AWS Launches MediaConnect and almost gives us multicast

It’s Re:invent time, and Amazon have launched a new service to make video routing to the cloud reliable and easier to set-up.

A few weeks back I was at the brilliant DPP Leaders Summit, it was under the Chatham House Rule.1 There were some great speakers, and I particularly loved the exec who, to paraphrase, “If it doesn’t work without months of professional-services, THEN IT ISN’T AN ACTUAL PRODUCT.”2

Anyway one of the speakers was facing rebuilding their entire stack due to ownership changes, and wanted to do so in the cloud. They said “We need multicast and Precision Time Protocol”. Which I can understand, for playout or production applications, the need for those two is pretty clear.

It’s now Re:invent season, which is the point in the year when AWS tend to release a lot of their good stuff. And yesterday they unveiled a new media ingest service AWS Elemental MediaConnect.

It’s a managed service to get your video signals to/from/between your Amazon clouds.

This has historically been a pain: back when I was working on the Video Factory project we initially mooted a box in the cloud that we would send the signal to, and then that would fan out to both archiving and live streaming. This was hard to do, so we side-stepped the issue, and just rapidly uploaded the stream to S3 in consistently sized chunks instead. Later something was put in place to do the streaming, using something that I don’t think has been spoke about too much in public, so I shan’t detail here.

Anyway, this new service allows you to send content to/from an endpoint using standard RTP (with/without Forward Error Correction) or the more reliable but commercial Zixi protocol. The video has an Amazon ARN identifier, which then means that external accounts can have permissions to subscribe to the stream, the documentation says a ‘flow’ can have up to 20 outputs.

How are we going to use this?

  1. Contribution to streaming output: fire the video somewhere and you don’t have to know if/where it’s being used
  2. Contribution for programming: using few Amazon regions, broadcasters could very easily build a global contribution network to backhaul outside-broadcasts very easily
  3. Contribution from a Playout appliance, if your cloud playout outputs to an MediaConnect flow, then you can then output that flow to your broader distribution chain, allowing re-routing of things downstream.

It isn’t multicast within a VPC, it’s not PTP, I suspect the latency involved may be too great to allow it to be used to route between different stages in a virtual playout chain3.

MediaConnect does however simplify integrating cloud processing workflows by providing fixed points at the edges in and out of the cloud.

I’ll be interested to see how people use it.

  1. That it is a singular rule is one of those bits of pedantry I cannot let go of ↩
  2. This is probably a topic for another time, but the fact that so many enterprise vendors expect you to pay for their ‘product’ then explain that ‘oh, no, you can’t just use it out of the box even in a basic manner’ is a bit of a joke ↩
  3. I could be very wrong here, I don’t have a one of those hanging around to test ↩

Two Apps Better Than One?

Mixing Subscription and Transactional VOD in the same application can give a bit of a confusing user experience.

When Sky launched Sky Store, which lets you rent films, it felt unnecessary alongside their existing subscription services: Sky Go (for Sky TV subscribers) and Now TV (for everyone else). It seemed little more than an attempt to get extra space on Smart TV menus.

Since then though, LOVEFiLM has finally acknowledged its longtime parent Amazon. I churned from LOVEFiLM a while back1, but I’ve a few months left on Amazon Prime. This now gives me access to “Prime Instant Video” via the “Amazon Instant Video” app2.

It’s good because thanks to all the exclusive content deals Amazon made 3, I’m able to catch on the series that weren’t previously available to me.  4.

But, the Amazon Instant Video app mixes stuff that’s ‘free’, with stuff I have to buy or rent.  There are categories designed to help me filter; but if I search for a series directly, I’m back to the jeopardy of “free or not” after seeing a search result.

Netflix doesn’t have that: if I see it, I can play it. The logic of Sky Store becomes clear.

Yes, NowTV has three subscription tiers of Movies, Entertainment and Sport: but those are really clear facets. I know which of those I’ve paid for, so I search for an entertainment show, knowing I can watch it.

Multiple apps may be the online equivalent of grabbing extra shelf-space, but I can see the UX benefit in separating subscription from purchase & rental.

  1. And their come-back emails would not let me forget this ↩
  2. Brand recognition since the rebrand is apparently poor ↩
  3. Alongside all the non-exclusive deals both Amazon and Netflix have ↩
  4. I’ve yet to figure out the rights-deal that’s made the BBC series Miranda appear with 4OD branding in Amazon ↩

Goodbye TVC

On the day TVC closes for general operation, a little on the past and future of this unique building.

TVC

Disclosure: I’ve worked on-and-off for various bits of BBC for many years.

The closure of TVC is one of those left-brain/right-brain things: The logical “right-brain” spreadsheet lover in me looks at the old building, the amount of asbestos, the legacy cables and the fact that News, Sport & Childrens have all moved out and thinks that it’s the right thing to do.

Meanwhile the left-brain in me is screaming loudly “BUT IT’S TELEVISION CENTRE”, it’s a place of dreams, of wonder, where I was in a small room in the basement while they filmed Jools Holland above. A place I got lost deliberately at lunchtime just so that I wouldn’t get lost that one time I was running for a meeting.

The truth probably lies somewhere in-between; News being in West1, unified with world-service is a great thing for the output. BBC Worldwide and BBC Studios will be moving back in a few years. Studios 1-3 will survive.

So on this, the last day the building is still in general operation, I will think fondly of the past, and hope that post re-fit the building emerges leaner and all set for 21st century.

My friend wrote about his recreation of a famous moment: On Tap-Dancing at TVC.

Pessimistic about TV Apps

I spoke on Guardian’s Tech Weekly Today, about how I see the future for dedicated TV Apps somewhat lacking.

I was on an episode of Tech Weekly today (23 minutes in) talking about Connected TV alongside the head of the DTG, Richard Lindsay-Davies. I was perhaps a bit down on TV apps and wanted to expand on that a little, in the hope of being more nuanced.

I think that Video Apps on the TV video are great: I love using iPlayer and NetFlix on my TV/PS3/AppleTV far more than on my laptop. You can glance away, and glance back when something interesting happens, in the way you watch TV. You’re not cmd-tabbing through windows to try and find the iPlayer tab before the interesting bit ends.

The BBC Olympics application will let fans have access to nearly all the sports, not constrained by how many channels the BBC has – a useful extension and I think it will be popular. The Twitter app on my TV? Not so much, I used it once, and used it to say how awful sending that tweet was.

I really don’t think we’ll manage to have that many TV-only apps. No developer without lots of video (the Broadcasters, Netflixs and YouTubes of the world) is going to pick up a TV SDK – they’re going to learn Android or iOS programming. There’s already a lot of fragmentation in the TV space and billing is never going to be as easy, and lucrative, as on the mobile platforms.

I think that in the future we’ll see some of these phone/tablet apps throwing interesting graphics and content to the TV screen, like the scores at the end of a round. There’s scope for real innovation here, but it’s about feedback, not interaction.

The TV should be the easiest screen to get content on, you shouldn’t have to think about how you get content there: It’s about leaning back and relaxing. We tried ordering pizza via TV in 1998, it didn’t really work. Today we’d just do it from our tablet or smartphone.

Have a listen, let me know what you think, am I being too pessimistic?

Is Facebook Open Graph going to enable “proper” social TV

Facebook have given us a rich vocabulary to describe media consumption, have we just social TV better than the humble hash-tag?

A few months ago I blogged about hashtags, and how they were imperfect but mostly worked… One of my meaningless predictions was that “Services like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will provide ways to embed this metadata in posts”.

Today Facebook unveiled Open Graph at f8. I didn’t really pay that much attention until someone linked to a way to get the new profile quicker, which involved signup up to develop an app using the Open Graph actions.

At which point I realised I was staring at a simplified RDF: you have Objects, and Verbs.

Defining Verbs and ObjectsClicking through to define the objects you can define custom fields: both visible and hidden. The channel people are watching a show on, the episode number, the internal identifier to link back to it on the website. Give Facebook the data to bubble up insights like “5 of your friends are watching the XFactor”, but driven from data and not term-extraction from statuses.

Facebook always had the social network. Now it’s defined ways to create these events that have never been worthy of statuses, but have always been ready for Facebook’s insight.

It will be very interesting to see what the likes of GetGlue, iPlayer, Zeebox make of this. We’ve just been given a sensible way to aggregate realtime viewing activity.

Who’s going to be the first to populate it easily?

Big things are obvious, but sometimes smaller things niggle as much

While I love my Apple TV, I would love it more if it just triggered my TV to change channel when it powered up.

I love my AppleTV, it’s the easiest way I’ve got to get music playing on my TV, which is the way to get music through my stereo.

The only thing that could make this nicer would be if Apple more fully used some of the features of HDMI. While I’m not really a fan of HDMI, it does have some useful things in it.

My PS3 can trigger my TV to turn on, or to change input to display it through the use of HDMI’s Consumer Electronics Control1.

The AppleTV doesn’t send any signalling: meaning that every time I’m sat playing music from my Laptop or iPad, if my TV isn’t in the right state, I have to find the remote control (or even worse stand up from the sofa).

It’s minor. Totally minor. But when I get this gripe most days, and when I know the thing sat beside the Apple TV can do this, it’s annoying.

People notice big things that are wrong in products, and complain about them vocally – but small recurrent niggles also wear down consumer satisfaction. It’s the only thing I really don’t like about my Apple TV. I forgive it not playing non-iTunes content, and its lack of favourites on radio stations.

I know it’s unlikely, and I don’t even know if the hardware supports it, but it would be lovely if an option appeared in settings after an update “Change TV input when Apple TV starts”.

Pretty please Cupertino?

  1. Consumer Electronics Control signalling allows the device to prompt the TV, and also for the TV to send remote key-presses to be processed by the device – allowing me to control my PS3 with my TV. Controlling devices like that can end up more a confusing novelty for anything more than basic 5-point navigation ↩

On content consumption and twitter

The rise of the likes of twitter make what your friends are doing more relevant to when you watch television – how can broadcasters harness this to increase the incidents of “event tv”

Since I got back I’ve found myself watching far less television than when I went away, my laptop has replaced the telly as my “ongoing background distraction”. (Radio4 has also made a welcome return in that role)

The only things I really have as appointment televisions are some reality shows like the Apprentice and some other far crappier programming that for reasons of reputation I’ll not divulge – and the thing I’m enjoying is tweeting along with my friends.

Commercial broadcasters must love this, because suddenly I’ve a reason to watch live, and take in the adverts. The BBC has the Predictor for the Apprentice, but aside from a Myspace, I’ve not seen things like this for commercial channels.

Anyway, since my friends who watch this show aren’t watching tonight, I’ve no reason watch live and am timeshifting to zip through without the adverts.

Who’s going to the be first broadcaster to put up a suggested #hashtag at the beginning of a show?