Panels and exhibits at this year’s AES show underscored music distribution’s ongoing shift from the file to the stream, and the attendant challenges it brings, and Dan Daley was on hand to listen to the buzz.
There was a good reason for putting streaming and broadcast audio under the same rubric at the Audio Engineering Society’s 2011 AES Show in New York City in October. David Bialik, the systems engineering consultant who put together the streaming and broadcast component of the AES Show’s panels this year (as he has for the last five shows) says that streaming music is an extension of radio, a next generation that’s also a sibling of its forebear. “One came before the other but they’re both working in tandem now, more than coexisting,” he says.
A study released by the NPD Group in October bears him out. Rather than following the music business down the digital rabbit hole it’s been sucked into since 2000, the study shows that Americans still listen to music on the radio more than any other medium. “The traditional formats of radio listening and using CDs in the car remain the dominant methods consumers use to interact with music,” the study says. At the same time, however, the study also finds that adaptive- streaming and on-demand-streaming radio is now gaining more traction in the market, complementing the pay-per-download format popularized by services like iTunes and Amazon MP3.
“There’s more awareness of streaming in general now,” Bialik says, noting that the conference agenda of the 2011 show saw a significant increase in both the number of panels as well as in their attendance, something he attributes at least in part to the heightened awareness of music streaming. “Both broadcasters and the general public are taking streaming more seriously now,” he states. “It’s become a full-blown media now, like radio or television. Advertising is picking up on streamed media, especially in music, and auto makers are working on ways to build streaming into cars.”
Cars would come up again in the conversation, as part of the acknowledgement that digital music, which had moved into a mobile paradigm with the advent of the iPod almost a decade ago, was now adding streaming content to that. Both concepts have been around for a while, but combining them has created a bump in the business models, which are being overtaken by new technological developments even before they fully find their footing. For example, several music streaming companies, including Google and Amazon, launched streaming music services before securing licensing agreements with key content rights holders.
That same dynamic is impacting the technology side. Where streamed media is often looked at as a fully developed media silo, multiple approaches to it are still evolving. One of those was a focus at several of the AES panels. HTML5, though developed mainly for video, has already been selected as a delivery format for some of Pandora’s and Google’s music streaming channels. Apple’s selection of HTML5 as a primary format for its current iPad OS has helped the codec gain market – and mindshare – but as several panellists pointed out, it’s still not a perfect music carrier, citing such issues as a lack of support for adaptive streaming services and no current support for DRM. Nonetheless, Ian Bennett, a senior architect and evangelist for Microsoft, told attendees that HTML5 would become a ‘citizen’ of the forthcoming Windows 8 environment. Greg Ogonowski of Orban is also supporter, describing HTML5 as a viable alternative to Flash and MS’s Silverlight platform, though he views HTML5 as a “work in progress for music,” one that lacks key features and consensus within the streaming industry.
“Without codec consensus, HTML5 will fail [as a delivery format],” Ogonowski told the crowd flatly. “But MP3 has outlived its usefulness, so we need something new going forward.” Ogonowski also outlined the landscape for delivering HTML5. They include progressive downloads utilizing M4A and MP3 from web servers, live streaming using HTTP/ICY SHOUTcast/ICEcast2 servers, and HTTP/HLS segmented files from Apple web servers, as well a handy link to relevant PAD/metadata standards.
In a panel entitled ‘Improving the Streaming Audience Experience,’ audio D-A conversion expert Dr Steve Harris from BridgeCo Network (recently acquired by chipmaker SMSC) outlined sources for streaming in the home and their effect on the streaming experience. DLNA/UPMP offers wide support of various codecs, though its GUI seems to have as many detractors as supporters, he told the audience. Apple’s Airplay format has the advantage of the Cupertino company’s consumer allure as well as a lossless transfer bit rate of up to 1.2 mbps and the fact that the iPhone can act as either a streaming controller or a base device.
Harris expects that the iPod’s 30-pin interface will soon be replaced by the Airplay dock. Premium music streaming services into the home, such as Rhapsody and Spotify, are benefitting from higher throughput broadband speeds to the home and in the process, which make the music experience more predictable and making music easier to search out. However, Harris pointed out, there is little standardization in the sector – different services use different streaming and encryption formats, and the subscription nature of the services means they must send out firmware updates regularly.
Streaming music services, whether server or cloud-based, are arriving on the scene as music continues to become a devaluing commodity in the marketplace. As DTS’s Geir Skaaden pointed out, “There’s been an increase in the amount of files out there, but not in revenue from them.” It suggests, he believes, that the future of music streaming will tend to be cloud-based due to lower costs, and that will favour the better-scaled companies in the field. “The personal cloud is getting the traction, and few players can really play there,” he said, noting that this dynamic is already playing out in the streaming movie business. “Even Netflix is getting squeezed now. Multi-screen distribution is now a requirement, as is the need to encode and store high-quality file [formats]. It’s not a mom-and-pop entertainment business at this point.”
BACK TO THE CARS
The mobile theme eventually came back to the automobile again. Jan Nordmann, Director of Marketing & Business Development at Fraunhofer USA Digital Media Technologies – represented on several streaming panels at the conference and also at a booth on the show floor, a reflection of the growing awareness of how important streaming is becoming to music – noted that Fraunhofer is currently collaborating with Panasonic Automotive Systems of America and personal radio service provider Aupeo on an in- car demonstrator that receives and plays Aupeo’s surround music streams over internet. The solution will be presented at industry events early next year.
The automobile was once considered prime territory for exploiting surround music. In the mid-oughts, Panasonic also worked with Grammy Award-winning producer/engineer Elliot Scheiner (who is a regular on panels at AES Shows, this year being no exception) and luxury vehicle manufacturer Acura to bring multichannel audio to the car environment. The premium audio system, branded ‘ELS Surround Premium Audio System’ was introduced in the Acura TL and later became available in four other Acura models, the TSX, MDX, RDX & ZDX.
The system has six independent discrete channels of audio source material comprising centre, left front, right front, left rear, right rear and subwoofer, sourced from an in-dash radio with a built-in six-disc DVD-Audio/CD changer capable of playing DVD-Audio discs, CDs and MP3s. The system is still technically available as an option but the lack of content has muted demand, but the car environment seems to retain its market potential for music delivery: the same NPD Group study cited earlier also finds that, “Nearly two out of three Americans say that the majority of their music listening takes place in the car.”
Nordmann believes that streaming offers surround music another shot at the consumer. “Surround music during the past decades has been bound to physical media such as SACD or DVD-A,’ he explains. “Due to the necessary high- priced special player equipment, consumer confusion and a lack of appealing content, those formats always remained a niche market for audio enthusiasts. Even today’s attempts to release multi-channel music on Blu-ray discs suffer from the same disadvantages. Only live music concert DVDs have broad appeal. [But] if surround music wants to succeed and become a mass market phenomenon that appeals to a broad consumer base, it has to be convenient, easy to use and offer attractive content in genres that also attract younger audiences. It also needs to fit in today’s mobile music listening habits that make it portable and easy to connect to home cinema systems or cars with surround sound systems. The broad attractive content base can only be achieved if the business case proves right and production costs can be minimized.”
What can contribute to that production cost containment, Nordmann says, is the use of bandwidth-effective codecs, such as Fraunhofer’s SX Pro surround/upmix codec, part of their MPEG Surround encoder suite. Discrete 5.1 mixes get encoded in MPEG Surround; stereo content gets upmixed and then encoded in MPEG Surround. The upmix is done fully automatically by analyzing the stereo original in the time and frequency domain. MPEG Surround operates on top of an existing stereo audio codec such as AAC. It combines highest compression efficiency with stereo compatibility and includes a binaural decoder mode that allows the rendering of surround audio over conventional stereo headphones.
Fraunhofer has already licensed this technology to Triton Digital (which recently acquired Streamtheworld) and Orban for use in their streaming encoders, and others will be announced. Using the combination of upmix and surround encoding enables service providers such as the personal music service Aupeo. Fraunhofer also announced a licensing agreement with Texas Instruments earlier this year that gives TI’s customers access to the Fraunhofer MPEG Surround decoder software as part of the network audio SDK that comes with the DSP. Products with MPEG Surround capability are expected for release in 2012.
Despite a bumpy start and a crowded field of competitors, streaming music will certainly be ubiquitous, if not necessarily a huge profit centre for music. But the attention that it got at this year’s AES Show suggests that it’s definitely going to keep sounding better and better.
