Encoding

Three recent Alliance for Open Media presentations on YouTube shed new light on AV2’s performance and utility. Andrew Norkin, Director of Codec Development at Netflix, presented the current status and architecture of AV2. He outlined the codec’s design goals, early performance results, and hardware-focused development approach, noting that the low-level toolset is now finalized. The YouTube video is here. Ryan …

Multiview, or the ability to view multiple live feeds simultaneously, is quickly becoming a must-have feature for sports and live-event streaming. The core technical question for providers is how to implement it.  There are two main architectural options: client-side and server-side multiview. Both can display multiple games or camera angles on a screen, but they work in very different ways, …

I recently sat down with Marc Todd, CEO of Skreens, to discuss how multiview has evolved from a niche feature into a must-have capability for sports and live-event streaming. Skreens has been at the center of this transformation, powering multiview deployments for millions of subscribers. What follows is a slide-by-slide look at Todd’s presentation, told mostly in his own words. …

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 …

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 …

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 recently tested the Deep Render AI codec and issued a report, which you can read here. The bottom line was that in the tested low-latency use case, the Deep Render AI codec substantially outperformed SVT-AV1 quality-wise and was only slightly behind VVenC. While the codec lacks features like bitrate control that are necessary for most deployments, it offers outstanding integration …

If you’re optimizing x265 for speed, enabling Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) looks like a no-brainer. Table 1 shows a staggering 7.3x improvement in encoding time. A 3:15 encode with WPP turns into a painful 23:51 without it. The quality penalty? Negligible. VMAF drops just 0.19, with the low-frame VMAF off by only 0.77  (low-frame is the lowest VMAF score of …

In a recent conversation with Jan Ozer from the Streaming Learning Center, Marc Todd, Founder and CEO of Skreens, shared insights into his company’s background, its mission, and its multi-view technology, which is already deployed by a major US service provider, and available either directly from Skreens or through MediaKind. You can watch the interview on YouTube here, or embedded …

In their paper entitled, Multi-resolution Encoding for HTTP Adaptive Streaming using VVenC, Kamran Qureshi, Hadi Amirpour, and Christian Timmerer from the Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA (Alpen-Adria-Universität, Klagenfurt, Austria) propose an accelerated multi-resolution encoding strategy for HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) using VVenC, an optimized open-source Versatile Video Coding (VVC) encoder. Their approach, called MEVHAS (Multi-resolution Encoding in VVenC for HTTP Adaptive …