Asia-Pacific Broadcasting (APB) Satellie Special Supplement 2016 | Page 12

2016 SPECIAL

How will your programmes
reach viewers in 2020?
The B2B transmission business is the mainstay of broadcast contribution and distribution,
and it is undergoing big changes in technology and markets. What will the programme
origination centre of tomorrow look like, and what new capabilities will it provide for
content owners in Asia-Pacific? Robert Bell, executive director of the World Teleport
Association, tells the APB Satellite Special more.
What are the trends shaping the future of broadcast
distribution right now?

Robert Bell: We just published a report called The
Teleport of Tomorrow, which gave me a chance to
ask CEOs and CTOs how they see their businesses,
technologies and operations changing.
The big change is in bandwidth. As 500Gb-800Gb of new
satellite capacity enter service from now through to 2017, it
is going to drive down prices so that the market can absorb
that capacity. Service providers are working to figure out how
to support more customers and services on less revenue per
customer while running profitable and growing businesses.
Most of this capacity will be in the new high throughput
satellite (HTS) architecture, which reuses frequencies
across hundreds of spot-beams. That is going to make
managing the network far more complex and challenging,
and requires levels of automation and partnering among
service providers that we have never seen before.
Will HTS satellites play a big role in broadcast
distribution?

Bell: Not in distribution, because wide-beam satellites
aren’t going away. There is still no more cost-effective
and reliable way to distribute video content to millions of
people than wide-beam satellite, and that isn’t going to
change, even in the age of the Internet.
Yahoo! was recently reported to have paid US$85,000
to one content distribution network (CDN) for four hours
of coverage of an American football game. Multiply that
by the dozens or hundreds of CDNs that would be needed
to cover a really big event like the World Cup or Super
Bowl, and it’s completely unaffordable. Online distribution
will have an important place, but the optimal distribution
network will always have a big satellite component.
Where HTS has a role to play is in contribution, and in

❝Satellite needs to be like
the cloud in five years’ time
— making everything simple,
flexible, affordable and very high
performance.❞
— Robert Bell,
Executive Director,
World Teleport Association
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the distribution of channels intended for one country or
territory, because of local tastes or cultural restrictions
for content. The narrow spot-beam architecture, with high
throughput at a low price, is a perfect fit there.
What new capabilities will service providers be able to
offer in the future?

Bell: Video-on-demand (VoD) is driven these days by
catch-up viewing and by binge-watching of programmes.
Today, people want to be able to do that on any screen.
Now, what information do you need to provide that VoD
service? You need to know exactly when the programme
started by frame. Who knows that? It’s not transmitted
with the video signal: the only place in the universe that
this information comes from is, the point of origination.
Our members originate a huge number of broadcast
channels. One of them is working on a way to send this
metadata along with the video signal and condition the video
signal in such a way as to make it easy to find. That makes
possible a frame-accurate service. They will mark the start
and end of every bit of programming precisely and encode it
into the metadata.
When they compress it, they insert an IDR frame at
every break point, which will allow it to be played from that
point, without reference to what came before it and without
de-compressing the video. When they process it for delivery
via Internet streaming, they segment the MPEG-2 transport
stream along those boundaries.
When a new programme starts, they automatically shut
down that segment and start a new segment with an IDR
frame. The manifest can then track every piece that plays
out a whole chann el. It lets you change out advertisements,
move them wherever you want. So, not only can they deliver
over satellite in this format, but also over the Internet —
and any service provider down the line who receives it can
do frame-accurate distribution.
Will these changes ultimately be positive or negative
for service providers and their customers?

Bell: Today’s satellite networks are like the terrestrial
networks of 10 years ago. They are made up of distinct,
point-to-point links. But in information technology today,
we are working in the cloud. Satellite needs to be like
the cloud in five years’ time — making everything simple,
flexible, affordable and very high performance. That’s the
challenge our members set for themselves. It is a tough
one, but it is going to be great for the industry and for its
customers in broadcasting.