History of Media Supply Chain Workflows

Over the course of my career, I’ve changed the way I look at media technologies, as the industry itself has changed the way it implements technology. In this blog I look at the major changes of the last couple of decades. [blog.mindrocketnow.com]

When I started out in this industry, as analogue was being replaced by digital, each broadcaster had its highly secure data centre consisting of racks of highly specialised opaque boxes, all connected to each other with thick braids of cables. The role of the broadcast architect was to understand all the configuration possibilities of each of those boxes, and how to connect them into chains that represented the workflow you were trying to implement. 

The first revolution was to replace all of the highly specialised opaque boxes with general purpose computers. These were more occluded boxes, because whilst the hardware was general purpose, the software became even more configurable and required new programming skills to chain into workflows. Fundamentally, those workflows were the same, and built into the same racks, just cheaper to buy.

The second revolution is well underway, and was born of a desire to stop capital spend on new boxes every year, and to prefer annual operational spend on someone else to do that for us. So those broadcaster data centres are now all shuttered and workflows are now in the cloud. Creating the chain now only requires mastery of one or two programming languages, but also of the myriad of APIs for all the software components. And because those APIs can be improved at a much faster rate, the possibilities to do interesting things in those workflows has increased at a much faster rate also.

At its simplest level, the workflows have remained the same throughout all of these three revolutions. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on VOD for TV, and the playback workflows within that. (I’m not going to get into associated and important workflows like marketing, revenue assurance, operations.) Let’s get into it!

Simplified broadcaster workflow

The role of a broadcaster is to market their catalogue as widely as possible. To do this they focus on making programmes applicable to the market:

• Choosing titles that will be popular, then putting the corresponding master assets into the workflow

• Making sure they conform to technical quality standards

• Making sure that they conform to legislative taste and decency standards

• Enriching with metadata (enrichment assets) that makes the asset more attractive, such as creatively written synopses, artfully composed imagery, dubbing in local language by local talent, creatively written subtitles

• They also look at enrichment in a broader sense, such as marketing titles locally in cooperation with service providers

• Insert ads

• Finally, the asset is exported in a form that can be imported by service providers, at negotiated cost, at an agreed schedule

Simplified service provider workflow

Service providers are sometimes the same broadcaster that provided the VOD asset, other times they are MVPD (multichannel video programming distributors), or perhaps content aggregators. All have a similar role to broadcasters, to market their (aggregated) catalogue (to consumers) as widely as possible, with the addition of implementing an attractive business model:

• Making partnerships with broadcasters that are popular

• Making sure the VOD assets that are provided conform to technical quality standards, and are timely

• Further conform the VOD assets to conform to platform technical standards, e.g. different bit rates, packaging

• Insert/ replace ads

• Enrich the metadata to reflect the business model, including: DRM method, tagging for revenue accounting

• As each consuming device might have a different preference for how it consumes the asset, the asset is exported once more

• Ingest the associated metadata (enrichment assets) into a catalogue and making it discoverable

• Promote the title both technically e.g. on the home screen of the app, and also non-technically e.g. in marketing literature

Simplified consumer device workflow

In many respects, the end consumer holds the power in the value chain. They determine the value of assets by asserting their choice of what to watch. They also provide one of the two sources of money in the value chain by buying stuff. To do this, their workflow consists of:

• Discovering content to watch, which is usually done by viewing associated assets, e.g. the next programme in the programme guide, “watch next” recommendations, marketing literature, ads

• Buying the content (even free content goes through the same authentication/ authorisation/ accounting process)

• Playing the content (which encompasses the technical processes of unpacking, decrypting and presenting images)

• And I’ll separate out viewing as oftentimes the viewing is on a different device to the playback, which can also insert/ replace ads i.e. smart TVs

• Watch the ads, watch the content

What next?

This business has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades, unsurprisingly as technology as a whole has changed dramatically. Broadcast generally follows, not leads, and at a comfortable distance, in order to sweat every last drop of amortisation from investments. So it’s relatively easy to make predictions - just look at what’s going on elsewhere. Here are a few of the trends happening in other industries which will wind their way into broadcast at some point.

Intelligence at the edge

A relatively new website architecture pattern is the Jamstack (JavaScript + APIs + Markup). The idea is that the website application itself is static, and as much intelligence as needed is associated with the content. That means the website can be distributed over a CDN and doesn’t need to be built for each visitor individually.

For media workflows, as some of the intelligence can only be implemented when you know the target, it means pushing out some of the conform/ enrich/ export steps from the central cloud to the network edge. This becomes possible as CDN providers implement cloud processing features at cloud prices.

Dumb apps

Putting intelligence at the edge means being able to deploy dumb apps. Maintaining apps fast becomes a profusion problem. The Now TV app is available on Apple, Android, Xbox, Roku, Samsung smart TV, LG smart TV, Amazon Fire TV as well as its own range of hardware. Each of thes hardware platforms comes with their own app store, and each app store has its own foibles. Each release can take 2 weeks to approve, so many companies employ release managers to handle the negotiations with the app stores to assure that they will pass first time. Even so, it takes a lot of resource to manage 8x approvals in parallel.

It’s very attractive to only need to deploy a new release once a year, to reduce the app store submission headache. This requires finding clever ways of making the app dumb. Web browsers are very complicated pieces of software that are almost invisible to surfing, and this is the direction that video apps need to go.

Intelligent content

As the app gets dumber, the content will need to get cleverer. Entire features of the app will need to be delivered as content. Content will self-aggregate as web pages with hyperlinks can, so that enrichment assets can be viewed at consumption time. And content will change after publishing, no longer remaining static. Just like the recent Cats movie, you’ll be able to see version 2.0 of your favourite movie as it reacts to real audience reaction.

What do you think of my predictions? Let me know in the comments!

Unboxing broadband, part 4: Chromecast and the dumb broadband pipe

My latest toy is Chromecast. It gives me access to great new content, for the price of picture quality. I love it! blog.mindrocketnow.com

My latest TV toy is Chromecast. It’s the price of the bundle that convinced me to buy: £16 for a Chromecast with free season 1 of The Blacklist. Alternatively, £16 for season 1 of The Blacklist with a free Chromecast. Either way the proposition was too good to pass up.

We also have BT Broadband, so I can also watch BT Sport on the TV in HD. That’s one premiership game per week (if the family will leave me alone long enough to enjoy it) for free. Which is about as much as DW is willing to pay.

The way Chromecast works is different to our other set top boxes (Apple TV, Now TV, DTT). Google doesn’t attempt to curate content, it just provides the means to put content onto your TV. You need a Chromecast-compatible app (for example the Chrome browser from my MacBook, or the BT Sport app on my iPhone). You may need to pay the app provider for the content, or it may be free (such as from YouTube). Once selected (and paid for), you can then “Cast” the content to your TV.

Casting (a new web 3.0 verb to get used to) is different from the streaming that Apple allows to its Apple TV. When Casting, the content is streamed directly from the web to the Chromecast box. This means the quality can be better (the smartphone isn’t an unnecessary intermediary congesting the Wi-Fi) and you don’t eat up battery life.

Today we Casted Gummi Bears from YouTube (the DDs are on summer holiday). The whole process was very slick. Finding the content on the YouTube app on the iPad is very easy with the combination of text search and swipe select available. The app found the Chromecast and started Casting without me needing to delve into the settings menu.

This illustrates a few fundamental changes that the TV industry is going to need to navigate. Firstly price: the price for the content, and crucially now the hardware too, is either free or close to free. I’m guessing that Google made or even lost money on the bundle that I bought (Chromecast + season 1 + Gummi Bears on YouTube). So where’s the money to be made from the value delivered? I think it’s from the bundle. Even though Google probably lost money on the bundle, I’m guessing that NBC-Universal / Sony Pictures (the show distributors) didn’t, because £16 is still a healthy amount for a virtual box set. And let’s also consider that the full value chain is now different; let’s not feel sorry for Google since it served the ads that engirdled the Gummies.

Secondly, the bundle: The bundle that consumers want isn’t the bundle that Cable traditionally provides. It’s no longer about buying your entire digital world from one shop. The key to the kingdom is connectivity; bundling broadband, 3/4G, Wi-Fi is the utility of the future. Everything else is cheaper, and crucially better, from sources other than Cable. Telephone calls are better from a mobile. TV is better when Casted. The bundle is now about what I want to do (I want to watch TV so I want a bundle of content, hardware and assume Wi-Fi) rather than how I want to do it (line rental + broadband speed/usage/time allocation + hardware).

Thirdly, convenience rules: I weep at the quality of picture that we’re now watching. YouTube is pixelated, BT Sport HD is barely better than SD when Casted, Now TV is only 720p – none of these compare with the video (and audio) quality when we watch a Blu-ray. But we very rarely watch a Blu-ray nowadays, because it’s much more convenient to search and swipe our way to find something to watch, than to get up and go over to our wall of discs. The argument that better quality commands a premium is delusive, at least for the majority. And it’s by volume selling to the majority that the only real money is now made.

The signs and portents are for consumers to just want a dumb broadband pipe. And there is a lot of money to be made by Cable in connectivity just as a utility. However, there is also opportunity – by separating the concerns of connectivity and services that use the connectivity, the opportunity is to both compete and collaborate with web TV providers. Compete for service revenues through cheaper, better, more innovative services. Collaborate by generating demand for connectivity. Make revenue by doing both.

From the perspective of consumers, the burgeoning options for web TV is starting to bring the problem of too much choice. Each STB has its exclusive content, so to watch it, the consumer needs to understand and navigate all the packages to find their combination. This complexity is to the detriment of the proposition, and to the market as a whole. Each STB might be cheap at £16 a pop, but I now have 4 of them costing over £300, just to get all the content we want to watch. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so cheap.

More in this series: part 3, part 5.

Futuregazing, part 4: Better matching humans with tech.

Tech should become like us, not the other way round. That way, it’ll actually be what we want. blog.mindrocketnow.com

February is a bit late to make predictions for the year, even if it still feels like the year has only just started. (Actually, it’s March now – should’ve posted this yesterday!) Instead, this year I thought I’d write about advances I’d like to see in the industry. These will probably arrive later than 2014, but I think they’re necessary, and sooner rather than later. In this last entry I look at how we interact with TV technology.

Better human-technology interaction.

There’s a common characteristic of many technology-led innovation, that the way you use it requires you to read the manual. Most things aren’t as intuitive as the iPhone, and those that are, are truly disruptive. Improving the way we interact with the technology of watching TV will be disruptive in this industry.

I’ve written before about how the way we interact with the TV, using the remote control and the electronic programme guide, is hindering innovation. There are interesting solutions already: companion app EPG, Hillcrest lab’s remote control, using Kinect to create a “touch screen” experience for TVs, BBC Playlister. Let’s see what matures in 2014.

I was thinking about how else we interact with the TV, and it occurred to me that the most obvious interaction was the act of watching. Even though there continues to be great innovation in the way the bits and bites are put onto the screen, the way the image gets from the screen to our eyes hasn’t changed in a hundred years. We still rely upon how we perceive all those itty bitty red green and blue pixels (let’s conveniently forget Sharp's attempt to give us a fourth pixel). Better tuning the pixel wavelengths to our rods, cones and photosensitive ganglia will mean less cognitive friction translating displayed colours to actual colours, so more pleasing images.

The same principle can be applied to the CMOS sensor in the camera that captures the images, and also the encoding process itself. And for a double bonus, better matching means fewer “wasted” bits to describe the image, and so better compression.

I’ve also written before on the limitations inherent in how currently chose what to watch. Or to put another way, how we interact with the metadata. The separation of content discovery from content consumption better matches how we receive recommendations. At the moment, recommendations are far too contextualised: the EPG shows programmes that are carried by your service provider only, the “people like you have watched” recommendation limits selections to the on-demand catalogue provider.

But real-world recommendations, the ones that are made by actually talking to someone, pays no heed to which service you use, or how it’s negotiated licensing rights. When someone tells you that Sherlock was brilliant if overly obtuse, it doesn’t matter that you have a choice of watching the episode on iTunes or iPlayer. So to better match how humans make recommendations, we need to separate the recommendation from the viewing.

This approach has a double whammy also. There’s much less emphasis on usage pattern around the programme (categorising behaviour through collaborative filtering in a data set restricted by content catalogue), and much more on the nature of the programme itself. As a result, the recommendation will be better.

Finally, let’s turn our attention to the actual image. I’m no director, and I don’t purport to know how to frame the perfect shot. But there’s an interesting new tool that directors who do know these things, will be given with the introduction of Ultra HD. The much larger resolution greatly increases the field of view, so that a more natural image including wraparound peripheral vision is possible. And a more natural image is more immersive. I’ve personally seen this effect – never has footage of people crossing the road in Japan been so engrossing than at NHK's demonstration of Ultra HD at TV conferences.

TV has managed to be wildly successful despite being quite user-unfriendly. By improving the human interface, there’s less to get in the way of why it’s successful, the communication.

More in this series: part 3.