there are more and more video types wanting to reach non-broadcast destinations (so not suitable for continuous satellite feeds), to feed 100s and 100s of consumer networks. Again another sign of life in IPTV, mobile TV and the emerging web video markets in Europe.

Copyright © 2007, Faultline

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