Project Orion Description

Project Orion will provide the operating countries of UPC Europe the ability to extend the cable viewing experience beyond the home with both live and on demand content delivered to any IP enabled device. This will be a multi-country, multi-language, multi-currency and multi-platform video service with a dedicated portal for consumers to fully access online content. Orion is a centralized platform that can be extended into each appropriate operating country without having to fully replicate the end-to-end solution each time. Content, language and interface will be localized for each country. All business models will ultimately be implemented:

  • Free
  • Ad-supported
  • Transactional
  • Subscription entitlement by level of service

Customers will be authorized via the UPC billing systems and then given access to content for playback based upon the level of entitlement provided by the level of subscription. UPC customers will have the option of billing transactional rentals either to the cable bill or via 3rd party credit card provider.

Content will be streamed via HTTP to all IP enabled devices including but not limited to PCs, iPads, Android devices, iPhone, games consoles and connected TVs/ DVD players. At a future time, there may be a downloadable service component however, that is not in the initial architecture or business plans.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

HOSTING FACILITES LOCATION

Encode Farm / UPC, NL
Linear Stream / UPC, NL
Widevine VOD Packager / UPC, NL
RMP (thePlatform component) / UPC, NL
CDN / UPC, NL
Orion Enterprise Service Platform / UPC, NL, ioko (UK)
Orion Web Application / UPC, NL
Feed and Selector Servers (thePlatform Component) / ioko, UK
Web CMS / UPC, NL
thePlatform / Seattle, WA, US, Philadelphia, PA US

DRM

Orion will utilize the Widevine Cypher system to provide DRM and adaptive bit rate streaming Widevine is approved by all major studios for the IP delivery of SD, HD VOD and live channel streaming.

Preconfigured policies, digital rights and encryption are applied to inbound assets, automatically registered with Widevine and the CMS, then uploaded to a destination partner network or CDN. Subsequent delivery to CE devices is secured using Widevine’s multiplatform DRM client on each device. As bandwidth conditions change, Widevine’s adaptive streaming adjust the bit rate to the highest quality video. For an added level of protection the Widevine client monitors, detects and responds to tools that pirate content even after content has been decrypted.

Player

By utilizing Widevine DRM and the Widevine container, Orion will support multiple players (Flash player, etc) dependent upon the consumer’s device and operating system.

Encoding Profiles

Single Bitrate stream
  • H.264 video format in MP4 container.
  • Optimized for streaming
  • i.e. audio and video interleaved
  • All Content encrypted with Widevine DRM
  • Minimum bitrate 1Mbps

MultiBitrate stream – Adaptive Bitrate

This specification is pertinent to all high quality video delivered over the web for Orion and other LGI IP platforms that will utilize the same assets. The following encodes should be produced for each piece of content, depending on the highest quality source material available.

Each device will have a range of encodes that provide for the fastest access and then increase to the highest bitrate in the range depending upon available bandwidth at any given time.

  • H.264 video format in MP4 container.
  • All Content encrypted with Widevine DRM
  • Initially only 750 K to 2M Specifications will be used for Orion because there is no HD content in the service.

Ad Insertion

The video content management system (VCMS) can interface to a number of the most popular ad servers that are generally utilized by content providers. The ad servers can be controlled by the broadcasters/cable networks and use a playlist model to deliver the ads. The playlist will be managed by UPC.

In an implementation the video will play until an ad break is specified and then the VCMS will insert the designated ad from the content owner’s ad server. The video will resume following the ad. The viewer will not be able to fast forward through the ad breaks.

Black Outs

All black-out information will need to be input into the Orion Application at the time of content ingest. For linear streams, the broadcaster must supply the specific blackout metadata and the appropriate rights information. The stream will then be blacked out at that point in time. The easiest and most reliable is for a broadcaster is to include an ‘Internet’ flag with the linear stream metadata. The content is then blocked based upon if the flag is set or not

For VOD, the Orion Application will only show content based upon availability windows.

Content recording

Widevine DRM providesadds an additional level of protection against the hundreds of software tools available, such as stream recorders and screen scraper’s on the internet that record content and enable piracy. In the background, Widevine’s digital copy protection solution monitors for the acceptable usage of content. If a user attempts to use a screen scraper or other piracy method, Digital Copy Protection will detect this and produce a number of customizable responses from silent monitoring to revocation of viewing rights.

Device management

Orion will allow authenticated subscribers to view content on any authorized devices (PC/Mac, iOS and Android) and will not limit the number of devices used. There will be a limit on the number of concurrent users by account which will provide protection against a user giving their username and password to multiple users.

For SVOD, it is anticipated that this limit will be from 2-4 concurrent users at any given point in time.

For TVOD, there will only be a single user allowed at any given time.

Geo-filtering

The Orion Application will provide geo-filtering by IP address and look up systems by country. Dependent upon rights specifications, the content will be blocked based upon geo-filtering rules as established by the content provider.