Video Distribution Research Articles

Emergence of OTT Video and the Production Expenditures of Established Audiovisual Producers

ABSTRACT This paper examines the audiovisual programming and production expenditures of leading US media distributors, in the context of the market entry of Over-The-Top content distributors such as Netflix. Using data from the annual SEC filings of publicly traded audiovisual production companies over 2008–2017, it seeks to provide insights into how production expenditures figure as part of a competitive strategy in the context of new media growth. The results suggest that, despite media accounts to the contrary, established audiovisual producers have not materially altered their investment strategies in response to OTT video distribution.

Understanding videos at scale: How to extract insights for business research

Video content has become a major component of total internet traffic. Growing bandwidth and computational power conspire with an increasing number of video editing tools, smartphones, and online platforms that have facilitated video production, distribution, and consumption by businesses and consumers alike. This makes video content relevant across business research disciplines. However, analyzing videos can be a cumbersome manual task. Automated techniques are scattered across technical publications and are often not directly accessible to business researchers. This article synthesizes the current state of the art and provides a consolidated tool to efficiently extract 109 video-based variables, requiring no programming knowledge. The variables include structural video characteristics such as colorfulness as well as advanced content-related features such as scene cuts or human face detection. The authors discuss the research potential of video mining, the types of video features of likely interest, and illustrate application using a practical example.

An experimental study on the perceived quality of natively graded versus inverse tone mapped high dynamic range video content on television

High Dynamic Range (HDR) television promises to display higher brightness and deeper black levels and thus more vivid and realistic images. However, home video distribution and video broadcasting were historically designed for what we now call standard dynamic range screens (SDR). In order to display SDR content on an HDR screen, it is explicitly or implicitly converted, in a process called inverse tone mapping (iTMO). This paper’s goal is to assess the perceived quality of converted SDR content in comparison to natively graded HDR content. In doing so, this paper aims to enable content creators/distributors to make informed choices between creating/broadcasting HDR content or relying on conversion. To this end, a psychophysical experiment was performed to tests how viewers evaluate the difference between natively graded HDR and a set of SDR to HDR conversion options in a television setup. Results indicate that viewers prefer natively graded HDR content, followed by inverse tone mapping algorithms starting from videos with a compressed dynamic range. When comparing conversion options, users clearly prefer conversion from ‘compressed dynamic range’ SDR over ‘clipped dynamic range’ SDR. Users disliked videos that were naively stretched from standard SDR. In addition, a significant effect of type of sequence was found, with a preference for light scenes with low contrast.

An MMT-Based Hierarchical Transmission Module for 4K/120fps Temporally Scalable Video

High frame rate (HFR) video is attracting strong interest since it is considered as a next step toward providing Ultra-High Definition video service. For instance, the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB) standard, the latest broadcasting standard in Japan, defines a 120 fps broadcasting format. The standard stipulates temporally scalable coding and hierarchical transmission by MPEG Media Transport (MMT), in which the base layer and the enhancement layer are transmitted over different paths for flexible distribution. We have developed the first ever MMT transmitter/receiver module for 4K/120fps temporally scalable video. The module is equipped with a newly proposed encapsulation method of temporally scalable bitstreams with correct boundaries. It is also designed to be tolerant to severe network constraints, including packet loss, arrival timing offset, and delay jitter. We conducted a hierarchical transmission experiment for 4K/120fps temporally scalable video. The experiment demonstrated that the MMT module was successfully fabricated and capable of dealing with severe network constraints. Consequently, the module has excellent potential as a means to support HFR video distribution in various network situations.

Distribution of teaching surveillance video via edge computing

The generation, processing and distribution of multimedia data from video are increasingly toward the edge of the network with the development of mobile and industrial network. The uncertainty of user behavior and limited system resources have become a major challenge for network video services, for example, the distribution of teaching surveillance video. It is a hot spot to support network video services and content distribution with lower latency and higher bandwidth requirements by using the computing, storage, and network resources at the edge of network. In this paper, we first analyze the challenges which are faced in video distribution based on edge computing; then propose a framework for teaching surveillance video content distribution through the network, storage, and computing capabilities of edge computing; lastly provide an edge caching architecture and a cache update strategy by using a LSTM network. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed framework is more efficient than previous ones.

In between the global and the local: Mapping the geographies of Netflix as a multinational service

The different technological affordances and revenue models of subscriber-funded, internet-distributed video streaming services have altered the competitive environments of audiovisual services. One category of these services, multinational SVODs (subscription video on demand), are changing the dynamics of transnational video distribution. Although having subscribers and offices, and commissioning content from many countries, are obvious measures of these services’ multinational status, the extent to which the distinct affordances of these services diminish the national lens through which all other international television trade occurs may be the most profound measure. The article explores how this too becomes a distinguishing competitive tool for Netflix that enables uncommon content strategies, such as the ability to program for tastes and sensibilities too small to effectively form a viable market for services limited by national reach.

Targeted Advertising for the Broadcasting Industry in DVB Markets

Today, targeted advertising (TA) needs no commercial justification. Even for the linear horizontal broadcasting ecosystem, TA is a necessary evolution to be on a par with the online video distribution on all these mobile devices and personal computers (PCs) where the addressability of advertising has been a solid reality for many years. It is going to be a reality even in the “old” horizontal broadcasting ecosystems, thanks to connected TVs and recent standardization by the digital video broadcasting (DVB) Projecti and the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) Association.ii

Beyond Canned Television

The October of 2018 saw the creation of BBC Earth Tribe, a global online brand representing BBC Natural History Unit (NHU)’s programming on Tencent Video, one of China’s leading online streaming services. Besides providing over 650 hours of BBC documentaries to Chinese online audiences, BBC Earth Tribe delivers unprecedented access to creators from BBC NHU through interactive screen forms and offline events. This article offers a study of BBC Earth’s global strategies in its partnerships with one of the largest Chinese digital platforms, Tencent, in terms of coproduction and online community building beyond traditional canned television distribution. It examines Project Penguin, which has formalised coproduction partnerships between BBC Studios and Tencent Online Media Group (OMG) since October 2018. The distribution partnerships involve not only pre-sales of BBC Earth’s flagship documentaries but also coproduction and online community building on Tencent-run platforms, from streaming services to social media platforms. By examining BBC Earth’s distribution strategies in the Chinese media landscape from the early 2000s, the paper aims to theorise distribution strategies between BBC Studios and Tencent Video and its socio-cultural implications on television distribution in the digital, multiplatform era of convergence.

Transnational Television Distribution and Co-Production Challenges

This article explores the production and distribution process for television co-productions and explains the potential benefits and risks compared to other media joint ventures, like television formatting. Using a detailed case study of one television series within a larger co-production agreement between a German rights trader and a Hollywood studio, the author analyzes production and distribution challenges and complex contractual arrangements within the context of global media trade. Co-productions are situated in between, and as a transition from, acquiring rights to canned television programs, and acquiring rights to television formats. The author contends that a range of difficulties in co-productions has contributed to a turn to television formatting, where the production process is more easily controlled and customized by the partner acquiring the property, leading to more predictable and successful distribution outcomes.

Predicting the Session of an P2P IPTV User through Support Vector Regression (SVR)

Scalability and ease of implementation make Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure an attractive option for live video streaming. Peer end-users or peers in these networks have extremely complex features and exhibit unpredictable behavior, i.e. any peer may join or exit the network without prior notice. Peers' dynamics is considered one of the key problems impacting the Quality of Service (QoS) of the P2P based IPTV services. Since, peer dynamics results in video disruption to consumer peers, for smooth video distribution, stable peer identification and selection is essential. Many research works have been conducted on stable peer identification using classical statistical methods. In this paper, a model based on machine learning is proposed in order to predict the length of a user session on entering the network. This prediction can be utilized in topology management such as offloading the departing peer before its exit. Consequently, this will help peers to select stable provider peers, which are the ones with longer session duration. Furthermore, it will also enable service providers to identify stable peers in a live video streaming network. Results indicate that the SVR based model performance is superior to an existing Bayesian network model.

Multimodal Local-Global Attention Network for Affective Video Content Analysis

With the rapid development of video distribution and broadcasting, affective video content analysis has attracted a lot of research and development activities recently. Predicting emotional responses of movie audiences is a challenging task in affective computing, since the induced emotions can be considered relatively subjective. In this article, we propose a multimodal local-global attention network (MMLGAN) for affective video content analysis. Inspired by the multimodal integration effect, we extend the attention mechanism to multi-level fusion and design a multimodal fusion unit to obtain a global representation of affective video. The multimodal fusion unit selects key parts from multimodal local streams in the local attention stage and captures the information distribution across time in the global attention stage. Experiments on the LIRIS-ACCEDE dataset, the MediaEval 2015 and 2016 datasets, the FilmStim dataset, the DEAP dataset and the VideoEmotion dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Detachment as a privilege: industry participation at TV programming and distribution marketplaces

ABSTRACT While studies have described the role of international trade fairs in building new industries, few have analyzed the reverse: that of companies detaching from fairs, and the contexts in which such events disappear. We study the processes of attachment and detachment to trade fairs in the television programming and distribution industry, using two polar cases: a recently created trade fair in Africa, at the fringes of the globalized market; and a declining trade fair in eastern Europe, which had once been a hub for international trade. We use quantitative data to characterize the degree of internationalization of these two fairs, and focus with qualitative data on the organization of these events. We show that attachment occurs when a fair is new and unavoidable for industry actors; but in older marketplaces, already integrated in globalized markets, powerful actors can detach from the marketplace and re-embed their commercial interactions into personal networks.

“LADY U SEND ME YR MOVIE:” constructing Joanie 4 Jackie’s feminist distribution network

ABSTRACT Joanie 4 Jackie was a U.S.-based women’s video distribution network begun by artist Miranda July that operated from 1995 to 2007. Every woman who submitted to the network would be included on a 10-video compilation VHS that was sent back to each participant, along with a zine listing filmmaker statements and contact information. This article focuses on this distribution model as a site for understanding how media distribution is tied to feminist community-building. I first show the ways that Joanie 4 Jackie drew on the distribution infrastructure of feminist punk subculture riot grrrl — including robust systems for the circulation of music and zines — to jumpstart this video network. I discuss the ways that Joanie 4 Jackie enacted a feminist distributive imagination, creating inventive modes of distribution to counteract unequally distributed money, power, technology, and visibility in filmmaking along gendered lines. In turn, I argue for a consideration of a feminist distributive imaginary, or the hopeful possibilities for both self and community that Joanie 4 Jackie’s modes of distribution prompted–whether or not one submitted a video for distribution.

Adaptive distributed SDN controllers: Application to Content-Centric Delivery Networks

This paper aims to propose a deployment solution for Content-Centric Delivery Networks (C-CDN) based on the SDN technology in an IoT-like environment. To meet today’s network requirements in terms of reliability, scalability and performance and to match the specific IoT needs, the SDN architecture needs to be physically-distributed, but logically-centralized. The key idea is to consider the knowledge plane natively provided by the SDN controllers to build Information-Centric Networking (ICN) applications (e.g. Video distribution services). To achieve this, we put forward an adaptive and continuous consistency model for the distributed SDN controllers in large-scale deployments. More specifically, we propose to turn the standard replication technique into a scalable and intelligent replication strategy following Quorum-replicated consistency. That strategy uses the read and write Quorum parameters as adjustable control knobs for a fine-grained consistency level tuning. The main purpose is to find at run-time appropriate partial Quorum configurations that achieve, under changing network and workload conditions, balanced trade-offs between the SDN application’s continuous performance and consistency requirements. When compared to ONOS’s static consistency model, our approach which was implemented for a Content-Centric Delivery Network (C-CDN) application that we designed on top of ONOS, proved efficient in minimizing the application’s inter-controller overhead, while satisfying the SLA-style application requirements.

Re-Digitizing Television News: The Relationship between TV, Online Media and Audiences

This study takes a socio-technical approach, and uses ethnography, participant observation, and in-depth interviews to analyze the online operations of two major Colombian TV news organizations—Caracol TV and Citytv—and the interaction between traditional media and online news teams during a moment in which television is experiencing renewed technological pressures coming from innovative forms of online video production and distribution and unprecedented access to digital platforms such as social media that offer live social broadcasting features. Findings show that complicated organizational arrangements between traditional and online media conditioned the adoption of digital technology, the transition of television media to online settings, and the production of online content at Caracol TV and Citytv. Likewise, the relationship between online teams working for TV stations and online users mimics the traditional relationship between television professionals and TV viewers in national and local contexts.

CYBER CRIME DAN POTENSI MUNCULNYA VIKTIMISASI PEREMPUAN DI ERA TEKNOLOGI INDUSTRI 4.0

The phenomenon of the industrial revolution 4.0 has had many influences, both positive and negative for society. It is undeniable that slowly everything has turned to digital. So that the interaction between humans and technology is inevitable. Such developments make digitization even more difficult to recognize, because everything is now integrated, everything now requires the internet. The opportunities for cyber criminals are getting wider, various kinds of cyber threats continue to emerge and this is a challenge for users. So many crimes that occur today in cyberspace or what is known as cyber crime, especially affect women. There are cases of illegal content (illegal content), violations of privacy (infringement of privacy), threats of private photo or video distribution (malicious distribution), online defamation, to online recruitment (online recruitment). The high number of online-based gender violence, especially for women, seems to open our eyes to always wisely use internet technology in carrying out activities and routines of daily life.

Maintaining Transmission: DirecTV’s Work-at-home Technical Support, Virtual Surveillance, and the Gendered Domestication of Distributive Labor

This article draws upon interviews with work-at-home (WAH) agents who did technical support for DirecTV between 2009 and 2016. Satellite television technical support workers comprise an important node in maintaining the flow of television content as it is distributed by corporations, like DirecTV, through complex and often fragile technological conditions. Using interviews, trade press, and online employee forums, I outline the history of DirecTV’s WAH call center work and employment conditions, and its dissolution after the merger with AT&T. This research intervenes to demonstrate the ways in which WAH television technical support work is an ambivalent form of distributive media labor, at once feminine and immaterial, while also creative and essential for television distribution. This article also demonstrates how technical support work is influenced by current precarious and digitally converged working conditions, surveillance tactics, and media conglomerate mergers and structures.

Skipping-based handover algorithm for video distribution over ultra-dense VANET

Next-generation networks will pave the way for video distribution over vehicular Networks (VANETs), which will be composed of ultra-dense heterogeneous radio networks by considering existing communication infrastructures to achieve higher spectral efficiency and spectrum reuse rates. However, the increased number of cells makes mobility management schemes a challenging task for 5G VANET, since vehicles frequently switch among different networks, leading to unnecessary handovers, higher overhead, and ping-pong effect. In this sense, an inefficient handover algorithm delivers videos with poor Quality of Experience (QoE), caused by frequent and ping-pong handover that leads to high packets/video frames losses. In this article, we introduce a multi-criteria skipping-based handover algorithm for video distribution over ultra-dense 5G VANET, called Skip-HoVe. It considers a skipping mechanism coupled with mobility prediction, Quality of Service (QoS)- and QoE-aware decision, meaning the handovers are made more reliable and less frequently. Simulation results show the efficiency of Skip-HoVe to deliver videos with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) 30% better compared to state-of-the-art algorithms while maintaining a ping-pong rate around 2%.

Rethinking Must-Carry and Retransmission Consent Regulation in the Digital Era

The emergence of new technological platforms to access online services and content have transformed the media landscape dramatically. They require policymakers to reexamine the decades-old regulations traditionally addressed to broadcasters and telecommunications providers. Must-carry, retransmission consent, and “carry one, carry all” rules in particular require reconsideration, if not reform.
 Must-carry regulation mandates cable and satellite pay TV providers to retransmit free-to-air broadcast programming. Such regulations have been adopted around the world, including the United States, Mexico, and France, the subjects of this article. Policymakers in these three countries have offered a variety of justifications for such rules, including the promotion of competition, local news and content, viewers´ rights, and content diversity.
 Recent data and case law, however, strongly suggest that emergent platforms to access online services and content undermine the standing justifications for must-carry, retransmission, and “carry one, carry all” rules.
 This Article argues that policymakers should consider other regulatory mechanisms to achieve the original reasons for such rules. The dramatic increase in the variety of devices (e.g., TV, tablet, mobile phones, smart TVs), service and content distributors (e.g., free-to-air TV, cable TV, internet), and service providers (e.g., broadcasters and “over-the-top” internet providers) strongly suggests that policymakers must reconsider the current approach. But any amendment to current regulation will depend on internet penetration and access to new video distribution platforms in a given geographic area. That is, without internet access, free-to-air TV might continue to be an important platform for service and content distribution.

Analyzing Global Feature for Duplicate Video Retrieval using CNN and PCA

At present, Duplicate video retrieval has attained the interest of researchers because of the vast amount of online videos. This video retrieval has extensive applications like online video monitoring, copyright protection, and automatic video tagging. Some local features constitute primary building blocks in this video retrieval algorithms; with this, most researchers use local information for feature representation. Moreover, this local knowledge-based representation eliminates more prominent information regarding global distribution. However, the discriminative power of local descriptors is diminished by feature quantifiers. The ultimate goal is to use universal features to categorize similar keyframes into the same class that is essential to enhance video retrieval performance. Here, CNN features acquire global geometric distribution of video, from which discrete features are considered for computation. Discretization is performed with principal component analysis. These kinds of features maintain geometry transformation with reduced noise. Next, an integration strategy known as k-NN is used to merge these features with global VR features for enhancing recognition accuracy. Experimentation has been carried out with available datasets to show that the anticipated model outperforms existing approaches in VR applications