Author Archives: Olivier

IBC report 2018

IBC is one of the two biggest show related to broadcast and by extension broadband in the world (the other is NAB). It is happening in Amsterdam every year in September.

Consolidation is probably the main word which could summarise the IBC this year. Dozens of companies are providing the same level of feature / products. They are trying to differentiate from each other with the “business/use-cases” solution they can provide.

Note: I focused this article only on some topics related to the OTT technologies and delivery, there were others trends like blockchain which was covered during the event.

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Live to VoD workflows – which solutions ?

For many companies, especially for broadcasters, there is a common question : how can I de-linearize the live to create VoD contents ? During last IBC, I made a turn of the different tools which can help to create this kind of workflows. Some provides software and others provides appliances. Here is an overview of the different solutions of the company I identified which provide solutions. Continue reading

[OVFS] Speaker at the next SATIS expo in Paris

satis2013I will be a speaker (as panelist) in one session during the next Satis expo in Paris. This session is called : “White card to the Online Video French Squad”. Online Video French Squad a french group of tech guys who working in the online video ecosystem.

Online Video French Squad

In this session, we will talk about : DRMs, what costs for the OTT security ?

Which DRM for which devices ? Business models, technical constraints, issues on multiscreen workflow and user experience…

The others panelists will be :

  • Nicolas Weil, Solution Architect at Akamai
  • Simon Laroque, Project Manager at Cognacq-Jay Image
  • Philippe Rambourg, Broadcast Engineering Manager at Canal +

The session will be on Wednesday, the 20th of November at 12PM.

To my english readers, I apologize in advance, this session will be in french.

How to create and architecture an open-source and/or free video platform ?

This post is the result of a sort of challenge. The objective is to create an architecture to generate, manage and deliver HTTP streaming videos using free and/or open-source tools and/or applications. It need to answer to many questions : tools must be open source or free; reliability of the platform and the ability to scale up quickly. The architecture can be split in two parts : the content preparation and the delivery. I will expose an overview for each part of the architecture. Then I will list differents tools you can use. To finish, I will give you in details the architecture I will choose to deploy. But to realize this, few or some developments can be required, the language you will use, will be your choice. The operating system will be on Linux. Continue reading

Play with ffserver – a quick overview

ffmpegEverybody knows ffmpeg the command line encoding tool but do you know ffserver ? ffserver is a multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. With it, you can stream over HTTP, RTP and RSTP.

Quick overview

The concept is to use ffmpeg to push content to one server. This server will transcode streams and deliver to the end-users.

FFServer map

Input streams are called feed and for each feed you can have multiple output stream.

We can manage ffserver via a configuration file. The syntax is close to the one used for Apache server. You can find a example here. And there are more informations in the ffserver wiki.

We will see two examples on how to deliver content via a ffserver. There will be a FLV and a WebM stream.
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