Software Defined Video Monitoring SolutionsHOW DO WE MONITOR OTT DELIVERY IN THE CLOUD?

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Ed McGivernDirector Americas Video Sales

Geoff BowenWest Region Sales Manager

Perhaps You know Tektronix for Products Like…..

But You Would Only Know of ~50% of Our Business…….

Typical Users of Tektronix Software Monitoring & Automated QC Products…..Traditional Linear Workflows Extend to ABR and OTT

Content Creators

Cable/Telco Operators

Online Video Providers (OVP)

Streaming Aggregators

Vendor Cloud

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

COMPREHENSIVE VIDEO AND AUDIO MONITORING FOR CONTENT DELIVERY

• Linear transport streams over IP, QAM and ASI Monitoring

• Adaptive Bitrate Streams supporting HLS / DASH

Sentry Monitors:

Sentry and Aurora enables video providers to deliver content with optimum quality while reducing operational expenditures. Systems are available in Appliance, Virtual Machine and Cloud solutions.

Sentry and Aurora

• Automated QC of File Based Content

• Checks quality, compliance and syntax violations

Aurora Monitors:

ABR

An Introduction of Network Monitoring Solutions for Linear and ABR Content

Distribution Solutions

byGeoff Bowen

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COMPREHENSIVE VIDEO AND AUDIO MONITORING FOR CONTENT DELIVERY

• Linear transport streams over IP, QAM and ASI Monitoring

• Adaptive Bitrate Streams supporting HLS / DASH

Sentry Monitors:

Sentry and Aurora enables video providers to deliver content with optimum quality while reducing operational expenditures. Systems are available on prem, Virtual Machine and Cloud solutions.

Sentry and Aurora

• Automated QC of File Based Content

• Checks quality, compliance and syntax violations

Aurora Monitors:

Machine Learning ABR

Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming

• Video is split into “chunks”, typically 2-10s in duration

• Different representations of the same content vary by image size and bit rate

• Player dynamically decides which representation to request, based on network conditions

MULTIPLE REPRESENTATIONS OF CONTENT

High

Medium

Low

Video Representations

AVC Profile@Level Width × Height Frame Rate Max. Video Bit RateHigh@4.1 1280 × 720 59.94p 3.5 MbpsMain@3.2 1280 × 720 29.97p 2.7 MbpsMain@3.1 768 × 432 29.97p 1.6 MbpsMain@3.1 640 × 360 29.97p 1.0 MbpsMain@3.1 512 × 288 29.97p 675 kbpsMain@3.1 320 × 180 29.97p 405 kbpsMain@3.1 320 × 180 29.97p 270 kbps

EXAMPLE HLS PACKAGE

ABR System Architecture

Encoders/Transcoders

Storage Server Origin Server

Packager/Segmenter

+ DRM

HTTP

High bitrate version

Medium bitrate version

Low bitrate version

Media asset

Manifest file

Media asset

High bitrate version

Video segments

Medium bitrate version

Video segments

IngestServer

Live orFinishedContent Content

DeliveryNetwork

Home andMobileClient Players

Encoding and Transcoding

• Multiple bitrate (MBR) transcoding creates multiple versions of a single media stream or asset◦ Typically 7-10 versions at different bitrates◦ Usually with different video resolution, and sometimes with different audio streams◦ Input is often a high bitrate mezzanine file / stream◦ Outputs are typically single program transport stream (SPTS) files with H.264/AVC video and

AAC and/or AC-3 audio

ABR SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

TranscoderInput fileor stream

Output filesor streams

ABR Package Formats

• HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)◦ Originally developed by Apple, documented as IETF draft◦ Most widely deployed ABR format

• Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH)◦ ISO/IEC standard◦ Preferred ABR format in some countries (esp. Europe)

• Smooth Streaming◦ Developed by Microsoft for Silverlight◦ Part of Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows Server

ABR SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Digital Rights Management

• ABR streams are frequently encrypted, with access control provided by a Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology◦ Copyright owners will require service providers to protect their content

• Several DRM systems are commonly used:◦ PlayReady (Microsoft)◦ Widevine (Google)◦ FairPlay (Apple)

• Encryption is usually part of the packaging process

ABR SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Content Delivery Network

• CDNs provide storage and distribution of ABR content in an efficient manner

• At the edge of CDNs are many edge servers which may deliver content directly to clients, or may terminate into MSO/Telco access networks

• Major CDN vendors include Akamai and Amazon CloudFront

ABR SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Single-server distribution vs. Content Delivery Network with edge servers

Live OTT Ecosystem

Content Creators

Cable/Telco Operators

Online Video Providers (OVP)

Streaming Aggregators

Vendor Cloud

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Live Streaming – Quality Key To SuccessCUSTOMERS DON’T ACCEPT QUALITY ISSUES

Source: Phenixrts: Streaming Wars, The Real Time Differentiator, 2018

REPORTSNeed to be able to generate reports for business and compliance purposes

Customer needs – the job to be doneDELIVERY ENGINEERING & OPERATIONS - AUTOMATED MONITORING

COMPLIANCEISSUE DIAGNOSTICS AD INSERTION

SERVICE VIEW

Need to detect and troubleshoot a wide range of errors of transport, video, audio, ad‐insert, and quality

Need automated compliance confirmation to ensure gov’t or 

operator standards

Need to confirm ad insertion points are correct and confirm 

ads played correctly

Need real time visibility of program workflow for visual 

verification and quick diagnostics

SCALABLE / API CONTROLNeed to automate multi‐service monitoring at scale through operations management

THRESHOLDS & ALERTSNeed to be able to set alert 

thresholds on key network and A/V parameters

SENTRY

QOS/QOE MONITORINGNeed to check that the streams (Linear or ABR) being delivered 

are correct

Monitor Points on OTT Video Workflow

STREAMING DEVICES

PACKAGEINGEST CDN

DAI

ENCODE

VOD

ENCODE

LIVE

SentrySentry

Aurora

Monitor Points on OTT Video Workflow

STREAMING DEVICES

PACKAGEINGEST CDN

DAI

ENCODE

VOD

ENCODE

LIVE

SentrySentry

Aurora

Contribution Quality and compliance

Monitor Points on OTT Video Workflow

STREAMING DEVICES

PACKAGEINGEST CDN

DAI

ENCODE

VOD

ENCODE

LIVE

SentrySentry

Aurora

Encode Quality

Monitor Points on OTT Video Workflow

STREAMING DEVICES

PACKAGEINGEST CDN

DAI

ENCODE

VOD

ENCODE

LIVE

SentrySentry

Aurora

Package Issues URL & fragment verificationFragment alignment

Monitor Points on OTT Video Workflow

STREAMING DEVICES

PACKAGEINGEST CDN

DAI

ENCODE

VOD

ENCODE

LIVE

SentrySentry

Aurora

SCTE35 trigger payloadPost insert verification

Monitor Points on OTT Video Workflow

STREAMING DEVICES

PACKAGEINGEST CDN

DAI

ENCODE

VOD

ENCODE

LIVE

SentrySentry

Aurora

Service Working?Network conditions

ML

◦ Non-Reference Picture Quality metric◦ Available for Live of File Based Content

◦ Quality assessment has 90%+ correlation to human scoring

◦ Practical for multi-stream monitoring applications

◦ Detects source & encoding degradations

◦ Adjustable threshold alerts

TekMOS for Sentry and AuroraTEKTRONIX QOE MEASUREMENT BASED ON MACHINE LEARNING

How TekMOS Works…..TRAINING MODE TO CREATE MODEL

TekMOS Scoring ResultsOVERALL SCORE CORRELATION AND CORRELATION BY DISTORTION CLASS

Total Correlation = 0.981

79 Reference images

474 (79x6) images made up of 6 different levels of JPEG tiling

474 (79x6) images made up of 6 different levels of MPEG4 tiling

474 (79x6) images made up of 6 different levels of noise

474 (79x6) images made up of 6 different levels of blur

TekMOS ResultsSAMPLE TEKMOS QC REPORT

Visualization

• Monitor By Exception

• Bubble issues to the top

• Tek GUI supplements user’s dashboard views

Visualization

• Automated penalty box highlights service issues

• Real-time view of problems to enable fast resolution

DashboardsCUSTOMERS DOING COOL DASHBOARDS

• Sentry customers are creating summary dashboards

◦ Pull API data they want

◦ Customized to fit business needs

◦ Often updating every few seconds or minute

◦ Examples dashboards are Grafana or Datadog

◦ Cloud based options – Game changers! we’ve seen 2 week turns for a complete UI

◦ Overall health including telemetry from all vendors

COMPREHENSIVE VIDEO AND AUDIO MONITORING FOR CONTENT DELIVERY

• Linear transport streams over IP, QAM and ASI Monitoring

• Adaptive Bitrate Streams supporting HLS / DASH

Sentry Monitors:

Sentry and Aurora enables video providers to deliver content with optimum quality while reducing operational expenditures. Systems are available in Appliance, Virtual Machine and Cloud solutions.

Sentry and Aurora

• Automated QC of File Based Content

• Checks quality, compliance and syntax violations

Aurora Monitors:

ABR

What is a Media Factory?

• Accepts input content and delivers the revenue-generating deliverables to downstream services and devices

• May be a business in its own right, or a function within a larger facility

AMWA DEFINITION

Media Factory FunctionsVIDEO WORKFLOW

PACKAGETRANSCODEINGEST QCAUTHORING

• File, tape or film• Mezzanine format• Nearline storage

• Create multiple versions

• Re-mix audio• Add subtitles

• From mezzanine to distribution format(s)

• Deep check and/or spot check

• Compliance check

• Follows delivery specification(s)

• Include sidecar files

• Ready for playout

• Client deliverable

DELIVERY

MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT and WORKFLOW AUTOMATION

AURORA – FILE QC

Customer Needs – the Job to be DoneMEDIA FACTORY – FILE WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

29 January 2019

CORRECTION

FORMAT SUPPORT ENTERPRISE READY

QC ANALYSIS 

PERFORMANCE

API AUTOMATION

NEED TO BE ABLE TO PROCESS DIFFERENT FILE, WRAPPER AND 

CODEC FORMATS

REPAIR AUDIO, VIDEO, METADATA AND CONTAINER ERRORS IN THE FILE PACKAGE

NEED TO PROCESS FILES IN A  24×7 OPERATIONAL 

ENVIRONMENT

NEED TO DETECT VISUAL AND AUDIBLE ARTIFACTS WITH HIGH DEGREE OF CORRELATION TO 

HUMAN PERCEPTION

NEED TO BE FASTER THAN REAL TIME FOR SD, HD AND UHD/4K 

WORKFLOWS

NEED TO BE ABLE TO INTEGRATE INTO FILE‐BASED 

WORKFLOW

CLOUD READYNEED TO WORK IN CLOUD 

INFRASTRUCTURE – PRIVATE, PUBLIC OR HYBRID CLOUD

DELIVERY SPECNEED TO BE ABLE TO CHECK THE FILE AGAINST REGIONAL 

DELIVERY SPECIFICATIONS SUCH AS IMF, DPP, NETFLIX, AS‐10

What is a Delivery Specification?

• Document published by the receiver of program or commercial material

• Enables a smoother delivery from content provider to broadcaster

• Constrains the permissible file format(s), codec type, encoding options, track layout, etc.

• Sometimes include requirements for header/trailer presence

• Sometimes include quality checks

• Increasingly includes specifications for auxiliary files, such as program metadata (XML), poster images, and caption files

29 January 2019 34

Delivery Specifications baked in

Plus many moreOr make your own

21 February 2019

QC report

21 February 2019

• Formats for human readable online and offline viewing◦ HTTP◦ PDF

• XML for integration with MAM and Workflow Orchestration Engines

RDS

EC2 Instance

WindowsServerless App

Aurora on AWS MarketplaceARCHITECTURE

Controller VerificationUnit

Automation

WebUI

Browser

RESTAPI

SQLDB

29 January 2019

Media AccessS3

Bucket

Lambda Function

ML Services

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Tests

• Support for HDR10, Dolby Vision and HLG formats for HEVC, JPEG 2000 and ProRes video codecs

• Metadata shown in video attributes section

29 January 2019

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Tests

• Luminance graphs in Measurement Results section◦ Content Light Level (CLL) and Frame-Average Light Level (FALL) measured on a per-frame

basis and plotted on the time graph and distribution histogram◦ Visually compare measurements to MaxCLL and MaxFALL metadata

29 January 2019

Intelligent Decode for Faster Processing

• Many (48) metadata tests can return a pass/fail result immediately◦ Job can complete in about one or two seconds◦ Indicated in the template editor with an icon on the test header

◦ Very useful for a quick format check prior to detailed QC

• 19 other tests complete very quickly because they do not require a full video decode (e.g. CableLabs EBP, IMF Photon, Caption Dropout)

• Audio-only jobs will also complete very quickly because the video track is not decoded altogether

29 January 2019 FIN

RDS

EC2 Instance

WindowsServerless App

Aurora on AWS MarketplaceARCHITECTURE

Controller VerificationUnit

Automation

WebUI

Browser

RESTAPI

SQLDB

29 January 2019

Media AccessS3

Bucket

Lambda Function

ML Services

Software Defined Video Monitoring Solutions

For More Information on how these solutions can be deployed for you or your clients, call Geoff Bowen at 818-395-1860

Software Defined Video Monitoring SolutionsHOW DO WE MONITOR OTT DELIVERY IN THE CLOUD?

Thank You!