24 CONTENT FOCUS Live Streaming
workflow to enable that. For security purposes most of the social networks are now looking at adding a primary and secondary stream which will have seamless cross over. “If a live stream of a major brand goes down, then it’s serious. It really is not just looking at the technical solution, it’s looking at the areas of risk. You have to sit down in a planning meeting from a content point of view and a technical point of view.” Most often, the issue with bandwidth is purely making sure that it is strong enough to handle a high-quality stream. “Many clients tend to forget about the importance of a strong Internet connection when it comes to getting live content osite,” says Ward. “They assume that a strong Internet connection for things like web browsing means that it will be the same for live streaming, but this isn’t the case. They may have a speed of 100MB, but when a building full of people are draining the bandwidth, it often gets squeezed to considerably lower. We get around this when handling a stream by physically sending an engineer to test a venue’s broadband signal.” Then there’s the added worry of the rise of live 360 video in 4K. On the one hand, shooting 360 footage in 4K is clearly beneficial for the medium, increasing the quality and therefore the viewer experience, but it requires more bandwidth. You will want to ensure the average viewer is able to enjoy a stream even without a 15MB connection. Part of this involves degrading streams for those who lack the bandwidth to stream 4K. FACEBOOK WILL AUTOMATICALLY KILL A STREAM IN UNDER TEN SECONDS IF IT DETECTS ANY COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL COPYRIGHTPERMISSIONS Whilst most people can appreciate the importance of getting the right permissions to use copyrighted material, many are not aware of how long this process can take, and how sensitive social networks are to any form of copyright infringement. Both Facebook and YouTube have sophisticated monitoring systems to detect copyrighted material, and if something isn’t cleared properly, you can bet they will know about it. YouTube oers a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy, but Facebook will automatically kill a stream in under ten seconds if it detects any copyrighted material which the streamer does not have the rights to use. “The problem is, these systems are so sensitive that even a copyrighted piece of music played accidentally could take a stream o air,” says Ward. “I’ve had situations in the past where everything is copyrighted, but someone has driven past in a car playing a radio track, and I’ve got a strike on YouTube. Copyright is really a big issue at the moment, often not looked at and not cleared properly by the brands. It takes time. Facebook takes five or six days to clear a music track for use on a stream. If you’re trying to do something really quickly, you may hit problems.”
RUN LOLA RUN StreamAMG streams football matches using its proprietary encoder Lola. Clients include UK’s Derby Country and Ukraine’s Shakhtar Donetsk
CASE STUDY: STREAM AMG DELIVERS CHAMPIONSHIP FOOTBALL StreamAMG takes charge of the live web streaming for a string of European soccer clubs, including Shakhtar Donetsk and AC Sparta Prague, as well as institutions such as sessions of the UK Supreme Court and the European Council, which unites a single video feed with 32 audio feeds. The company also works with a growing number of Championship football clubs in the UK, including Derby County, to stream home matches internationally. In all these cases, StreamAMG takes the produced feed and passes it through its own low-latency encoder, Lola. “We have two installed on-site at each football club we work for – a primary and a backup,” explains Duncan Burbidge, CEO of StreamAMG. “We get handed the SDI feed from the OB supplied by the club. We take in that single SDI feed and create MPEG Dash and HLS versions and apply a digital rights management licence within Lola. We might also provide a personal stream for the club owners (Lola can handle 18 streams at once).” All this activity is monitored remotely from StreamAMG’s network operations centre in Stratford, London. The feeds are ingested to the NOC from satellite and fibre links either direct or via London’s BT Tower along with ISDN (all audio comms still use this old-school telephony) before being rebroadcast via CDN. “The ability to monitor all encoders simultaneously is a big plus,” says Burbidge. “We’re doing HD standardly at 1080p. We could go UHD at 4-6Mbps but we are not seeing demand for it. UHD would get more expensive and, given the kind of money you can generate from advertising and pay-per-view, a big chunk would be taken out by bandwidth required for UHD.”
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