SOLUTIONS TO REQUIREMENTS OF Clients

Video Encoding and Bit Rate

Most clients requested an acceptable quality similar to "640x360/25fps videos, H.264 encoded at 500Kbps", which is equivalent to H.264 Baseline Profile, Levels 2.2. GGMMTV using its proprietary compression HVMT is able to provide 720x576/25fps video encoded using less than 512Kbps giving a very acceptable quality.

Other resolution settings can be customised but subject to availability of target bandwidth.

Audio Encoding

GGMMTV is able to provide encoded audio in stereo sampled at 44.1kHz. The quality of the audio is on par with AAC+ encoding (or HE-AAC version 1 standardized in 2003 by MPEG and published as part of MPEG-4 in document ISO/IEC 14496-3, Amd.1:2003).

Other audio settings can be customised but subject to availability of target bandwidth.

Number of Concurrent Users

The initial system will be able to support 100,000+ concurrent users, with the option of expanding the number of concurrent users by installing more servers. The GGMMTV system is scalable and coupled with the P2P delivery system, any future expansion will be efficient and cost effective. The content provider should however be aware of various P2P related legal issues which the content provider must disclaim and make clear in the user's agreement.

The P2P delivery system which GGMMTV uses is the "Live P2P" system. This is a 3rd party system and is being used by tv.sina.com.cn. In the case of Sina's IPTV, it deploys a 500Mbps bandwidth and claims to have 78,000 concurrent users.

As a matter of interest and statistics, www.maxtv.cn is another popular P2P portal in China. On its website it claims that it has over 10 million registered users and 20,000 concurrent users.

User Experience

The GMT Player has a stand-alone version as well as a browser plug-in version. The latter allows the content provider to integrate the GMT Player within its web page. Functions that are available to the GMT Player can be customised according to the content provider's requirements.

The GMT Player can have the content provider's default advertisements (changeable periodically by the content provider) which will be displayed first, followed by other advertisements served up by the content provider while the main video is being buffered. In the event where re-buffering is required, the content provider's default advertisements will simply kick-in while the GMT Player is buffering, the main video will continue after the re-buffering is completed and the advertisement has finished. Subject to the content provider's requirement, this is in addition to any in-stream advertising which the GMT Player may be linked with by the content provider.

IP Restrictions

Built into the P2P delivery management system, a variety of user IP management is available including but not limited to: blacklist by individual IP number, blacklist associated with content being served, blacklist associated with geographic locations (although in practice this can only be 90% accurate), and last but not least blacklist by definable groups.

Content Protection

Due to the P2P method of delivery, part of the content served may be stored on the user's PC. The content or parts thereof will however be encrypted. An enhanced version of the GMT Player will be able to generate and display a small watermark as a series of numbers (consisting of the viewer's IP address, date, time, and subscriber's login name) to be periodically displayed on screen randomly at any of the four corners to stop piracy using the "analogue hole" method or similar means. In practice, this has been found to be more effective than DRM and literally at no cost to the content provider. The fact that such visible watermark will make any pirated content traceable to the source will simply deter piracy.

Advertising Insertion

The GMT Player is able to support in-stream advertising, such as DoubleClick in order to implement the relevant codes into the GMT Player.

Delivery Mode

The GGMMTV delivery system is able to support both live-streaming and VOD, at the resolution, bit rates, audio encoding and quality specified.

Reporting

Full user management report is available on a daily basis, including but not limited to:

For each video clip
- Number of viewers
- Average viewing time
- Average viewing time of each viewer

For all clips combined
- Daily number of viewers/users
- Daily average viewing time
- Hourly number of viewers/users
- Hourly average viewing time
- Hourly maximum number of concurrent users
- Bandwidth consumption displayed in the form of Multi Router Traffic Graph ("MRTG") (a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links, MRTG generates HTML pages containing graphical images which provide a live visual representation of this traffic).

Other statistics and reports are available including IP logs etc.

Content Management

GGMMTV has its own Content Management System including but limited to scheduled insertion, scheduled removal, general administration of each video clips, etc. All being accessible via a web based interface with password access control.

Membership Management

GGMMTV has its own Viewers Management System software enabling the content provider to keep a record of registered viewers. Supported options such as:
- Viewer must register before viewing is allowed;
- Viewer must register and pay before viewing is allowed.

The registration process will provide the viewer with a login and password which must be entered into the GMT Player before viewing is permitted. The users' management system can also be linked to a payment gateway system which will allow payment to be processed and accepted online, giving the viewer instant access to chargeable contents.

The Viewers Management System can also manage a subscription service where expired subscriber will not be permitted to access chargeable contents.

Note that a user registration system will permit the implementation of an effective watermark content protection method as described above.