Live Streaming On Unlimited Bandwidth?

I spent two days last week in Lisbon, Portugal attending the Fiber to the Home Conference, which is in its seventh year. Headed by the Fiber to the Home Council Europe, the show centers on at very-high-speed adoption rates in Europe.

As in the United States, the roll-out of fiber to the home (or to the MDU—multiple-dwelling unit—or apartment) is spotty. Heavy concentrations in the urban areas are eclipsed by a lack of availability in the rural areas. Both Europe and the US are chasing Asia, where 100 Mbps connections to the home are commonplace.

The disparity between Asia and the rest of the world is vast. Two examples:

First, the government of South Korea recently stated its intent to become a gigabit nation. Already the country has approximately 96% penetration with 100 Mbps fiber connections. South Korea will accomplish the goal of providing every household with 1 Gbps connections, right about the time that the UK reaches a similar penetration at 2 Mbps connectivity to each home. Yes, that’s a 500% difference in speed.

Second, the Australian government has been rolling out a national broadband network (NBN) initiative, what one of its senators calls the biggest public works build-out in Australia’s history. While it is in the planning stages of rolling out 6,000 km of fiber broadband backbone to cover over 395,000 mainland Australians, the real work is being done on the island of Tasmania.

“By July, the first three towns in this neglected area will be connected with 100 Mbps fiber,” the senator said in a recorded speech at the Fiber to the Home conference. “Industry is also working with government to map out services, and we are committed in the mid-term to change the competitive landscape, so we are in discussions with Telstra [Australia's incumbent, former government, telecommunications company] to address the competitive marketplace.”

So what does this have to do with live event videography? Turns out quite a bit.

In my last blog post, I talked about the potential of ATSC mobile TV multicasting, and how our industry might consider providing services to fill that bandwidth with content.

For fiber, a similar offering might also be possible, especially since many of the fiber providers understand the need to deliver 3–5 simultaneous video streams into a household. After all, the average household has that many televisions and is accustomed to having several of them on at the same time, all viewing different content.

Danny de Korte, Marketing Manager of United Content Distributors, was part of a panel discussing this very topic. As part of the Daily Media delivery solution, United Content Distributors feels the model for web-based video can be translated to the television.

“The Revolution is Now” was the title of de Korte’s presentation, and he talked about how they’ve gone so far as to build their own set-top box based on feedback on other set-top boxes, since users were having difficulty accessing content on limiting user interfaces.

“The set-top box needs to be free of cost to consumer,” de Korte said, “which means we need to have partnership structured with content partners. We’ve added a few of the big names – flickr, Google Maps, MovieMax, twitter and YouTube—but we’re open to more.”

United chose to use the Apprico application platform, which is a product of Philips New Media Labs that was showcased at the 2009 International Broadcast Conference (IBC) on several set-top boxes.

An extensible architecture, Apprico handles live streams with ease, including those that might want to charge (as in a pay-per-view or controlled-access model not unlike the same services on a cable box).

So what might those live streams look like? To answer that, a panelist on the “FTTH – It’s More Than TV” panel talked about what he’d like to see into homes in the near future. “We want to have 9 Mbps for full HD and assume that content for medium-size screens at 3-4 Mbps,” said Ferry Kesselaar, Manager Technology, NOS, the Netherlands’ public broadcaster.

“We now offer up to six live feeds on our website,” he continued. “For the Vancouver Olympics. we’ve got six live feeds online, It’s quite simple to add new themed channels online around particular content—much easier to do than in the traditional television world—and we’re expanding to the Internet TV on Philips and Samsung monitors.

Besides the Internet-enabled monitors, NOS also offers live feeds—including all 6 from the Olympics—on Nokia and iPhone mobile handsets. In the end, Kesselaar said the multi-screen philosophy has yielded significant benefits: “There’s a saying around NOS,” he said, “which is ‘It doesn’t matter where they find you as long as they can find you’.”