Life is not simple for provider of over-the-top (OTT) Internet video services – whether they are pay-TV operators or new pure- Internet players. Services like Netflix have proven that it is possible to attract large audiences to Internet-delivered premium video content, but staying competitive is difficult. Devices that can consume Internet video are proliferating to include set-top boxes (STBs), Smart TVs, optical disc players and game consoles as well as PCs, laptops and smartphones.
Consumers have become conditioned to “all my media on all my devices all the time” from their experiences with digital music and e-book services, and they expect no less from video; meanwhile, Hollywood studios and other video content licensors have raised, not lowered, their expectations that their content be protected from unauthorised use.
In general, the technological complexity of building, maintaining, and scaling multiscreen OTT video services is not decreasing. Operators require a range of capabilities including streaming video, content protection, application development and other technologies. Yet no single, “silver bullet” stack with all these capabilities has emerged for operators to rely on to build out their services in a future-proof, scalable and interoperable manner.
This white paper, specially commissioned by Irdeto is designed to help OTT video service providers understand some of the complexities and interdependencies of multiscreen streaming video technology today and in the near future. It aims to help them set a strategy that minimises and isolates complexity among several moving parts. By making OTT service deployment easier, operators can better respond to competitive developments in the marketplace while minimising total cost of ownership (TCO).
The first section of the white paper looks at imperatives for OTT service providers, including consistent user experiences across screens, content access model variety, and competitive pressures. It also compares the evolution of multiscreen digital video with that of digital music and e-book services, and it describes the sources of technical complexity that service providers must grapple with, to meet these requirements.
The next section describes today’s landscape and the near-term development of key technologies for streaming premium video content: adaptive bitrate streaming, web browsers as application development environments, digital rights management (DRM), and browser-based video players. In particular, the paper looks at the emerging standards of HTML5 for application development and DASH for video streaming, as well as the current web browser market for digital video consumption devices and the challenges of integrating DRM technologies with browsers.
The final section lays out a strategy and high-level solution architecture that OTT service providers can use to take as much advantage as possible of current and emerging standards while isolating and minimising the sources of technical complexity that are likely to persist for the foreseeable future. The strategy calls for starting (or transitioning to) a programme of multiscreen application development that takes advantage of DASH adaptive streaming, web browsers, and HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions, and uses a variety of DRMs that (in many cases) go hand-in- hand with browsers and the client platforms they run on. The section ends with a description of maxdome, a successful European OTT service that is transitioning to a solution similar to that discussed here.
Imperatives for Over-the-Top Video Service Providers
The bar is high for both pay- TV operators and pure-Internet providers that run, or are planning to launch, multiscreen OTT Internet video services. Here are several of the imperatives that OTT providers should bear in mind when planning implementations.
The most important requirement for consumers is to offer them a consistent experience across all of their devices and – as far as licensing rules permit it – all locations. Users expect to have similar experiences on their phones, tablets, desktops, laptops, STBs, game consoles, and Smart TVs.
In general, this has been more difficult for premium video services to achieve than it has been for other types of content services such as streaming music and e-books. Leading services of these types – such as Pandora and Spotify for music, and Amazon Kindle and Kobo for e-books – have had consistent cross-platform implementations since around 2010. In contrast, most premium video services have taken longer to achieve similar levels of platform ubiquity.
Of course, there are many reasons for this, such as the lack of sufficient bandwidth over wireless networks to support adequate quality video streaming in many locations until more recently. But mobile devices with sufficient video capabilities (e.g., Apple iPhone and iPad, Samsung Galaxy series, and various other Android devices) were available by 2010.
Sources of Complexity
Several complexities in multiscreen OTT video service implementation have presented obstacles to platform ubiquity. These include:
- Application development: the need to develop largely different code bases for apps on different client platforms.
- Encoding and streaming: the need to support several different codecs and streaming protocols, and to create and store a large number of files per content title, to reach a wide variety of devices.
- Digital rights management: the lack of standards for DRM that both satisfies the content protection requirements of Hollywood studios (and other content licensors) and is supported on a sufficient variety of clients.
Tools and technologies exist to help minimise some – but not all – of these areas of complexity. As we’ll see, these tools and technologies are in various stages of adoption.
Application Development
HTML5 was designed to enable single-source application development with cross platform interoperability and consistent implementation of audio, graphics, and video applications.
Yet, although Pandora and Amazon released HTML5 browser versions of their music and e-book applications in 2011, HTML5 did not become a practical choice for video services until more recently. Netflix started rolling out HTML5 versions for ChromeOS and Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2013; other services such as Hulu still do not use HTML5.
As we will see, HTML5 is only now becoming a reasonable choice for rich media applications that require DRM.
Encoding and Streaming
Another source of complexity is streaming video protocols. Although streaming video technology has existed since the late 1990s, the adaptive bitrate technology required for uninterrupted viewing at the best possible quality dates back to the late 2000s; and various incompatibilities exist between adaptive streaming protocols and popular client platforms. In contrast, streaming music technology is simpler and more established; and the technology for sending e-books to users’ devices is simplest of all.
Digital Rights Management
Yet another area of complexity is studio requirements for content protection. Streaming music services typically rely on standard SSL/TLS transport encryption to protect content. Music download services no longer require DRM in most cases. On-demand music services like Spotify and Deezer use DRM for device-cached (“offline listening”) files, but each service provider designs its own DRMs. Many leading e-book services use their own DRMs as well, and book publishers rarely have much technical input into or approval over such schemes.
In contrast, video services must use third-party content protection technologies, demonstrate conformance to robustness rules, and obtain approval on specific implementation details from multiple content licensors. To complicate matters further, it has not been possible until recently to implement DRMs within browser environments, meaning that video services have had to be implemented as standalone applications and/or using rich media application environments such as Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Other obstacles to consistent branded interfaces for video services include usage rules, which can become quite complicated given the variety of content and access models that a service could support (linear television, VOD, rental, pay-per-view, etc.) and the complexity of licensing rules. But it is well known that consumers rebel against complexity and inconsistency, so it’s important to implement consistent rules across all platforms.
Competition
Pay-TV operators in particular are realising that they have new competition as they expand from managed networks to over-the-top services on the Internet; in fact, the Internet has forced many operators to face their first real competition of any kind. And the competition comes from multiple sources: it includes services that focus on single access models that are simple for consumers to understand by themselves, such as subscription VOD (Netflix, Hulu Plus), rental and sell-through (Apple iTunes, Amazon Instant Video), and standalone services from name-brand content providers (HBO GO, CBS All Access) – not to mention unlicensed streaming and downloads. In contrast, many operators offer limited VOD and SVOD services of their own, in addition to the same branded content that providers like HBO and CBS now offer by themselves.
Adding OTT versions of all these services – the results of many licensing arrangements negotiated over a long period of time – opens up many possibilities but also many more dimensions of complexity for both operators and their customers.
Operators face a dilemma as they roll out OTT services: should they try to emulate their managed-network offerings online and add many types of services quickly, or should they go slow and bring their subscribers along gently? Either approach carries a risk of driving customers away, either from confusion over complexity or from not having desirable content or features.
The best principles to bear in mind during this transitional period are consistency and flexibility. Operators should add features in a way that maximises a consistent user experience and minimises additional complexity, and they should be able to add features quickly based on market developments and customer feedback.
The good news is that many of the challenges to OTT service implementation have been eliminated or reduced by new technologies, tools, and best practices today. Operators nowadays have greater possibilities to launch OTT services in a way that manages complexity and minimises TCO.
Life is not simple for provider of over-the-top (OTT) Internet video services – whether they are pay-TV operators or new pure- Internet players. Services like Netflix have proven that it is possible to attract large audiences to Internet-delivered premium video content, but staying competitive is difficult. Devices that can consume Internet video are proliferating to include set-top boxes (STBs), Smart TVs, optical disc players and game consoles as well as PCs, laptops and smartphones.
Consumers have become conditioned to “all my media on all my devices all the time” from their experiences with digital music and e-book services, and they expect no less from video; meanwhile, Hollywood studios and other video content licensors have raised, not lowered, their expectations that their content be protected from unauthorised use.
In general, the technological complexity of building, maintaining, and scaling multiscreen OTT video services is not decreasing. Operators require a range of capabilities including streaming video, content protection, application development and other technologies. Yet no single, “silver bullet” stack with all these capabilities has emerged for operators to rely on to build out their services in a future-proof, scalable and interoperable manner.
This white paper, specially commissioned by Irdeto is designed to help OTT video service providers understand some of the complexities and interdependencies of multiscreen streaming video technology today and in the near future. It aims to help them set a strategy that minimises and isolates complexity among several moving parts. By making OTT service deployment easier, operators can better respond to competitive developments in the marketplace while minimising total cost of ownership (TCO).
The first section of the white paper looks at imperatives for OTT service providers, including consistent user experiences across screens, content access model variety, and competitive pressures. It also compares the evolution of multiscreen digital video with that of digital music and e-book services, and it describes the sources of technical complexity that service providers must grapple with, to meet these requirements.
The next section describes today’s landscape and the near-term development of key technologies for streaming premium video content: adaptive bitrate streaming, web browsers as application development environments, digital rights management (DRM), and browser-based video players. In particular, the paper looks at the emerging standards of HTML5 for application development and DASH for video streaming, as well as the current web browser market for digital video consumption devices and the challenges of integrating DRM technologies with browsers.
The final section lays out a strategy and high-level solution architecture that OTT service providers can use to take as much advantage as possible of current and emerging standards while isolating and minimising the sources of technical complexity that are likely to persist for the foreseeable future. The strategy calls for starting (or transitioning to) a programme of multiscreen application development that takes advantage of DASH adaptive streaming, web browsers, and HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions, and uses a variety of DRMs that (in many cases) go hand-in- hand with browsers and the client platforms they run on. The section ends with a description of maxdome, a successful European OTT service that is transitioning to a solution similar to that discussed here.
Imperatives for Over-the-Top Video Service Providers
The bar is high for both pay- TV operators and pure-Internet providers that run, or are planning to launch, multiscreen OTT Internet video services. Here are several of the imperatives that OTT providers should bear in mind when planning implementations.
The most important requirement for consumers is to offer them a consistent experience across all of their devices and – as far as licensing rules permit it – all locations. Users expect to have similar experiences on their phones, tablets, desktops, laptops, STBs, game consoles, and Smart TVs.
In general, this has been more difficult for premium video services to achieve than it has been for other types of content services such as streaming music and e-books. Leading services of these types – such as Pandora and Spotify for music, and Amazon Kindle and Kobo for e-books – have had consistent cross-platform implementations since around 2010. In contrast, most premium video services have taken longer to achieve similar levels of platform ubiquity.
Of course, there are many reasons for this, such as the lack of sufficient bandwidth over wireless networks to support adequate quality video streaming in many locations until more recently. But mobile devices with sufficient video capabilities (e.g., Apple iPhone and iPad, Samsung Galaxy series, and various other Android devices) were available by 2010.
Sources of Complexity
Several complexities in multiscreen OTT video service implementation have presented obstacles to platform ubiquity. These include:
Application development: the need to develop largely different code bases for apps on different client platforms.
Encoding and streaming: the need to support several different codecs and streaming protocols, and to create and store a large number of files per content title, to reach a wide variety of devices.
Digital rights management: the lack of standards for DRM that both satisfies the content protection requirements of Hollywood studios (and other content licensors) and is supported on a sufficient variety of clients.
Tools and technologies exist to help minimise some – but not all – of these areas of complexity. As we’ll see, these tools and technologies are in various stages of adoption.
Application Development
HTML5 was designed to enable single-source application development with cross platform interoperability and consistent implementation of audio, graphics, and video applications.
Yet, although Pandora and Amazon released HTML5 browser versions of their music and e-book applications in 2011, HTML5 did not become a practical choice for video services until more recently. Netflix started rolling out HTML5 versions for ChromeOS and Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2013; other services such as Hulu still do not use HTML5.
As we will see, HTML5 is only now becoming a reasonable choice for rich media applications that require DRM.
Encoding and Streaming
Another source of complexity is streaming video protocols. Although streaming video technology has existed since the late 1990s, the adaptive bitrate technology required for uninterrupted viewing at the best possible quality dates back to the late 2000s; and various incompatibilities exist between adaptive streaming protocols and popular client platforms. In contrast, streaming music technology is simpler and more established; and the technology for sending e-books to users’ devices is simplest of all.
Digital Rights Management
Yet another area of complexity is studio requirements for content protection. Streaming music services typically rely on standard SSL/TLS transport encryption to protect content. Music download services no longer require DRM in most cases. On-demand music services like Spotify and Deezer use DRM for device-cached (“offline listening”) files, but each service provider designs its own DRMs. Many leading e-book services use their own DRMs as well, and book publishers rarely have much technical input into or approval over such schemes.
In contrast, video services must use third-party content protection technologies, demonstrate conformance to robustness rules, and obtain approval on specific implementation details from multiple content licensors. To complicate matters further, it has not been possible until recently to implement DRMs within browser environments, meaning that video services have had to be implemented as standalone applications and/or using rich media application environments such as Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Other obstacles to consistent branded interfaces for video services include usage rules, which can become quite complicated given the variety of content and access models that a service could support (linear television, VOD, rental, pay-per-view, etc.) and the complexity of licensing rules. But it is well known that consumers rebel against complexity and inconsistency, so it’s important to implement consistent rules across all platforms.
Competition
Pay-TV operators in particular are realising that they have new competition as they expand from managed networks to over-the-top services on the Internet; in fact, the Internet has forced many operators to face their first real competition of any kind. And the competition comes from multiple sources: it includes services that focus on single access models that are simple for consumers to understand by themselves, such as subscription VOD (Netflix, Hulu Plus), rental and sell-through (Apple iTunes, Amazon Instant Video), and standalone services from name-brand content providers (HBO GO, CBS All Access) – not to mention unlicensed streaming and downloads. In contrast, many operators offer limited VOD and SVOD services of their own, in addition to the same branded content that providers like HBO and CBS now offer by themselves.
Adding OTT versions of all these services – the results of many licensing arrangements negotiated over a long period of time – opens up many possibilities but also many more dimensions of complexity for both operators and their customers.
Operators face a dilemma as they roll out OTT services: should they try to emulate their managed-network offerings online and add many types of services quickly, or should they go slow and bring their subscribers along gently? Either approach carries a risk of driving customers away, either from confusion over complexity or from not having desirable content or features.
The best principles to bear in mind during this transitional period are consistency and flexibility. Operators should add features in a way that maximises a consistent user experience and minimises additional complexity, and they should be able to add features quickly based on market developments and customer feedback.
The good news is that many of the challenges to OTT service implementation have been eliminated or reduced by new technologies, tools, and best practices today. Operators nowadays have greater possibilities to launch OTT services in a way that manages complexity and minimises TCO.
