Video: Mitigating Online Video Delivery Latency

Real-world solutions to real-world streaming latency in this panel from the Content Delivery Summit at Streaming Media East. With everyone chasing reductions in latency, many with the goal of matching traditional broadcast latencies, there are a heap of tricks and techniques at each stage of the distribution chain to get things done quicker.

The panel starts by surveying the way these companies are already serving video. Comcast, for example, are reducing latency by extending their network to edge CDNs. Anevia identified encoding as latency-introducer number 1 with packaging at number 2.

Bitmovin’s Igor Oreper talks about Periscope’s work with low-latency HLS (LHLS) explaining how Bitmovin deployed their player with Twitter and worked closely with them to ensure LHLS worked seamlessly. Periscope’s LHLS is documented in this blog post.

The panel shares techniques for avoiding latency such as keeping ABR ladders small to ensure CDNs cache all the segments. Damien from Anevia points out that low latency can quickly become pointless if you end up with a low-latency stream arriving on an iPhone before Android; relative latency is really important and can be more so than absolute latency.

The importance of HTTP and the version is next up for discussion. HTTP 1.1 is still widely used but there’s increasing interest in HTTP 2 and QUIC which both handle connections better and reduce overheads thus reducing latency, though often only slightly.

The panel finishes with a Q&A after discussing how to operate in multi-CDN environments.

Watch now!
Speakers

Damien Lucas Damien Lucas
CTO & Co-Founder,
Anevia
Ryan Durfey Ryan Durfey
CDN Senior Product Manager,
Comcast Technology Solutions
Igor Oreper Igor Oreper
Vice President, Solutions
Bitmovin
Eric Klein Eric Klein
Director, Content Distribution,
Disney Streaming Services (was BAMTECH Media)
Dom Robinson Dom Robinson
Director,
id3as

Video: Best Practices for Advanced Software Encoder Evaluations

Streaming Media East brings together Beamr, Netflix BAMTECH Media and SSIMWAVE to discuss the best ways to evaluate software encoders and we see there is much overlap with hardware encoder evaluation, too.

The panel gets into detail covering:

  • Test Design
  • Choosing source sequences
  • Rate Control Modes
  • Bit Rate or Quality Target Levls
  • Offline (VOD) vs Live (Linear)
  • Discrete vs. Multi-resolution/Bitrate
  • Subjective vs. objective measurements
  • Encoding Efficiency vs Performance
  • Video vs Still frames
  • PSNR Tuning
  • Evaluation at Encode Resolution Vs Display Resolution

Watch now for this comprehensive ‘How To’

Speakers

Anne Aaron Dr. Anne Aaron
Director of Video Algorithms,
Netflix
Scott Labrozzi Scott Labrozzi
VP Video Processing, Core Media Video Processing,
BAMTECH Media
Zhou Wang Dr. Zhou Wang
Chief Science Officer,
SSIMWAVE
Tom Vaughan Moderator: Tom Vaughan
VP Strategy,
Beamr