Sustainable TV Distribution by Delivering Universal DVB-I TV Services

TV consumption patterns and delivery methods have been subject to major changes in the last decades. It has led to two heterogeneous ecosystems with, on one side the traditional broadcast making use of MPEG-TS applications, and, on the other one, streaming applications over the broadband internet, addressing enriched use cases such as customization and VoD. To reach their fragmented audience across a plurality of access networks, devices and usages, service providers and operators have to decline their services into many technically heterogeneous flavors. In parallel, the growing awareness of the streaming industry's impact on the climate has become a strong incentive to streamline the entire TV service delivery ecosystem. [1] proposed an end to end sustainable solution based on DVB-I addressing OTT, IPTV, and 5G mobile networks. DVB-I [2] is an emerging standard developed by DVB to harmonize discovery and consumption of TV services over the multiplicity of access networks. As a discovery mechanism, DVB-I can help prioritize the selection of network and service flavors based on energy savings criteria. This paper considers the set of key features from [1] aimed at reducing power consumption for video streaming, covering codec, packaging and transport aspects. Versatile Video Codec (VVC) [3], issued in mid-2021, provides around 50% bandwidth saving compared to its predecessor HEVC [4]. VCC is more complex and requires more power during the encoding and decoding phases but can provide large savings in transmission power arising from the reduced bandwidth demand. As indicated in [5], a large portion of energy consumption for video streaming is done by end devices. First measures on end devices for VVC were done in [6] and are complemented in this paper by a set of additional measurements. Subjective tests are performed to identify the best energy saving configuration (definition/codec) for mobile devices and TV sets: when the user experience is practically identical, the usage of smaller resolutions, in particular on small screens, is preferable. This paper investigates the impact of the codec choice (AVC/HEVC/VVC) on the energy consumption for the end to end streaming delivery system, from the head end to the end devices. The paper then analyzes the end to end impact of using the Common Media Application Format (CMAF [7]) for packaging the video streams. CMAF has been specified to be used with both the DASH [8] and HLS [9] protocols, reducing consequently the amount of media content to be cached or broadcasted: the media can be packaged once and stored once, reducing its footprint in the head-end and the CDN. The evolution of the smartphone fleet and the increasing portion of devices supporting CMAF confirms the relevance of this format. Finally, the paper considers the gains brought by using multicast for the distribution of live OTT services. First, at the CDN level, we can scale the delivery by leveraging DVB-MABR [10]. This can have a very significant impact of the CDN dimensioning, as it allows to absorb the consumption peaks during popular events. And then, at the access network level, by using point to multipoint transmissions over 5G using the new 5G Multicast Broadcast Services (5G MBS) feature [11].