SYT General 2 - New Thread., page-340

The Interoperability Challenge: Is OTT Ready for Standards?

OTT companies innovate to differentiate their products from their competitors' products, but for the industry to reach its potential, they'll have to cooperate.

OTT viewership is growing day by day. More viewers are flocking to services like Netflix, Hulu, and Sling. In fact, some recent statistics have even claimed that online video viewership is overtaking traditional broadcast. Regardless of whether you believe all the hype, it’s clear that the television industry is in a state of transition—a generational shift, driven by economics and consumer behavior—from delivering video via video-specific RF-modulated systems to delivering it via IP both over the internet and over private networks.
But that state of transition leaves a lot of consumers wanting more. Online video isn’t like traditional TV broadcast. The reliability, quality, and consistency tend to be lower. Part of that is just a byproduct of a burgeoning industry. Think of online video as a teenager, undergoing monumental physiological and emotional changes while still trying to navigate a world with expectations. The pace of innovation is happening so quickly—with new codecs, technologies, and processes being implemented by video distributors in their march to meeting their viewers’ needs—that distribution solutions sometimes requires a little bubble gum and duct tape to make them work properly.
But part of where online video and OTT services are lacking is a result of companies in the space—content owners, CDNs, technology providers—going their own way. Of course, that’s entirely reasonable. Those companies need to provide value to their subscribers, who are demanding an anytime, anywhere, any device approach to online video consumption. The providers need to do whatever they can, however they must. That exposes a critical issue—what happens when the technologies change? Will companies have to rip and replace, wasting countless dollars and employee time to rebuild architectures and integrations to meet consumer requirements?
Of course, there’s no way to predict the future, so video distributors and broadcasters build what they can with what they have. But this line of thinking leads to a question: Would it benefit everyone involved, distributors and consumers, to have standardized components, or guidelines, for building OTT services? According to StreamingMedia.com executive vice president Dan Rayburn, it would: “When things are built according to best practices, or even standards, it enhances everyone’s business potential, creating not only more opportunities for revenue but a better experience for consumers as well.”
The Perils of Going It Alone

Let’s start by looking at an historical analogy—the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. When BART was built, it was intended to be both “space-aged” and “state-of- the-art.”
The engineers had imagined a system that other cities would envy, and in doing so, they created something that was truly revolutionary, something that no one had ever seen before. But there was a critical flaw—the entire system was built using non-standard components. For example, the track was a unique gauge (5' 6", compared to 4' 8.5"), which was considered a bold and compelling feature at the time. But that fateful decision led to a cascading string of other requirements including custom-made wheels, brake assemblies, and track repair vehicles. And finally, there’s the computer system that runs the entire operation. Back in 1972, when BART first opened to public travel, it was considered cutting-edge. But, today, even relatively minor software updates can cause system-wide crashes. And when that happens, it’s literally back to manual switching along the 104-mile line.
The consensus on BART is that it’s beyond end-of-life and is on life support. There’s little that can be done to fix the underlying problems except continue to fund bond measure after bond measure for the capital required to maintain a system that was originally designed for 100,000 per week, but now sees more than 400,000 passengers per day. Just imagine if the BART engineers had built their rail system according to the standards already established by the U.S. government for the railroads? Of course, they didn’t have to and they sought to “go their own way,” to build something that was uniquely different from what consumers might find in other cities (i.e., a municipal differentiator). But imagine if they had used a standard rail gauge. What if they had used other components already in place in rail systems throughout the U.S.? The service they offer today might be more stable, less costly to maintain, and ultimately might benefit the consumer more (by not having as many outages). Now imagine a broadcaster building a TV Everywhere solution or a pure-play OTT provider standing up a new service. They want to create something that is “state of the art.” They want to offer a service that is uniquely different. And to top it off, there are no standards or guidelines. No one is sharing what they have done. There is no government agency overseeing the entire system.
The Need for Blueprints

Traditional television is different. For decades, the FCC has regulated not only how broadcasters distribute their signal, but how they operate. And a host of standards have evolved, from a variety of organizations such as the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), that govern the minutiae of delivering broadcast video content—advertising, encryption, quality-of-service measurement, even the television itself. If you wanted to start a broadcast company today, there’s an accepted method—a blueprint, if you will—to get that done.
Not so for OTT. But that’s not to say that there is, or should be, a “standard” way of building an OTT service or delivering online video. “No one has mastered how it [building an OTT service] should be done. Until that becomes more standard, there are still multiple options to get it done,” says Keith Zubchevich (top right), chief strategy officer for Conviva. “[There’s] not a single way yet, so people are going to keep exploring. Think about a mature OTT service. That’s maybe a 6- or 7-year-old business. It’s very infantile. There’s not much of a historical perspective on how it should be done. Until someone figures out which is the best way to do it, people will do it the way they feel it should be done.”
But there are components within OTT services, similar to the components in a municipal rail or television broadcast system, that can be standardized, especially as they approach commoditization. “I don’t think there will ever be a standard way to launch an OTT service, because it doesn’t naturally lend itself to standardization,” says Jason Hofmann (lower right), VP of network architecture at Limelight Networks. “But pieces of it may—like how you pay, or how content gets delivered—those components in which innovation has slowed down enough to warrant a standardized approach that may ultimately save costs, time, and drive up revenue.”
We need to keep in mind that the OTT market, and online video in general, is very young when compared with television. As an industry, OTT has only been around for 15 years at the most, and its foundational technologies haven’t been around for much longer. Consider that the maturity arcs of some television technologies, like ATSC 1.0 to ATSC 2.0 to ATSC 3.0, took decades. Putting rigid standards for online video in place now would only hold back the innovation that is driving the industry forward.
Still, interoperability is critical for the industry to mature. If things don’t work together, if companies continue to “go their own way,” to build what they need right now without regard for the future, then online video will continue to be a mess. Perhaps, then, it’s not standards that are needed right now but guidelines, best practices, and specifications—documentation that describes optimal methods for building commoditized components or processes of the online video value chain, documentation that isn’t rigid and fixed, but can be adjusted quickly and easily as innovation deems necessary.
Only creating those blueprints for components shouldn’t happen on its own, and it’s going to require the very culture of the industry to change. According to Rayburn, “vendors in our market just don’t share. They don’t talk about what they are doing or how they are doing it because they feel that all of the information they might share could potentially be used by a competitor. That ‘cult of secrecy’ hinders the growth of the industry for everyone.”
Without the companies sharing information for the betterment of the industry, one scenario that could happen is to have a federal regulatory body, like the FCC in the U.S., step in and force standardization. In the young and maturing OTT and online video market, that might be disastrous. “I hope that the government doesn’t get so involved in trying to legislate things in a market that is so young,” says Joe Inzerillo (below right), executive vice president and chief technology officer of BAMTech. “It needs time to breathe and that innovation to mature. Folks participating in the OTT space, by and large, are super focused on trying to deliver to their customers and fans. What regulation would possibly help?”
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

This leaves an alternative—the industry must come together and collaborate, to share ideas, to build the best practices, specifications, and standards that would create more interoperability. Of course, that only makes sense when the area of collaboration is one where everyone benefits. “I think that people have to choose to work together,” says Inzerillo. “There are times where collaboration is important and the collaboration is such that the ‘rising tide lifts all boats.’ But there are also times where people are innovating, and collaboration slows them down or strengthens their competition.”
So when does everyone in the industry benefit from collaboration? When the area of technology—for example, the IP stack or how the network scales—has become commoditized, when innovation has slowed down, and when there is little competitive differentiation gained through that component. According to Zubchevich: “Ultimately, as everybody is solving different pieces of the OTT puzzle, interoperability isn’t a priority—building pieces of the workflow, technology chain, etc. No one was really looking at it. As the business matures, as OTT services become a little bigger, interoperability will become important because you’ll have all these technologies that need to work together. Every time you can make something simpler, easier, and less complex, it’s a good thing.”
Without standards or guidelines (call them “soft standards”) available, the industry itself must come together and collaborate to create the specifications that address commoditized elements of the value chain. When that happens, there’s a significant upside. First, costs can be reduced. Rather than building and maintaining expensive customized solutions for non-differentiating components, companies can save money by building against proven standards or guidelines. Second, companies can bring services to market more quickly when they are based on standards or best practices. Finally, there’s the opportunity to create consistency of experience for consumers across providers. When things operate in relatively the same fashion—consistently, reliably, and with high quality —adoption will explode.
So how does collaboration happen? It’s mainly through industry forums and organizations such as the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers, the Consumer Technology Association, the Streaming Video Alliance, Ultra HD Forum, Alliance for Open Media, etc. By providing an open place for engineers to collaborate, such as specific working groups focused on commoditized areas, these forums engender an ethos of transparency as participants work together to create solutions to critical challenges from which they will all benefit. But if the only thing these forums provided was a place for engineers to come together, they would be nothing more than glorified meet-ups. No, these forums are also about design and development. As the collaboration moves from conversation to paper, the goal becomes not only about sharing, but also about documenting. Companies, sometimes direct competitors, work together to create the specifications, best practices, or standards. “You get the right people, who are committed to transparency and trying to advance the whole industry forward, in the room together and you can come out with some pretty powerful documents that will help shape the way things evolve,” says Inzerillo. “Hard standards and soft standards are important to what we need to do.”
And, finally, many of these forums promote the proof-of-concept process, where a group of companies puts the documentation into practice to demonstrate to the market how component operation can be accomplished based on the designed specification. This is exactly what’s happening in forums like the Streaming Video Alliance—three competitors in the watermarking space (Irdeto, Verimatrix, and NexGuard) are all collaborating on a best practices document for forensic watermarking.
But without some regulatory body forcing standards, is there impetus for adoption? Again, when the component around which the specification, best practice, or standard is designed doesn’t provide competitive differentiation, the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” “Content Provider A is not going to win one more subscriber over Content Provider B based on the IP stack they are using,” says Inzerillo. “They are going to win based on the merits of their content.” Hofmann echoes that sentiment: “They [the video distributor] have to think that it is a net benefit for them. They must believe it’s in the best interest of the company. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any downsides, but the benefits outweigh the downsides. Building off a standard simplifies their workflow, reduces their cost, increases their revenue, doesn’t give away too much secret sauce, and doesn’t cost too much to implement.”
Still, adoption won’t happen overnight, and it will take significant momentum to drive everyone to adopt these specifications, best practices, or standards. Either a major industry player will adopt and influence the smaller players (we may see this as a result of Apple’s decision to support HEVC), or lots of industry players all at once will spur mass adoption. And what’s the result when providers begin to build video streaming workflows based on agreed-upon specifications, when they encapsulate interoperability into the very DNA of their service? Stability. And through stability will come the acceleration and completion of the generational shift we see in television today.
The OTT market is at a very precarious point. It’s young. It’s immature. It’s in a state of flux as rapid innovation determines the direction and shape of how video is delivered, monetized, and measured. And as video distributors work to bring the highest level of value to their subscribers, they can’t take the chance of waiting for standards to tell them how to do it. They need to build solutions that meet their needs today with the technologies available to them. With that said, though, as the BART example illustrates, building against the grain can have long-term, negative impacts.
What the industry needs isn’t necessarily standards, but more transparency, more best practices, more guidelines that can help direct the way things should be built. Why? “Companies are greedy,” says Rayburn. “They are doing what’s in the best interest for themselves and their business. Why would they adhere to standards that only bring their competition closer?” As more companies leverage available best practices, produced by collaborating engineers from within those very companies and deployed by industry giants or a mass number of smaller companies, interoperability will increase and improve, leading the industry to a point in the future where standardization will seem only natural for those components that don’t provide competitive differentiation. Still, to reach that point we must have an industry that’s ready to be transparent, and we are only just embarking on that long journey.