[opendtv] =?utf-8?Q?Re:_[opendtv]_Re:_TV_Technology:_Half_of_Video_Streame? =?utf-8?Q?rs_Experience_âBuffer_Rageâ?Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2016 21:31:35 -0400
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 18, 2016, at 8:17 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
I wonder how much this has to do with the speed/quality of the last
mile broadband service.
As far as I can tell, it *may* have a lot to do with your broadband speed,
but it *should not*.
Like I said, within any given program, everything might stream just fine,
except for one ad. It's possible that the one problem ad is being transmitted
only in HD, and a link like ours can't stream it properly, but there's no
excuse for that to happen.
That could be an issue. Another possibility is stream switching; the ad
insertion server may be different than the program server. Each server may set
up the link independently; if buffering for the ad is not complete you might
get a glitch...
Reminds me of the good old days operating master control at several TV
stations; we would sometimes have to do local "roll overs" to cover network ads
that were not supposed to be show in our market. Timing was critical, and we
would typically genlock the station to the network. Sometimes this caused sync
glitches.
When you think about it, it is pretty remarkable what modern devices are able
to do with respect to integrating the local OS, HTML graphics (the web page
framework) and compressed video streams...
There may be other causes for these buffering delays. But if they do not
occur consistently, on everything you stream, but rather only certain content
and only on certain sites, then attributing the problem to broadband speed
doesn't make sense.
The level of complexity is non trivial. The fact that we generally do not see
problems with programs that are not interrupted by commercials, suggests that
once the link is established and buffering is properly set up, things are good.
Inserting commercials can be tricky. No problem if the program and commercials
are prepared as a synchronized stream before the stream is encoded. When we
began the DTV transition MPEG stream splicing was difficult and expensive - so
stations converted everything to baseband, inserted commercials via a
traditional master control switcher, then encoded the output on the way to the
transmitter.
Now we are seeing real time programmatic advertising - the typical web page is
built from multiple servers: the content we want from one server, and ads we
don't want from other servers. I'm seeing a lot of video streams dropped into
text based articles I am reading now.
As we learned last week, a feature of TVE is to insert local ads from your
ISP/MVPD, into streams originating from a "network" TVE server. Lot's of
technical challenges to make this work seamlessly...
Regards
Craig
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- » [opendtv] =?utf-8?Q?Re:_[opendtv]_Re:_TV_Technology:_Half_of_Video_Streame? =?utf-8?Q?rs_Experience_âBuffer_Rageâ?Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2016 21:31:35 -0400 - Craig Birkmaier