The Challenge:
Champions: BT Media & Broadcast, RTE, SVTA (Streaming Video Technology Alliance), GLOBO, BBC, YLE, Channel 4, Bouygues Telecom, Comcast
Participants: Elecard, Google Cloud, Ateme, Yospace, Qualabs
The Challenge:
With the impending shutdown of digital terrestrial and satellite television, we need a truly scalable architecture to deliver TV to millions of consumers over the internet with the same latency, stability, feature set, and performance they are accustomed to – over an entirely different technology stack.
This project combined several open standards to create a production-like experience over a large number of clients and geographies.
Project Goals:
Building on the foundation of the previous Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports accelerator (an L3D-DASH implementation) in 2024, this year the project team focused on the development of a truly scalable architecture for delivering live TV over the internet, introducing functionality expected from a production DTT channel using new open specifications.
The Accelerator explored key technical components, including CDN and multicast ABR (mABR) integration, personalized ad insertion, and the use of CMCD v2 (upcoming CTA 5004-A) for Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring and ad beaconing. The primary objective was to achieve ultra-low latency glass-to-glass delivery, near-instant playback start, and tight synchronization across multiple viewers on consumer devices.
A central focus was on designing, testing, and demonstrating an open, non-proprietary architecture capable of supporting ultra-low latency streaming for millions of users. By leveraging currently deployed infrastructure, this approach will provide media organizations and service providers with a scalable solution to transition from traditional broadcasting to internet-based TV delivery without compromising performance.
Kickstart Pitch:
PoC Results:
The PoC demonstrated a low-latency DASH-based streaming system for RTÉ News and a synthetic RTÉ Sports sequence. The former was 0.5s ahead of the DTT, the latter showcased SGAI and non-linear ads. An open-source CMCDv2-based system was used to calculate and display KPIs close to real time.
The IBC'24 PoC was the first implementation of then in-progress L3D-DASH. This PoC extended it by introducing CDNs into the mix and adding essential functionality such as server-guided ad insertion (using DASH Alternative MPD events) and monitoring (using CMCDv2).
A large number of non-simulated sessions was run mainly in Ireland and UK, with smaller clusters in Uruguay and the United States, with devices ranging from STBs (e.g. YouView and Fire Stick) to PCs and laptops, using both Shaka an dash.js open-source DASH players.
What’s Next?
This accelerator project showed a blueprint of a viable low-latency DTT replacement. The next challenge is industry adoption. Hopefully, more commercial vendors adopt the technologies prototyped in this PoC, making it possible to use it in broadcasters' streaming offerings.
Technologically, the next frontiers are three-fold.
Firstly, every low-latency system needs tuning, and with buffer management and rate adaptation optimized for L3D DASH.
Secondly, additional transport technologies should be benchmarked.
Lastly, there is a need to integrate SGAI (both linear and non-linear) into the broadcast ecosystem of SCTE 104, SCTE 35, and SCTE 250.
Additional information and links about the open source contributions to support the project:
Google Cloud CMCD v2 Dashboards and collectors
CMCD v2 explanation in Qualabs tech website
Open source Libraries to implement cmcd v2 in web Players
Qualabs blog Post by Nicolas Levy of on the project and CMCD v2.
The below screenshots were taken while developing this project, the players screenshot is Shaka player with different configuration:
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