This issue's highlights
DVB Announces Webinar On Man-In-The-Middle Solution
Commercial Module Group For Virtual Reality Formed
UHDTV In Russia
DVB Technologies To Shine At BroadThinking 2017
Public Service Broadcasters Investigate VR, AR And MR
DVB Speakers' Corner
Standardization Activities
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A not to be missed webinar on DVB's solution for the prevention of Man-In-The-Middle attacks.
DVB Announces Webinar On Man-In-The-Middle Solution

Today's connected Smart TVs that support interactive services have more in common with the computer in your home than the television sets of yesterday. This means that they could be at risk of being manipulated via the broadband interface. In addition, academic research has demonstrated that such an attack can also be initiated via the terrestrial RF input. In demonstrated cases, Man-in-the-Middle attacks were performed by overriding the terrestrial broadcast signal and placing malicious codes in the TV software which enabled the hijacker to control, for example, the webcam and then stream the pictures from the living room back to the internet. 
 
Just a few years ago such an attack on the broadcast channel would have required a truckload of expensive broadcast equipment. Now, with ongoing miniaturization, the necessary devices have become inexpensive and are easily transported. It must be said, that for the time being, there is little real-world evidence of such attacks. However, after these came to light, DVB immediately commenced its work on a comprehensive and appropriate solution to help prevent Man-in-the-Middle attacks in Smart TVs supporting interactivity. The culmination of this work came in the form of updates to TS 102 809. The DVB Steering Board approved the updates on 16 February. 
 
The updated version of TS 102 809 (currently available as DVB BlueBook A137) enables broadcasters to add authentication information to the signaling of their interactive services. In essence, the television receiver learns the legitimate transmission on each channel and will then identify and reject any subsequent tampering. This provides an extra layer of defense for TV sets and their owners in addition to manufacturers' activities to improve their products security.

You can now learn all about the new security features in a webinar by on 9 May. The webinar and Q&A time should take around 1 hour. You can send your questions by the Webex chat function during the webinar and questions will be answered in a few blocks during the webinar. No need to register.  Join Nigel Earnshaw (BBC R&D, UK), Nick Birch (S&T, UK) and  Robert Esterer (IRT, Germany) to learn all the details of the recently updated solution to avoid Smart TV Man-in-the-Middle attacks. 
 
Don't forget to set a reminder for 9 May at 15:00 CEST (Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris time).

For further information and to join the webinar use this link.
Virtual Reality Commercial Module Group Formed

With the promise of deeply immersive and engaging experiences for consumers, VR has not just become one more increasingly hot topic in the industry. VR goes far beyond the usual question of audiovisual formats and technology. It is also about unleashing new creative possibilities, opening new areas from a narrative perspective, and transforming the way a viewer can experience live-action. 

VR is a fantastic opportunity for content creators, and of course for those who deliver
not just content but experiences to audiences . Advances in technology will support the enablement and development  of this opportunity. Moreover,  in order to succeed from a commercial perspective, it is crucial that the industry comes up with standards, including for distribution. That's what the DVB CM-VR group is all about - to define and agree on commercial requirements for the distribution of VR experiences to audiences through DVB services.
 
VR is a tremendously complex topic. In order to move forward, DVB will approach the work in phases. The work will take place as the market continues to evolve and core technologies are developed and standardized by SDOs, for instance at MPEG. For this purpose, the CM-VR group will continuously run an activity aiming to ensure it is in sync with both the market and state of the art technology development, similar to the work that has been done in the context of the CM-VR Study Mission Group, which resulted in a significantly valuable deliverable for the industry.
 
With the conclusion of the Study Mission, a first phase was launched with a focus mostly on VR/360 experiences delivered to untethered devices, i.e., those which can fully implement a VR/360 playback. The objective for the CM-VR is to indentify stable commercial requirements for this first phase by IBC 2017. These will be approved by the DVB Commercial Module and Steering Board, before being passed to the Technical Module to begin its guidelining work. The CM-VR will then move on to phase 2, focusing on tethered devices, such as those with different playback paradigms (e.g., decoding on one device, rendering on another one). The objective for phase 2 is to have stable requirements ready by the CES 2018, for approval by the DVB Commercial Module and Steering Board. I n the longer term, the CM-VR group will also look at advanced VR experiences including, for instance, 6-degrees-of-freedom.

Ludovic Noblet, Director Hypermedia Labs at b<>com, is convening the new group until a chair is elected on 21 June. Ludovic has significant experience with DVB on 3DTV, HEVC, UHDTV and immersive audio.
UHDTV In Russia

Let's start with some statistics. According to J'son & Partners, at the end of 2016 the share of UHD TVs in Russia was 1% with more than half of them 48-55 inch. Most Russians choose smaller screen sizes simply because larger screens don't fit in the living room of a typical Russian apartment. The advantages of 4 К resolution compared to HD are practically indiscernible with the smaller screens and it is because of this that the vast majority of TVs purchased are still HD (91% in 2016). There is no reason to expect that this will change until there is a significant amount of UHD content available in HDR and HFR formats.

For now, HDR content is available only in the library of Megogo - the second largest Russian and CIS online cinema. It provides about 10 HDR titles. There are other online cinemas that have added 4 K movies to their libraries but they are not HDR.

To date, Tricolor-TV is the only TV operator to launch a UHD service on a commercial basis. It launched its UHD package in the autumn of 2014 and now offers four channels that are available for the same price as the basic package. There are at least three reasons that can be seen for this move. Firstly, it has helped to reaffirm Tricolor-TV's leadership in the Russian DTH market. Secondly, it has encouraged their subscribers to migrate to services utilizing HEVC compression. To help reduce the churn rate, the company is migrating to the newer compression formats gradually, following a sophisticated strategy. Thirdly, the multi format broadcasting approach, with the early introduction of 4K /HEVC services, goes towards ensuring constant STB upgrades, which is good news for General Satellite, Tricolor-TV's technical partner and, to some extent, parent company.

At present, the other operators do not seem to see any commercial advantages for UHD implementation. At the beginning of April, NTV Plus launched 2 UHD channels at no extra charge. The channels can only be received by 4K TVs with a smart-card. Shortly before introducing its 4K package, NTV Plus had introduced an advanced hybrid STB but it does not support 4 K . So it seems that UHD was launched simply to show that NTV Plus is on trend. However, NTV Plus plans to launch another channel in the future. MTS, the only Russian operator with both a DTH and CATV network, launched a 4 channel on its DTH network in February and  has recenlty added the channel to its CATV network. Like NTV Plus, MTS did not include 4K functionality in its new HEVC STB. The declared goal of the launches was to estimate the number of subscribers with 4 K TVs in large cities and in the countryside.

The first CATV operator to implement 4 channels was Ufanet, known for its technological and business innovation. Last autumn, Ufanet launched and produced a 4K relaxation channel (4K Home). The channel is now also available via two other operators, including NTV Plus.

With regard to the other operators in Russia, most of them agree that UHD is the inevitable future of television, but so far prefer to delay their launches.

Source: Anna Biteleva - Media Sputnik
DVB Technologies To Shine At BroadThinking 2017

The annual EBU BroadThinking seminar is set to take place on the 3-4 May. This year the seminar will address the growth of online audiences pushing broadcasters to deliver more and better content over broadband, and to deliver it more intelligently. The seminar will seek to provide insight through industry experts that will highlight technology solutions as well as strategies to leverage them.

The seminar will take a closer look at opportunities and challenges in 5G, at streaming technologies that improve the user experience, and at approaches that enable new forms of content, such as VR. DASH and new usage models around CDNs are also on the agenda, alongside presentations on smart file workflows in the cloud.

Each year the seminar hosts a number of technology demos. This year, DVB technology will feature prominently amongst the supporting demos.

The important factors for an immersive experience are HDR and HFR. These two parameters provide, when used with the right content, a perceptible increase in image quality. Delegates will have the opportunity to see different resolutions combined with HDR and HFR, delivered via DVB-T2 and adaptive streaming (DASH).

The key aspects of the demo will show how an immersive experience can be attained without adopting a full 2160p (4K) spatial resolution if HFR and HDR are utilized. It will demonstrate how the delivery of an immersive UHDTV experience to multiple consumer devices is possible via DVB-T2, satellite and broadband. HFR 100fps will be delivered in a backward compatible manner to 50fps devices exploiting HEVC's default temporal scalability. DVB DASH allows additional interactive features such as on demand slow motion by playing 100fps content at half the speed.

In a second demo, Second Screen Media synchronization will be seen using HbbTV. HbbTV allows for the delivery of interactive services over broadcast and broadband networks through an internet-connected TV or set-top box and DVB-CSS (Companion Screens and Streams) referenced in the HbbTV 2.0 standard. Here the demonstration will show two of the relevant parts of the CSS specification, which are time synchronization and content discovery. DVB-CSS supports a wide range of added services including: additional languages; additional subtitles; audio description for the visually impaired; additional audio or video channels, e.g., a second camera position; participation in voting and gaming events.

In another demonstration a DVB terrestrial transmission will be converted into an IP stream to provide live terrestrial broadcast content to mobile devices through Wi-Fi networks. It encapsulates the recovered MPEG-2 Transport Stream from the RF input into IP packets, and then streams it through the Wi-Fi network.

The two-day event (3-4 May 2017) will take place at EBU Headquarters in Geneva. Further information on BroadThinking 2017 and how to register can be found on the EBU website.
Public Service Broadcasters Investigate VR, AR And MR

Alongside DVB's own recent work, there has been a lot of other activity in 360-degree video and Virtual Reality, and much speculation about emerging Augmented Reality activities. This has involved all relevant sectors, including device manufacturers, games companies, audio-visual content suppliers and service providers, and has covered application areas both inside and outside the media and entertainment industries. A new report, 'Opportunities and Challenges for Public Service Media in VR, AR and MR' commissioned by the EBU and based on input from six public service broadcasters from Europe, Japan and South Korea introduces Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality as they might be embraced by Public Service Media.

There have been claims that viewing VR via head mounted displays will eventually replace television viewing via a conventional screen. VR does follow the fashionable trajectory of 'personalization', allows stereoscopic viewing which normal TV does not, and a VR headset may use less energy resources than a television. It can be said to be an efficient form of media consumption. It is also a very involving experience, which probably makes it more memorable to the viewer, and provides a greater sense of reality for the viewer. If indeed, VR were to become a replacement or substitute for television, then clearly public service media would need to provide their content via VR.

This report gives an insight into how the opportunities and challenges of VR and related technology are being viewed. It summarizes the kind of tests and trials that have already been conducted, discusses what has been learned from these, and concludes by summarizing future activities that are currently foreseen and the roles that PSBs could play together in further developments.

Contributing to the report were: Graham Thomas (BBC); David Wood (EBU); Rainer Schaefer (IRT); Young-Woo Suh (KBS); Kensuke Hisatomi (NHK); Giorgio Dimino (RAI); Gregg Young (VRT); Rainer Kirchknopf (ZDF).
 
The full report can be downloaded from the EBU Technology & Innovation website
DVB Speakers' Corner

Theirry Fautier (Harmonic) will deliver a Keynote speech at the upcoming EBU BroadThinking Seminar. He will provide an overview of the different aspects of the streaming market. The two day event starts on 3 May and is being held at the EBU Headquarters, Geneva.

Peter Siebert (DVB)
will be presenting '
Delivering DTT: Innovative Solutions and Platforms' at t he seminar 'Digital Broadcasting in India - Way Forward' on 4 May. The event is being hosted by the  Telecom R egulatory Authority of India  and will be held at the  Hotel Ashok in  New Delhi from 4-5 May.

Also, in the same session,  Herbert Tillmann  (ARD) will give a presentation on 'Integrated Broadcast-Broadband (IBB) Systems - its architecture, deployments, and various use cases'.

www.trai.gov.in
 
At BroadcastAsia 2017, 23 - 25 May in Singapore, Markus Fritz (Eutelsat) will be presenting 'Building A HDR Delivery Roadmap for A Profitable Future' on day 2 of the conference - 24 May. Peter Siebert (DVB) will give a presentation on 'The Future of Broadcasting' on 25 May. There will also be a a half-day workshop on UHD on the same day led by Peter Siebert (DVB)Ian Trow (Harmonic) and Nils Ahrens (Rohde & Schwarz).

David Wood (EBU) will participate in the NHK Open Day at the NHK STRL (Science and Technology Research Laboratory) in Tokyo on 25 May. His presentation 'Tomorrow's Media - Transformation or More of the Same?' will look at the way the elements of broadcasting and the media are changing, and yet some fundamentals remain. The event runs from the 25 - 28 May.

Peter Siebert (DVB) will be giving the Keynote speech 'UHD - Facts and Fiction' on 9 June at the IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting 2017, being held in Cagliari, Italy. The event runs from the 7-9 June.

Speakers' Corner is a regular column of DVB Scene eNews that serves to let readers know where they can see DVB related presentations at the various conferences, seminars and events around the world. DVB Scene eNews is published 10 times a year (each month with combined issues for Dec/Jan and July/Aug). Publication is on the last Thursday of each month with a copy deadline on the preceding Friday. The eNews is distributed to over 5,000 subscribers.

So, if you are a DVB Member speaking on a DVB topic at an upcoming event get in touch and let us know and we will publish it here.
Standardization Activities

2-3 May - TM-IPI DASH - Starling Geneva Hotel & Conference Centre, & EBU Headquarters, Geneva. The agenda of the meeting is to progress the revision of the DVB DASH profile with the view to present the specification for approval at the June TM. The focus will be on finalizing the specification text for High Dynamic Rate and High Frame Rate and to progress the parts relating to Next Generation Audio support.

08 May, 15 May, 22 May - DVB IPI DASH. Regular Monday Webex telco to work on a new revision of the MPEG-DASH profile for the transport of ISO BMFF-based DVB services over IP networks. This work will lead to a specification for UHD-1 Phase 2 DVB DASH Streaming including support for HDR, HFR and NGA (object-based audio).

09 May, 23 May - ABR Multicast taskforce plenary.  Webex telco meetings for all interested parties and on alternate weeks a focus meeting to discuss specific technical topics. The technical specification will aim at fulfilling the Commercial Requirements for the transmission of media streams at multiple different bit rates and qualities, in which at least part of the transmission is achieved using IP multicast.

10-11 May - TM-GBS - Stuttgart, Sony. Preparation of maintenance updates to EN 300 468, TS 101 211 and TS 101 162, all due for approval at the June TM meeting.

11-12 May - TM-SUB - Stuttgart, Sony. The agenda is to finalize the update to the existing bitmap subtitles standard (EN 300 743) and complete the new TTML-based standard in time for the June TM meeting.

15-16 May - TM-WIB - Geneva. This group studies the technical potential and feasibility of Wideband frequency reuse-1 techniques. At this meeting the group will continue to consider the results of the initial technical analysis for the potential of WiB and will be working towards agreeing the scope of and approaches to the studies that the group will undertake. The main output of the group will be a report delivered to the TM by by January 2018 the latest.

18 May - PCM - Geneva. Planning for IBC and DVB World 2018 will be on the agenda.

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