Video to Go

Much of what’s on TV today, particularly news and sports, is overrun with on-screen text. Whether headlines or sports scores, broadcast TV increasingly relies on complex 3D animations to whoosh text into frame and keep it dynamically updated.

The problem, though, is that what may look slick on TV often doesn’t translate to the mobile experience. Screen sizes are smaller, so text can become illegible, and bitrates are lower, so fast motion and moving graphics are often muddled and herky-jerky. Simply put, repurposing broadcast video straight to a mobile device will not work if you want the text and graphics to be readable.

But Norway-based Vizrt is offering another way to deliver text and graphics. Vizrt’s bread and butter is its high-end real-time 3D renderer used primarily by broadcasters to insert dynamic text and graphics over video. Today, they’re readying the launch of a new extension of their product into the mobile space: the Vizrt Multi-Platform Suite.

"When you’re presenting video and graphics in the same stream you have a very tough challenge in making that graphic readable," says Bernt Johannessen, SVP of U.S. Operations for Vizrt. "What we do is separate the two so the video stream is one thing and the graphic is localized onto the device you’re looking at so the graphic can be tailored to the resolution of that device."

Vizrt does this by splitting the graphics rendering out of the video and onto the device through a client download. "Every user will have a client on their device, and that client will communicate back and forth with the server," says Johannessen. "So we piggyback onto the actual hardware and utilize those features to present real-time, true 3D graphics."

When content creators build mobile experiences, they insert graphics just as broadcasters do, overlaying graphics onto video. Only now, "the player has the ability to adjust that graphic to fit onto whatever device wants to watch it," says Johannessen. And by combining their resolution-independent, vector-based graphics creation engine with the separation of video and graphics, "it enables you to get a really crisp, personalized experience for your device, which would be impossible to do if you embedded your graphic into the video stream," he continues.

While Vizrt does provide streaming video hosting services, they don’t tie their users to those services. "Where the stream comes from is not really that important to us. We do have a solution where we have a streaming server and can encode video and stream it out, but more commonly another vendor is used to handle the streaming video aspect of it," says Johannessen. "What you’d do is within the graphic you’ve created include a video box and then point that to a URL where your stream is located."

It’s important to note that this is a real-time product, enabling you to update graphics on the fly during a live stream; for example, keeping viewers up to date on the latest returns from election coverage. Additionally, data can be streamed both directions, enabling the creation of interactive graphics.

Most any device with an internet connection can utilize that stream within Vizrt’s player. Today the product is distinctly broadcast, but in the not-too-distant future Vizrt expects to expand their offerings further, leveraging the fact that clients will be installed on individual devices. "Eventually you won’t be restricted to a one-to-many distribution, but you’ll be able to go down and do much more of a one-to-one communication with end viewers," says Johannessen.

While most of Vizrt’s customers are broadcasters—and the Multiplatform Suite fits seamlessly into that existing workflow—this new product is one that any content owner looking to deliver real-time, high-quality graphics on mobile devices can potentially benefit from.

Harris Corporation—Over-the-Air TV Goes Mobile
DVB-H and MediaFlo are the two biggest names in mobile broadcast technology. Both are being deployed to various degrees, and both aim to enable national broadcast opportunities for content owners wanting to reach cell phones with their content.

But if Harris Corporation has its way, they won’t be the only games in town for long.

Harris supplies broadcast technology to local TV broadcasters across the country. Recognizing that their over-the-air customers are under siege on many fronts, they and LG Electronics have developed a product called MPH, which promises to allow local TV broadcasters to enter the mobile media game.

"The MPH is an in-band system that shares the channel with a broadcaster’s digital television signal using the same transmission platform," says Jay Adrick, VP of broadcast technology for Harris. This model is distinct from something like MediaFlo, which demands a separate transmission network on its own channel using a format that’s unique to their system.

Unlike other mobile video systems, "the devices we’re focused on include cell phones, but they also include things like in-car entertainment systems, PDAs, laptop computers, and other handheld and mobile receiving devices," says Adrick.

MPH doesn’t necessarily compete with DVB-H and MediaFlo, though. Harris envisions a potential future where MediaFlo might deliver video from national broadcasts, for which MPH could provide things like local news, weather, sports, and traffic, either as separate channels or simply replicating the local affiliate’s on-air TV signal, for example.

The number of channels a broadcaster can support will vary based on which TV signals they’re broadcasting. At worst, MPH will support 2–3 simultaneous mobile channels. But MPH can do more than broadcast mobile TV; it’ll also be able to allow for content to be pushed over the network and stored on mobile devices for future playback, somewhat similar to RSS, though it won’t support on-demand playback over the network. This mechanism may also be used for things other than video, like sending data such as maps to first responders during a crisis.While the company’s core customers are broadcasters like Sinclair and Dispatch Broadcasting Group local affiliates looking to expand their reach into mobile scenarios, Harris expects to see opportunities popping up through MPH whereby a broadcaster might lease access to channels to outside programmers.

MPH has been tested in pockets across the country and it’s supported by the Open Mobile Video Coalition, which represents more than 700 TV stations pushing for this technology. But full-fledged deployments are still a ways off.

Most broadcasters are shooting for a February ’09 launch, when the digital TV transition will free up analog spectrum that MPH can thrive in. LG Electronics is developing the MPH receiver chips now, and a whole family of new MPH-enabled devices are expected at CES in January.

Early adopters of the technology should begin deployment as early as the middle of next year.