The Promise of the Cloud

Consumer adoption of tablets, smartphones and smart TVs is increasing rapidly and driving the take-up of over-the-top (OTT) TV services on multiple devices. Pay-TV service providers have started exploiting their existing Web video-streaming infrastructure, alongside their own broadband networks or by partnering with ISPs, to deploy first generation OTT TV services.

But as the needs to deliver premium content over more device types in the home and outside the home becomes a market reality, service providers need to consider more scalable, secure and cost effective solutions such as cloud delivery and hybrid gateway devices.

The challenges service providers face Multiscreen TV delivery, especially over third-party unmanaged networks, poses a number of challenges to services providers, from both a technology and business perspective.

In terms of technology, the key challenges are coping with usage peaks and ensuring a consistent quality of service. Adaptive streaming and multi-CDN strategies provide significant resilience to video delivery problems, although they are not in themselves an absolute cure for network congestion. Improved network and device monitoring will increasingly allow service providers to take more proactive steps to manage potential performance problems.

On the business side, while the HTTP-based adaptive streaming technology at the heart of OTT TV is inexpensive and CDN technology and bandwidth costs are falling consistently, unicasting remains less cost-efficient than broadcasting or multicasting as a way to reach large audiences. Emerging OTT TV multicast technologies, such as those provided by innovative NAGRA CDN technology partners such as Octoshape or Broadpeak, aim to reduce unicast network delivery costs while improving video-delivery quality. Such technologies could act as catalysts to accelerate the shift from managed IP multicast networks to OTT-based TV delivery.

And as bringing live TV content to different screens in the home becomes increasingly popular, complementary devices such as the hybrid multimedia home gateway device can help service providers expand their OTT offering quickly and efficiently. The gateway enables the transformation of broadcast TV into IP streams sent over WiFi in the home and provides additional, cost-effective and secured content delivery capabilities to multiple devices.

We anticipate that most service providers will adopt a dual broadcast/unicast strategy to maximize consumer reach and use OTT to offer value-added multiscreen services. In this context, our NAGRA MediaLive multiscreen solution delivered from the Cloud and our NAGRA HomeCruise gateway solutions offer hybrid capabilities that exploit the benefits of both broadcast and broadband TV delivery across multiple devices.

Last but not least, security is critical to Cloud-delivered TV, in two respects personal data and content protection. As more premium live TV content becomes available, it inevitably attracts the attention of pirates and other cyber criminals. While cloud platforms implement the same advanced technologies used by Web transactional systems to protect customers' personal data and privacy, OTT content delivery to the TV usually requires comprehensive end-to-end security solution, including cyber-security monitoring and services.

For content delivery, NAGRA-certified hybrid gateways, set-top boxes and chipsets address such security requirements, implementing hardware root of trust chipset security in the device. Gateway products ensure the secure bridging from broadcast to IP delivery. For other retail devices such as tablets, NAGRA has developed a robust software-only content protection solution, featuring software security updating. To maximize device reach, the NAGRA MediaLive Service Platform also offers a multi-DRM solution to ensure that DRM-based content protection can be enabled on a large number of consumer devices.

TV from the Cloud OTT TV delivery offers a very compelling solution for providing TV services to a new generation of ever more mobile and connected consumers. Scalability, flexibility and efficiency become paramount for service providers in this new context. The benefits offered by cloud-based delivery will generally outweigh the perceived loss of control over the infrastructure for most service providers.

To address these needs, NAGRA recently joined forces with Spanish infrastructure provider Abertis Telecom to provide a Cloud TV solution for both pay-TV service providers and free-to-air broadcasters, allowing them to add multiscreen services in a simple and cost-efficient way. There is no infrastructure to put in place, little waiting time and limited upfront costs.

The result is a fully hosted multiscreen television service from the cloud that has all the right elements in place to support the delivery of a consistent experience across multiple devices, while enabling a variety of applications such as start-over, catch-up TV and VOD, and various monetization models.

As service providers develop their strategies and tactics to respond to the multiscreen imperative, they are likely to find that the benefits of OTT TV are actually strongly re-enforced by a Cloud-based platform and a gateway-based hybrid content delivery strategy, concludes NAGRA.

For more information on NAGRA's Cloud Services, please contact dtv@nagra.com.

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