Next-Generation Video Coding and Streaming

Benny Bing

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119133339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Señales y procesamiento de señales

Reviews the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard and advancements in adaptive streaming technologies for use in broadband networks and the Internet This book describes next-generation video coding and streaming technologies with a comparative assessment of the strengths and weaknesses. Specific emphasis is placed on the H.265/HEVC video coding standard and adaptive bit rate video streaming. In addition to evaluating the impact of different types of video content and powerful feature sets on HEVC coding efficiency, the text provides an in-depth study on the practical performance of popular adaptive streaming platforms and useful tips for streaming optimization. Readers will learn of new over-the-top (OTT) online TV advancements, the direction of the broadband telecommunications industry, and the latest developments that will help keep implementation costs down and maximize return on infrastructure investment.

• Reviews the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard and compares its coding performance with the MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and MPEG-2 standards
• Provides invaluable insights into the intra and inter coding efficiencies of HEVC, such as the impact of hierarchical block partitioning and new prediction modes
• Evaluates the performance of the Apple and Microsoft adaptive streaming platforms and presents innovative techniques related to aggregate stream bandwidth prediction, duplicate chunk
• Includes end-of-chapter homework problems and access to instructor slides

Next-Generation Video Coding and Streaming is written for students, researchers, and industry professionals working in the field of video communications. Benny Bing has worked in academia for over 20 years. He has published over 80 research papers and 12 books, and has 6 video patents licensed to industry. He has served as a technical editor for several IEEE journals and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished lecturer. He also received the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Technology Innovation Award for demonstrations of advanced media technologies.

CHAPTER 1
DIGITAL VIDEO DELIVERY

Television has in many ways promoted understanding and cooperation among people all over the world. About 600 million people saw the first person walk on the moon and a billion people watched the 20th Summer Olympic Games. By 2012, there were over 3.6 billion viewers for the 30th Summer Olympic Games. TV watching used to be confined primarily to the living room. This has changed. The ubiquity of HD-capable smartphones and tablets equipped with powerful video decoders enables TV view time on mobile devices to surpass view time on the TV. The Internet has become a key media distribution platform that has opened up new ways for discovering, sharing, and consuming TV content anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Online Internet TV providers are trumping cable and satellite pay-TV providers with a dramatic increase in subscription and advertising revenue in recent years. Ala-carte-style Internet TV has now started to break the traditional pay-TV distribution model that is based on channel bundling. Although pay-TV providers are making TV content available online for their subscribers, they may now have to migrate to online streaming boxes and ditch the venerable set-top. Cable is now a broadband business. Among the top cable providers, broadband Internet service accounted for more subscribers than cable TV. Ultimately, pay-TV providers may have to rely on broadband to grow profits. Currently, over 10 million US households are broadband-only. In this chapter, we analyze these game-changing trends in digital video delivery.

1.1 BROADBAND TV LANDSCAPE

Over 80% of Internet users watch video while 30% of these users watch TV. In the United States, viewers spent an average of more than 6 h/month watching video on the Internet. Streaming live sports programs online makes truly national or global events possible, reaching millions of consumers via handheld devices. There are several challenges. Due to the mobility of subscribers and the heterogeneity of the user devices, the streaming server has to adapt the video content to the characteristics and limitations of both the underlying network and the end devices. These include variations in the available network bandwidth and user device limitations in processing power, memory, display size, battery life, or download limits.

1.1.1 Internet TV Providers

The emergence of over-the-top (OTT) online content providers such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon offers more choices to the consumer by providing replacement or supplementary TV services, usually TV shows and movies but no sports programming. The service is either free or much cheaper than pay-TV and this has led to a steady migration of subscribers from pay-TV to online TV, despite efforts from cable and satellite pay-TV providers in making TV content available online. Unlike OTT providers, these “TV Everywhere” Web portals may include both sports and video on demand (VOD) or time-shifted TV content.

Because broadcast pay-TV tends to surpass online TV in visual quality, it delivers better overall experience. For example, the quality of online TV service may fluctuate according to the bandwidth availability on the broadband Internet connection. However, other factors such as choice of content, flexible viewing time, and content portability are also important for the consumer. Thus, hardware set-top box (STB) vendors (e.g., TiVO) traditionally aligned to linear broadcast programming cable TV service have integrated OTT streaming content to their channel lineup.

Pay-TV operators may follow this lead and let OTT content into their STB. In doing so, subscription rates may be lower compared to traditional pay-TV subscription. For example, Walt Disney recently signed a carriage deal with Dish Network, making it the first pay-TV provider to bundle ABC, ESPN, and other channels owned by Disney in a TV service delivered entirely over the Internet. This lower-cost product will allow Dish to broaden their customer base and target new broadband-only consumers who do not currently subscribe to any form of cable or satellite TV. It is interesting to note that Dish is employing a small-scale version of the traditional multichannel subscription bundling, which provides carriage fees to the TV industry for large packages of channels.

Ala-carte-style Internet TV, where users can subscribe to individual channels, has now arrived. The new age of Web-delivered TV allows viewers to have more options to pay only for the TV networks or programs they want to watch and to decide how, when, and where to watch them. Unlike pay-TV, many of these subscription-based video on demand (SVOD) providers are currently ad-free. However, ad-based OTT service may appear in future to further reduce subscription fees. As live and on-demand Internet TV programming becomes mainstream, this development will ultimately increase competition and further drive subscription prices down. It has already forced some of the biggest pay-TV providers in the United States to merge.

1.1.2 Netflix

Netflix is currently the leader of OTT providers. It is a SVOD service where regular subscribers pay a low rate of $7.99 per month and ultra-high definition (UHD) customers pay $11.99 per month. There are over 80 million Netflix-capable devices, including TVs, smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. The number of Netflix viewers passed the number of YouTube viewers. Netflix has over 57 million subscribers in 50 countries (about 39 million US subscribers and 18 million foreign subscribers) and streams over 2 billion hours of TV shows and movies per month. Roughly half of all US households now have a Netflix subscription. Netflix accounts for nearly 30% of Web traffic in the United States at peak periods, a dominant leader among all online video websites. This percentage has increased as Netflix has added 4K UHD content to its streaming video library. Such data-heavy usage is creating a huge problem for Internet service providers (ISPs), who are demanding higher fees for the interconnection required to deliver high-quality service.

1.1.3 Hulu

Hulu provides both free TV and SVOD services. It handles over 30 million online users (over 6 million are paid subscribers) and over 1 billion video streams per month. Hulu and Amazon account for 1–2% of all Web traffic during peak hours.

1.1.4 Amazon

Amazon Prime Instant Video has a few million subscribers. Six new original TV series have been launched by Amazon in 2014, including five programs that were produced in UHD format. Amazon Studios also plans to shoot its new drama and comedy series pilots in UHD, teaming up with Samsung and major media corporations including Warner Bros and Lionsgate.

1.1.5 YouTube

YouTube has the largest library of both user-generated and premium videos. The growth of YouTube is accelerating in spite of increased competition from social networks such as Facebook. Unlike Netflix, which offers full-length movies and TV shows, YouTube's short-form videos are particularly popular. These short-duration videos are perfect for on-the-go viewing on small-screen personal devices such as smartphones. Thus, YouTube dominates other online TV websites with over 20% of all mobile downstream traffic in the Unites States. Roughly the same amount of traffic is delivered over fixed networks during peak hours. This is about half of Netflix, even though YouTube has a far greater number of views and downloads. For example, in May 2011, the number of views on YouTube hit 3 billion/day. The first video posted on YouTube was a 19-s clip called Me at the Zoo over 10 years ago. Today, more than 300 h of video are uploaded every minute. Google's Hangouts enable virtual participation in live events where users may record and stream videos, as well as interact in conferences, music concerts, and even football matches. The free service works on any Android and Apple device and recorded videos can be broadcast on YouTube.

1.1.6 ESPN3

Unlike OTT providers, ESPN3 offers live sports viewing online. The 2012 Super Bowl attracted over 2.1 million unique viewers when the game was streamed online by ESPN3 in the United States for the first time. In that year, all 302 events of the summer Olympics were streamed live. The service is available to Internet or pay-TV subscribers from affiliated service providers who pay fees to ESPN. Since 2008, free ESPN3 service has been made available to US college/university students and military personnel.

1.1.7 HBO

HBO has been one of pay-TV's most successful products for decades but plans to break off from the cable bundle in 2015 and distribute its shows to consumers using a standalone OTT streaming service via Apple TV. It will become a direct competitor to Netflix's SVOD service.

1.1.8 CBS

CBS launched a new subscription Internet TV streaming service on October 2014 that allows people to watch its live programming and thousands of its current and past shows on demand without paying for a traditional TV subscription. The new “CBS All Access” service costs $5.99 a month. CBS is the first traditional broadcaster that makes a near-continuous live feed of its local stations available over the Internet to non-pay-TV subscribers.

1.1.9 Sony

Sony launched the world's first “Video Unlimited” UHD movie/TV streaming service on September 4, 2013. Sony has Internet rights to carry channels from Viacom, which owns cable channels such as MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central. Sony is also developing an original TV drama series that will be available initially on its PlayStation gaming consoles.

1.1.10 Retail Giants

Retail giants such as Best Buy, Sears, and Walmart are joining the digital media ecosystem. Best Buy, for example, is providing their high-dollar customers with free online video rentals from CinemaNow.

1.2 INTERNET TV DELIVERY PLATFORMS

Content distribution platforms to store, transcode, and deliver petabytes of video on commodity hardware are readily available. The TV platforms are scalable in computing, storage, and bandwidth resources even when the data centers are interconnected through the Internet and long-distance networks. The dynamic location of these service facilities and the virtualization of hardware and software elements are increasingly complemented by a flexible software-defined network (SDN) architecture, which employs programmable application interfaces to couple the control and data planes of network hardware (e.g., routers, switches) so that data can be p...