The State of Streaming, Spring 2021 Report, was sponsored by Harmonic, Inc, and details the radical changes that have occurred in streaming production and consumption during the second half of the pandemic. This interview explores key findings from the report with the authors Michelle-Fore Siglin and Tim Siglin, including which job skills and technologies have become more important over the …
Read More »DRM and Cloudfront Lessons Added to Wowza Streaming Engine E-learning Course
We’ve added several new lessons to our E-learning course, Getting Up and Running with Wowza Streaming Engine. The advanced new modules include Deploying DRM with the Wowza and BuyDRM’s KeyOS Platform and Configuring a Wowza Origin with Amazon CloudFront Edge Servers. New lessons include: • KeyOS MultiPack Wowza Module Set-up and Configuration • Testing Encryption with A Sample Streaming URL …
Read More »Proving the ROI on Training for Streaming Media Professionals
On-the-job training has a significant cost in learning materials and employee time. When ROI is king, is training worth it? That’s the issue explored by this white paper from the Streaming Learning Center. Key findings include: That training can accelerate time to proficiency by 30 – 50%. With technical employees paid from US $35,000 – $100,000+, accelerating time to efficiency …
Read More »Webinar: Producing VP9 for VOD and Live Streaming: Should You and How-To
This webinar provided an overview of producing VP9 for VOD and live streaming. You can watch the recorded video below. Click here to download the handout. Description: The VP9 codec is at an interesting inflection point. On the one hand, VP9 provides better quality than H.264, and similar quality but much better browser support than HEVC. On the other, …
Read More »Beginners’ Guide to Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
Lesson of the Week: What’s the Optimal Data Rate for Mezzanine Files?
Sourcebook 2021 Tutorials Focus Video and Course Production
Every year, the Streaming Media Sourcebook features tutorials to help streaming media professionals perform their daily tasks faster and better and buyer’s guides to help them purchase the right gear and software. This year I focused my articles on video production topics. Here are the tutorials with a brief description: Connecting a DSLR or Camcorder to an External Mic – …
Read More »My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week of Virtual Presenting
So, here I am, just about to launch a course on webinars and live video production (now launched), and I experience the worst two virtual presentations ever. In this blog, I’ll share the gory details and let you know how you (perhaps) can avoid the same fate. All that said, this is more a writer’s self-therapy for me than learning …
Read More »Webinar: Video Codecs in 2021 and Beyond with Jan Ozer
I was honored to present a free webinar entitled Video Codecs in 2021 and Beyond with Muvi on April 8, 2021. The slides and recording are below. Here’s the description. There has never been a time where so many video codecs were available (or soon to be available) for video producers. From MPEG, we have AVC (H.264), HEVC (H.265), VVC …
Read More »How to Reduce Encoding Time by Up to 40% With Negligible Quality Loss
Reducing the reference frame setting from 16 to 1 when using x.264’s veryslow preset decreased encoding time by 46% on ten 2-minute test files while dropping the average VMAF score from 96.06 to 95.97, a decrease of less than .001. If you used the Medium preset, at the default setting of 3 reference frames, changing to ref=1 would drop encoding …
Read More »