Articles

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

I just launched Streaming Monetization 101, a 50+ lesson, roughly seven-hour course created in partnership with the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA). It’s available now through SVTA University for $399. The course provides new hires in streaming services and the companies that support them with a comprehensive, real-world understanding of how platforms generate and grow revenue. It covers the business …

On July 3, I spoke with Hari Kalva and Velibor Adzic from Florida Atlantic University about Feature Coding for Machines (FCM), a new MPEG standard being developed for machine-to-machine video applications. You can watch the full interview on YouTube and it’s embedded below. This blog presents that conversation in a lecture-style format. It follows the slides shown during the session …

AI video compression standards have moved from the research lab to the standards committee. This post summarizes the current status of formal standardization efforts as of July 2025, the groups driving them, and the anticipated timeline for real-world deployment. If you’re wondering whether the next generation of video codecs will be AI-native or just AI-enhanced, this should give you a …

Dan Rayburn recently published the video and slides from my NAB Streaming Summit session, where I walked through real-world techniques to optimize x264 and x265 for quality and efficiency. No AI, no codecs from 2030, just practical optimizations that work today. If You’re Still Encoding with x264 and x265—Good You don’t need to jump to AV1 or VVC to get …