LTE Asia: transition from technology to value... or die

I am just back from LTE Asia in Singapore, where I chaired the track on Network Optimization. The show was well attended with over 900 people by Informa's estimate. 

Once again, I am a bit surprised and disappointed by the gap between operators and vendors' discourse.

By and large, operators who came (SK, KDDI, KT, Chungwha, HKCSL, Telkomsel, Indosat to name but a few) had excellent presentations on their past successes and current challenges, highlighting the need for new revenue models, a new content (particularly video) value chain and better customer engagement.

Vendors of all stripes seem to consistently miss the message and try to push technology when their customer need value. I appreciate that the transition is difficult and as I was reflecting with a vendor's executive at the show, selling technology feels somewhat safer and easier than value.
But, as many operators are finding out in their home turf, their consumers do not care much about technology any more. It is about brand, service, image and value that OTT service providers are winning consumers mind share. Here lies the risk and opportunity. Operators need help to evolve and re invent the mobile value chain. 

The value proposition of vendors must evolve towards solutions such as intelligent roaming, 2-way business models with content providers, service type prioritization (messaging, social, video, entertainment, sports...), bundling and charging...

At the heart of this necessary revolution is something that makes many uneasy. DPI and traffic classification, relying on ports and protocols is the basis of today's traffic management and is becoming rapidly obsolete. A new generation of traffic management engines is needed. The ability to recognize content and service types at a granular level is key. How can the mobile industry can evolve in the OTT world if operators are not able to recognize a content that is user-generated vs. Hollywood? How can operators monetize video if they cannot detect, recognize, prioritize, assure advertising content?

Operators have some key assets, though. Last mile delivery, accurate customer demographics, billing relationship and location must be leveraged. YouTube knows whether you are on iPad or laptop but not necessarily whether your cellular interface is 3G, HSPA, LTE... they certainly can't see whether a user's poor connection is the result of network congestion, spectrum interference, distance from the cell tower or throttling because the user exceeds its data allowance... There is value there, if operators are ready to transform themselves and their organization to harvest and sell value, not access...

Opportunities are many. Vendors who continue to sell SIP, IMS, VoLTE, Diameter and their next generation hip equivalent LTE Adavanced, 5G, cloud, NFV... will miss the point. None of these are of interest for the consumer. Even if the operator insist on buying or talking about technology, services and value will be key to success... unless you are planning to be an M2M operator, but that is a story for another time.

All bytes are not created equal...

Recent discussions with a number of my clients have brought to light a fundamental misconception. Mobile video is not data. It is not a different use case of data or a particular form of data, it is just a different service. The sooner network operators will understand that they cannot count, measure, control video the same way as browsing data, the sooner they will have a chance to integrate the value chain of delivering video.

Deep packet inspection engines count bytes, categorize traffic per protocol, bearer, URL, throttle and prioritize data flow based on rules that are video-myopic. Their concern is of Quality of Service (QoS) not Quality of Experience (QoE). Policy and charging engines decide meter and limit traffic in real-time based on the incomplete picture painted by DPIs and other network elements.

Not understanding whether traffic is video (or assuming it is video just based on the URL) can prove itself catastrophic for the user experience and their bill. How can traffic management engine instantiate video charging and prioritization rules if they cannot differentiate between download, progressive download, adaptive bit rate? How can they decide what is the appropriate bandwidth for a service if they do not understand what is the encoding of the video, what are the available bit rates, if it is HD or SD, what is the user expectation?

Content providers naturally push a content of the highest quality that the network can afford, smartphone and tablets try and grab as much network capacity available at the establishment of a session to guarantee user experience, often at the detriment of other connections / devices. It is wrong to assume that the quality of experience in video is the result of a harmonious negotiation between content, device and networks.
It is actually quite the opposite, each party pulling in their direction with conflicting priorities.
User experience suffers as a result and we have started to see instances of users complaining or churning due to bad video experience.

All bytes are not created equal. Video weighs heavier and has a larger emotional attachment than email or browsing services when it comes to the user's experience of a network's quality. This is one of the subjects I will be presenting at Informa's Mobile Video Global Summit in Berlin, next week.

For or against Adaptive Bit Rate? part III: Why isn't ABR more successful?

So why isn't ABR more successful? As we have seen here and here, there are many pros for the technology. It is a simple, efficient means to reduce the load on networks, while optimizing the quality of experience and reducing costs.

Lets review the problems experienced by ABR that hinder its penetration in the market.

1. Interoperability
Ostensibly, having three giants such as Apple, Adobe and Microsoft each pushing their version of the implementation leads to obvious issues. First, the implementations by the three vendors are not interoperable. That's one of the reason why your iPad wont play flash videos.Not only the encoding of the file is different (fMP4 vs. multiplexed), but the protocol (MPEG2TS vs. HTTP progressive download) and even the manifest are proprietary.This leads to a market fragmentation that forces content providers to choose their camp or implement all technologies, which drives up the cost of maintenance and operation proportionally.MPEG DASH, a new initiative aimed at rationalizing ABR use across the different platforms was just approved last month. The idea is that all HTTP based ABR technologies will converge towards a single format, protocol and manifest.

2. Economics
Apple, Adobe and Microsoft seek to control the content owner and production by enforcing their own formats and encoding. I don't see them converge for the sake of coopetition in the short term. A good example is Google's foray into WebM and its ambitions for YouTube.

4. Content owners' knowledge of mobile networks
Adaptive bit rate puts the onus on content owners to decide which flavour of the technology they want to implement, together with the range of quality they want to enable. In last week's example, we have seen how 1 file can translate into 18 versions and thousand of fragments to manage.Obviously, not every content provider is going to go the costly route of transcoding and managing 18 versions of the same content, particularly if this content is user-generated or free to air. This leaves the content provider with the difficult situation to select how many versions of the content and how many quality levels to be supported.
As we have seen over the last year, the market changes at a very rapid pace in term of which vendors are dominant in smartphone and tablets. It is a headache for a content provider to foresee which devices will access their content. This is compounded by the fact that most content providers have no idea of what the effective delivery bit rates can be for EDGE, UMTS, HSPA, HSPA +, LTE In this situation, the available encoding rate can be inappropriate for the delivery capacity.

In the example above, although the content is delivered through ABR, the content playback will be impacted as the delivery bit rate crosses the threshold of the lowest available encoding bit rate. This results in a bad user experience, ranging from buffering to interruption of the video playback.

5. Tablet and smartphone manufacturers knowledge of mobile networks
Obviously, delegating the selection of the quality of the content to the device is a smart move. Since the content is played on the device, this is where there is the clearest understanding of instantaneous network capacity or congestion. Unfortunately, certain handset vendors, particularly those coming from the consumer electronics world do not have enough experience in wireless IP for efficient video delivery. Some devices for instance will go and grab the highest capacity available on the network, irrespective of the encoding of the video requested. So, for instance if the capacity at connection is 1Mbps and the video is encoded at 500kbps, it will be downloaded at twice its rate. That is not a problem when the network is available, but as congestion creeps in, this behaviour snowballs and compounds congestion in embattled networks.

As we can see, there are  still many obstacles to overcome for ABR to be a successful mass market implementation. My next post will show what alternatives exist to ABR in mobile networks for efficient video delivery.

For or against Adaptive Bit Rate? part I: what is ABR?

Adaptive Bit Rate streaming (ABR) was invented to enable content providers to provide video streaming services in environment in which bandwidth would fluctuate. The benefit is clear, as a connection capacity changes over time, the video carried over that connection can vary its bit rate, and therefore its size to adapt to the network conditions.The player or client and the server exchange discrete information on the control plane throughout the transmission, whereby the server exposes the available bit rates for the video being streamed and the client selects the appropriate version, based on its reading of the current connection condition.

The technology is fundamental to help accommodate the growth of online video delivery over unmanaged (OTT) and wireless networks.
The implementation is as follow: a video file is encoded into different streams, at different bit rates. The player can "jump" from one stream to the other, as the condition of the transmission degrades or improves. A manifest document is exchanged between the server and the player at the establishment of the connection for the player to understand the list of versions and bit rates available for delivery.

Unfortunately, the main content delivery technology vendors then started to diverge from the standard implementation to differentiate and control better the user experience and the content provider community. We have reviewed some of these vendor strategies here. Below are the main implementations:

• Apple HTTP Adaptive (Live) streaming (HLS) for iPhone and iPad: This version is implemented over HTTP and MPEG2 TS. It uses a proprietary manifest called m3u8. Apple creates different versions of the same streams (2 to 6, usually) and  breaks down the stream into little “chunks” to facilitate the client jumping from one stream to the other. This results in thousands of chunks for each stream, identified through timecode.Unfortunately, the content provider has to deal with the pain of managing thousands of fragments for each video stream. A costly implementation.
• Microsoft IIS Smooth Streaming (Silverlight Windows phone 7): Microsoft has implemented fragmented MP4 (fMP4), to enable a stream to be separated in discrete fragments, again, to allow the player to jump from one fragment to the other as conditions change.  Microsoft uses AAC for audio and AVC/H264 for video compression. The implementation allows to group each video and audio stream, with all its fragments in a single file,  providing a more cost effective solution than Apple's.
• Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) for Flash: Adobe uses a proprietary format called F4F to allow delivery of flash videos over RTMP and HTTP. The Flash Media Server creates multiple streams, at different bit rate but also different quality levels.  Streams are full lengths (duration of video).

None of the implementations above are inter-operable, from a manifest or from a file perspective, which means that a content provider with one 1080p HD video could see himself creating one version for each player, multiplied by the number of streams to accommodate the bandwidth variation, multiplied by the number of segments, chunks or file for each version... As illustrated above, a simple video can result in 18 versions and thousand of fragments to manage. This is the reason why only 4 to 6% of current videos are transmitted using ABR. The rest of the traffic uses good old progressive download, with no capacity to adapt to changes in bandwidth, which explains in turn why wireless network operators (over 60 of them) have elected to implement video optimization systems in their networks. We will look, in my next posts, at the pros and cons of ABR and the complementary and competing technologies to achieve the same goals.

Find part II of this post here.

Google vs. rest of the world: WebM vs H264

After the acquisition of ON2 technologies, as anticipated, Google has open-sourced its video codec WebM (video format VP8 and audio format Ogg Vorbis encapsulated in Matroska container) as an attempt to counter-act H.264.

The issue:

In  the large-scale war between giants Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and Google, video has become the latest battlefield. As PCs and mobile devices consume more and more video, the four companies battle to capture content owners and device manufacturers mind share, in order to ensure user experience market dominance.

Since video formats and protocols are fairly well standardized, the main area for differentiation remains codecs.

Codecs are left to anyone's implementation choice. The issue can be thorny, though, as most codecs used to decode / encode specific formats require payments of license to intellectual property owners.

For instance, the H.264 format is managed by MPEG LA, who has assembled a pool of patents associated with the format, from diverse third parties and is licensing its usage, collecting and redistributing royalties on behalf of the patent owners. H.264 is a format used for transmission of videos in variable bandwidth environment and has been adopted by most handset manufacturers, Microsoft, Apple and Adobe as the de-facto format.

If you are Google, though, the idea of paying license to third parties, that are in most case direct competitors for something as fundamental as video is a problem.

The move:

As a result, Google has announced that they are converting all of Youtube most watched videos to WebM and that the format becomes the preferred one for all Google properties (Youtube, Chrome...).

The purpose here, is for Google to avoid paying royalties to MPEG LA, while controlling user experience by trying to integrate vertically the content owners, browser and device manufacturers codec usage.

It does not mean that Google will stop supporting other formats (flash, H.264...) but the writing is on the wall, if they can garner enough support.

The result:

It is arguable whether WebM can actually circumvent MPEG LA H.264 royalty claims. There are already investigations ongoing as to whether VP8 is not infringing any of H.264 intellectual property. Conversely, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether MPEG LA practices are stifling competition.

In the meantime, content owners, device manufacturers, browser vendors have to contend with one new format and codec, increasing the fragmentation in this space and reducing interoperability.

Mobile video 101: protocols, containers, formats & codecs

Mobile video as a technology and market segment can at times be a little complicated.

Here is simple syllabus, in no particular order of what you need to know to be conversant in mobile video. It is not intended to be exhaustive or very detailed, but rather to provide a knowledge base for those interested in understanding more the market dynamics I address in other posts.


Protocols:

There are many protocols used in wireless networks to deliver and control video. You have to differentiate between routing protocols (IP), transmission protocols (TCP & UDP), session control (RTP), application control (RTSP) and content control protocols (RTCP). I will focus here on application and content control.

These protocols are used to setup, transmit and control video over mobile networks

Here are the main ones:

• RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) is an industry protocol that has been created specifically for the purposes of media streaming. It is used to establish and control (play, stop, resume) a streaming session. It is used in many unicast on-deck mobile TV and VOD services.
• RTCP (Real Time transport Control Protocol) is the content control protocol associated with RTP. It provides the statistics (packet loss, bit transmission, jitter...) necessary to allow a server to perform real-time media quality control on an RTSP stream.
• HTTP download and progressive download (PD). HTTP is a generic protocol, used for the transport of many content formats, including video. Download and progressive download differentiate from each other in that the former needs the whole content to be delivered and saved to the device to be played asynchronously, while the later provides at the beginning of the session a set of metadata associated with the content which allow it to be played before its complete download.
• Microsoft silverlight, Adobe RTMP and Apple progressive streaming. These three variants of progressive download are proprietary. They offer additional capabilities beyond the vanilla HTTP PD (pre-encoding and multiple streams delivery, client side stream selection, chunk delivery...) and are the subject of an intense war between the three companies to occupy the mindset of content developers and owners. This is the reason why you cannot browse a flash site or view a flash video in your iPhone.

Containers:

A container in video is a file that is composed of the payload (video, audio, subtitles, programming guide...) and the metadata (codecs, encoding rate, key frames, bit-rate...). The metadata is a set of descriptive files that indicate the nature of the media, its duration in the payload. The most popular are:

• 3GPP (.3GP) 3GP is the format used in most mobile devices, as the recommended container for video by 3GPP standards.
• MPEG-4 part 14 (.MP4) one of the most popular container for internet video.
• Flash video (FLV, F4V). Adobe-created container, very popular as the preferred format for BBC, Google Video, Hulu, metacafe, Reuters, Yahoo video, YouTube... It requires a flash player.
• MPEG-2 TS: MPEG Transport Stream is used for broadcast of audio and video. It is used in on-deck broadcast TV services in mobile and cable/ satellite video delivery.

Formats
Formats are a set of standards that describe how a video file should be played.

• H.263 old codec used in legacy devices and applications. It is mandated by ETSI and 3GPP for IMS and MMS but is being replaced by H.264
• H.264, MPEG4 part 10, AVC is a family of standards composed of several profiles for different use, device types, screen sizes... It is the most popular format in mobile video.
• MPEG2 is a standard for lossy audio and video compression used in DVD, broadcast (digital TV, over the air, cable, satellite). MPEG2 describes two container types: MPEG2-TS for broadcast, MPEG-2 PS for files.
• MPEG4 is an evolution of MPEG2, adding new functionalities such as DRM, 3D and error resilience for transmission over lossy channels (wireless for instance).  There are many features in MPEG 4, that are left to the developer to decide whether to implement or not. The features are grouped by profiles and levels. There are 28 profiles or part in MPEG 4. A codec usually describe which MPEG-4 parts are supported. It is the most popular format on the internet.

Codecs

Codec stands for encoding and decoding a media stream. It is a program that has the ability to decode a video stream and re encode it. Codecs are used for compression (lossless), optimization (lossy) and encryption of videos. A "raw" video file is usually stored in YCbCr (YUV) format which provides the full description of every pixel in a video. This format is descriptive, which requires a lot of space for storage and a lot of processing power for decoding / encoding. This is why a video is usually encoded in a different codec, to allow for a better size or variable transmission quality. It is important to understand that while a container obeys strict rules and semantics, codecs are not regulated and each vendor decides how to decode and encode a media format.

• DivX Proprietary MPEg-4 implementation by DivX
• WMV (Windows Media Video) - Microsoft proprietary
• x264 a licenseable H.264 encoding spoftware
• VP6, VP7, VP8... proprietary codecs developed by On2 technologies, acquired by Google and released as open source