SKYflow Satellite Streaming

Satellite broadcast has long been a proven approach to expand the information and entertainment footprint for traditional video services, but the majority of consumers are now much more comfortable with watching videos on cell phones and tablets than they are on legacy STB devices. As a result, the holy grail of the service delivery marketplace has become an effective convergence of satellite multicast content delivery with personalized video streaming consumption on smart devices. And the technology that enables this convergence has to support a wide range of connectivity challenges while enabling a compelling business model.

The SKYflow consortium is a prime example of companies uniting, leveraging their expertise and unique strengths, providing groundbreaking solutions that can be game-changers for communities in Asia, LatAm, Africa, and beyond. SKYflow leverages DVB-NIP, a relatively new standard that facilitates the integration of standard OTT and Broadcast technologies into an efficient and contemporary IP media distribution solution. DVB-NIP specifies an end-to-end Native IP broadcast system built on existing DVB specifications, including DVB-I for service discovery and program metadata, DVB-AVC and DVB-DASH for source coding and stream formatting, and DVB-S2X, DVB-S2 and DVB-T2 for transport.

Skyflow’s strength lies in leveraging this standard and its collaborative ecosystem, at present comprising a growing set of partners, each bringing distinctive expertise to the table. EasyBroadcast delivers a robust Content Management System and consumer content player, while ST Engineering iDirect specializes in Modulation and Transmission. EKT provides cost-effective Set-Top-Box receiver solutions, and EZDRM ensures standardized security for content distribution that underpins a service business. Recently, Kencast and ENENSYS have also joined the group.

At its heart, Skyflow aims to leverage standard OTT technologies and content standards that are being continuously perfected by today’s mainstream streaming services. A sophisticated content management system at the head end marshals standard live and on-demand Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) content streams, together with metadata, into a structure suitable for broadcast delivery. The content here can be either in the clear (FTH) or multi-key encrypted using standard DRM packaging.

Best-in-class efficient encapsulation then marries this content to the bandwidth constraints of the physical layer to deliver DVB-NIP encapsulation for forward delivery (DVB-S2X) over satellite.

A SKYflow enabled broadcast channel will deliver the encapsulated content to remote locations, and is received on a low cost STB and WiFi network gateway device, that provides the multicast to unicast conversion. On-demand and live stream presentations are cached with their metadata as a wireless network accessible resource, offering local network unicast streams for consumer device delivery when requested. This conversion is equally effective for live events streams and for delivery of a library of movies and series for on-demand consumption. On a local WiFi network, content at the edge also minimizes stream start time latency and buffering events during viewing.

On any consumer device in the local receiver's network, a custom player app is available to interact with the STB server, render the content metadata and initiate playback of available content streams.

From a security perspective, where a DRM license is required to play back any content, there are at least three key configurations to be supported:

• Where there is limited but persistent Internet connectivity to the local receiver STB, either via a wireless or VSAT connection. Since the bandwidth required for license requests are infinitesimally smaller than for the video delivery and much less latency sensitive, this can be a realistic configuration for commercial video.
• More commonly, where there is cellular Internet connectivity to the mobile consumption devices, this channel can be used as a proxy for DRM requests related to the video delivered from the receiver STB. Again, bandwidth and latency requirements are minimal.
• For a truly unconnected local environment, novel asynchronous license delivery can be implemented. The approach uses mobile devices to cache licenses between intermittent sessions of connectivity, perhaps related to routine visits to better connected locations.

Free unprotected - or Free-to-Air content - is, of course, always available through the forward only channel.