ALTICAST FLEXES ANDROID TV, HOSPITALITY MUSCLES AT IBC

Android TV and next-generation hospitality solutions that can open the doors to new service and revenue opportunities for pay-TV operators will highlight the Alticast exhibit at IBC 2016 September 9-13.

At Stand 1.F39 at the RAI Amsterdam, Alticast will premiere an Android TV system for pay-TV, including IPTV.  This demo highlights ambient UX technology that contextually improves the user experience, as well as an Intelligent Personal Assistant that can execute individual tasks or services.  Alticast also will be showing a hospitality solution that embeds guest automation services leveraging IoT systems, as part of its suite of enterprise IoT and media solutions.

In addition, Alticast will demonstrate products and services that are driving success for pay-TV operators today, including:

·       Alticast’s new hospitality UX , which demonstrates how a hotel guest can use voice commands to find salient info about their location including weather, nearby restaurant reservations, and VOD recommendations. This experience exemplifies a sophisticated, future-driven Alticast IoT framework.

·       A full entertainment experience with Android TV functionality, merging an operator based UX with the opportunity to access approved Android applications, as well as a new, unique ambient personalization experience.

·       Integrated media solutions that span cloud, devices and customers –allowing

pay-TV providers quickly to launch innovative complete solutions including dynamic UX and TV Everywhere over multiple devices with Cloud DVR.

                          

·      Cloud UI solutions that enable operators such as Korea’s KT to provide a next-generation user experience for existing and new devices. The Alticast solution also provides the ability to have personalized UIs for watching sports, kids shows and entertainment.

Media and industry analysts interested in meeting with Alticast executives at IBC 2016 should contact pspr@att.net to schedule a date and time.

IPTV Avoiding the Obstacles Ahead...

Multiple Pay TV operators are starting to provide video through IPTV infrastructures, and Alticast has published a couple of white papers that discuss the many considerations that need to be made as infrastructures are built out for a full transition to IPTV.

Early entrants like Sling TV can provide good insight to the challenges ahead as pointed out by Fierce Cable's Daniel Frankel in an interview with CEO Roger Lynch:

Lynch restated that the challenge for a live-streaming service like Sling TV is to overcome endemic technical problems associated with using the internet.

"If you were going to architect a network to deliver video, you wouldn't architect the internet the way it was architected," he said. "It wasn't architected for synchronous video delivery. And so a lot of effort goes into designing systems to counteract the way the internet was designed with its random discard of packets and things like that that happen in routers."

Read the rest of the interview to learn how Sling is now in 'Whack-a-Mole' mode to knock out the final issues.

QoS the key to IPTV shift

No matter how many dropped calls, bad connections or dead zones, there’s no denying that mobile telephony has eroded use of landlines over the past several decades.  In a new white paper from Alticast, Susan Crouse posits that a similar shift is priming the pump for a parallel shift in the television landscape.

 “IPTV Migration Strategies, Part II: The Household Infrastructure” looks at the in-home obstacles – including Wi-Fi inconsistencies, shared bandwidth and other problems – that operators need to overcome, and identifies Quality of Service (QoS) as the “lynchpin” in determining operators’ readiness to shift to IPTV.

The paper notes that younger viewers already are accepting video breakup, buffering and Adaptive Bitrate quality degradation in the name of any-device, anytime convenience, just as mobile callers have learned to put up with the inconsistencies of cell service. But that doesn’t mean Cable operators will accept degraded video quality, so while bandwidth is getting better and streaming is improving, operators are figuring out how they will deliver high quality video over an IPTV network as they transform their video delivery platform.

Ultimately, IPTV services can offer greater viewing flexibility, tools that allow consumers greater control over the viewing environment and “big data”-driven search and discovery and other new applications. Solving QoS issues can unlock the door to product and service innovations that can enable significant customer acquisition, customer retention and new product offerings expanding revenue opportunities for cable operators.

To download the white paper, follow this link.

Cable’s Shift to IPTV and New IoT Opportunities

For cable system operators seeking to take on OTT video competitors head-to-head, a shift to IPTV requires a balancing act between meeting existing consumer expectations and delivering new service enhancements.  In this video, our director of product management, Susan Crouse, envisions an IPTV future in which viewers can experience seamless, continuous viewing from one IP device to another as well as true “TV Everywhere” experiences in which authenticated content can be viewed without geographic market restrictions. Crouse outlines how the need to maintain service quality could spawn new IoT service opportunities that operators could offer to consumers, including “household firewalls” that could protect services and data and monitoring applications that would help consumers manage broadband usage within the home. 

Helping to Drive New Thinking at NAB

Written by Susan Crouse, Director of Product Management for Alticast US

When change comes to the television industry, one of the best places to spot it is at the annual NAB Show.  Driven in part by the growth of High Dynamic Range for 4K and 8K, this year’s event in Las Vegas was long on attendees (more than 103,000) and new products – including devices and software that enable content creation, editing and distribution for the higher-resolution video that is fast becoming the de facto standard. The most buzzed about demos were VR and drone displays that continue to take more floor space and draw the crowds with their great demos, and while drones are having commercial success, VR still has a long indefinite road ahead for broad commercial adoption.

In the Connected Media area, Alticast was among the innovative companies spotlighting innovative software solutions for addressing the burgeoning market for IPTV content delivery. There was no shortage of companies, new and old, providing OTT workflow services for the growing market of small and large content creators delivering video. In addition to workflow tools, there was a plethora of cloud-based streaming technology (often with encoding), CDNs specialized for media delivery, and search, discovery and recommendation solutions starting to leverage social media behaviors to develop more personalized results.

Interestingly, entrenched software products that provide services for cable are finding competition from start-ups providing similar functionality for IPTV/OTT operators. Their different video delivery perspective has led to a variety of fresh ideas: Business software is taking advantage of simpler models that integrate common Internet transaction companies like PayPal, and a number of companies are using Internet-based advertising models to hone targeted ad delivery.

The varying sources of new high-quality content are transforming the roadmap for content delivery and NAB is the place to see how tools are converging for both traditional pay-TV with OTT providers. Alticast’s proven ability to meet the needs of all constituencies opens the door to innovation and implementation around new technologies that are driving the industry forward.

CES 2016 Wrap-up

Drones, robots and autonomous cars notwithstanding, it was difficult to find standout announcements at CES, but there was a definite increase in the number of companies solving particular problems, as well as improvements in burgeoning technologies. For the cable industry, health monitoring is becoming more viable, not just within personal devices, but in new products that can provide richer and more technical interfaces for remote medical care. The industry still tip-toes forward in consideration of privacy and security, but each year it seems remote doctor visits and remote family care are becoming plausible, with hopes that in the future cable operators will securely offer this important service to their customers.

New IoT offerings in home automation were highlighted alongside others that integrate devices, protocols and dashboards within a single service. A challenge is the difficulty of standardization, given the existence of Z-Wave, ZigBee, and other protocols for sensor networking, as well as the emergence of new protocols, some of which are designed for specific applications. Regardless, home automation continues to grow at a rapid rate, with Samsung standing out for its integration of their SmartTV with home services.

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As expected 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) with High Dynamic Range (HDR) was everywhere.  This is good news for Operators like Videotron that, with the help of Alticast, already launched a 4K set top box.  There were also numerous announcements on content deals that will help accelerate UHD TV uptake. IPTV 4K delivery remains to be a challenge, the trick is ensuring enough continuous bandwidth over wi-fi or broadband for receiving this stunning content. Some solutions that deliver 4K content use Adaptive Bit-rate Streaming (ABR) which can fluctuate the resolution based on bandwidth availability, providing a non-optimal 4K experience. 

Virtual reality, a product of the 1980s, has come back with a vengeance, thanks to better and more accessible technology. Press reports suggest it will be a moneymaker, certainly for medical and training, but for entertainment content it falls prey to the same issues as 3D TV, requiring content that is expensive to produce and special viewing hardware. It will take time to see if it will proliferate beyond gaming-type applications.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

What does the future hold for these technologies?  In the months ahead, the market will separate the sizzle from the sustainable. For now, all of us can get back to doing what we do best -- innovate new products and enrich the lives of consumers. And, of course, look forward to the spotlight of CES 2017.