Research Archives - Hello Future

Live streaming has become increasingly widespread. With the addition of 5G, this service can be dramatically improved at all levels, including image quality, download times, interruptions and lag. Faced with today’s generations’ enthusiasm for live feeds, researchers are now working to adapt live streaming TV so it can be done on the go. The Goal: Lag-Free Live Streams Getting closer to what’s happening live is one of the main challenges in the field of live streaming. Yet, streaming over the Internet using Wi-Fi or 4G still results in a lag of 30, 40 or even 50 seconds on tablets or smartphones. This lag will particularly hit home for any soccer fans who have ever heard their neighbor watching TV and cheering for a goal they haven’t seen yet. It also affects participants in time-limited interactive TV game shows and televised broadcasts by figures of authority in relation to announcements, alerts or disasters, for example. Ensuring service continuity, particularly when faced with high demand, is another challenge of live streaming. At Orange Innovation, researchers are therefore thinking about how they can make improvements in the field of TV streaming on the go, using a combination of 5G, video streaming technologies (multicast, low latency), network bandwidth allocation (network slicing) and edge computing. Their work has primarily focused on mutualizing streams; a key way of saving bandwidth. Dominique Thômé, Product Manager Innovation Data TV, explains that “Unlike unicast technology, which broadcasts streams as many times as there are simultaneous connections, multicast should allow a single stream to be broadcast to thousands of people connected to a large 5G zone. This mutualization prevents bandwidth loss and, consequently, service interruptions from network congestion. Another advantage, which is of great importance to Orange, is that it consumes less energy and therefore contributes to the transition to a low-carbon economy.” Recognizing the Know-How of Carriers Experiments carried out in the Orange laboratory have yielded interesting results. A real-time readjustment of video quality to prevent network saturation resulted in each customer being able to watch TV with only five seconds of lag, confirming the feasibility of 5G live streaming on the go. In fact, faced with ever-increasing volumes, some broadcasters are beginning to turn to carriers to broadcast their TV streams. They need players that are able to transmit this huge amount of data while ensuring optimal quality, in order to avoid any latency problems. Thibaut Mathieu, Director of Innovation for Interactive & Multiscreen Services at Orange says that “Our pioneering approach toward 5G live streaming highlights the valuable role that network carriers play, right at the heart of the system, compared to OTT players (“over the top,” such as the Tech Giants), both in terms of technology and business. We will be able to get involved in data transmission, with optimal mutualization technology that will save money and energy.” These technologies are consistent with Orange’s CSR commitment, both in terms of carbon footprint (lower energy consumption) and inclusion (broadcasting the right information at the right time). More than Just Entertainment The challenge goes far beyond the traditional TV broadcasting market itself. In the context of the health crisis, brands have been quick to understand the value of live streams to generate sales and are starting to venture into “Live Shopping.” Originating from China, this large-scale approach to teleshopping consists of an online event where presenters, influencers or personalities showcase products live to a digital audience who are able to order products or ask questions. Live Shopping is attracting more and more brands around the world. “With hundreds of thousands of people connected at the same time, its large scale will certainly create capacity issues” says Thômé. “This is another case where mutualization will ensure quality of service.”

Networks and IT / Article

How 5G Is Revolutionizing Live Streaming

Live streaming has become increasingly widespread. With the addition of 5G, this service can be dramatically improved at all levels, including image quality, download times, interruptions and lag. Faced with today’s generations’ enthusiasm for live feeds, researchers are now working to adapt live streaming TV so it can be done on the go. The Goal: […]

Digital culture / Folder

Flasback 2021

At a time of great challenges, companies are giving priority to technological innovation. They learn to master change to build a new future that is mainly digital driven. Driven by the demands of a new reality over the past 18 months, companies have adapted to the unexpected acceleration of technological advances. Cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, cloud […]

Data / Article

Materializing data to understand it better

Physical representations have existed for millennia. Before the invention of writing, early civilizations used various objects – pebbles, ropes, etc. – to pass on information, stimulate thought, and improve cognitive ability. The most often quoted example is that of the Mesopotamian clay tokens (calculi), used in 4,000 BCE for accounting, and whose shape varied according […]

Networks and IT / Article

Graphene, an innovation accelerator for the optoelectronics of tomorrow

Synthesized for the first time in 2004 by Russian physicists Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim and earning them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010, graphene is often described as a “miracle material” because of its unique properties, be they mechanical, electric or thermal. A two-dimensional sheet made up of carbon atoms arranged in a […]

Digital culture / Folder

The metaverse: the future of the internet and digital practices

The word metaverse is the new buzzword in the tech world. It embodies the Internet of the future based on various booming technologies: 3D, AR/VR, Blockchain, connectivity. But what is it really? The metaverse is a set of persistent, interconnected and immersive virtual spaces accessible online through digital avatars that share and interact with each […]

Digital culture / Article

Journey Through the Metaverse: Digital Twins Are Synchronizing the Physical and Virtual

A digital twin is a digital representation of real-world entities — an object, system or process — that is synchronized with the real world. With sensors that relay information and two-way Internet of Things (IoT) object connections, this technology can synchronize the digital environment with the physical world and vice versa. Any change in the […]

A woman in front of a computer analyzing electricity consumption data

Artificial intelligence / Video

Reducing mobile network power consumption with AI

Taoufik En Najjari, senior data scientist at Orange, explains: “For ten years, we have modernized our networks to make them more efficient and less energy-intensive. Our studies show that AI could reduce our power consumption by 15%.” Orange research teams have created an algorithm using machine learning and big data technologies to scan the network […]

Artificial intelligence / Article

When the evolution of species inspires algorithms

Human beings have always drawn from nature to develop new technologies and techniques. This highly fertile process of innovation is known as “bioinspiration” or “biomimicry”. Since the mid 1960’s, scientists and engineers have been taking inspiration from Charles Darwin’s theory on the evolution of species that the English naturalist developed in his 1859 book “On […]

Artificial intelligence / Article

When AI knows your state of health thanks to the sound of your voice

The voice contains a lot of information on people’s state of health. Indeed, several conditions – neurodegenerative and pulmonary diseases, cardiovascular disorders, mental disorders – can change the way in which a person speaks. For example, they may not articulate as well, or they may stretch vowels more. Although the human brain can analyze some […]

Artificial intelligence / Article

Video Compression: A Neural Network Challenging the Conventional Approach

The rules were clearly defined so that innovations in the scientific community could be judged on the same criteria: some 100 videos of several seconds each needed to be compressed to 1 Mb/s, while retaining the best possible quality. Thirteen candidates submitted their coding for testing, with players from around the world, both in industry and […]

Data / Article

DNA, hard drive of the future for our digital data?

The molecule that supports the genetic heritage of living organisms, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) contains all the information necessary for an organism to function. Since the works of American physicist Richard Feynman in the late 1950s, scientists have also been planning to use it as the support for human knowledge. In theory, it is quite simple: […]

Artificial intelligence / Word of innovation

PINNs

The inventors of PINNs define them as “neural networks that are trained to solve supervised learning tasks while respecting any given law of physics described by general nonlinear partial differential equations”. Indeed, algorithms do not necessarily take into account the physical principles governing the systems to which they are applied. Yet, the behaviour of these […]