Netflix

Video: Streaming Tech Sweden 2018 Keynote

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


To mark International Women’s Day these videos are free to watch, but for 3 days only! Free registration required.

To mark International Women’s Day, Eyevinn Technology have opened their premium archives to allow you to watch two videos for free until 11th March which are normally reserved for patrons of the Streaming Tech Sweden conference – so act quickly to watch Netflix’s Megha Manohara discuss Netflix’s dynamic optimiser framework and how they ensure best quality over a variety of bandwidths.

Megha covers encoding testing, metrics such as VMAF, visualising the results, per-shot encoding and the way they validate with their audience they have done a good job.

Watch Megha’s talk now! You need to register for free and then sign in for this link to work.

Streaming Tech Sweden is an annual conference which prides itself on excellence and independence. Without sponsors, they are free to pick the best and the most relevant speakers working on at the cutting edge of video streaming. The talks from Streaming Tech Sweden 17 are free to watch, but those from 2018 are available for attendees only. Later in 2019, they will become free, but until then, this is a short opportunity to watch these two great talks in order to mark International Women’s Day 2019. Registration with the site is free.

The second talk available from Streaming Tech Sweden 2018 is from Codemill’s Johana Björklund talking about contextual marketing and ad personalisation. Johana explains how the ads work, how GDPR has changed the way personalisation is carried out and how video metadata is used to find pre-roll and post-roll ads.

Watch Johana’s talk now! You need to register for free and then sign in for this link to work.

Speakers

Megha Manohara Megha Manohara
Senior Software Engineer,
Netflix
Johanna Björklund Johanna Björklund
Head of R&D,
Codemill

Video: VMAF – the Journey Continues

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

VMAF is a video quality metric created by Netflix which allows computers to indicate what quality a video is. This is an important part of evaluating how good your encoder or streaming service is so it’s no surprise that Netflix has invested years of research into this. Other metrics such as PSNR and MS-SSIM all have their problems – and let’s accept that no metric is perfect – but what the industry has long grappled with is that a video that has a strong fidelity to the source doesn’t necessarily look better than one that less-faithfully replicates the source.

Imagine you had a video of an overcast day and one encoder rendered the video a bit brighter and a bit more blue. Well, for that clip, people watching might prefer that encoder even though the video is quite different from the source. The same is true of noisy pictures where replicating the noise isn’t always the best idea as some people, for some content, would prefer the cleaner look even though some details may have been lost.

As such, metrics have evolved from PSNR which is much more about fidelity to metrics which try harder to model what ‘looks good’ and VMAF is an example of that.

Zhi Li explains the history of VMAF and explains some of the new features which were released in August 2018, when this talk was given, which gives an insight into the way VMAF works. Plus, there’s a look ahead at new features on the road map. This talk was given at a SF Video Technology meet up.

Watch now!

Speakers

Zhi Li Zhi Li
Senior Software Engineer – Video Algorithms and Research
Netflix

Video: OTT Moves Toward Microservices

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


 

Using microservices is a way of architecting your software platform to be nimble, simple and is just as applicable to on-premise platforms as cloud. As scaling is important for OTT providers, it’s not surprising that much work is being done in the OTT sector to utilise microservice architectures.

Even companies that are not yet actively operating on a microservices architecture are looking for vendors who at least have a strategy to cater to it for the future. This session will examine the core benefits (including redundancy, dev ops, scalability, and self-healing), the different approaches (including containerisation and orchestration via Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos, as well as native microservices models like Erlang), and the complexities of migrating a generic architecture to a microservices architecture.

This panel covers:

    • Why is OTT so suited to microservices?
    • How microservices enable companies to be flexible to changing customer demands
    • How microservices reduce complexity
    • Benefits of continuous deployment

plus much more!

Watch now!

Moderator: Dom Robinson, Director and Creative Firestarter – id3as, UK & Contributing Editor, StreamingMedia.com, UK
Stefan Lederer, CEO & Co-Founder – Bitmovin, USA
Steve Miller-Jones, Vice President of Product Strategy – Limelight Networks, UK
Xiaomei Lio, Senior Software Engineer, Netflix
Mark Russell, Chief Technology & Strategy Officer, MediaKind
Olivier Karra, Directory of OTT & IPTV Solutions, Marketing, Harmonic Inc.

Video: Best Practices for Advanced Software Encoder Evaluations

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

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