Keepixo and IRT demonstrate CMAF at NAB 2017

Wednesday, April 19th, 2017
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GRENOBLE, France — Keepixo, a leading provider of software-based head-end solutions for IPTV and OTT TV, and IRT, the research centre of the public broadcasters in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, today announced a complete CMAF demonstration at NAB 2017.

CMAF, MPEG’s Common Media Application Format, aims at unifying the two OTT TV leading standards which are Apple’s HLS and MPEG-DASH today. Technically, with CMAF, both HLS playlists and DASH manifests are allowed to reference the same fragmented MP4 (fMP4) chunks. This allows any recent Apple device (iOS10, tvOS, MacOS) to playback the exact same media segments as DASH players.

That brings immediate business benefits to operators deploying CMAF over their competitors:

  • Light packaging infrastructure: only one OTT packaging system is required, and only one flavor of media chunks needs to be built.
  • Better viewer experience: HTTP caches in the delivery network are much more efficient, as only fMP4 chunks need to be cached, instead of both MPEG-TS and ISOBMFF. The same fMP4 can be shared for viewers on Apple devices or Android smartphones, PCs or tablets. Previously, different chunks needed to be cached in parallel for DASH and HLS, possibly leading to network congestion and a degraded viewer experience.
  • Lower storage costs: if the operator offers any delinearized services such as nPVR, timeshift, or start-over, storage needs are divided by 2, and no later “re-packaging” infrastructure is needed.
  • Improved cross-platform delivery of subtitles and captions in one package.

CMAF also provides a number of technical improvements to HLS devices over legacy TS chunks, such as a framework for Common Encryption (CENC), and extended text- or image-based subtitling modes.

“At Keepixo, we’re always striving to add the latest features that the TV industry needs.” says Jerome Blanc, COO of Keepixo. “The recent addition of CMAF to our OTT packager is the perfect example of how we can address the entire OTT TV spectrum, and help operators reduce their costs and improve their subscribers’ experience.” Keepixo’s packager is a flexible, feature-rich live OTT packager, which can be provided as a stand-alone solution or integrated within Keepixo’s live multirate OTT transcoder.

“IRT investigates alternative streaming methods to legacy HLS or MPEG-DASH-delivery to find more efficient and thus less expensive workflows while targeting broadcast-quality also for IP-based distribution.” says Thomas Schierbaum, Head of Public Relations at IRT. “Besides well adopted mechanisms for adaptive media transport, also the joined carriage of program-associated data like subtitles is evaluated. In this context CMAF provides a lot of promising options.”

A demonstration of Keepixo’s OTT encoder-packager with CMAF content playing on iPhone SE, Android tablet, and Windows PC, will be available on Keepixo’s stand (#SU9102CM) at NAB/Las Vegas, April 24-27, 2017.