Jan Ozer

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I help streaming and video technology companies solve complex technical and market-facing problems in practical business terms. Engagements range from fixed-scope audits and codec strategy reviews to product testing and technical content that helps customers, prospects, and internal teams connect technical performance to business outcomes. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses.

Monetizing Multiview

Traditional and streaming content and service providers, MVPDs, and other rights holders that dismiss multiview as an unnecessary expense are leaving revenue on the table. Wherever it has been deployed, multiview has delighted customers, driven acquisition, and reduced churn. Just as important, it adds new ad inventory and formats, creating monetization opportunities that weren’t possible in a single-screen world. The …

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Practical Troubleshooting with Elecard: From Quality Loss to Ad Insertion

In a recent interview, Elecard’s Alexander Kruglov shared practical approaches for diagnosing and fixing common streaming problems. Alex, the product manager for StreamEye Studio, demonstrated this product, as well as Boro, a live QoS/QoE monitoring tool. This blog summarizes the discussion, which you can watch on YouTube here. As Alex explained, Elecard started out as a codec developer, but in …

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What Is the Market for the Second-Best Sports Experience?

Content and Service Providers, MVPDs, and other rights holders spend billions on sports rights. Without investing in the viewing experience, the return on those investments may shrink fast. For decades, all sports broadcasters —traditional and streaming —competed on a common platform with the same fundamental building blocks: live streaming sports to big-screen TVs, basic client-side application controls, and broadcast copies of …

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VVC Gains Momentum with Amazon and Dolby Acquisitions

Recent moves by Amazon and Dolby may hint at a growing interest in VVC (Versatile Video Coding). Amazon’s Acquisition of MX Player On Wednesday, June 5, Amazon agreed to acquire key assets of Indian video streaming service MX Player from Times Internet, reportedly in a bid to increase sales and brand awareness in India. Interestingly, as reported by TechCrunch, “the …

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Chick-fil-A’s Play App: A Family-Focused Strategy with a Strategic Edge

While driving to Atlanta the Saturday before Thanksgiving, I streamed the Georgia UMass football game on my iPhone (my wife was driving). The video quality was good with only occasional buffering, but the advertising was limited and monotonous; pretty much the same six commercials for each three-minute segment. One advertisement, though, was particularly interesting; a new app from Chick-Fil-A with …

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AI Dubbing: An Untapped Opportunity for Global Growth

The rise of AI-driven dubbing has created a fundamental shift in content localization. While some see it as an added expense, forward-thinking content producers and vendors increasingly recognize it as a strategic opportunity. By lowering costs, improving scalability, and unlocking new markets, AI dubbing is poised to deliver real growth for those who embrace it. AI Dubbing Is Gaining Traction …

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Where Ad Dollars Quietly Break: Beyond the Obvious in Streaming Monetization

If you work in product, operations, or revenue at a streaming platform, you’re probably already tracking fill rates, CPMs, and demand quality. But the biggest revenue losses often happen elsewhere, quietly, invisibly, and without triggering a single alert. A growing body of technical guidance, operational reports, and publisher best practices reveal much quieter threats to advertising effectiveness: poor quality of …

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David Ronca Unveils VCAT: An Open Benchmarking Tool for Android Playback

I recently interviewed David Ronca, who you probably know from his work at Meta and Netflix, but who’s now running his own company, RoncaTech. We discussed the upcoming release of VCAT (Video Codec Acid Test), a tool that benchmarks video playback performance on Android devices. By way of background, I reviewed an earlier version of VCAT for Streaming Media Magazine. …

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AI Scraping and Publisher Revenue: The Great Content Robbery

More than 80 media executives met in New York last week under the IAB Tech Lab banner to address unauthorized AI content scraping, which enables AI companies to harvest publisher content for model training without compensation. While Google and Meta participated, the AI companies most implicated, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, declined to attend. The industry’s response centers on the LLM …

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Netflix’s Live Platform: What Streaming Engineers Can Learn — and What They Can’t

Three years ago, Netflix asked a deceptively simple question: What would it take to stream live events with the same quality, scale, and reliability as our on-demand catalog? What followed wasn’t a moonshot. It was a methodical, multi-year buildout that turned Netflix into a serious live platform that now supports everything from comedy specials and NFL games to record-setting boxing …

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