Video: The early days of Netflix Streaming Days and Perspective

David Ronca has had a long history in the industry and is most known for his time at Netflix where he was pivotal in the inception and implementation of many technologies. Because Netflix was one of the first companies streaming video on the internet, and at a global scale, they are responsible for many innovations that the industry as a whole benefits from today and are the recipient of 7 technical Emmys. David is often pictured holding an Emmy awarded to Netflix for their role in the standardisation and promotion of Japanese subtitles one of the less-talked-about innovations in contrast to VMAF, Per-Title encoding and per-shot encoding.

In this video, talking to John Porterfield, David talks about the early days at Netflix when it was pivoting from emailing DVDs to streaming. He talks about the move from Windows-based applications to cross-platform technologies, at the time Microsoft Silverlight which was a big direction shift for Netflix and for him. The first Silverlight implementation within Netflix was also the first adaptive bitrate (ABR) version of Netflix which is where David found he next calling within Netflix writing code to synchronise the segments after DRM.

The PS3, David recalls, was the worlds most powerful Blu-ray player and part of the Blu-ray spec is a Java implementation. David recounts the six months he spent in a team of three working to implement a full adaptive bitrate streaming application within Blu-ray’s Java implementation. This was done in order to get around some contractual issues and worked by extending the features which were built into Blu-ray for downloading new trailers to show instead of those on disc. This YouTube review from 2009 shows a slick interface slowed down by the speed of the internet connection.

David also talks about his close work with and respect for Netflix colleague Anne Aaron who has been featured previously on The Broadcast Knowledge. He goes on to talk about the inception of VMAF which is a metric for computationally determining the quality of video developed by Netflix as they didn’t feel that any of the current metrics such as PSRN and MS-SSIM captured the human opinion of video well enough. It’s widely understood that PSNR has its place but can give very different results to subjective evaluations. And, indeed, VMAF also is not perfect as David mentions. However, using VMAF well and understanding its limits results in a much more accurate description of quality than with many other metrics and unlike competing metrics such as SSIMWAVE’s SSIMPLUS, is open source and royalty-free.

David concludes his talk with John saying that high-quality, well-delivered streaming is now everywhere. The struggles of the early years have resulted in a lot of well-learned lessons by the industry at large. This commoditisation is welcome and shows a maturity in the industry that begs the question about where the puck is going to next. For David, he sees environmental sustainability to be one of the key goals. Both environmentally and financially, he says that streaming providers will now want to maximise the output-per-watt of their data centres. Data centre power is currently 3% of all global power consumption and is forecast to reach up to 20%. Looking to newer codecs is one way to achieve a reduction in power consumption. David spoke about AV1 last time he spoke with John which delivers lower bitrate with high computation requirements. At hyperscale, using dedicated ASIC chips to do the encoding is one way to drive down power consumption. An alternative route is new MPEG codec LCEVC which delivers better-than-AVC performance in software at much-reduced power consumption. With the prevalence of video – both for entertainment and outside, for example, body cams – moving to more power-efficient codecs and codec implementations seems the obvious and moral move.

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Speakers

David Ronca David Ronca
Director, Video Encoding,
Facebook
John Porterfield
Freelance Video Webcast Producer and Tech Evangelist
JP’sChalkTalks YouTube Channel

Video: Scaling Video with AV1!

A nuanced look at AV1. If we’ve learnt one thing about codecs over the last year or more, it’s that in the modern world pure bitrate efficiency isn’t the only game in town. JPEG 2000 and, now, JPEG XS, have always been excused their high bitrate compared to MPEG codecs because they deliver low latency and high fidelity. Now, it’s clear that we also need to consider the computational demand of codec when evaluating which to use in any one situation.

John Porterfield welcomes Facebook’s David Ronca to understand how AV1’s arriving on the market. David’s the director of Facebook’s video processing team, so is in pole position to understand how useful AV1 is in delivering video to viewers and how well it achieves its goals. The conversation looks at how to encode, the unexpected ways in which AV1 performs better than other codecs and the state of the hardware and software decoder ecosystem.

David starts by looking at the convex hull, explaining that it’s a way of encoding content multiple times at different resolutions and bitrates and graphing the results. This graph allows you to find the best combination of bitrate and resolution for a target quality. This works well, but the multiple encodes burdens the decision with a lot of extra computation to get the best set of encoding parameters. As proof of its effectiveness, David cites a time when a 200kbps max target was given for and encoder of video plus audio. The convex hull method gave a good experience for small screens despite the compromises made in encoding fidelity. The important part is being flexible on which resolution you choose to encode because by allowing the resolution to drift up or down as well as the bitrate, higher fidelity combinations can be found over keeping the resolution fixed. This is called per-title encoding and was pioneered by Netflix as discussed in the linked talk, where David previously worked and authored this blog post on the topic.

It’s an accepted fact that encoder complexity increases for every generation. Whilst this makes sense, particularly in the standard MPEG line where MPEG 2 gave way to AVC which gave way to HEVC which is now being superseded by VVC all of which achieved an approximately 50% compression improvement at the cost of a ten-fold computation increase. But David contends that this buries the lede. Whilst it’s true that the best (read: slowest) compression improves by 50% and has a 10% complexity increase, it’s often missed that at the other end of the curve, one of the fastest settings of the newer codec can now match the best of the old codec with a 90% reduction in computation. For companies working in the software world encoding, this is big news. David demonstrates this by graphing the SVT-AV1 encoder against the x265 HEVC encoder and that against x264.

David touches on an important point, that there is so much video encoding going on in the tech giants and distributed around the world, that it’s important for us to keep reducing the complexity year on year. As it is now, with the complexity increasing with each generation of encoder, something has to give in the future otherwise complexity will go off the scale. The Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 has something to say on the topic as it’s improved on HEVC with only a 5% increase in complexity. Other codecs such as MPEG’s LCEVC also deliver improved bitrate but at lower complexity. There is a clear environmental impact from video encoding and David is focused on reducing this.

AOM is also fighting the commercial problem that codecs have. Companies don’t mind paying for codecs, but they do mind uncertainty. After all, what’s the point in paying for a codec if you still might be approached for more money. Whilst MPEG’s implementation of VVC and EVC aims to give more control to companies to help them control their risk, AOM’s royalty-free codec with a defence fund against legal attacks, arguably, gives the most predictable risk of all. AOM’s aim, David explains, is to allow the web to expand without having to worry about royalty fees.

Next is some disappointing news for AV1 fans. Hardware decoder deployments have been delayed until 2023/24 which probably means no meaningful mobile penetration until 2026/27. In the meantime the very good dav1d decoder and also gav1 are expected to fill the gap. Already quite fast, the aim is for them to be able to do 720p60 decoding for average android devices by 2024.

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Speakers

David Ronca David Ronca
Director, Video Encoding,
Facebook
John Porterfield
Freelance Video Webcast Producer and Tech Evangelist
JP’sChalkTalks YouTube Channel

Video: AV1 Commercial Readiness Panel

With two years of development and deployments under its belt, AV1 is still emerging on to the codec scene. That’s not to say that it’s no in use billions of times a year, but compared to the incumbents, there’s still some distance to go. Known as very slow to encode and computationally impractical, today’s panel is here to say that’s old news and AV1 is now a real-time codec.

Brought together by Jill Boyce with Intel, we hear from Amazon, Facebook, Googles, Amazon, Twitch, Netflix and Tencent in this panel. Intel and Netflix have been collaborating on the SVT-AV1 encoder and decoder framework for two years. The SVT-AV1 encoder’s goal was to be a high-performance and scalable encoder and decoder, using parallelisation to achieve this aim.

Yueshi Shen from Amazon and Twitch is first to present, explaining that for them, AV1 is a key technology in the 5G area. They have put together a 1440p, 120fps games demo which has been enabled by AV1. They feel that this resolution and framerate will be a critical feature for Twitch in the next two years as computer games increasingly extend beyond typical broadcast boundaries. Another key feature is achieving an end-to-end latency of 1.5 seconds which, he says, will partly be achieved using AV1. His company has been working with SOC vendors to accelerate the adoption of AV1 decoders as their proliferation is key to a successful transition to AV1 across the board. Simultaneously, AWS has been adding AV1 capability to MediaConvert and is planning to continue AV1 integration in other turnkey content solutions.

David Ronca from Facebook says that AV1 gives them the opportunity to reduce video egress bandwidth whilst also helping increase quality. For them, SVT-AV1 has brought using AV1 into the practical domain and they are able to run AV1 payloads in production as well as launch a large-scale decoder test across a large set of mobile devices.

Matt Frost represent’s Google Chrome and Android’s point of view on AV1. Early adopters, having been streaming partly using AV1 since 2018 in resolution small and large, they have recently added support in Duo, their Android video-conferencing application. As with all such services, the pandemic has shown how important they can be and how important it is that they can scale. Their move to AV1 streaming has had favourable results which is the start of the return on their investment in the technology.

Google’s involvement with the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), along with the other founding companies, was born out of a belief that in order to achieve the scales needed for video applications, the only sensible future was with cheap-to-deploy codecs, so it made a lot of sense to invest time in the royalty-free AV1.

Andrey Norkin from Netflix explains that they believe AV1 will bring a better experience to their members. Netflix has been using AV1 in streaming since February 2020 on android devices using a software decoder. This has allowed them to get better quality at lower bitrates than VP9 Testing AV1 on other platforms. Intent on only using 10-bit encodes across all devices, Andrey explains that this mode gives the best efficiency. As well as being founding members of AoM, Netflix has also developed AVIF which is an image format based on AV1. According to Andrey, they see better performance than most other formats out there. As AVIF works better with text on pictures than other formats, Netflix are intending to use it in their UI.

Tencent’s Shan Liu explains that they are part of the AoM because video compression is key for most Tencent businesses in their vast empire. Tencent cloud has already launched an AV1 transcoding service and support AV1 in VoD.

The panel discusses low-latency use of AV1, with Dave Ronca explaining that, with the performance improvements of the encoder and decoders along-side the ability to tune the decode speed of AV1 by turning on and off certain tools, real-time AV1 are now possible. Amazon is paying attention to low-end, sub $300 handsets, according to Yueshi, as they believe this will be where the most 5G growth will occur so site recent tests showing decoding AV1 in only 3.5 cores on a mobile SOC as encouraging as it’s standard to have 8 or more. They have now moved to researching battery life.

The panel finishes with a Q&A touching on encoding speed, the VVC and LCEVC codecs, the Sisvel AV1 patent pool, the next ramp-up in deployments and the roadmap for SVT-AV1.

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Speakers

Yueshi Shen Yueshi Shen
Principle Engineer
AWS & Twitch
David Ronca David Ronca
Video Infrastructure Team,
Facebook
Matt Frost Matt Frost
Product Manager, Chome Media Technologies,
Google
Andrey Norkin Andrey Norkin
Emerging Technologies Team
Netflix
Shan Liu Dr Shan Liu
Chief Scientist & General Manager,
Tencent Media Lab
Jill Boyce Jill Boyce
Intel