Sports OTT Forum: Streaming Protocols Adapt to Era of Constant Change Will CMAF bring harmony to a multi-stream, multiprotocol world? By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Monday, August 5, 2019 - 10:59 am
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What's next in streaming protocols? The alphabet soup of CMAF, HLS, DASH, and more were the focus of a discussion at last month's SVG Sports OTT Forum.
David McLary, VP, video technology, NBC Sports Group Digital, laid out the challenge: offering a video platform that can serve a number of needs, from an authenticated simulcast of a broadcast stream to VOD content or, as in the case of NBC Sports Gold, a direct-to-consumer subscription service.
We've seen a lot of growth in that over the last 18 months or so, he said. You can buy specific packages with things like PGA TOUR, IndyCar, and there's a bunch of new packages that we launched recently. We also have a Playmaker business, which is kind of a white-label B2B service where we partner with folks like F1. We have the same video platform underneath all three of those business lines, and we need a good foundation so we can do the cool stuff over-the-top.
From left: NBC Sports' David McLary, IBM Aspera's James Wilson, and Limelight Networks' Fritz Seifts discussed the state of streaming protocols at the 2019 SVG Sports OTT Forum.
Navigating hundreds of standards is difficult, and that is one of the reasons NBCUniversal is looking to CMAF as well as other standards and protocols. McLary said CMAF offers a middle path that can solve issues like latency, common stream, and platform support. When, for example, delivering an HLS stream to a DASH device, tradeoffs need to be made, but CMAF moves the industry toward delivering only a single stream.
In a perfect world, there would be a way to offer one stream that can serve different types of devices, video players, and platforms. That is where CMAF comes in, and some big companies - such as Viacom, Disney, and Amazon - are already embracing it (AWS Elemental has implemented CMAF support across on-premises and cloud-based systems, and Akamai also supports low-latency streaming using CMAF). But, currently, HLS (Apple's solution to adaptive-bitrate delivery) and MEPG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) protocols still need to be used, and even RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) needs to be supported for Flash-based clients.
One day, we will have a single stream that we can deliver to all devices, McLary predicted. As basic an idea as that is, we are so far from it right now. I would love to be in the broadcast world, where I can just shoot my stream out to an IRD everyone gets.
James Wilson, director, engineering, Aspera platform, IBM Aspera, said that Aspera has always erred on the side of value over cost.
What we look at doing is providing solutions that allow choice, he said. If we can provide an abstract interface for TCP or HTTP that can accelerate whatever the technology du jour is, then that's exactly what we want to do. We want to be in a place where we can be easily integrated wherever. That's how we make those decisions.
Wilson added that CMAF is about reducing the overall amount of data that has to traverse the network to optimize the available resources. To me, CMAF is about encode once and then use in many formats, he said, adding, There are a lot of disruptive technologies pushing the next level, the next generation of that. There are companies talking about content fabric and identifying things at a segment level across the web. That is something very interesting to watch out for.
Scale Matters
A constant thought, McLary added, is how to deal with scale and to find the best solution for the demand.
This year, we don't have a Super Bowl, we don't have an Olympics, but we're going to end up streaming tens of thousands of events, he explained. We think about the scale of the delivery platforms we have to support and the number of customers. It goes back to reliability vs. latency, performance vs. feature set. We end up weighing all those things, but I think scale is always at the forefront of our mind when we're making those decisions.
Addressing standards, Fritz Seifts, principal architect, Limelight Networks, said that the decision begins with figuring out what you are building for: is it the future or to optimize operations today? The push and pull of what is a standard, what will become a standard, and how that impacts decision-making is a constant battle. Standards are evolving and consolidating, and transit protocols are trying to overcome an internet that was never designed to do what it is doing today.
It is a completely hostile environment that we've been trying to make this thing work, he explained. The inefficiencies at scale with something like TCP are pretty evident at this point.
Wilson said that Aspera tackled TCP bottlenecks in its early days and agreed that those working on networking computers via TCP in the 1970s could not have imagined where things would be today.
The thing that we're seeing is that data movement over time is constantly changing, he added. The way that we're moving data and the way that we're delivering data two years from now is going to be a completely different traffic pattern than today.
Seifts noted that the tactical side of things and the strategic side of things inform each other as to what to do.
We're also informed by our customers as well, saying we don't like you to support this, we need you to support this, can you support this, so forth and so on, he said. There's the business logistics of customer needs, but, internally for us at the CDN, the formula divider is always, can we do this at scale? Sure, we can do it live, and, sure, we could maybe do it for o
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Sports OTT Forum: Streaming Protocols Adapt to Era of Constant Change Will CMAF bring harmony to a multi-stream, multiprotocol world? By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
