First to Market with Timely Content on the iPad

Immediately after the launch announcement of the iPad, ABC television network executives recognized the opportunity to deliver video content to Apple’s latest and perhaps most revolutionary device. With less than three months until the iPad launch and without a hardware prototype, ABC engineers set to work creating end-user applications for Apple’s new tablet allowing anytime, anywhere access to the network’s news and original programming.

The ABC Player for the iPad launched with much fanfare and success. Building on this success, ABC set out to develop a dedicated ABC News application for the iPad, designed to provide a rich, interactive end-user experience in which text and video work together to inform and entertain. The free ABC News App’s debut targeted an installed base of more than three million iPad users. ABC News was the first broadcast news organization to offer an application for the iPad, garnering a large share of the initial market for professionally-produced video on the new device. How did ABC port its content to the iPad in such a compressed timeframe?

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Background: ABC's Expansive Video Assets

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC), a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is a major producer and distributor of entertainment content. ABC owns an enormous video content library dating back to 1970 as well as most of its in-house television and theatrical productions. With close to 100 hours of network programming a week, ABC maintains and continuously adds to its vast video collection on an hourly basis. The network is also a recognized market leader in providing rich video content to online and mobile platforms by way of its innovative player available on the ABC website and iTunes. In addition, ABC delivers a large portion of its content to abc.com and through Hulu. 

Challenge: Go Broad or Go Home

Gone are the days when networks sent out a single signal over dedicated broadcast infrastructure for consumption on a single standardized television. Today, video is accessible from many sources to many devices, with an ever-expanding expectation of availability and quality.

As new media platforms proliferate, content producers like ABC are increasingly challenged to supply archived and first-run video for playback in a variety of formats on a wide range of devices over bandwidth-constrained networks. When a new device like the iPad is introduced into the market, large content providers must be prepared to convert video assets for compatible format and display. But formatting and display are only part of the equation. In the past, a single transcode was sufficient for progressive video download to a desktop or laptop computer; today multiple copies, and therefore multiple transcodes of the same content, are needed to deliver the highest possible quality experience on a wide array of devices. Video compression is an extremely compute-intensive task, and with the increasing need for media multiplication across a variety of display platforms, often proves to be a significant pain point or bottleneck for content providers and distributors.

Solution: A Big Win Using Content Conversion

Adaptive bit rate streaming, available through a variety of protocols specified by companies such as Adobe, Microsoft and Apple, is quickly becoming a technology requirement for content providers and distributors supplying video to web-based devices such as laptops, mobile phones and increasingly, tablet platforms. In the case of the iPad, ABC must encode and segment years and years of video into the fragments required for Apple’s HTTP adaptive streaming protocol to display the highest possible quality video via the web and on the go.

To address this issue, ABC deployed Elemental Server into its production workflow to customize video content for its ABC News application for the iPad. Elemental Server expedites the transcode portion of the overall workflow and directly addresses the lag time between the availability of content on abc.com and the availability of the same content via the iPad. Elemental Server speeds encoding operations by 5x, eliminates ABC’s transcode bottleneck, and helps the company deliver content to multiple platforms virtually simultaneously.

In addition to overcoming the speed and performance limitations of existing solutions, Elemental Server also addressed the Apple App Store requirements to use the m3u8 file extension as well as to provide a 64K-bit stream for all video apps. Files are generally either 640 x 360 or 480 x 360, 24 frames per second, with a 48 GOP size and incremented in 10 second segments. ABC currently serves its Apple iPad content via Akamai’s streaming media service. In the ABC News use case, each input file may be formatted to the five outputs listed at the right.

All of the video content available through the free ABC News App for iPad is generated by Elemental Server. The app interface features the iconic ABC News globe populated with different stories including up-to-the-minute news and historical content reaching back several decades. The touch interface maneuvers the 3D globe, or the user can shake it to randomly select a story. The user can dynamically change the video display resolution with a single swipe of the finger and set parameters to filter for preferred topics. The spinning globe contains content from abc.go.com including stories from “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” “20/20” and “This Week.” Just a week after launch, the ABC News App became one of the most popular iPad apps in the app store.

Benefits: Giant Gains for ABC

Elemental Server significantly streamlines content conversion for the iPad with a substantial increase in transcoding efficiency compared to existing solutions. Built-in presets for the iPad eliminate the need for customized encoding settings and save operator time. The performance available with a single Elemental Server system reduces the number of systems required for large-scale transcoding tasks, therefore lowering operations cost and overhead. In addition, the system’s flexibility allows effective conversion of video for the iPad today and ensures support for video delivery standards and protocols such as HTML5 and WebM in the future. The system’s massively parallel architecture can easily handle the processing required to transcode simultaneous inputs and outputs in real time. With Elemental Server, ABC can convert more than twenty 640 x 360 or 480 x 360 files in real time for on-demand adaptive bit rate streaming.