It’s time to grab your NAB floor map and decide which technologies you want to see live at the show, April 16-21 in Las Vegas. Among your choices are:
• Akamai Technologies plans to demonstrate new capabilities at the show that its says can help improve overall performance of OTT video services and support growing demand for 4K and virtual reality content. Accelerated ingest, latency reductions and predictive delivery will be among the highlights.
Akamai’s accelerated ingest capabilities are designed to minimize the amount of time live video streams take to reach the Akamai CDN from their origination point. This faster transport is enabled through a combination of user datagram protocol (UDP) based delivery and dynamic encoder to entry-point mapping (DEEM), which provides improved throughput and automatically optimizes entry-points based on current Internet conditions. Accelerated ingest is among several enhancements to Akamai’s Media Services Live delivery solutions. The company says show attendees can see how it is minimizing the time between content capture and playback via in-booth demonstrations showing live OTT workflows from acquisition to end-user viewing devices.
Akamai is also highlighting predictive delivery capabilities that aim to improve viewing experiences through instant startup of high-quality/high-bit rate video with no buffering. Available as a white-labeled application or as part of a suite of modular, client-side SDKs, the technology allows on-demand content to be pre-positioned and stored on mobile and in-home devices, overcoming the inherent challenges of delivering video over the radio access network and Internet.
In addition, Akamai’s NAB Show exhibit will allow visitors to physically “walk through” 4K OTT workflows and see how the company’s technology and services can help broadcasters deliver exceptional online video experiences. Demonstrations will focus on acquisition and ingest; cloud-based processing and delivery; monitoring and reporting; and playback.
• Alticast will use the confab to discuss how KT Skylife, Videotron’s Illico and other services are leveraging the company’s middleware, UI enablement and other areas to drive new user experiences that can increase subscriber engagement and value. AltiView 3 builds on the AltiView product family, “enabling elegant and sophisticated content discovery and bringing a fresh approach to television engagement,” according to the company.
Alticast also will highlight its Android-based set-top solutions that it says provides operators with increased functionality and versatility, while building solutions for the transition to all-IP networks. Combined technologies from Alticast, S & T and UniSoft also will be featured that enable broadcasters to deliver ATSC Interactive applications, including a new generation of ITV services and advanced advertising applications.
• Beamr will be demonstrating H.264 and HEVC content adaptive optimization and encoding solutions at NAB next week. Visitors to the Beamr and Vanguard Video booths will be shown how their recent collaboration works for video imaging, encoding and optimization. The companies’ proposition is said to offer a delivery roadmap for high dynamic range (HDR) video solutions, including workflow content tools and front end encoding software solutions to power next-gen entertainment.
• Imagine Communications introduced Selenio One, a unified software-based platform that reportedly offers service providers and content distributors with the ability to control, manage, scale and evolve current and future compression operations and capabilities across multiple target applications. It is scheduled for commercial availability in June, but attendees at NAB Show 2016 can see a demonstration at the company’s booth.
Designed to handle a spectrum of compression activities and based on a modular software architecture that reportedly enables the platform to continuously scale and adapt to new business requirements, Selenio One is said to provide media companies with the potential to consolidate all of their compression capabilities into a single, future-proof platform.
By supporting the full spectrum of distribution technologies on a single platform, the solution offers a transition platform for video service providers that are evolving their services to support hybrid distribution models, according to Imagine. Initially shipping with support for MPEG-2 and H.264 transcoding and statistical multiplexing, the software-based solution is optimized to address the compression requirements of cable operators, IPTV and satellite TV providers.
• Concurrent will showcase an integrated content delivery solution targeted at broadcasters and Internet streaming providers at the upcoming show. Concurrent and igolgi’s joint solution solution is said to make it easier for customers to launch direct-to-consumer video streaming services over the public Internet by combining encoding, transcoding, just-in time packaging, digital rights management, scale-out storage, and streaming into “a simple, cost effective solution offering.”
The technology employs igolgi’s 100% software-based transcoding platform and advanced codec to process live and file-based content, create adaptive bit rate bundles, and publish them automatically to Concurrent’s UpShiftT unified origin server. Concurrent’s origin server supports just-in-time repackaging and DRM encapsulation of HTTP adaptive bit rate content, enabling video to be streamed simultaneously to many different viewing devices over public or private content delivery networks (CDNs). As a software-based solution, the system is cloud-native, scalable, and fully upgradable, enabling customers to introduce features like 4K, 8K, and high dynamic range (HDR) as required to meet future requirements.
• DEV Systemtechnik, a Quintech company, announced that its Archimedes L-Band matrix switch now comes with an integrated spectrum analyzer (ISA) option. The switch with ISA is said to gives operators the ability to easily and flexibly analyze their RF and Satellite signals via a graphical user interface over Ethernet, or the solution’s multi-touch display. RF signals at both the output of the matrix, and from separate equipment can be analyzed without the need for additional rack space or measurement equipment, according to the company, which will be at NAB in Las Vegas next week.
“This makes the product ideally suited for systems operators in headends, since signal analysis and optimization operations can be readily performed with an ‘always-available’ built-in spectrum analyzer device,” Oliver Herzberger, strategic technology manager at DEV Systemtechnik, says.
