Tokyo Video Tech #1 Report (en)
Reported by @nuchi https://www.facebook.com/nuichi
Photograph by Yuji Hanamura
It was November 2018, online video technology focused meetup group Tokyo Video Tech just started.
On 12 December 2018, 1st meetup event #1 Uite the world was held supported by Forecast Communications and SPARROWS. Even though every short notice, 27 people attend. From 4 sessions and bash, it was very meaningful and exciting time they shared.
Event page : https://www.meetup.com/Tokyo-Video-Tech/events/256935179/
# 11 — Opening remark
Organizer Takesato Hayashi(Takesato) taking Opening remark part.
Magic number 11 displayed on the screen then he said “What it the 11?”. Everyone goes silence. Takesato, then start talking gently.
“Last year I had a dinner with friends came from San Francisco. Actually he is a video engineer. He is talking about Meetup with passion. That was my first experience to hear about “Meetup”. At first I couldn’t understand at all.” Then Takesato realize, that is kind of workshop who has interest and have deep knowledge of online video technology and want to share. There’s no geographic boundaries of company and services. San Francisco is the origin of Video Meetup named “SF Video Technology”.
Following SF, variety of cities and countries start Meetup. Sydney, Portland, Denver, Boston, New York, Seattle, Taipei, Paris and Barcelona. Takesato introducing various Meetup pages.
“So, magic number 11 is our number. We are 11th online video technology focused meetup group Tokyo Video Tech”.
Takesato stated, Tokyo Video Tech use Meetup (https://www.meetup.com/) as definitive web portal system. Like SF Video Technology, many video tech meetups use this service even though it is not popular here in Japan yet. I think it is very good choice.
Plus, as an information portal Tokyo Video Tech create definitive account on Medium(https://medium.com/@tokyovideotech). I think we’ll have Tokyo Video Tech #2 and #3, this Opening remark is the their starting point to recall. They are already united with various cities and countries.
# STREAMING MEDIA WEST 2018
First speaker Takahiro Nakatsuka(Nakatsuka), Forecast Communications.
The session titled “I went to STREAMING MEDIA WEST 2018”, he reported with many photo and slides.
STREAMING MEDIA WEST is paired conference with EAST which is held in New York every year. Starting from 2005 and one of the major conference for streaming industry. Sponsor company like Disney, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Adobe, Intel, NASA and more, a lot of famous companies line up.
This year held from November 12–13 for three days event. The numbers are.
1,000+ Attendees
100+ Speakers
40+ Solutions
Size of the conference is middle, only dedicated for streaming. Hotel is located in front of Huntington Beach, I could feel very California atmosphere through many photo taken by Nakatsuka.
He has strong two reason to attend this conference,
- To learn circumstances of overseas video distributions.
- To find out new solutions, products and technologies.
Especially second one, it is hard to find good place to get these information at one place in Japan. Then it must be worth to attend, I think.
Nakatsuka explained key point of workshops and keynotes with many slides. I am not familiar with streaming hardware, but these slides covered many technical elements such as equipment, composition, encoder, cloud structure and codecs. I feel the impression every workshop was showing off speakers hands quite a bit. Participants of this session seemed to be absorbed in listening Nakatsuka’s comments on devices.
Then, quoting words from 2nd days keynote speaker Mr. Warren Schlichting, Executive Vice President and Group President, Sling TV, Nakatsuka said.
“In US there’s 87 million traditional TV subscribers and 7 million OTT subscribers. Anyway, this share will be reversed.”
I am feeling same way. So, it will be reversed in near future. If the time has come, conference like STREAMING MEDIA WEST could provide us cutting edge streaming technologies, techniques, business model, deep knowledge is needed to survive this world.
# Demuxed 2018
Next speaker Hiromine Kanazawa(Hiromine), Forecast Communications.
He is also co-organizer of this event and managing online video platform development project.
The session titled “Unite the DEMUXED”, he explained the event held in San Francisco on October named Demuxed with many photo and slides like Nakatsuka.
I think many of you are not familiar the name of Demuxed. Hiromine introduced as “The conference for video engineers ”. This conference covers very wide range of topics starting from encoding to playback. No other conference could cover streaming technologies like this one. It is world’s leading conference.
Demuxed started from 2015 with 9 speakers, 128 attendees and 2 sponsors. Since then, it is held every October. Every times the reputation of it is increased, they attract video engineers around the globe. This year held from October 17–18 for two days event. The numbers are.
515 Attendees
31 Speakers
17 Sponsors
As Takesato explained on his opening remark, origin of Demuxed is based on activities of SF Video Technology. Core member come from QoE solution provider MUX<https://mux.com/>, SF Video Technology has 1,300+ members and provide monthly meetup.
This time, Demuxed was placed on cutting edge co-working space “BESPOKE COWORKING”. Just in case you are not heard this place, please take a look this short video <https://vimeo.com/229786353/>. In Tokyo, we have variety of shared office now like WeWork. Hiromine said “It’s concept/design, I believe BESPOKE COWORKING is forefront runner. Very fascinated working environment.”
Hiromine said his motivation of participating Demuxed (That’s unbelievable! Attending with this self-expenses…) . “No product promotion there, it is the place to learn engineer learned”. Then he point out following 4 items.
- All speaker require submission first. Demuxed organizer evaluate topics then select the speaker. It guarantee your meaningful times with it.
- No speech slot to be sold. Same rule applied for sponsors, too. Never worry about unnecessary sponsor session.
- Participants list is not shared with others including sponsor. So, no product promotion or head hunting related e-mail is coming to you after the event.
- This is the only place I could learn a lot topics about online video technologies. Very useful. I could hear the direct voices of famous OTT service provider’s engineers.
So, his points explained. It is not only online video technology. This solid and 100% pure engineering focused event is very hard to find in Japan. We should note this stance of conference like Demuxed are attracting many engineers and keep expanding.
Then Hiromine start talking about his favorite session titled “Lessons learned from streaming the World Cup live in UHD with HDR” by Billy Romero & Thomas Symborski, Fubo.tv. Structure of aws, definition of how to Encoder/packager and so on. Normally this levels of information is under confidential, but they are talking about very details with openly. In addition that, they shared actual issues, video monitoring solution for linear streaming with names of the products. Finally they displayed actual data of end users device share and stats data of FIFA World Cup 2018. At the end of his session, Hiromine stated. “Demuxed provide video archives via YouTube and Twitch. I strongly encourage everyone to watch this.”
Demuxed archives: <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIc_DkRxo9UgUSTvWVNCmpA/feed>
# SportsPro OT SUMMIT
Last speakers of today is Katsuyuki Sakai (Katz), SPARROWS.
Katz is also co-organizer of this event, the session titled “I was there SportsPro OTT SUMMIT, piracy activities of sports broadcasting forefront”, he was just back from Madrid couples of days ago. This is very unique session, he revealed behind the scene of online streaming business/criminals/countermeasures.
Katz said, “It is very good combination sporting fan and digital contents delivery.” For example, world of TV Broadcasting, they only broadcast major sports programs or Final match of the tournaments. But with digital, you can watch matches of your favorite team from qualification.
There’s actual data about Olympics. The digital coverage of 2014 Sochi Olympics exceeded the coverage of TV. For digital delivery more than 60 thousand hours compared to TV broadcasting 42,000 hours.
Beyond that, 2016 Rio Olympics digital coverage was 218,000 hours. That was 2.5 times longer than 2012 London Olympics.
Organizer of SportsPro OTT SUMMIT “SportsPro Media Ltd” was founded 2008 in UK. They are organizing 5 different type of Sporting conferences like SportsPro OTT/SportsPro Live/The Brand Conference/Black Book Motorsport Forum/SP Talks. This time, Katz chose business side of sports OTT world event “SportsPro OTT SUMMIT (Madrid, Spain)” and he was there two days from November 28–29. This year, there’s 600+ attendees (more than doubled last year), 32 sessions. They provided 4 sessions dedicated for Piracy. This means high levels of attention from stakeholders.
At first, Katz raised fundamental question “Why people do piracy?”. There’s a reason for both End User side and Piracy Business side.
End User: I want see what I want. I do not want to pay for the fee.
Piracy Business: No license fee/production cost required, “Very High Profitable”.
Piracy has a history. It used be a hack and counterfeit of B-CAS but now mainstream are changed, from soccer stadium they are broadcasting via Facebook Live and YouTube Live without any approval from license holders. Shooting high definition TV or PC then retransmitting. Actually, there are more than 1,000 free apps(Piracy) of Liga Española on app store.
When Katz told out “as a countermeasure against the rights holder side is”, attendees suddenly holding pens.
1st one is DRM (Digital Rights Management). By using DRM, only authorized people can decode contents. And, some DRM provides additional functionalities like disabling external outputs, stop rendering when detecting screen capturing software.
2nd one is watermarking. By using watermarking, it can represent who is pirating the content and how much of content are pirated by that person.
There’s three ways of overlaying watermark on video.
One is to overlay watermark on server side. It is robust, but it requires special facility on server side and it costs a lot.
The 2nd is preparing A/B variants of video chunks and interleaving video chunks in a client-specific sequence in order to encode a unique watermark pattern for each subscriber. Due to the nature of interleaving, it takes long time to detect subscriber ID from the pattern, and the ID cannot detect properly if the pattern is modified by the piracy company.
The last way is to overlay watermark on client side. Obviously, client needs to be robust because non-watermarking video is delivered to the client.
A large-scale piracy happens at the national level. In fact, beoutQ who is said to be backed by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates pirates the genuine contents delivered through beIN who is established by Qatar.
A digital piracy is done at IP base, and people can watch pirated contents at anywhere on the globe. Plus, comparing to dramas or movies, there’s less language barrier with sports match.
The robustness of protection of the pirated contents is usually poor, and other piracy companies pirates the weakly-protected pirated contents.
In general, watermarking is used to track “who pirated the content”. But, with large-scare piracy, tactics used by crackers are sophisticated. They obstruct watermarking or destroy the evidence of piracy facility remotely.
In the case of beoutQ, beIN found at least two evidences; the payment history of the CDN beoutQ uses contains the name of CEO of the piracy company, the software in STB contains the name of the piracy company.
But, it usually takes so long time to find evidences when a piracy is done at large scale.
In summary, it’s always challenges to fight against piracy when you want to deliver sports contents via digital media.
Finally,
Tokyo Video Tech #1 Unite the world last session, the standing bash. All speakers and attendees are talking about deep online video technologies which normally hard to talk with someone.
I think, this Tokyo Video Tech is just a newly born baby. My impression is that like other countries Video Tech meetups, this could unite online video technology engineers and others, going to settle as an opportunity to strengthen each other.
Slides
- Streaming Media West 2018(LA) by Takahiro Nakatsuka
https://www.slideshare.net/takahironakatsuka/smw2018-report20181211 - DEMUXED 2018(San Francisco) by Hiromine Kanazawa
https://www.slideshare.net/hirominekanazawa/unite-demuxed-2018-tokyo-video-tech-2018 - SportsPro OTT SUMMIT(Madrid) by Katsuyuki Sakai
https://www.slideshare.net/onflow1/2018-11-sports-pro-ottsed-pdf2/onflow1/2018-11-sports-pro-ottsed-pdf2
