CBS All Access Eyes Adding More 4K HDR Content, Says Engineering Point Man
LOS ANGELES -- With the CBS All Access over-the-top service, “we’re looking at higher resolutions right now,” Robert Seidel, CBS vice president-engineering and advanced technology, told the SMPTE conference. Streaming content at 4K resolutions increases “storage requirements quite a bit for a typical file,” he said Wednesday.
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Subscribers to CBS All Access can watch the original series Star Trek: Discovery in 4K, but that's “the only asset that we now have up that’s at a higher rate” of resolution, said Seidel. It's the only content on the service that’s streamed in HDR, he said. “We’re looking, yes,” said Seidel when we asked if CBS All Access plans additional streaming content in 4K HDR.
Seidel defended the service's choice of the older H.264 codec over H.265 as giving CBS All Access the more widespread reach the network seeks. The H.264 codec is “well-developed, it works in a lot of devices, we find it in a lot of television sets,” said Seidel. “Our goal is to reach the broadest possible audience, rather than going for a codec that is not as widely distributed.”
CBS All Access was conceived “to be everywhere, all the time, and to really be able to move as viewers migrate from the large screen,” said Seidel. “That’s the case in my house. You see everyone watching on tablets and phones.” CBS wanted to be sure “we could measure that and include it in the total content rating” that Nielsen reports, because "we were getting leakage in the system” in the form of uncounted viewers, he said. “We knew people were migrating to other devices to view the content, and therefore we had to be able to capture that.”
Seidel could have provided “session logs to the advertiser” showing what CBS content was being viewed on which devices. Advertisers needed “a third-party independent verification” from Nielsen “that this was indeed being viewed and that it could be aggregated against the total content rating number,” which measures PCs, large-screen TVs and mobile devices, “no matter what platform,” he said.
The broadcaster wanted to be sure “we could deliver our broadcast linear content, as well as the library content, to hundreds of millions of existing devices,” said Seidel. “We didn’t want to have specialized hardware in order to receive the signal. We wanted to use existing devices, and we wanted to make it available on all networks, whether it’s 3G, 4G, LTE, eventually 5G.” The company wanted to “replicate” the designated market area of the local affiliate, “and we wanted a low capital investment for the station so they weren’t burdened with massive deployment of transmitters and equipment,” he said.
The “heart” of CBS All Access is “pretty darn simple,” using “essentially the same signal that’s going to the transmitter,” said Seidel. The company picked Syncbak as its “geofencing” technology for confining CBS All Access content within an affiliate’s DMA, he said. “Once Syncbak verifies the location of the device in the market, it then connects you to the market that you’re in,” he said. “As you move across the country, you will be connected to other services.” Mechanisms are built into the service “so we don’t annoy the viewers,” he said. “If you started watching, let’s say, the Boston Red Sox, and you’re driving down to New York, we’ll keep you with that stream.”