Media engineering for IT and broadcast TVB Europe (January 2008)
Broadcasting engineers have traditionally been solder-iron focused, rather than PC-orientated. ioko is one of a new breed.
ioko calls itself a media engineer. It takes all of the different products that are already in place in a broadcaster's environment, and integrates them with products from third parties such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft and Vignette. "Our skill is glueing it all together and making it work," says Fearghal Kelly, the firm's Media Solutions director.
From a start in the very early days of the internet back in 1996, ioko now has 250 employees. When people started taking the web seriously during the last dot.com boom, deploying brands online, ioko found itself well placed to help these companies because of its early grip on the world of the web.
The company started off building more traditional-style retail web presences, and evolved from there. These sites are what Kelly calls 'spiky', providing the company with a solid background in high and variable traffic volume websites. "We built a lot of expertise in that engineering. A lot of it, you can't get training on, you can't buy a book on, you've just got to innovate and get inventive," he states.
Now the business has helped to design and make the web presences for Sky News and Sky Sports, both of which are prime examples of 'spiky', heavy traffic sites. At the end of 1999 and beginning of 2000 the company began feeling a demand for video on the web that, as an immature technology back then, provided many challenges for the business.
Sky was one of the first companies globally to adopt video on the web whole-heartedly, states Kelly. It deployed Premiership football on the internet in 2000. ioko got involved as Sky needed help in designing and building a web presence and menu to deliver the video service.
Websites continued to become more media rich, says Kelly. The dot.com crash scared people away from the web, but even so, the technologies behind the web and online video continued to mature. The BT Fusion products, Tiscali's HomeChoice and Sky Anytime, its PC-based delivery for movies and sports clips on IPTV that ioko developed for Sky two and a half years ago, are proof that rich media on the web has been revisited and has grown.
Broadcasters' needs that ioko meets are many, states Kelly: "We now deal with high volume, huge transactional levels delivery of stuff. We have a natural understanding of how to approach those complex technical solutions and how to build platforms that will achieve that kind of loading."
Kelly continues: "All the broadcasters use different technical systems for doing playout, that all work differently and talk in different languages. Each time we have gone into a broadcaster we've had to integrate into all those different systems. The thing we're bringing uniquely to each customer is we don't say 'Here's the car and it only comes in one colour', we build a custom solution for each one of these players to take their content and work it with the output of their scheduling system, metadata system, rights reporting, finance systems, and even user account management systems."
There is a cheap version, but it is not as appealing, says Kelly. "The alternative is you can go out and spend £50,000 on one of these one-size-fits-all services from somebody like Joost or Intrigue or BabelGum, and as long as you're happy looking the same as everybody else, having a very bland user experience, then you can do so."
"But for any big, decent player, these solutions are part of their future; they're going to be making revenue from them whether it's adfunded or pay-per-view, more and more so in coming years. So you've got to spend proper money on it, build proper solutions and basically treat it with the same respect you treat the playout system."
Peer to peer delivery To get that differentiation, ioko works with partner Verisign to use the Verisign-owned Kontiki technology for peer to peer delivery of video over the internet. Sky Anytime is based on peer to peer delivery from Verisign's Kontiki technology, and has recently passed the one million movie downloads mark.
This is the same technology as another pie that ioko stuck its fingers into with Verisign's Kontiki, the BBCs iPlayer, which carried out its trials before Sky but did not make the transition to market so smoothly. The next client ioko won after that was Channel 4, for 4oD, which ioko built, hosted and managed, again with Verisign's Kontiki. ioko also won the itv.com rebuild and streaming contract.
There are strong advantages to using peer-to-peer software for this delivery over streaming, says Kelly. He explains: "C4, the BBC and Sky are all based on this [peer-to-peer] technology. For any major player that has a lot of content and potentially a very big audience such as the BBC, [peer-to-peer] is the most cost-effective way of delivering content out. If you deliver it as a stream the cost would just be astronomical."
"The other thing is you can get a quality of service that is better than streaming, as you've got the content downloaded and you can play it again and again; streams can get interrupted," he continues. "And you get a download manager on your PC to manage the content from the provider. If you don't have a content manager, you end up with files all over your C drive. It's a well managed, nicer way of interacting with all this content. This means it's easier to monetise a service [run on peer-to-peer software] as the quality of the product is better."
Challenges for ioko started with the convergence of IT and broadcasting. Kelly says broadcasting engineers have traditionally been solder-iron focused, rather than PC-orientated. ioko sits in the middle, bridging the gap between the broadcasters and the IT world, he claims. What the company frequently does is take good IT technologists and puts them through the media landscape, teaching them the language of broadcasters so they do not, in Kelly's words, "scare the bejesus out of people."
There are many more challenges for ioko in its chosen field of expertise, he says. When working with ITV, some of the content for the service had already been digitised as a live stream without digital rights management applied to it. ioko had to create software that would apply these previously encoded assets.
Rights management systems for content can also be problematic for ioko. Just looking at ads designed for television, one might assume they could be shown online. However, the rights for online distribution have not been cleared so they cannot simply be run alongside online content. Ads are also shown with ties to products or content placement; for instance, an advert with Ant and Dec might only be allowed to run when I'm A Celebrity is also playing, further complicating matters. "Creating a system to manage that is not easy," he states.
"The next big challenge is going to be the next big refresh cycle on IPTV," he reveals. "This will happen as IPTV gets more and more accepted by consumers. There will be changes, and they will happen frequently, every four or five years - compared to television where the biggest update is a one-off digital switch over, the only update in 60 years."
Mobile is a current and future area for ioko. "People are always looking to distribute content onto mobiles," adds Kelly. "We work with various partners like Volantis and Vignette to deliver mobile content, at the moment news and sports content. I don't think mobile TV is going to be a very big hit until everyone's got a very big screen on their phone."
"For us it's about changing the video type into something that will work on the phones, changing the resolution of it for the different screen sizes. We're also working with games and ring tone distribution and using your phone as a remote control for your Sky Plus box," he says. "It's the phone as a functional tool and a means of getting content."
Article taken from TVB Europe January 2008 issue, Heather McLean
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