Delivering universal TV services in a multi-network and multi-device world with DVB-I

Abstract

The TV landscape went through significant changes during the past decades. The traditional broadcast switched from analog to digital thanks to new modulation, transport and coding systems. In the meantime, internet brought new ways of experiencing TV services with more customization by creating the need of on-demand features, paving the way to the streaming world we know today. These ecosystems grown separately, with MPEG-TS centric broadcast application being developed by DVB/ATSC and broadband streaming applications being developed by GAFAM based on IP-protocols from IETF. This created a fragmentation in the audience in terms of usage (linear, on-demand), access-network (IPTV, broadcast, OTT & 4G-Lte/5G) and devices (TV, set-top-boxes, mobiles). Broadcasters and operators addressed this fragmentation by declining services in many flavors, leveraging various and non-homogeneous technologies which led to a complex video delivery infrastructure having a lot of redundancies. This increases the delivery cost significantly and represent an energetic waste in networks and datacenters. In this paper, a solution for universal TV service delivery is proposed, based on recently standardized DVB-I, and addressing OTT, IPTV and 4G-Lte/5G mobile networks. Recently, Versatile Video Coding (VVC) [1] has been added to the DVB toolbox as an enabler for new applications in the DVB ecosystem [2]. Beside, 3GPP-SA4 started characterization of video codecs for 5G applications, including VVC as a relevant compression technology [6]. VVC has been issued in mid-2021 and has been developed by JVET, a joint group of ITU-T and ISO/IEC. VVC has been designed to address a various kind of applications and formats through its design and provides around 50% of bandwidth saving compared to its predecessor HEVC [5] for a similar visual quality [5]. Thus, VVC is a relevant technology to address new use-cases including 8K, VR-360, gaming and augmented reality. Beside this multiplicity of codecs, the multiplicity of delivery network and devices brought new challenges. To address this fragmentation while maintaining the audience, DVB developed a new paradigm for media consumption in order to harmonize and make TV services universals: DVB-I [7]. DVB-I enables, through a centralized service-list, to access TV services in a network/device agnostic manner. The service list enables to describe in a universal way the access-networks and decoding capabilities, including prioritization aspects. This paper proposes a delivery architecture based on DVB-I enabling video services to reach any kind of devices (Set-top-boxes, smartphones, TVs), on various network coming from broadcast (DVB) to broadband (3GPP) worlds. The headend produces video bitstreams (HEVC/VVC) and packages the stream using Common Media Application Format (CMAF) [3] producing DVB-DASH compliant streams for delivery over IPTV, 4G-Lte, 5G and OTT. The DVB-MABR standard is leveraged as well as 5GMS in order to reach end-devices. A service list URL substation mechanism is proposed to address interoperability of DVB-I with DVB-MABR and 3GPP networks. Clients on smartphones and android set-top-boxes are demonstrated, embedding DVB-MABR client, DVB-I client and live VVC decoding open-source library [4]. To demonstrate the proposed approach and architecture, an end-to-end live demonstrator is provided and further detailed in the poster. The solution provides to operators a cost-effective manner of deploying universal services over multiple networks and devices. The bandwidth is optimized leveraging latest coding technologies (HEVC, VVC) while CMAF is used to unify packaging and enable low-latency delivery. DVB-MABR is implemented to optimize bandwidth over operators' network. These components are tight together by DVB-I in order to signal TV services in a network and device agnostic manner. Finally, a DVB/3GPP compliant player is proposed for any devices providing a consistent and high quality of experience.