Akamai speaks on Digital media at Uplinq
September 2014 – At the Uplinq conference for QUALCOMM held in San Francisco, Akamai gave a talk about directions in digital media distribution and consumption for mobile devices. The talk was given by William Law their chief architect. Currently over 60% of all content traveling on the Internet is related to some sort of media file. As the displays have been improving in mobile devices and in TVs the content being distributed is getting larger and larger. The standard today is to deliver 1080p content with eight bits of color data at a 30 fps data rate.
The next step to hire data is going to UHD which is a 4K technology that requires over four times the data content of a standard HD 1080p signal. Currently 99.9% of the data that is being broadcast is unicast. This means it’s sending out 200Gbps of data in the form of 100,000 streams at 20MB each. The technology needs to be developed to multicast this data so it can sit at about 10 Gbps for the 100,000 streams which would allow it to fit through the wireless connections of most devices. To address this technology a new codec has been created known as H.265 or HEVC. This new compression will support streaming video on lines such as ADSL and 4G that have a capacity to receive 720p video at under 2 Mbps. This level of compression will allow OTT UHD for 4K to be feasible on a large number of devices. The challenge with the HEVC codec is legal in nature due to there being no single licensing body for the specification.
To address the challenges of the HEVC codec a new solution has been proposed that is called MPEG DASH. This is a unified delivery format that is standardized by an independent body and supports three different delivery mechanisms. The advantage of this format is it doesn’t matter what delivery mechanism you chose of the three for your content. The DASH program currently has 76 member companies. The technology supports a multi core design and the more cores you have the more complex the D code can be and the higher compression can be supported. This allows for higher resolutions streaming data and if storage is being used instead of streaming there is a trade-off of bandwidth and storage capacity. In this format storage and streaming are mutually exclusive.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 with LTE solitions
One of the issues for delivering higher resolution content is to create a Fast TCP protocol that will eliminate some of the delivery problems by using a congestion avoidance algorithm. The Fast TCP format will support eMBMS which allows it to run on multiple ports and multicast. This is supported by the Snapdragon 800 and LTE chipset from Qualcomm. This solution uses a new hybrid protocol which is called Astraeus and is a combination of the HTTP and UDP protocols. The new protocol uses a packet timing optimization which is called OPA NGA this. This supports scalable video coding (SVC) and continues to send the data at an 8x data size.
An alternative approach of Peer to Peer (p2p) connections has similar traffic offset and of avoidance issues as the TCP/IP protocols. Work is still being done on WEB RTC with peer-to-peer along with WEBCRYPTO to go through and make sure the video content and media content being presented is safe and secure. Soon we will reach an installed base of 1 billion web RTC enabled devices.
