January, 2017

• 11 January

  Facebook Live Case Studies

  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 …

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• 9 January

  Apple Makes Sweeping Changes to HLS Encoding Recommendations

  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 …

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• 8 January

  Conference Videos from Streaming Media West are Available

  I spoke at Streaming Media West on three topics, the first a 3-hour workshop which was not recorded, and two one-hour sessions that were. The PDFs used in the presentations have been available for awhile; I just added the videos from the two sessions. Here are the links. Workshop – Encoding 2016: Codecs and Packaging for PCs, Mobile and OTT/STB/Smart …

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• 3 January

  Ozer ships new book Video Encoding by the Numbers

  I’m proud to announce my latest book, Video Encoding by the Numbers, Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video, which is available now on Amazon. You can read all about the book by clicking here, or click here for a detailed table of contents.  Briefly, after introductory chapters get you up to speed and familiar with objective quality metrics, the next chapters …

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December, 2016

• 30 December

  What the Nokia-Apple Lawsuit Means for the Streaming Industry

  If Nokia’s standards infringement lawsuit prevails over Apple, the costs could be steep to any company relying on H.264 or even HEVC. Here are the issues at stake. On December 21, 2016, Nokia sued Apple for infringing eight patents related to H.264 encoding and decoding. By its terms, the complaint makes clear that Apple’s usage of H.264 is generic, and …

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• 11 December

  The Changing State of MPEG DASH Royalties: How Bad Will it Get?

  MPEG LA’s recent announcement of a DASH royalty pool is the first such royalty on free internet video. And this is only the beginning. We’ve all had time to reflect upon MPEG LA’s announcement of a DASH royalty pool. In my case, it led to the realization that this is the first royalty on free internet video and that things …

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• 11 December

  Containing Costs: How Publishers Can Save Money on ABR Encoding

  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 …

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November, 2016

• 22 November

  HEVC Advance Makes Some Software Royalty Free

  HEVC Advance says it hopes to speed the adoption of HEVC decoders among the installed base of computers and devices by making some software downloads royalty free Seeking to accelerate HEVC deployment to the installed base of computers and mobile devices, HEVC Advance announced this morning that it will seek no royalty on some classes of application software with HEVC …

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• 11 November

  Video: The Case for Custom Encoding, Part 2: Resolution

  Streaming Learning Center’s Jan Ozer makes the case for custom, per-title encoding on the Netflix model, focusing on resolution issues in part 1 of this 2-part series from his Streaming Media West presentation. Following the model established by Netflix in December 2015, Jan Ozer argues against content providers applying a standard encoding ladder to all of their content because of …

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• 11 November

  Video: The Case for Custom Encoding, Part 1: Bitrate

  Streaming Learning Center’s Jan Ozer makes the case for custom, per-title encoding on the Netflix model, focusing on bitrate issues in part 1 of this 2-part series from his Streaming Media West presentation. Following the model established by Netflix in December 2015, Jan Ozer argues against content providers applying a standard encoding ladder to all of their content because of …

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