Live TV from the Cloud

The Cloud is rapidly being established as an important new form of TV distribution, using over-the-top (OTT) technologies to reliably deliver TV to devices inside and outside the home. It increasingly makes economic and strategic sense for pay-TV service providers to deliver TV including live TV, from the cloud.

The rapid take-up of tablets and smartphones, and the demand by consumers to watch TV on these devices anywhere and everywhere, has been a key driver for the growth of OTT based TV services. These OTT services were originally focused on on-demand content but in the last year that focus has increasingly shifted to live/linear TV, live TV being essential for certain kinds of content sports, event-based programs and the emerging genre of social TV.

As mobile devices become ubiquitous, TV Everywhere becomes increasingly important to pay-TV service providers who want to build relationships with their customers beyond the home, using live and on-demand content delivered from the Cloud. A key question is to what extent they can or should fully replicate their set-topbox service on the secondary screens of smartphones and tablets.

Another rationale for Live TV from the Cloud is the move by cable and telco pay-TV providers to deliver off-net services using OTT technologies to areas outside their networks and to reach new customers in a more cost-effective way. To offer a similar level of service to all customers, the OTT offer needs to include linear programs.

Telcos are also turning from providing TV via managed IPTV networks to the simpler and more cost-effective approach of OTT. While this means a shift from quality of service to a best effort model, adaptive bitrate streaming ensures the best possible service is delivered and there is a graceful degradation of service as network conditions change. It can also adapt to the consumers inhouse network which is often beyond the control of the service provider. Some would argue that such graceful degradation leads to better quality of experience than an all or nothing service.

Lastly, delivering television via the cloud - relying on CDNs - is becoming increasingly economically viable in geographies where broadband is both sufficiently ubiquitous and open, making it a realistic option already to distribute the niche channels of a bouquet in a hybrid broadcast-broadband setup.

New cloud-TV services that include live TV are launching on a nearly weekly basis. In Spain, NAGRA has provided the technology to enable telco Jazztel to switch earlier this year from an IPTV service to an OTT service using an IP-based settop box that employs adaptive bitrate streaming that provides both linear pay-TV channels and VOD.

As cloud based TV services increasingly offer live TV as well as VOD, they need to take on more of the characteristics of a traditional broadcast network and the technology that enables TV from the cloud. Most notably the content protection and security used needs to become more like traditional broadcast systems. A new breed of solution is needed that combines digital rights management (DRM) used today to secure Internet delivered content with the best aspects of broadcast conditional access (CA). Such solutions must address the specific requirements of delivering premium live content via OTT.

Premium live content (e.g. sports) has a different risk profile from content traditionally delivered from the cloud. It also has much higher scalability requirements. Major football matches not only attract a large percentage of the subscriber base, the usage is highly synchronized.

With linear TV, it is the service/channel as a whole that needs to be protected rather than individual content items. Linear services have particular business models; these include such things as live pay-perview events with geographical blackout, free previews, pay per time, vouchers and subscription bundles and packages. These have been supported for years by CA vendors for broadcast TV but are potentially new concepts for DRM providers.

The DRM systems that protect content delivered over the Internet therefore need to rapidly evolve to be more like the conditional access systems protecting broadcast content today. The growth of live TV from the cloud will have a particular impact on the content protection and security systems in place. Other technologies must evolve as well because there is a clear imperative for service providers to expand this part of their multi-screen offer.

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