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BT Sport takes Elemental step of software encoding

Hardware keeps getting left behind...your TV's always nearly out of date

Analysis BT has been as bold over distribution technology as the content itself for its sport channels, but then it had to be given Sky’s entrenched position in sports rights in the UK.

BT Sport succeeded in at least ruffling Sky’s feathers and arguably making serious inroads firstly by biting into the English Premier League pie and then seizing exclusive rights for the EUFA Champions League and the lesser Europa League.

When it comes to technology there is no argument, since BT Sport has clearly seized the initiative over quality where Sky used to reign supreme. This became clear in June 2015 when BT beat Sky to the draw by announcing Europe’s first dedicated 4K sports channel, BT Sport Ultra HD, based on HEVC software encoding technology from Elemental.

This came in time to show the first match of the 2015/2016 season, followed by many Champions League and EPL games, as well as Aviva Premiership Rugby. Then this week at a sports bar near the TV Connect show in London, BT Sport raised its game again by confirming Elemental as its sole supplier not just for encoding but also Software Defined Video (SDV) to unify its traditional and multiscreen head ends.

Elemental now has strong live TV encoding deals at all four of the UK major broadcasters – BBC, BT, Sky and ITV – with only Virgin Media to go for the full set.

These Elemental encoders enable BT Sport to serve all its delivery platforms, including the BT TV Everywhere, BT Sport App, and BT Ultra HD services. The capability to host UHD was demonstrated at the London event in showing live coverage of the Champions League semifinal match between Manchester City and Real Madrid on its BT Sport Ultra HD channel. It claimed this to be the first live sports platform of its kind in the UK and Europe and the pictures did look good, if a bit over-bright on the Samsung screens in this particular sports bar.

The BT infrastructure uses Elemental software for HEVC/H.265 coding and its 4K content processing as well as delivery. Then the BT TV Everywhere service for customers to view on multiple devices once they authenticate as subscribers is based on the Elemental SDV. Elemental also provides a unified head-end for subscription linear channels delivered to both IPTV set tops and other connected devices. Finally, for the BT Sport App, Elemental Delta enables start-over viewing for UEFA Champions League games with its live-to-VoD output filter.

As the Champions League game played out, BT’s managing director head of TV technology and content Greg McCall said that the Elemental technology was as much about delivering the best viewing possible and doing this consistently across multiple platforms as about achieving cost savings and operational efficiency.

But the original decision to go for a software based approach can perhaps be credited to Howard Watson, who was BT’s chief architect at the time the first decisions involving Elemental were made. Watson is a great advocate for software based networking in general, and has been instrumental in transforming the way BT develops its own software internally across a wide range of processes including OSS and billing. Watson was promoted to CEO of BT Technology, Service and Operations (BT TSO) in January. There was nothing radical in BT’s decision to deploy software encoding and SDV, but what is more unusual at this stage is to trust it for premium live channels and valuable content that the operator has spent huge sums to acquire.

We are used to hearing the likes of Ericsson claiming that the role of software in video processing and encoding should be confined largely to on demand content and that the extra efficiency enabled only by hardware is needed for premium live services. Following this logic Ericsson’s virtualized encoding platform embraces both hardware and software based approaches.

But already there are signs that bespoke hardware approaches are now a thing of the past. The chief problem with dedicated hardware is that it is cast in stone, so that even if it out performs generic processors at the time of implementation, it tends to get left behind after a few years and then needs renewal at cost.

The software approach allows successive generations of commodity hardware to be slipped in and deliver incremental improvements in performance and functionality, getting away from the big-bang approach which has characterized TV through all its history.

The software approach allows the broadcasting industry to join enterprise IT in being able to enjoy the benefits of Moore’s Law. We should also be clear about what we mean by SDV, which is not Elemental’s property whatever it would like us to believe, but a clearly identified field closely related to Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The idea is to partition services between routine tasks that can be performed at a hardware level if required and higher level ones calling for more intelligence that can be hived off and “virtualized” onto commodity hardware which can be located anywhere - in principle.

SDN came first, emerging from the old seven-layer model of computer processes ranging from the physical media at the bottom to application software at the top. SDN came about by splitting the third networking layer into two, between the basic forwarding of data packets, now almost always IP packets, and the control level routing decisions which can take account of factors such as desired QoS and congestion to optimize end to end service. NFV then kicks in by providing the tools to host the control level routing processing, as well as other network related functions like intrusion detection, on commodity hardware.

SDV extends this process to video, so that tasks such as encoding can also be virtualized, while ensuring that intelligent processes are separated from those that can perform automatically without any higher level feedback.

At the BT presentation BT’s McCall was happy to go along with Elemental’s bullish insistence that SDV could now go all the way for any pay TV service to create a unified delivery infrastructure capable of scaling to any number of users across multiple platforms and ensure consistent delivery of mixed services including UHD.

Copyright © 2016, Faultline

Faultline is published by Rethink Research, a London-based publishing and consulting firm. This weekly newsletter is an assessment of the impact of the week's events in the world of digital media. Faultline is where media meets technology. Subscription details here.

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