Articles

How are organizations such as PBS and TechCrunch using Facebook Live to reach and grow their audiences? The platform has been with us for a year now, so it’s time to check in. We’ve all known for a while that you can stream live video to Facebook Pages. While the technical side is interesting, the big questions on our minds …

(Note: This article was amended to show the comparative results at 6 mbps) Summary (The MPD) As more and more producers move their encoding to the cloud, or distributing via OVPs or other service providers, the data rate for the mezzanine files is significant factor for upload time and bandwidth and storage costs. The big question is, how much extra …

We spoke with 15 publishers including PBS, The YES Network, and TechCrunch to find out exactly how they’re broadcasting to Facebook Live, and the technology they’re using to do it. For our article “Facebook Live: A Progress Report After One Year of Growth,” we interviewed 15 video publishers to get a sense of the strategic reasons why they’re webcasting on …

N2224 has long been considered the Rosetta Stone of ABR encoding (image courtesy of Beamr). Apple TN2224 was originally posted in March 2010 to provide direction for streaming producers encoding for delivery to iOS devices via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). Because the document was so comprehensive and well thought out, and HLS became so successful, TN2224 has often been thought of …

Many companies spend too much on adaptive bitrate encoding. In turns out there’s a pricey way to go about it and a cheaper way. Dynamic packaging to the rescue! Let me throw a couple of numbers at you. The first is shown in Figure 1, from Encoding.com’s “Global Media Format Report 2016,” which shows the respective share of the adaptive …

Here’s the session description; click below to download the handout and watch the session. Almost all of the commercial cloud encoding services, and many of the largest streaming producers encode in the cloud using FFmpeg. It’s cheap, relatively simple, and highly effective. To accomplish this yourself, you need two basic skill sets; first how to encode with FFmpeg, and then …

Here’s the session description; scroll down to download the handout and watch the video. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way to gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of the streams. However, by measuring stream quality via metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VQM, you can precisely …

Here’s the description for my workshop at Streaming Media West; download the handout below: As video resolutions increase and target playback platforms multiply, video producers must leave their H.264/HLS/HDS comfort zone and expand into HEVC, VP9, and MPEG-DASH. This workshop is divided into multiple segments by target platform to teach you the applicable standards and best strategies for delivering live …

I recently finished a white paper comparing the pricing for a new cloud encoding service named Hybrik with multiple cloud providers, including Amazon Elastic Transcoder, Microsoft Azure, Bitmovin, encoding.com, Telestream Cloud, and Zencoder. The white-paper was sponsored by Hybrik, and you can download it below. By way of background, I ran all calculations by the respective services (except Amazon) to verify my …

The Matrox Monarch LCS is an inexpensive dual-input lecture capture solution with two output channels that can be independently set for recording and/or streaming.   At $2,495, the Matrox Monarch LCS is an inexpensive dual-input lecture capture solution with two output channels that can be independently set for recording and/or streaming. You control the unit via a standard browser, and …