Now that programs like Wirecast and vMix make it simple to perform side-by-side interviews like my recent interview with Beamr’s Dror Gill below, I’ve been doing more of them. The tension has always been regarding video quality. Specifically, do I connect a camera to my HP notebook, or go with its internal webcam or my aging Logitech C615 webcam. Even …

We’ve known Beamr as an optimization company, and in 2016 they bought Vanguard Video, a codec company. Traditionally, Beamr sold SDKs to large customers, but now they’re launching a cloud transcoding service. I recently interviewed CTO Dror Gill about the new service; here’s the video.

The graph below shows two off-the-shelf players retrieving the same HLS manifest under the similar test conditions, which vary from 512 kbps at the low end to 5120 kbps at the top end. On the left, Player A, stopped retrieving video multiple times during the low bandwidth transmissions, stalling playback, which are the red lines at the bottom of the …