OpenTV Video Platform Internal Release Notes ( OPF 20.25_STD0_Draft ) - 2020.Q2

Release Summary

This new release enriches User Experience thanks to catalogue management improvements that will show contents in a more attractive way as well as providing flexibility to the operators to decide what to present to their subscribers. We have also improved the VoD Search possibilities within a new service to allow search and exploration of VOD assets, including Nodes and Series / Seasons, available as a collection of operator APIs that can be integrated with outside of the Operator Console.

New Product Features

This chapter provides a high-level overview of new features coming with the 2020-Q2 STD0 product release out of PI 2020-Q2 R&D development cycle.

1. Title:  Configuration Management: Config kept after upgrade 

[Internal feature] 

When upgrading OpenTV Video Platform modules business related configuration (customer specific) is not overridden by default values, reducing the upgrade time and risk of manual errors. 

2.[Title] OpenTV Video Platform Small layout

[Internal feature]

Definition and validation of the smallest possible layouts (highly available or not) to deploy a functional viable environment to be used by small customers, staging environments or labs.

3.Title: Normalisation of SSP/OpenTV Video Platform ADM & RMG

[Internal feature]

This feature aligns closer SSP and OPF versions of ADM & RMG, solving problems like creating extra indexes in the DB, merging SSP SOAP tests, to ensure no future regression.

This feature also removed Drools from RMG, resulting in a decrease of costs, as well as cleaned up other tech debt on the module.

4.[Title] General DWH Compliance with GDPR 

[Internal feature]

This feature ensures that the data warehouse as implemented is compliant with data retention policies, GDPR policies and security best practice both AWS guidance and as reviewed by the internal Nagra security team. 

5.Title: TVOD single products: Subscribers screen Integration

[Product Feature]

The ability to manage TVOD product entitlements for subscriber accounts via Operator Console. This feature allows the operator to directly set which TVOD products the subscriber account has access to. This includes the ability to manage access to TVOD collections as well as individual content items linked to  shared TVOD products.

6.Title: SVOD Products management in Operator Console

[Internal feature]

Bringing the SVOD product management capability into the new product management area of Operator Console

7.Title: Operator Search - VOD

[Product Feature]

New operator search service to allow search and exploration of VOD assets, including Nodes and Series / Seasons. Available as a collection of operator APIs that can be integrated with outside of the Operator Console.

Key Features:

• Directly addresses previous stability concerns

• Directly addresses previous ingest and query performance concerns

• Search results tuning of the typical use cases, utilising field weight, tie breaking, and targeted analyzers to provide logically accurate and correctly ordered results

• Support for Lucene based syntax for powerful advanced searching of VOD assets

• Search suggestions

• Grouping of content by its' Series / Season

• Ability to request entities to be synchronously refreshed, ensuring updates are always reflected immediately

The VOD screens in Operator Console have been reworked to integrate tightly with the new search APIs, providing further stability and performance improvements in the UI and an enhanced UX. 

8. Performance testing the throughput of the CRM-GW APIs for typical CRM scenarios (add accounts / add devices / create entitlements etc..).

[Internal Feature]

The purpose of feature is to verify the performance of CRM gateway. The response time for CRM gateway APIs is the aggregation of OPF and SSP calls. The performance limit has been met and it depends on the OPF and SSP inter-region response times.

9.Title: Exclusion of Managed Devices from Streaming limits

[Product Feature][Starhub] 
For Managed devices. like STBs using Nagra CAS products, the platform can be configured to exclude these devices from device Session Streaming Management (SSM) limits setup by the operator for accounts.

10.Title: Exclusion of Managed Devices from Device limits

[Product Feature][Starhub] 
For Managed devices i.e. STB using Nagra CAS products, the platform can be configured to ignore these devices from the device limit that is attached to an account.

11.Title: Integration with Broadpeak HTTP Sessions Authentication System (CDN Tokenisation)

[Product Feature][Starhub] 

Broadpeak can deploy their uCDN with an http protection mechanism which requires the client application/player to have a security token to access the content on their CDN.
OPF3.x is integrated with Broadpeak's solution to provide valid accounts and devices authorization to playback OTT content from their secure CDN.

12. Title: Purge of Broadpeak Assets using single purge Job (Starhub)

[Product Feature][Starhub]  

Workflow integration with Broadpeak packaging solutions has been extended to allow content purging using a single purge Job.

13.Title: CIM interface to S3 Bucket

[Product Feature][Starhub] 

OpenTV Video Platform has now the capability to ingest content files from a regular directory, a provided SFTP service or an Amazon S3 bucket.

14.Title: Multi Factor Authentication for Operator Console 

[Product Feature][Starhub] 

Security of Operator Console login has been enhanced by the addition of MFA ( Multi-factor Authentication ) - a Time based OTP (OTP) generated via common mobile authenticator apps is needed in addition to the user-name password to login into Operator Console.

15.Title: External Notifications by email

[Product Feature][Starhub] 

OpenTV Video Platform can send email notifications when certain events occur in the system. These events are also recorded in Data Warehouse and are available for use in customer reports.
The recipients are configured during deployment and can be updated by NAGRA on request.

Typical events for which notifications are sent are metadata ingest/export and Asset workflow.

16. Support Signon using Account ID 

[Product Feature]

Support for signon by account credentials using account ID only, optionally with integration to SSP-DAS for device ID generation and validation.

17. [Telefonica] [WMK BBAND] Finalize control of the CCL WMK from the SSP HE (part#2.1)

[Internal feature] HE Controlled Watermarking (SSP Feature)

An attribute to allow SSP to store a watermark identifier against a device - used for identifying an account from a stream captured with an embedded watermark.

*** When we create Telefonica-specific release notes, we need to mention that this does NOT mean that watermarking works end-to-end yet.

18.Title: OpenTV Platform protection against DOS&DDOS attacks 

[Product Feature]

Security of OpenTV Platform deployments have been enhanced to protect against DOS/DDOS attacks ( Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of service ) using CloudFlare service.

19.Title: Validity Date Simplification

[Product Feature]

Rationalization of the rules and entities that control when a content asset is deemed to be valid and, by association, visible to a client. This feature moves the product towards an editorial management of the catalogue, rather than technical, led product retailing model.

20.CDS for improved scalability (UI Builder API) 

[Internal] 

The current version of CDS suffers from scalability issues when used in a scenario where it is required to deliver a high volume of personalised content in a short period of time. These issues have been identified when conducting break point load testing against. To improve the ability for the CDS module to scale at load we will implement several changes over two phases, the first phase implemented in Q2 2020 will consist of the following.

1. Performance tune the current code base, addressing any issues we find in performance testing such as blocking calls.

2. Split the CDS module along a functional boundary to allow us to deliver more focused services that can scale independently. Specifically in this case the CDS module will focus on the delivery of the content templates to the client, the new module will be focused on the management and creation of the templates.

3. Tune the NGINIX caching on offer from the platform using the ability for NGINIX to manage duplicate calls and responses and also we will improve the current caching mechanism and set appropriate levels of caching for personalised vs non personalised content  

4. Introduce more focused API’s to allow different clients to make more specific calls to CDS to retrieve the full metadata details they require for actions, to avoid the requirement to make repeated or additional calls further reducing the load on the service.

21.Title: VOD Group Membership Enhancements

[Product Feature]

Previously VOD content could only be associated with either a Series / Season OR a single bespoke collection. This enhancement now allows VOD content to optionally be associated with a Series / Season OR any number of bespoke collections, OR both. 

22.Title: Upgrade of 3rd party libraries with known security vulnerabilities

[Internal feature]

Versions of software libraries used in OpenTV Video Platform micro-services that have been flagged for vulnerabilities by the SCA ( Software Configuration Analyzer ) tool in the build pipeline have been upgraded.

These are summarised in the following table:

23.Title: Dynamic Application Security Testing of OpenTV Video Platform API's

[Internal feature]

Dynamic application security testing of OpenTV Platform API's are now being performed as a part of security validation of the product. This is performed in an automated manner using ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy ) that simulates most common API attack scenarios against the public API's of the platform.

24.Title: Migration to EKS

[Internal Feature] 

Finalization of the OpenTV platform infrastructure migration to make use of EKS (Kubernetes as a service by AWS).  

25.Title: Show latest content added to the catalogue

[Product Feature]

This feature provides the ability for the client to show the latest content (catch and normal VOD, as defined by Creation Date). Call has been improved by adding a creation date attached to the MDS record that’s returned via the API the client makes to MDS. 

This way, the app client will receive, with a single API call, the content in the order they were added to the catalogue.   

26.Title: StarHub - Extended Ufinity Authentication for Sign-on by CASN

[Starhub]

This feature introduces a new API to sign-on with CASN to improve the security by ensuring the STB CASN is associated with the Starhub (Ufinity) account that is being used.

Backward Compatibility Consideration

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Compatibility Matrix

Below here is the compatibility matrix between OpenTV Platform and ION.

	20.11_STD4	20.25_STD0
MobION  0.25.1
MobION  0.25.2
FireTvION  0.7.0.3.1
Desktop 1.4.9.1
OCB 0.6.5
DWH (Glue script, Redshift schema change) CL1190520
Tableau (Online config)1.2.0-139

< Use Tick mark in the above table >

List of Known Issues

The following issues are still open ( not resolved ) in this OPF_20.25_STD0 release.

Resolved Issues

The following issues are fixed and these bug fixes are part of this OPF_20.25_STD0 release.

New Issues

The following are the new issues seen in this OPF_20.25_STD0 release.

OpenTV Video Platform Components Deployed:

The following components are deployed as part of this release.