Russell Trafford-Jones, Author at The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: The state of advanced codecs; separating hype from reality

Posted on 28th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are a lot of codecs both new and old that are in use or vying to be the next big thing. Tom Vaughan helps us see what they really can achieve and where each one is useful.

Recorded at San Francisco Video Tech Meetup in September, this video starts with a look at a the ‘hype cycle’. Tom places each codec, from MPEG 2 to VVC on the curve before looking at what the barriers to adoption are.

Tom then looks at HEVC discussing which devices can receive it, which can create it, the streaming services which support it and where adoption is likely to be. Finally, HEVC discussion is complete without a look at the HEVC patent landscape Venn diagram.

The focus then shifts to the Alliance for Open Media and their AV1 codec, its patent status and technical progress to date. He then discusses the performance of AV1, HEVC and Beamr against each other.

Almost brand new out of the starting blocks is VVC from MPEG and the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF). Tom explains the aims of the forum and the VVC codec they are creating before taking questions from the floor.

Watch now!

Speaker

Tom Vaughan
VP Strategy,
Beamr

Webinar: Video Delivery Trends

Posted on 27th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Date: Thursday February 28th 2019, 10am PT / 1PM ET / 18:00 GMT

Streaming continues to grow, in amount streamed, in people consuming it and in importance within this and other industries. One things which has always been an enabler yet made streaming harder to deploy is its rapid evolution. Whilst this has been a boon for smaller, nimbler companies – both content producers and service providers – the streaming has now arrived at most companies in one way or another and this breadth of use-cases has kept streaming tech moving forward and showing no signs of abatement.

Some aspects are changing. For instance we are seeing the first patent-free MPEG standard proposals (EVC, which has basic patent-free functionality and a better performing patent-controlled profile) on the heels of AV1. We’re seeing low-latency efforts such as CMAF taking hold as an alternative to WebRTC. With CMAF being much closer to the ever popular HLS, this may well beat out WebRTC in deployments at the cost of a slightly higher, but much improved latency.

To bring all of this in to focus for 2019, Jason Thibeault from the Streaming Video Alliance is bringing together a panel of experts to look at the coming trends and to give us an idea of what to look out for, and how to make sense, of 2019’s year of video delivery.

Register now!

Speakers

	Guillaume Bichot Head of Exploration, Broadpeak
	Joshua Pressnell Chief Technology Officer, Penthera
	Pierre-Louis Theron CEO & Co-founder Streamroot
	Johan Bolin Chief Product & Technology Officer, Edgeware AB
	Steve Miller-Jones Vice President of Product Strategy Limelight Networks
	Moderator: Jason Thibeault Executive Director Streaming Video Alliance

Webinar: Women in Technology: Now and in the Future

Posted on 26th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Date: Wednesday 27th February 2019
12:30 PM EST / 9:30 AM PST / 17:30 GMT

Ofcom recently surveyed the 5 main UK broadcasters and found that women held only 25% of technical roles and so the report shines more light on a problem we all live with in this and many other industries. Pleasingly there are noticeable and increasing steps of late to actively counter the gender imbalance when it comes to workplace diversity.

More can always be done, but recent, successful, steps by IBC to even out male/female representation in the conference speakers is one example of taking concrete steps to ensure that the women who are in the industry are heard and seen. Fortunately IBC is not alone in this and many trade shows across industries have taken positive steps and, at the very least, included Women in Technology sessions in their agenda.

This webcast brought to you by SMPTE and SID, the Society for Information Display, looks at:
• Why Women in Technology activities are becoming more important in the high tech industry;
• How the display industry does in terms of diversity;
• What is next for the industry and how can women contribute to its success.

Register now!

Speaker

Tara Akhavan
CTO & Founder of IRYStec
Marketing Vice-Chair, Society for Information Display

Video: RIST – an evolutionary video transport protocol

Posted on 25th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Delivering low-latency live-video over the public internet, or any network which sees packet loss is ever a challenge, but recently there have been a number of protocols which have been created to allow this to work.

The problem to be fixed is that packets get lost and when you have a video decoder trying to output 50 images every second, there really isn’t time to deal with missing packets. Protocols such as SRT, Zixi and, now, RIST allow a mechanism which adds a small buffer and a mechanism to request missing data.

This isn’t a problem, in general, for live streaming to consumers on devices or computers such as Netflix or iPlayer because they use HLS or similar protocols based on TCP, but for low-latency streams this is not practical.

In this talk Kieran Kunhya explains more about these basics, the challenges to be overcome and the ways of dealing with them.

He covers: