Streaming 2.0: what awaits radio and TV tomorrow?

The world around is changing, the tapes have been replaced by disks, and the disks - by files, the files - by streaming, but if you think about it, this is not a revolution, but evolution. The revolution now accompanies mostly newspaper journalism, and the radio and the Internet simply adapt. Print journalists need to master the world, which has become many times more dynamic, while the format of television and radio broadcasting has not changed. The TV channel "Rain", for example, began to cover the Internet audience, but no technological breakthrough in the broadcast itself did not happen. From the point of view of the content delivery mechanism, only the data transmission environment changed, except that it was possible to watch the archive and read the decryptions. Television goes in the direction of quantitative development, not quality - megapixels are increasing, pagers and telephones are replaced by tweeters and forums in the calls on the air. Soon digital radio will reach us - but in fact, this is just another package of the same streaming. There is no revolution.

In today's article, I want to share with you my idea of ​​the technological revolution in audio and TV broadcasting. More precisely, its technical basis. I did not manage to meet anything similar, and I would appreciate a tip from good examples.

It will be a question of an open draft protocol for streaming audio and video, which allows you to use the maximum possible player-receiver.
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Briefly about technology

For those familiar with HTML and CSS, the explanation will be simple. Imagine that the HTML page is infinite, but on the fly you can add to it, replace styles, images and javascripts. And imagine that HTML is described not by a visual page, but by multimedia streaming audio or video content.

As another “parallel from our reality,” recall Youtube. When you open a page with a video, we first load HTML, then resources — javascript, CSS, images, flash modules; moreover, we take some of this from the cache if it was used before and has not changed, then the flash module (or the browser itself). if HTML5) starts streaming content - the actual video, the campaign overlaps with individual channels, overlapping with the video.

As a result, it turns out that our player-receiver collects an audio stream from its components - MIDI-background music, voice, commercials, text together in accordance with some logic. Part of this logic is stored in the settings of the player-receiver, part - comes with this content from the air. The player receiver can use a speech synthesis engine or display text / graphics / video on the screen (if the receiver has one). And of course, he has a buffering that allows loading the content in advance, before it has to go on the air, use it for other needs. For example, advertising comes only once and then scrolls many times a day, at that time something else is being loaded.

The key difference from digital radio or TV is that the architecture does not limit the receiver to a single stream of the same type, allows you to improve the receivers and transmitters, while maintaining the protocol and compatibility with “old” devices. For example, we will get perfect speech synthesis in 5-10 years, and through a separate channel you can drive the text of an entire audiobook with MIDI music. In addition to the live broadcast, the receiver’s owner receives a lot of cached content, which can be listened to before and after, and saved “on a flash drive”, and rewound to the beginning “from the live broadcast”, and listen in an “extended version”, etc. d. In that the caching and reuse of content is actively used.

What should be the receiver for such content?

Yes, in fact it is a computer with a specialized "browser". Receivers can be more detailed (if it is a radio, then with a screen, large memory, a good audio part) and simpler. They can support feedback (make a request to the server) or not support (play, “what they give”).

A specialized player-receiver of such a protocol has several parallel channels, a cursor moving along the time scale, mixing the corresponding pieces in each of the channels, cached resources. One of the channels is the manager, in essence, this is a program that collects content from other channels into one, taking into account the preferences of the user. For example, a channel may contain “audio subtitles”, which the receiver can voice independently or not at all, and another channel contains a running news line.

What should be the protocol?

In fact, it is a streaming protocol that supports feedback (if the receiver is capable of this) and a special control / markup language focused on multimedia content.

What should be the transmitter?

For the Internet and for the radio, the architecture looks somewhat different. For systems with feedback (Internet, for example), where it is desirable to minimize the load on the channel, the web services scheme works — the receiver makes a request, receives a resource or flow, that is, the scheme is similar to that available on the network. For a radio channel without feedback, it is possible to transfer resources regularly, uniformly loading the channel on full. Here, as with teletext, the information came, the receiver recorded it at home and is ready, if you need to pull it out and use it, but while it is not there, it is silent, everyone is waiting, yes. A mixed mode is possible - immediately after switching on, a voice comes, then background music in MIDI catches up with it, a commercial is loaded on a separate channel, which should be included in the program at the beginning of the hour.

This opens up a lot of possibilities for building “smart receivers” adapted to particular needs.

Backward compatibility

An interesting feature of this protocol is that it is compatible with the existing “old radio” or “old TV” and allows you to gently switch to the new system. In fact, when switching to such a system, a channel is first created with an existing broadcast, then one optional channel is added to it, transmitting the same, but logically split into parts (advertising, news, weather, etc.), then more and more appear there are fewer devices that mostly use this “advanced” set of channels and users of the “old radio”, as a result it will ever turn off altogether.

From the existing systems I was unable to find anything in the field of audio streaming, and some remotely similar systems in the field of TV set-top boxes (settopboxes). For example, there is such technology HbbTV - Hybrid Broadcast Band TV. Special receivers, combining navigation through information with a video stream. There you can, for example, view detailed information on a football player in parallel broadcast.

There is CMML technology - Continuous Media Markup Language or Annodex or Kate connected with it, close to the above ... But they did not receive much development and the concepts embedded in them are just a cut of the above.

Do you think something like that will take off?