Bitmovin Archives – Page 5 of 10 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Webinar: Assessing Video Quality: Methods, Measurements, and Best Practices

Posted on 12th November 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Wednesday, November 13th, 8am PST / 16:00 GMT

Bitmovin have brought together Jan Ozer from the Streaming Learning Center, their very own Sean McCarthy and Carlos Bacquet from SSIM Wave to discuss how best to assess video quality.

Fundamental to assessing video quality, of course, is what we mean by quality, which artefacts are most problematic and what drives the importance of video quality.

Quality of streaming, of course, is interdependent on the quality of the experience in general. Thinking of an online streaming system as a whole, speed of playback, smooth playback on the player itself and rebuffing are all factors of perceived quality as much as the actual codec encoding quality itself which is what is more traditionally measured.

The webinar brings together experience in measuring quality, monitoring systems and ways in which you can derive your own testing to lock on to the factors which matter to you and your business.

See the related posts below for more from Jan Ozer

Register now!
Speakers

	Jan Ozer Industry Analyst Jan Ozer
	Sean McCarthy Technical Product Marketing Manager, Bitmovin
	Carlos Bacquet Solutions Architect SSIM Wave

Video: Mitigating Online Video Delivery Latency

Posted on 1st November 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

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

Video: VVC, EVC, LCEVC, WTF? – An update on the next hot codecs from MPEG

Posted on 30th September 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The next-gen codecs are on their way: VVC, EVC, LCEVC but, given we’re still getting AV1 up and running, why do we need them and when will they be ready?

MPEG are working hard on 3 new video codecs, one in conjunction with the ITU, so Christian Feldmann from Bitmovin is here to explain what each does, the target market, whether it will cost money and when the standard will be finalised.

VVC – Versatile Video Codec – is a fully featured video codec being worked on as a successor to H.265, indeed the ITU call it H.266. MPEG call it MPEG-I Part 3. Christian explains the ways this codec is outperforming its peers including a flexible block partitioning system, motion prediction which can overlap neighbouring macroblocks and triangle prediction to name but three.

EVC is the Essential Video Codec which, intriguingly, offers a baseline which is free to use and a main profile which requires licences. The thinking here is that if you have licensing issues, you have the option of just turning off that feature which could five you extra leverage in patent discussions.

Finally, LCEVC – the Low Complexity Essential Video Codec allows for enhancement layers to be added on top of existing bitstreams. This can allow UHD to be used where only HD was possible before due to being able to share decoding between the ASIC and CPU, for example.

These all have different use cases which Christian explains well, plus he brings some test results along showing the percentage improvement over today’s HEVC encoding.

Watch now!
Speaker

Christian Feldmann
Codec Engineer,
Bitmovin

Video: The critical importance of user experience

Posted on 26th September 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Using the TV used to be very simple, but in recent years the different interfaces we have to viewing content and types of interface have proliferated. So how can we keep these interfaces simple and effective?

This panel from the IBC’s Content Everywhere Hub, hosted by Ian Nock, Chair of IET Media introduces the panel which looks at how to make video ‘just work’ and share their experiences.

Gerald Zankl, from Bitmovin makes the point that in this transitioning market, there is still space for linear news channels even in the midst of our video-on-demand-based market.
“It becomes a one-to-one conversation” agrees Renato Bonomini from ContentWise as he explains that there’s a lot of value in having a service you can turn on and rely on it to give you content you want through personalisation. “Search is the failure of recommendations”, Renato concludes.

Social media is another good example of why recommendation engines are important, explains Gerald. With so much information coming in, it’s not practical and would be boring to simply go through them arbitrarily. Similarly, video services with hundreds of thousands of assets also require a system to manage which content to surface.

Simone Leadlay from You.i TV points out “Customers willingness to pay for 250 services is zero.” meaning people find value in one or two services and are very willing to move to another app if their experience isn’t good enough.

The panel discusses the relevance of weekly episode releases in 2019 and then moves to bringing multiple companies together to form one service.

Bitmovin’s Gerald discusses giving feedback to the user if, for example, you can detect there are issues with the platform/local wifi etc. Giving them actionable feedback allows them to improve their experience, either directly or by pressuring their providers.

Simon, explains that the role of all of the companies on the panel is to fight against the challenges, fragmentation of the market (CDNs, codecs) for instance, so that no one notices they’ve done their job.

This panel concludes with a discussion on (actionable) analytics.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Gerald Zankl Global Head of Inside Sales, Bitmovin
	Renato Bonomini VP Global PreSales, ContentWise
	Simon Leadlay VP, Product Market Development You.i TV
	Ian Nock Chair, IET Media Chair, Ultra HD Forum

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