Speaker 1: Hi, welcome to today's show, where we're talking compliance, logging and analysis.

Speaker 2: Yes, stay with us. It really isn't only for the likes of the mainstream broadcasters, BBC, ITV, Channel 4, etc. We should all know more about it if we're distributing content.

Speaker 1: And regulations have formed how we produce and distribute content, and love them or hate them, they're there for a reason. They may be global regulations or ones local to your region, whatever the case, it's not just the main broadcasters who need to comply, monitor and analyse what's going out on air. And just how do we begin to control OTT content, much of which goes out over the public internet?

Speaker 2: Yes, so with us today is Peter Kavanagh from Polar Graphics to tell us a bit more. Hi Peter, so in a nutshell, what is compliance logging and why, as a broadcaster or service provider

Speaker 3: or content delivery, why do I need it? So in essence, it's the action of making an archive of your video and audio broadcast signals. So it's the signal as a broadcaster, it's signal leaving me. So you're typically outputting from programme play out intercut with live broadcast feeds. And in the past, banks of VHS recorders using long play tapes were the norm for this operation. And tape duplication was needed to provide archive material to users for review. Now, this is now replaced by resilient computer servers and redundant disk arrays. And review clips can be simply extracted and sent by email and other file transfer methods. And logging serves many purposes. So first off, there's quality control. So if you get reports of an outage, broadcasters can review and determine if the issue was present on their outgoing feed, or if something happened further down the line from them. You can use it for technical checks. So you can look at technical compliance for picture quality, caption and subtitles, and audio loudness. And there's also an angle here for revenue generation support. So it allows confirmation to advertisers that their messages were broadcast on agreed dates and times. And it can form part of the invoicing process. If you have integration with traffic and Avron, Avron servers metadata, that can make the process of finding and extracting those ads and proving to your advertisers that their ads were played a lot simpler and quicker. And finally, the big one, which is regulatory compliance. So logging is a key aspect of most broadcast licenses. And it supports the investigative process when there's a viewer complaint, or breaches of your licensing conditions are suspected, things like broadcasting inappropriate material before the watershed.

Speaker 1: So you've touched on legal requirements there, Peter. Who do those rules apply to? And maybe even if the rules don't apply to me, should I be thinking about adhering to them and why?

Speaker 3: Right. So the requirements differ on a country to company basis. But focusing on the UK, Ofcom require a licensee to adhere to a set of guidelines relating to content. These include requirements relating to accessibility. So subtitling, signing and audio description over and above the general content guidelines, things like the watershed, making sure that content is appropriate for the audience. In order to support those investigations, a broadcaster must retain audio and video recordings for a set period of time. So for the UK, for radio, it's 42 days. For cable and satellite broadcast, it's 60 days. And for terrestrial television, it's 90 days. Some countries mandate audio loudness levels be monitored. And these must also be logged as a data stream so that they can verify that you're not exceeding levels that are set up by the US CARM Act, things like that. And material for that must be made available to Ofcom within 10 working days of any request. Now, even if these things are not applicable to you as a broadcast, as a broadcast outlet, following these recording guidelines can support the day-to-day operations of a broadcaster or a service provider over and above their mandated compliance needs. And many compliance systems also include tools for monitoring analysis of broadcast outputs.

Speaker 2: So who applies? Should we, as Kit Plus is delivering content over YouTube, should we be looking at compliance?

Speaker 3: Well, your outputs are almost all file-based. So you're preparing all of your material and compiling packages and QCing them before you actually put them up to YouTube as a CDM. So the same kind of compliance recording requirement doesn't apply because you're not a live station. So you're not playing stuff out live. You don't have a broadcast license. You're able to do all your QC in an offline manner.

Speaker 1: So a compliance system, it seems, is made up of archiving and monitoring and analysis. What sort of other tools are likely to form part of that monitoring and analysis toolset?

Speaker 3: Generally, advanced compliance systems will give you things like incoming signal analysis. So they can look at the baseband feed coming in, they can look at IP transport streams, and they can also look and monitor at OTT sources, so sources coming in from streaming CDMs. Real-time monitoring of video and audio signals is often provided. So you can look at things like black freeze detection on video, silence monitoring, and audio level for audio. You can also monitor metadata. So you can do the analysis of things like captions, advertising placement signals, and viewer ratings, along with a lot of custom metadata that broadcasters may use in their broadcast chain.

Speaker 2: So how do these, I guess we touched on it a little bit there, broadcast license, could be the answer here, but how does compliance logging apply to new media broadcasters? So those who are purely OTT, and how is it regulated? How is it handled over the internet?

Speaker 3: Well, new media broadcasters typically still run as live. So you have some channels like yourselves, which are purely a playback operation. And it's very straightforward to QC your outputs before you put them out to the internet. But as a new media broadcaster doing an as live channel, you'll typically still have a point of origination where you have your final playback output from your programs and intercut with live sources. So you can still monitor it at that point before it's transcoded and packaged for OTT delivery. If you're then on the same, either on premise or on an external server, if you're then doing OTT packaging, transcoding, multi-bit rate preparation, you can also apply compliance monitoring at that point to make sure that your final outputs to the CDN are also good. And then in advanced logging systems, they can actually look out to pick up the stream you broadcast at the edge. So with this, you're looking to monitor the CDN itself and the final delivery points that would actually feed those OTT signals to the clients on their mobile phones or on set tops or whichever. And that edge monitoring may have different content. So your originated live stream may have its adverts replaced. So there may be things called scutty signals, scutty 104, 35 signals that define when an advert break is going to take place. And the advert can then be dynamically inserted at the edge. And in fact, there's systems out there that go right the way down to personalization of ads where each individual viewer gets a different advert. A little more difficult to monitor when you've got millions of viewers. But from a regional perspective, you could say, okay, I know that the South of England has correctly received a particular advert for a car or home improvement store or whatever it might be. The edge streams at that point can also be monitored for packet level quality. So you can also look at things like delivery bit rates for each of the quality layers within an adaptive bit rate stream. You can check for packet loss. And you can also monitor the web server, which ultimately is delivering those audio and video chunks is performing correctly and not giving you things like 404 errors.

Speaker 1: So Peter, over the last 12 months, remote production has been very much a thing that people have had to do. Is there such a thing as remote compliance? I mean, how are the broadcasters dealing with that now?

Speaker 3: Well, if you have all of your production staff remotely working from home, and they have obviously been a number of productions for live where they've monitored them from remote locations, you could have a centralized logging and compliance system. But they can also log into that system remotely. There are ways of delivering lower bit rates, proxy streams, and also purely data analysis, alarms and alerts to remote operators. So you don't have to have them all in the broadcast center at the same place as the monitoring is taking place. So yes, it's very much the ability to make it web accessible via VPN, secure VPN out to the operators wherever they need to work from.

Speaker 2: Cool. Now, I'm, you know, I think it's, you know, this is a complicated task. This is, you know, you need a clever piece of software, or a clever system to, and, you know, okay, let's state the obvious. Now, we're here to sort of find out, who is the number one choice? We know who it is. But, you know, why do we choose MediaProxy?

Speaker 3: So the MediaProxy log server product, MediaProxy have a history in compliance logging going back 20 years. They're currently deployed to over 200,000 channels worldwide, broadcast channels. And they monitor everything from off air analog radio signals right the way up to ultra HD delivery networks for major broadcasters. And the log server product itself encompasses all of those pieces that we've just discussed and lots more. It's very comprehensive, it's been developed, and is continuing to be developed based on the broadcaster's needs, the service provider needs. And now obviously, more and more the OTT delivery and advanced media needs as well.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. That's great. Thank you very much indeed for your time today, Peter. It's always good to catch up. Of course, we have to thank MediaProxy for their support of Kit Plus TV. You can find out about them and everything that Peter's been talking about at MediaProxy.com. And finally, if you want to listen to Kit Plus TV on the move, then you can check out the Kit Plus podcast with a massive back catalogue of shows. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.