5th FOKUS Media Web
Symposium

Development of multiscreen applications made easy

The Multiscreen Application Framework (MAF) is a proof-of-concept implementation of upcoming web standards and technologies related to key multiscreen features such as Messaging, Discovery, Application Launch, Content Presentation, Signaling, Synchronization, Push and Pairing of devices. MAF makes the development of multiscreen applications across different domains like Mobile, Smart TV, Smart Watch and In-Vehicle Infotainment faster and easier. The core of the framework is based on web technologies and enables access to underlying components using standard interfaces like W3C Presentation API and HbbTV 2.0 Companion Screen API. Each MAF component provides implementations for state of the art protocols and technologies like SSDP, mDNS, Physical Web, Airplay, Miracast, DIAL and UPnP and offers Software libraries and tools that can be easily integrated in applications on different platforms like Android, iOS, Cordova, LG WebOS TV, Samsung Gear, Android Wear and Node.js. Some MAF components provides also backend services that are accessible via REST interfaces and WebSockets.

Our solution supports displaying web content like HTML pages and videos on different types of presentation devices like HbbTV 2.0 Terminals, Chromecast and Apple TV and allows to control the playback using smart watches without the need to develop different applications for each of the addressed platforms. Furthermore, our solution enables the dynamic insertion of video advertisements according to the VAST standard with second screen support in both classic linear and on-demand TV content across a multitude of devices and platforms via DVB, HbbTV, and MPEG-DASH.

Solutions for the delivery of HTML5 based protected video

The FAMIUM DASH and DRM solution contains a comprehensive set of standard as well as cutting-edge features on content creation side. It is meant for early technology evaluation and interoperability testing. MPEG-DASH content can be created via a simple Web-interface, which allows different profiles of MPEG-DASH to be created (e.g. HbbTV 1.5, HbbTV 2.0/DVB-DASH, DASH264, DASH-HEVC) in order to support different platforms. Ad-Insertion is enabled by inserting DASH-specific signals (xLink, EventStreams) into the streams. Incoming SCTE 35 cue messages can analyzed and converted to DASH signals.

Our solution is also compatible with CENC for multi-DRM support and is integrated with a PlayReady license server. All these features are supported on the client side using a HTML5 DASH player (dash.js).

• End-to-end demonstration of a DASH ecosystem and HTML5 adaptive streaming

• Integration with Microsoft PlayReady Server and CENC support

• Ad-Insertion using SCTE, xLink and events

• Support for UHD/4k

• Next generation transport over HTTP/2 and WebSockets

Connect and build – two steps to create IoT applications

The capability to monitor and control more and more appliances via the Internet in the course of advancements regarding Internet of Things (IoT) will bring new challenges to consumers and companies due to an increasing complexity. In a home where every switch can be accessed via a central control unit and switched electronically, the user could benefit from a high degree of automation. One approach is to define conditional statements (or rules). For example “every time I switch on the light next to the entrance the light in the hallway and bathroom should be activated automatically”.

We present glue.things as solution to create IoT applications for TVs, wearable computing devices, APIs, services and all of the consumer and business tools. In two easy steps glue.things enables to create IoT applications:

1) Easily connect all your devices to glue.things to make them available on the Web. Gather data and use glue.things RESTful API to push and pull XML or JSON encoded data. Manage your devices and data using glue.things Web communication protocol.

 2) Configure data streams and set access policies for them. Use the glue.things visual composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup data streams from all your devices. Grab the output of any data stream as JSON and use it in your application. Define rules and condition statements for data streams in your applications. Deploy and run your IoT application as Node.js application.

• Supports common protocols to connect devices such as MQTT, REST, Web Sockets, JSON
• Web-based dashboard for IoT application developmentIntegrates multiple platforms for device and data management
• Browser-based flow editor for wiring together devices, APIs and Web services
• Supports conditional statements which are triggered based on changes to devices and Web services
• Multi-tenant flow processing support with permission checking
• REST API for pushing, retrieving and wiring data flows

Smart Home Button – Application show case

Our solution demonstrates how to leverage the functionality of the growing number of smart devices in our homes with one button. The button creates a shortcut to favorite actions at home. The user can control all smart home units with a smart and easily accessible button. The smart home button enables various scenarios: control lights, who is at the door, call your favorites, play music. Here we demonstrate how we can use the Smart TV as just another display for notifications that are provided from your smart button at the door. Imagine getting a notification about who just rang on your door on the TV, including a live picture of your guest. The smart home button, in combination with our smart home manager glue.things, can control many different Web services and smart devices. These and other scenarios are very easy to setup with glue.things that makes it easy to connect smart devices with one another and create useful combinations of their functionality.

VoD and Live TV premium content to Windows 10, Android and iOS devices, using MPEG-DASH

Driving DASH industry adoption for VoD and Live TV premium content protection: Starting from Common Encryption applied to MPEG-DASH we are able to playback streamed content in the browser without plugins via W3C HTML5 Media Source Extensions (MSE) and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). This demo showcases playback of Microsoft PlayReady DRM protected media content on various platforms, including Chromium browser and Opera SDK on Linux with an integrated PlayReady CDM, which is based on the Open Content Decryption Module (OCDM). Furthermore, Microsoft’s Edge browser (on Windows 10) adds playback support for HEVC encoded MPEG-DASH streams, which enables efficient 4k/UHD streaming.

Multiscreen video systems

Thomson Video Networks has a long history of delivering superior video quality at the headend for very demanding applications such as satellite broadcasting where bandwidth is scarce, and the ViBE VS7000 multiscreen video system is another example of Thomson’s outstanding compression performance. Picture quality becomes crucial for the end user as the average display size used to watch Over-The-Top (OTT) content continues to grow.

Multiscreen TV

Delivering high-quality video certainly helps to reduce churn and increase customer loyalty, but compression performance is also about increasing the HDTV eligibility footprint on ADSL networks, whether IPTV is delivered through a managed multicast network or through adaptive bit rate encoding (ABR).

Compression performance is also beneficial to operators working with Content Delivery Network (CDN) companies because they are usually charged per GB for the transport over a CDN network. 

Hence, a lower bit rate for a given video quality will directly translate into OPEX savings. The Thomson ViBE VS7000 video system encompasses Thomson’s next-generation compression platform for outstanding picture quality in an all-IP environment, with live broadcast-quality encoding.

By integrating the new HEVC compression standard into the ViBE VS7000, Thomson Video Networks is also paving the way for HD and Ultra HD content on any kind of device and any kind of network.

• Superior picture quality for all screens, from smartphones and tablets to smart TVs
• Flexible distribution solution for simultaneous delivery to IPTV, Mobile phones, tablets & PCs
• Support of all major industry codecs and formats including MPEG transport streams, Adobe® Flash®, Apple® HTTP Live Streaming, Microsoft® Smooth Streaming, MPEG-Dash and HEVC
• Easy integration with other subsystems such as CDNs, CAS, DRM
• Full automatic redundancy management across complete system
• Versatile architecture with smooth upgrade path to future compression or streaming formats
• Easy workflow customization and service provisioning
• Scalable from 1RU server to multiple blade server chassis

Cloud-based transcoding and streaming as-a-service

bitmovin is specialized in adaptive streaming solutions based on MPEG-DASH and Apple HLS, which can be used to offer live as well as on demand content in highest quality (HD, UHD/4K) without stalls and startup delays. Therefore, bitmovin offers its cloud-based transcoding and streaming platform bitcodin to generate the content for adaptive streaming via the Internet as well as its bitdash MPEG-DASH players to consume this content in the best quality (up to 100 % higher media throughput as other solutions). Using bitmovin’s products it’s possible to have one technology and solution for multiple platforms (Web, TV, Smartphone, etc.) and to use cost-effective HTTP delivery infrastructure, which both helps to reduce costs.

Features and Assets

• OTT adaptive streaming solutions based on MPEG-DASH and Apple HLS
• Cloud-based transcoding and streaming as-a-service
• bitcodin High Speed Cloud Transcoding of 4K and beyond: Multiple times faster than realtime
• bitdash MPEG-DASH and HLS Player: Based on HTML5 with a Flash fallback
• Live-Streaming as well as VoD Transcoding and Streaming

Open Source MPEG-DASH Player Framework

The dash.js project is an open source project to build a powerful, robust and spec-compliant MPEG-DASH player framework. The framework utilizes the MSE and EME extensions within modern browsers to provide adaptive segmented playback with full control over buffering, switching and scheduling logic. dash.js also serves as the DASH Industry Forum’s reference player, so it draws upon the latest in implementation guidelines and has broad support for DASH-AVC/264, DVB-DASH and HbbTV manifests. dash.js has a robust EME implementation providing support for CENC DRM implementations across different browser environments. The BSD-3 license allows commercial use at no charge and code contributions, road-map prioritization and feedback are open to the community.

Interactive Video – A new way of storytelling

BitTubes GmbH is a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS. Our technology allows the viewer to interact with objects within a video and access any kind of supplemental information, such as websites, documents or other multimedia content. We will showcase how interactive video is created and distributed through cloud based media services to any type of device ranging from PCs, Smartphones, Tablets to Smart TVs. 

The HTML5 based solution offers players and tools for both, media companies as well as individual users to create, manage and share interactive content through object-based media annotations, comments and supplemental information across Social networks custom made media campaigns.

We are proud to introduce suitest, an ambitious and exciting digital testing suite. Suitest enables QA specialists to quickly and easily test connected TV apps across a wide range of connected devices from anywhere in the world.

Faulty QA can destroy months of development. Before suitest, testing across multiple platforms and devices took hundreds of hours. Suitest allows a user to define test cases based on a ready app, using the web interface. Suitest records your interactions with the app and the app’s states at each step, and can then perform parallel tests on hundreds of devices in a matter of minutes. 

Suitest does not use simulated testing. All tests are conducted on authentic devices.

Features and Assets:

• A streamlined application to remotely test Connected TV applications across hundreds of connected TVs and set-top boxes on the market
• Cuts costs by saving hundreds of man-hours on QA testing
• Suitest uses remote “device zoos” to eliminate the need to purchase expensive devices for testing purposes
• Drastically reduces the likelihood of human error
• Provides essential feedback to manufacturers about the compatibility, functionality and speed of applications on their specific devices, and can compare this across their own – and their competitors’ – devices
• By streamlining the testing process remotely, suitest allows applications to enter into the market faster – ahead of the competition

PlayReady-compliant CDM for HTML5 content protection

The Open Content Decryption Module (OCDM) is a Content Decryption Module (CDM) compliant to W3C Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification to be used with HTML5 based browser environments. OCDM source code is now available on GitHub.

The Open Source Content Decryption Module has been developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS with the aim to be suitable and interoperable for as many systems and providers as possible. The code is accessible for everyone on GitHub.

It is intended for OEMs, DRM providers, system integrators and browser vendors looking to enable playback of premium video content via EME. The CDMi itself contains most CDM logic and is a c++ wrapper for the embedded platform DRM. This implementation offers interoperable HTML5 based protected video delivery, DRM interoperability based on Common Encryption (CENC) and MPEG-DASH support.

• Interoperable HTML5-based content protected video delivery

• EME-compatible Open Source CDM

• Compliance with CDMi specification

• Compatible with Microsoft PlayReady

• Integration with Chromium/Blink

Creating HbbTV apps made easy

The HbbTV Application Creation Toolkit – HAT – presents a CMS for creation of HbbTV applications, which allows content creators without specific technical skills to build interactive TV applications and is developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS’ Competence Center Future Applications and Media (FAME). So far HAT covers a simple themes collection which can be accessed through the editor UI. Here the content editor can choose from different layouts and designs regarding the background and color scheme. The layouts include basic modules, broadcast or IP-video, text, image and live blog. The live blog includes an external live blog coming via social media APIs. We see a great potential in the uptake of programme-related HbbTV apps creating new markets for developers and technology providers.

HbbTV Application Creation Toolkit Editor

HAT provides an editor/CMS with a set of GUI templates that can be filled with text, images audio and video content via a responsive user interface for desktop and mobile devices alike. The content palette can be extended by customized modules, e.g. for display of social-media feeds.

 The toolkit includes a collection of templates and modules, allowing control of all application elements including broadcast source, IP video source, images, text, picture gallery, social media feeds, popups and overall application layout. When creating more than one page, a navigation menu is automatically generated.

Benefits

• Fast and easy creation of programme-related HbbTV applications

• Provides a set of App templates tailored to the TV screen

• Content can be added via an easy to use web interface

• Supports HbbTV app developers by offering templates and modules like interactive video and photo gallery, text, menus, social media and companion screen support

Cloud based Monitoring of DVB-T/T2 networks

Linked data for service quality and experience gain in DVB-T/T2 networks. Digital service broadcast suffers from misconfigurations at the source and dynamically changing signal propagation conditions. The lack of feedback leads to undisclosed service degradation and decreased experience. Selective professional monitoring is costly and often not enough to cover large areas. 

Our Broadcast Probing System offers cloud-based continuous near real-time monitoring of broadcast networks by utilizing massively distributed low-cost probes. Controlled either individually or in groups the probes are securely instructed to execute scheduled jobs like scanning, tuning and transport stream inspection. The collected spatiotemporal data links RF characteristics and stream quality (e.g. Signal levels, TS packet errors), multiplexed tables (e.g. AIT/HbbTV, EIT/EPG) and AV dumps to allow for live analysis, evaluation and integration into monitoring environments. 

Features and Assets:

• Feedback channel for DVB-T/T2 networks to detect potential misconfigurations and service degradation 

• Near real-time monitoring of digital service broadcasts (RF level, TS level, AV level, ETSI TR 101 290)

• Remote control of individual and groups of low-cost probes (Android, Raspberry Pi)

• Execution of scheduled probing jobs and secure instant access (PKI, TLS)

• Analysis and evaluation on live and historical linked data (JSON-LD)

• Integrates with existing monitoring systems and offers a comprehensive API (SNMP, MQTT, REST/HTTPS).