OTT

Video: The (Live) Streaming Pro’s Toolbox

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Everyone has a go-to program or three they use for problem solving. Here is a review of a whole swathe of diagnosis programs out there for live streaming.

There are known favourites like Wireshark, FFPlay and MediaInfo, free applications such as Eyevinn Technology’s Segment Analyser and the open source YUView. And this also covers paid programs like Elecard’s Stream Analyser and Telestream Switch.

This talk by David Hassoun CEO of RealEyes media is well worth a look because there is bound to be something there you didn’t know about – and who knows how useful that will be to you!

Watch now to find out!

Speakers

David Hassoun David Hassoun
CEO, RealEyes Media

Video: The State of Server-Side Ad Insertion

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) it’s the best defence against ad-blockers, but switching in an ad at source can be tricky particularly in low latency streams. This talk at the OTT Leadership Summit at Streaming Media East brings together leaders in the field to explain where they’re up to in delivering this technology and the benefits they see.

Magnus Svensson tells us about the instrumental role Eyevinn Technology, the consultancy who run the technical conference Streaming Tech Sweden , is played in Sweden creating an open standard for all the broadcasters to work to in order to agree how to track SSAI allowing the correct payments to be made. Magnus also talks about aligning SCTE insertion with MPEG structure and the importance of correct preparation of the source video.

Tony Brown from Newsy talks about the centralised nature of SSAI making management easier and gives ana overview of decisioning bringing together buys and sellers of ads. Tony also discusses other analytics such as adjacency and targeting.

Jason Justman of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, explains SCTE insertion and talks about the technical difficulties in reacting to live changes in programming.

Geir Magnusson, Jr. from fuboTV covers the difficulties of preparing the ads quickly enough for thousands or millions of streams to get customised, SSAI ads at the same time and discusses his strategy to start pre-fetching ads from the ad server to prepare them ahead of time. Geir also highlights the misunderstanding that can exist where streaming provides the same video and programme experience as traditional broadcast but ad buyers don’t all understand how much more targeting is possible – even with SSAI.

Watch now!

Speakers

Nadine Krefetz Nadine Krefetz
Consultant & Founder,
Reality Software
Tony Brown Tony Brown
Chief of Staff,
Newsy
Jason Justman Jason Justman
Senior Principal Architect,
Sinclair
Geir Magnusson Geir Magnusson, Jr.
CTO,
fuboTV
Magnus Svensson Magnus Svensson
Media Solutions Consultant,
Eyevinn Technology

Video: QUIC in Theory and Practice

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Most online video streaming uses HTTP to deliver the video to the player in the same way web pages are delivered to the browser. So QUIC – a replacement for HTTP – will affect us professionally and personally.

This video explains how HTTP works and takes us on the journey to seeing why QUIC (which should eventually be called HTTP/3) speeds up the process of requesting and delivering files. Simply put there are ways to reduce the number of times messages have to be passed between the player and the server which reduces overall overhead. But one big win is its move away from TCP to UDP.

Robin Marx delivers these explanations by reference to superheroes and has very clear diagrams leading to this low-level topic being pleasantly accessible and interesting.

There are plenty of examples which show easy-to-see gains website speed using QUIC over both HTTP and HTTP/2 but QUIC’s worth in the realm of live streaming is not yet clear. There are studies showing it makes streaming worse, but also ones showing it helps. Video players have a lot of logic in them and are the result of much analysis, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see the state of the art move forward, for players to optimise for QUIC delivery and then all tests to show an improvement with QUIC streaming.

QUIC is coming, one way or another, so find out more.
Watch now!

Speaker

Robin Marx Robin Marx
Web Performance Researcher,
Hasslet University

Video: Optimizing ABR Encode, Compute & Control for Performance & Quality

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Adaptive bitrate, ABR, is vital in effective delivery of video to the home where bandwidth varies over time. It requires creating several different renditions of your content at various bitrates, resolutions and even frame rate. These multiple encodes put a computational burden on the transcode stage.

Lowell Winger explains ways of optimising ABR encodes to reduce the computation needed to create these different versions. He explains ways to use encoding decisions from one version and use them in other encodes. This has a benefit of being able to use decisions made on high-resolution versions – which are benefiting from high definition to inform the decision in detail – on low-resolution content where the decision would otherwise be made with a lot less information.

This talk is the type of deep dive into encoding techniques that you would expect from the Video Engineering Summit which happens at Streaming Media East.

Watch now!

Speaker

Lowell Winger Lowell Winger
Former Senior Director of Engineering,
IDT Inc.