Introduction to Play
Play is an Appspace extension that allows you to create Play applications that provide simple IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) experiences with live and on-demand videos, as well as broadcast TV channels, for targeted audiences.
You can choose to display or view Play apps via a variety of Play Clients for both personal and public view. Play Clients are both digital media players, and web browsers on web-enabled devices such as desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets.
The Play extension uses Spaces as a mechanism to configure and enable a collection of on-demand content such as images and videos directly from folders within the Appspace Library, with Channels, which are live video feeds encoded and delivered as IP streams associated with EPG (Electronic Program Guides) data. You can configure and allocate multiple content, devices, device groups, users, and Channels, to each Space.
When you add content to a folder in the Appspace Library that is already allocated to a Space, the newly added content automatically appears in the related Space and is delivered to all devices in the Space. Similarly, when a device is added to a device group under Networks that is already allocated to a Space, the device is automatically added to the Space.
All Play data are network specific. Therefore, you cannot share content from one network to another. You are able to view and allocate content, users, and multiple devices, that are only within the network assigned to you. All Spaces in the same network have the same theme as well; you can choose to customize the look and feel of Spaces in your network with the default theme or choose to create custom themes.
Access and IDs in Play
Devices and users added to a network can be given selective access to a particular Space. An Appspace user, and a browser or a media player registered as a device, are allocated one Appspace ID each for authentication in Play, and consume one ID from the central pool of Appspace IDs. Appspace IDs are unique identifiers used by Appspace to track users and devices, which replaces the formerly used Client Access License (CALs) provided in your subscription. The below describes how Appspace IDs are consumed for each type of access method:
Registered Device mode:
A Registered Device mode detects and provides media players and browsers registered with Play, viewing access to Spaces. Each device registered with Play is given one Device ID. Although this mode does not require user credentials when accessing Spaces in Play, every registered device consumes one Appspace ID.
User mode:
A User mode requires Appspace registered user credentials to authenticate user access to Spaces allocated to the user, user group, or network. Each user credential used to access a Space consumes one Appspace ID.
Instant Access mode:
The Instant Access mode uses one Appspace registered user account as a guest user account, and allows public view of a Space on a Play Web Client. This one user account consumes only one Appspace ID.
Note
Currently, to view these IPTV videos in any mode, you must be connected to the network, however, Appspace is working on making this available offline in the coming releases.
IPTV broadcast in Play
Play utilizes data streaming to distribute live TV, video, and media in full broadcast quality over a data network to multiple Play Clients with multiple Spaces, offering the highest levels of picture quality, flexibility, and scalability. IPTV broadcasts primarily use multicast protocols for live streaming.
For digital media players such as the Cisco Edge 340, Play uses the MPEG2_TS UDP Multicast with H.264 protocol, a bandwidth-conserving mechanism that reduces data network traffic by simultaneously delivering a single stream of information to thousands of recipients. As Cisco supports both multicast and unicast protocol, the Edge 340 is able to stream with both the MPEG2_TS UDP Multicast with H.264 protocol, and the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol.
For Web Clients or web browsers, Play uses the HLS protocol with progressive download, to conform to webcast guidelines that use unicast protocols for web-enabled devices. With the use of the HLS protocol on web browsers, Play is able to provide a better viewing experience on any kind of network over WiFi, 3G, or NAT (Network Address Translation) connections, ensuring video streams are downloaded in small fragments, while preventing packet loss, high bandwidth usage, and latency. HLS is also efficiently optimized by proxy servers, resulting in increased uptime.
Note
As HLS is a unicast protocol, it would be beneficial to have a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver video fragments seamlessly.
If your current network uses a multicast protocol, you have a range of options to convert your multicast streams to HLS, which include free or paid software, from vendors such as Cisco. You may also choose to optimize your network by allowing media player devices to use the multicast protocol while web based devices and browsers can use the HLS protocol. Based on your device and network bandwidth, you can choose to stream High Definition (HD) videos as well in Play.