Azure customers given complete access to rich set of cloud encoding and playback features from Bitmovin at IBC 2019

Bitmovin is excited to announce the integration of our world-class innovative cloud-based video streaming solutions, the Encoder and Player, with Microsoft’s Azure.  Azure customers can now use encoding and player solutions from Bitmovin to create highly customizable, flexible, easy and quick to deploy secure streaming solutions for video on demand (VoD) and live streaming use cases.
By ensuring full interoperability of its player with streams from Azure Media Services, Bitmovin has simplified streaming video content to PCs, laptops, mobile devices, streaming sticks, consoles and Smart TVs.
Bitmovin Encoder and Player products easily enable any number of features that are commonly expected in SVoD and AVoD workflow setups and critical to the delivery of high-quality streaming experiences to viewers. By providing the majority of features out of the box, Bitmovin and Microsoft customers can deploy ready to use solutions quickly, reducing time to market and speeding up return on investment.
Co-Founder and CTO Christopher Mueller suggests that the integration with Microsoft Azure Media Services creates a fantastic synergy between Azure and Bitmovin’s Encoding and Player solutions that truly optimize the delivery of cloud-based streaming and playout workflows in a secure environment. This integration opens up access to complementary services for Bitmovin and Microsoft customers alike, as they look to grow their customer base and make their content accessible to more viewers. The solutions from Bitmovin integrated into Microsoft Azure ensure that quality of service is consistent across all devices and platforms while simplifying the process of preparing content for all formats. 
With the Bitmovin Encoder, Azure customers will have complete access to a rich set of cloud encoding features including:

• Multi-codec, multi-device compatible encoding (H264, HEVC, MPEG DASH, VP9)
• Support for advanced codecs like AV1
• Transcoding for multi-device delivery
• DRM integrations for content protection
• Dynamic Ad Insertion
• Multi-language closed captions and audio selection
• Three Pass Encoding

With Bitmovin’s multi-device player, Azure customers will also have complete access to a rich set of playback features including:

• HTML5 and Native Player sdks to reach broad set of devices like browser, mobile, gaming console, Streaming Stick and Smart TV devices 
• Unified APIs that enable customizations and reduce cross platform development time
• Adaptive streaming for Live and VoD content
• Multiple playback formats such as Progressive, DASH, HLS, Smooth Streaming
• Playback of DRM, AES-128 encrypted content
• Flexible Server-Side and Client-Side Ad Insertion modules
• Multi-language closed captions, audio selection
• Pre-integrated video analytics solutions for QoS, Ad and Video tracking needs

For other interesting reads check out the following links:

• Video Developer Report 2019: This report provides key insights into the evolving technology trends of the digital video industry
• Per-Title Encoding Webinar: Netflix-Style Optimization for Quality and CDN Costs

The post Bitmovin encoding and player solutions are officially available on Microsoft’s Azure appeared first on Bitmovin.

We’ve always believed in data driven development, which is why we built our Analytics product in the first place. It was initially developed for our internal player teams to help debug common playback issues, quality snafus and trace problems across the entire video workflow chain so we can continuously iterate and optimize for that perfect playback experience.
Over the last year, we took the Analytics product from a closed Beta release to General Availability through early customer testing and incorporated numerous iterations through their feedback. We have also added a whole lot of features along the way such as Ads Dashboard, Fraud Detection and much more. We formally launched the product and saw great traction across a wide range of AVOD and SVOD customers globally.
Today, we’re excited to extend this to all player developers so you can test and optimize your current video player experience and see the power of data and actionable insights for yourself!
We’re excited to announce that we’re making a 30-day free trial available across all Bitmovin Player accounts starting immediately.
We’re automatically bundling this in so all you need to do is click a simple “Enable Analytics License” button on your Bitmovin dashboard and follow a few simple steps to allow analytics data collection across new player deployments*.

• Total content impressions or plays
• Total unique users and concurrent users
• Time watched

This can be sliced and diced by every browser and device so you can see the general distribution of viewers across your video service.
Have multiple sites and apps? No problem, we allow you to segment by specific domains, player versions and any custom filter that you would like to set up and monitor!
Want to know which titles are going to make the monthly top charts? Simply select “Video Title” in the Global Filters view to surface this data in the dashboard.

Check out more developer focussed metrics here.

In addition to basic video QoS metrics, Bitmovin also collects data on CDN performance, DRM license request and response turnaround time, Ads turnaround time so developers can troubleshoot issues across the entire video chain to see where things broke down or where things are sub-optimal so they can start looking into the right places to fix issues or raise issues.

Read about our new and improved Ads Dashboard here.

Overall, we believe that the right data can empower teams to deliver great experiences for their viewers and we wanted to make this available to everyone to experiment for themselves. We’re eager to hear from you so please contact us if you have any questions or feedback along the way.
Learn more about the complete analytics offering by clicking here.
Start your free analytics trial or register for our Better Together: Player and Analytics webinar to learn more!
     

Video technology guides and articles

• Back to Basics: Guide to the HTML5 Video Tag 
• What is a VoD Platform?A comprehensive guide to Video on Demand (VOD)
• Video Technology [2022]: Top 5 video technology trends
• HEVC vs VP9: Modern codecs comparison
• What is the AV1 Codec?
• Video Compression: Encoding Definition and Adaptive Bitrate
• What is adaptive bitrate streaming
• MP4 vs MKV: Battle of the Video Formats
• AVOD vs SVOD; the “fall” of SVOD and Rise of AVOD & TVOD (Video Tech Trends)
• MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP)
• Container Formats: The 4 most common container formats and why they matter to you.
• Quality of Experience (QoE) in Video Technology [2022 Guide]

The post Bitmovin Player and Analytics: Better Together! appeared first on Bitmovin.

Guest post provided by Bitmovin Partner:  

At Streamroot, ensuring compatibility and forging ties with innovative players throughout the video distribution chain are top priorities. We’d therefore like to take the time today to highlight our technology partnership, and the plug-and-play integration our teams have ensured between the Bitmovin Player, Streamroot DNA and Compass.
Aiming to promote quality through cutting-edge technology, Bitmovin and Streamroot both believe in using innovation to rise to the challenges our industry faces. Bitmovin has long put innovation first, leading the establishment of standards such as MPEG-DASH and more recently AV1. Streamroot meanwhile actively contributes to important open-source projects, as well as to the work of prominent organizations including the DASH Industry Forum and the Streaming Video Alliance.
Our respective solutions reflect this commitment.

Bitmovin Player and Streamroot Delivery: A quality-first approach

The Bitmovin Player aims to deliver premium, broadcast quality video across any screen and network. The feature-rich and modular video player comes with a patented ABR logic, a wide range of DRM and Advertising features, and customizable Buffer and Network APIs and interface for tailor-made QoE. It is used by major broadcasters and online video platforms around the world including Periscope, Sling and Ooyala.
Alongside a video player with a particular eye to quality, Streamroot’s player-side delivery technologies are a natural choice. Streamroot solutions promote the highest viewer QoE by intelligently multisourcing content delivery.
Video platforms using Bitmovin Player can easily add Streamroot DNA peer-to-peer technology to their delivery infrastructure to vastly increase their capacity and naturally scale to growing audiences and traffic spikes. Streamroot DNA powers over 20 million video sessions every day with premier broadcasters, making it the largest mesh network delivery technology on the market and a powerful tool for increasing reliability and quality for viewers.
In addition, broadcasters using multiple CDNs can add Streamroot’s state-of-the-art multi-CDN load balancer, Compass, to their Bitmovin Player. The Compass client-side CDN selector is the only solution on the market that uses real QoS feedback from the individual device in its switching decisions. Interacting directly with the video player, Compass can seamlessly direct segment requests to a different CDN midstream if a bandwidth issue is detected — without the viewer having to refresh the page. This provides greater redundancy and an extra layer of quality assurance, all at the player level.

Getting Started with Streamroot and Bitmovin

This partnership is a winning combination for OTT platforms seeking a fast, lightweight playback solution and effortlessly scalable & reliable video delivery. We have therefore made using our solutions together extremely simple: both Streamroot DNA and Compass can be integrated into your Bitmovin Player in just a few lines of code.  
To see just how simple it is, refer to the Streamroot documentation for more information about how to get up and running with Streamroot and Bitmovin Player.
If you’re heading to Vegas for NAB, don’t miss our joint demo at the Bitmovin booth SU9110 on Tuesday, April 9 at 11:30 am, or book a meeting with us to hear more about our solutions.
 
       

The post Partner Highlight: Streamroot and Bitmovin bring audiences an impeccable streaming experience appeared first on Bitmovin.

Supported Platforms:
iOS SDKs (iOS 9+)
Android SDKs (Android 4.4+)

The Bitmovin Advantage with Offline Playback

Bitmovin Mobile SDKs provides a class called OfflineManager that encapsulates all content download operations like starting content downloads, pausing and resuming downloads, canceling downloads and deleting already downloaded content.
The OfflineManager seamlessly maintains and returns the correct download states regardless of whether the application is in foreground mode, background mode or application gets force closed by user or crashes unexpectedly.
Here are the top reasons why Bitmovin can provide the best experience if you’re considering implementing download or offline playback for your mobile application(s):

• Quick to implement: Developers can follow our tutorials or jumpstart POCs through our readily available Github projects.
• Easy to Use: Our Mobile Player SDKs and Player APIs simplifies and abstracts the download workflow so developers can implement their custom business rules and focus on end user experience.
• Simplified DRM implementation: Our Mobile Player SDKs supports download and offline playback of DRM and non-DRM content. We support easy-to-use offline DRM APIs that works with both Apple and Android devices. Benefits include:
  • Easy configurations to decorate or modify DRM requests as needed for offline and custom content workflows
  • Flexible DRM APIs that work with any major DRM provider (Ex: Irdeto, Verimatrix, BuyDRM and more)
• Enables Customizations: Download Manager and APIs can be easily extended to support custom download use cases like:
  • Implementing custom DRM, License requests
  • Storing and Managing content on External storage
  • Customizing Device Notifications for better user experience
  • Customizing Content License rules (Ex: Enable background license refresh every 2 weeks etc)
• Road Tested: Bitmovin delivers a very advanced and feature-packed Download Module that’s been production tested across major Broadcaster and Media customer deployments. We have evolved the feature set over the past year and addressed edge cases through first-hand experience.
• Excellent Support: Unlike Open Source Players (OSP), we provide APIs for all the major Download use cases that’s easier and more convenient to use. We also enable customizations to support unique workflows. We also provide expert staff to support implementation needs and answer questions through the integration process.

Control the Offline Playback Download Lifecycle:

The Bitmovin Download feature is supported for both clear and DRM protected content. Bitmovin provides Player APIs and Events to track the download lifecycle:

Customize Download Experience Based on your Business Rules:

Bitmovin also provides a few utility features to help developers customize the download behavior and experience depending on device capabilities:

• Check Device Storage
• Check External Storage
• Check Internet Connectivity to determine offline or online playback
• Provide Device Notifications for download events
• Enables parallel downloads for multiple downloads
• Configuration for background downloads
• Extensive Download Error Reporting

Documentation

Ready to get started? Check out our Bitmovin Player Tutorials for getting started with Download on Mobile SDKs. We also provide code samples in our Github repos to help jumpstart development and POCs.

Tutorials:

• Getting Started with iOS Downloads
• Getting Started with Android Downloads: The Bitmovin Android SDK minimizes offline content management and playback to a few API calls, and allows fast integration of offline capabilities.
• How does offline DRM work on Bitmovin?: Offline playback allows target devices to persist DRM licenses locally so that downloaded DRM protected assets can be played without requiring any connectivity.

Github Code Samples:

• iOS Download Project
• Android Download Project

The post Control and Customize Offline Playback for Mobile SDKs appeared first on Bitmovin.

The New Year started with yet another reminder that security should not be taken for granted, even for the most established products and services.

At Bitmovin, security is top of mind for us even in cases where we’re not directly involved or responsible for the vulnerabilities.
We consider it our responsibility to do whatever we can, whether it’s to educate our customers or recommend best practices whenever we can so our customers can stay ahead of these issues.
The average user has many ways to watch their favorite piece of content today. We know Content Security is a top focus for studios and content owners as they ramp up investment to produce premium, box office hits or for introducing absolutely niche content to new markets. It becomes that much more important to protect precious content revenue from piracy and illegal distribution while maintaining a seamless and enjoyable experience for well-meaning paying subscribers.
However, as with all things security related, it’s only as good until someone figures a way around it. Last week, a British security researcher announced on a Twitter post that he had successfully cracked Widevine L3 DRM and could successfully recover the encryption key to decrypt content and play it back (albeit with a “few evenings” of effort and relevant expertise).

What was the vulnerability and who is affected?

Google Widevine provides 3 levels of data protection (L1, L2, L3) and L3 was already known to be less secure compared to L1 and L2 implementations by nature of design. You can read more about Widevine security levels here.

• L1 – all content processing and cryptography operations are handled inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
• L2 – only cryptography operations are handled inside a TEE
• L3 – content processing and cryptography operations are (intentionally) handled outside of a TEE, or the device doesn’t support a TEE

The reported vulnerability only affects Widevine L3 which is often used for lower quality video (below 720p or HD quality).
Widevine L3 is used by default in the following environments. Therefore, the vulnerability affects:

• Browsers on Mac and PC that use Widevine software CDM i.e. Chrome, Firefox.
• Devices that do not support TEE, usually older or low cost models from manufacturers that skimp device certification. Unfortunately, a full list is not officially available. But, here’s some helpful articles from Digit and AndroidAuthority.

What are the mitigation steps?

At the moment, the options are quite limited and Google is yet to reveal more public information. As we learn more, we will update this post with more information. In the meantime, we recommend the following measures to help you safeguard your content:

• You can choose to block content on browsers and devices that currently depend on Widevine decryption and wait for Google to apply their patch and unblock content later on.
• For Mobile and OTT apps, you can enforce L1 policy by checking what DRM level is supported by the underlying device before sending content. Unfortunately, this is not yet supported on desktop as all decryption happens within untrusted environments. So, you risk losing playback on unsupported devices.
• If you cannot afford to block content, take steps to apply more frequent key rotation in your packager. This makes it harder for the hacker but not entirely impossible but may incur additional licensing costs.

You can also contact your DRM Provider to see if they can provide any additional recommendations.

What to expect next?

Google is expected to release a fix soon. We will update this post as we receive news about the fix. Hopefully, no additional changes will be required once Google patches a fix as it should automatically get updated within the browser or CDM.

What else can be done to safeguard against these in the future?

• Check your DRM policies and enforce the correct setting always. Work with your Player and DRM experts to plan for the future (Download our DRM Whitepaper for more information)
• Check out CDN tokens as an additional layer of security, talk to your CDN expert to learn more
• Apply watermarking as an extra measure on top of DRM content to know more about the leak so you can monitor, identify and plug the source of the leak instead of blocking content altogether. Talk to us if you’re interested in learning more about this option.

The post Google Widevine (L3) Cracked – What to expect? appeared first on Bitmovin.

Roku is a leading platform for video delivery, but Roku development can be a challenge for even the most experienced programmers. The new Bitmovin Roku SDK is a great place to start.

Why Roku?

There are a lot of video streaming platforms on the market today, but in our opinion Roku stands out as one of the most powerful and user friendly solutions available. It is a platform that should be seriously considered by any content owner looking to expand their offering across emerging platforms.
Roku was one of the pioneers in streaming to over the top (OTT) devices at the very beginning of the cord cutting era. Since releasing their first streaming device, which carried Netflix (Roku DVP) in 2008, they have continued to maintain a leading position in United States, with over 37% market share of all streaming devices.

Device reach

According to their own Q3 2018 earnings report, Roku has 23M accounts and streams about 6.2B hours of content making it one of the top performing streaming platforms and therefore a great option for content providers looking to acquire and grow audiences. They are also making significant investments into a wide range of devices to further accelerate user adoption including: Dongles, STBs, Roku OS which is licensed and distributed with Smart TV’s, Roku Speakers and Roku Touch Assistant. This aggressive development is allowing them to compete against the likes of AppleTV and Amazon FireTV.
Affordability is also a big advantage for Roku, with prices starting as low as $29.99, it is a platform that is easily accessible to consumers in any market and is very likely to be a contributing factor to its worldwide growth in sales.

Partner focus, tools and support

Roku is also investing heavily in content partner relationships, offering tools and support  to help content providers to monetize their content offering through support for video ads, audience development and brand sponsorship advertising on the Roku user interface. This helps you on a number of levels, from the initial integration/development phase right through to gaining traction and growing your audience once you are up and running.

Getting started with Roku App Development

There are two possible approaches to developing Roku apps for publishing video content on their platform. The first is the Roku Direct Publishing web app. Roku advertises this as a zero coding, cookie cutter branded app where you, the content provider, can simply upload video feeds into predefined user interfaces. This is perfect for anyone just getting started with a basic video app on Roku. At the moment, it only supports monetization via advertising through the Roku Ad framework. It does require content owners to purchase a CDN service and maintain a content feed to power the app experience.
The second approach, a custom built app, which is what we will focus on in this article. This is the iOS/Android-like native apps developed in Brightscript for Roku. This type of app is customizable, both in terms of functionality and user interface. It’s perfect if you are looking to deliver advanced video offerings like subscription VOD (SVOD) or transactional VOD (TVOD) services which are not available through the Direct Publishing solution. It also opens the door to a wide range of possibilities allowing you to build a genuinely unique user experience for your customers.

What are the first set of challenges to overcome?

First of all, your developers will need to familiarize themselves with ‘Brightscript,’ which is a proprietary language used for the development of a Roku channel. This has proven to be quite  a big pain point as the language is not very popular among developers and there are very few community-contributed libraries. See the introduction to Brightscript here.
Having a language which is not used anywhere else obviously means that developers need to learn a whole new language just to get started. The syntax is a bit like BASIC/Python which is a bit dated whilst most developers nowadays are used to C-like languages like JavaScript, Java, C#, … oh, and it’s case-insensitive.
Roku is multi-threaded, so one of the important decisions to make is to choose the right communication method between components. There are two options. One is a field observer pattern and the other one is callFunc on the component.
Another unusual characteristic of callFunc is that it always takes exactly two arguments:

• The function name you want to call on the component as string
• Arguments you want to pass to that function. If you need more than one, then you need to use an (associative) array. If you don’t need one, you need to use Brightscript’s “invalid” keyword.

Developers need to be aware of which of the above methods to use and when. callFunc runs in the thread that invoked it. But asynchronous calls like HTTP requests must be executed in a component Task thread. The field observer pattern needs to be used in those cases.

Testing and troubleshooting

Alright, so you got the development going, next is to figure how to test/troubleshoot on Roku, here’s our recommendation:
The first thing to note is that BrightScript can only be run on Roku devices, and unfortunately there is no simulator available. This means that the code always needs to be deployed to a real device for testing.
To install a channel on a device which is not in the Roku Channel Store, you need to sideload it. To be able to do this, the device needs to be in the developer mode. Enabling it feels a bit like using the 80’s Konami Code – press ⌂ ⌂ ⌂ ↑ ↑ → ← → ← → (Home, Home, Home, Up, Up, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right) on the remote.
Note that there can only be one sideloaded channel at a time on a Roku device. Adding a new one will overwrite an existing sideloaded channel.
As BrightScript is an interpreted language, there is no compile step involved and building a ready-to-install channel package is fairly easy. It is simply a matter of zipping the source code plus the manifest, plus any assets like images, and you’re done! Deploying the app can be done by accessing the device’s IP address via a browser. After entering credentials, a web interface will load with upload functionality. This is nice to get started but impractical for development.
Luckily, there are some helpers available.
There are plugins for popular IDEs/Editors available, such as Atom, Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code. These plugins create the zip package and uploads it to the device.
Logs can be seen by using telnet (yes, telnet). However apart from the logs that you add to your channel, there is not too much information here.
Telnet does, however, offer the possibility to debug an app. A sideloaded channel can be interrupted using ctrl+c or by setting a breakpoint in the code using the STOP command. Once the execution is halted, you can execute commands on the telnet CLI to check variables or call functions. Some IDEs or editor plugins come with debugging functionality, and there is also a standalone cross-platform Roku Debugger app.
However, if a video is not playing it can be very difficult, often almost impossible to uncover the source of the problem. We provide unified Error Codes so developers can quickly identify issues and troubleshoot easily.

The Bitmovin Roku SDK

In our first version of the Roku SDK our primary focus was to deliver the core playback capabilities like VoD and live streaming, content protection including DRM support and Closed Captioning. We have also delivered Bitmovin’s unified Player APIs to help you and your developers to get started quickly on the Roku platform.
We have also exposed the player events to enable developers to build in any 3rd party analytics support that might be required and obviously integrating Bitmovin Analytics is a very easy addition.
We believe this initial feature list fulfils all the major requirements for SVOD services. Combined with the power of Bitmovin Analytics, customers can deploy on new platforms and start optimizing the user experience, monitor audience engagement and platform performance.

What’s next?

With the basic features squared away, we’re now working on introducing advanced features like advertising, built-in analytics integration and much more for our next v2 version. Our ultimate goal here is to make it really easy to build a video app on Roku without having to worry about the inner workings of the Roku streaming player and its limitations.

Getting Started

The fastest way to get started is to go to the getting started guide where we provide everything you need to get up and running right away. The getting stated guide is in our user dashboard, so all you need to do is sign up for a free account to access everything you need.

Other resources you might need to get started can be found in the links below including Roku SDK examples. Do check out our Roku player sdks and documentation and we would love to hear your feedback!

• • Roku SDK: https://bitmovin.com/roku-sdk-documentation/
  • Release Notes : https://bitmovin.com/docs/player/releases/roku
  • Roku SDK Examples : https://github.com/bitmovin/bitmovin-player-roku-samples

Don’t see the feature you’re looking for?
No worries, please write to us at player-feedback@bitmovin.com

The post App Development with the Roku SDK from Bitmovin appeared first on Bitmovin.