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Video: How to Up Your Sports Streaming Game

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

As countries seek to wrest themselves from lockdowns, however long that takes, we see the name of the game will be come out big and make the most of the renewed freedoms. Streaming has certainly seen a boost over the last year despite the challenges, but in order to make the most of that, as we switch up a gear in public life, now’s the time up your game. Sports streaming is likely to see gradual improvement in the number of live fixtures to cover and employees should be able to find protuctivity gains in working more closely with their colleagues when the time is right the share space again.

In this panel from Streaming Media Connect, Jeff Jacobs from VENN talks to Magnus Svensson, from Eyevinn Technology, Ali Hodjat from Intertrust Technologies, Live Sports’ Jef Kethley and Darcy Lorincz from Engine Media. Magnus kicks off the discussion highlighting the state of the sports streaming industry and the trends he’s seeing. Magnus says that streaming providers are moving away from mimicing broadcast services and inovating in their own right. The younger audience are still more interested in highlights clips then older viewers and esports wiith its on-screen chat and interactivity represents a big departure from what we are used to from broadcasters. Low-latency streaming remains important but keeping feeds synchronised within the home is often seen as more important than the absolute latency.
 

 
Jef speaks about the complete cloud infrastructure he built for the Drone Racing League (DRL) which gave a computer to each player and ran the program and drone simulation in the cloud. Looking to the future, he sees streaming as now allowing monetisation of newer sports. Now that it’s easier and/or cheaper to produce lower-interest sports, they can be economoical to monetise and deliver even to a small audience.

Darcy represents workflows where AI is doing the work. AI’s understanding the goals, the numbers on shirts and much of the action within a game. Darcy’s trying to find as many things AI can do to reduce our reliance on humans. Visualisation of data is grown in demand making these stats easily digestable for viewers by overlaying information in new ways on to the screen.

Ali’s view is from the security angle. He’s been focussed on protecting live sports. Weith the push to lower and lower latencies, the value of the streams has increased as they’re more useful to use for betting. At the same time, lower latency makes it harder to add encryption. On top of encryption watermarking individual feeds and quickly identifying them online is a major focus. Protection, though, needs to extend from the media back to the web site itself, the payment gateway, the applications and much else.

The panel session finishes after discussing low-latency, the pros and cons of remote working, co-streaming, low-latency for backhaul/contribution and finishes with a round of advice to use with your service.

Watch now!
Speakers

Magnus Svensson Magnus Svensson
VP Sales and Business Development,
Eyevinn Technology
Ali Hodjat Ali Hodjat
Director Product Marketing,
Intertrust
Jef Kethley Jef Kethley
Executive Director / President
LiveSports, LLC
Darcy Lorincz Darcy Lorincz
Global head of Esports & Business Development,
Engine Media Inc.
Jeff Jacobs Moderator: Jeff Jacobs
General Manager,
VENN

Video: Netflix – Delivering better video encodes for legacy devices

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

With over 139 million paying customers, Netflix is very much in the bandwidth optimisation game. It keeps their costs down, it keeps customers’ costs down for those on metered tariffs and a lower bitrate keeps the service more responsive.

As we’ve seen on The Broadcast Knowledge over the years, Netflix has tried hard to find new ways to encode video with Per-Title encoding, VMAF and, more recently, per-shot encoding as well as moving to more efficient codecs such as AV1.

 

Mariana Afonso from Netflix discusses what do you do with devices that decode the latest encoders either because they are too old or can’t get certification? Techniques such as per-title encoding work well because they are wholly managed in the encoder. Whereas with codecs such as AV1, the decoder has to support it too, meaning it’s not as widely applicable an optimisation.

As per-title encoding was developed within Netflix before they got their VMAF metric finished, it still uses PSNR, explains Mariana. This means there is still an opportunity to bring down bitrates by using VMAF. Because VMAF more accurately captures how the video looks, it’s able to lead optimisation algorithms better and shows gains in tests.

Better than per-title is per-chunk. The per-chunk work done modulates the average target bitrate from chunk to chunk. This avoids over-allocating bits for low-complexity scenes and results in a more consistent quality by 6 to 16%.

Watch now!
Speaker

Mariana Alfonso Mariana Afonso
Research Scientist, Video Algorithms,
Netflix

Video: Per-Title Encoding in the Wild

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

How deep do you want to go to make sure viewers get the absolute best quality streamed video? It’s been common over the past few years not to just choose 7 bitrates for a streamed service and encode everything to those bitrates. Rather to at least vary the bitrate for each video. In this talk we examine why doing this is leaving bitrate savings on the table which, in turn, means bitrate savings for your viewers, faster time-to-play and an overall better experience.

Jan Ozer starts with a look at the evolution of bitrate optimisation. It started with Beamr and, everyone’s favourite, FFmpeg. Both of which re-encode every frame until they get the best quality. FFmpeg’s CRF mode will change the quantizer parameter for each frame to maintain the same quality throughout the whole file, though with a variable bitrate. Beamr would encode each frame repeatedly reducing the bitrate until it got the desired quality. These worked well but missed out on a big trick…

Over the years, it’s been clear that sometimes 720p at 1Mbps looks better than 1080p at 1Mbps. This isn’t always the case and depends on the source footage. Much rolling news will be different from premium sports content in terms of sharpness and temporal content. So, really, the resolution needs to be assessed alongside data rate. This idea was brought into Netflix’s idea of per-title encoding. By re-encoding a title hundreds of times with different resolutions and data rates, they were able to determine the ‘convex hull’ which is a graph showing the optimum balance between quality, bitrate and resolution. That was back in 2015. Moving beyond that, we’ve started to consider more factors.

The next evolution is fairly obvious really, and that’s to make these evaluations not for each video, but for each shot. Doing this, Jan explains, offers bitrate improvements of 28% for AVC and more for other codecs. This is more complex than per-title because the stream itself changes, for instance, GOP sizes, so whilst we know this is something Netflix is using, there are no available commercial implementations currently.

Pushing these ideas further, perhaps the streaming service should take into account the device on which you are viewing. Some TV’s typically only ever take the top two rungs on the ladder, yet many mobile devices have low-resolutions screens and never get around to pulling the higher bitrates. So profiling a device based on either its model or historic activity can allow you to offer different ABR ladders to allow for a better experience.

All of this needs to be enabled by automatic, objective metrics so the metrics need to look out for the right aspects of the video. Jan explains that PSNR and MS-SSIM, though tried and trusted in the industry, only measure spatial information. Jan gives an overview of the alternatives. VMAF, he says, ads a detail loss metric, but it’s not until we start using PW-SSIM from Bright cove where aspects such as device information is taken into account. SSIMPLUS does this and also considers wide colour gamut HDR and frame rates. Similarly ATEME’s ‘Quality Vector’ considers frame rate and HDR.

Dr. Abdul Rehman follows Jan with his introduction to SSIMWAVE’s technologies and focuses on their ability to understand what quality the viewer will see. This allows a provider to choose whether to deliver a quality of ’70’ or, say, ’80’. Each service is different and the demographics will expect different things. It’s important to meet viewer expectations to avoid churn, but it’s in everyone’s interest to keep the data rate as low as possible.

Abdul gives the example of banding which is something that is not easily picked up by many metrics and so can be introduced as the encode optimiser continues to reduce the bitrate oblivious to the obvious banding. He says that since SSIMPLUS is not referenced to a source, this can give an accurate viewer score no matter the source material. Remember that if you use PSNR, you are comparing against your source. If the source is poor, your PSNR score might end up close to the maximum. The trouble is, your viewers will still see the poor video you send them, not caring if this is due to encoding or a bad source.

The video ends with a Q&A.

Watch now!
Speakers

Jan Ozer Jan Ozer
Principal, Stremaing Learning Center
Contributing Editor, Streaming Media
Abdul Rehman Abdul Rehman
CEO,
SSIMMWAVE

Video: State of the Streaming Market 2021

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Streaming Media is back to take the pulse of the Streaming market following on from their recent, mid-year survey measuring the impact of the pandemic. This is the third annual snapshot of the state of the streaming market which will be published by Streaming Media in March. To give us this sneak peak, Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen is joined by colleague Tim Siglin and Harmonic Inc.’s Robert Gambino,

They start off with a look at the demographics of the respondents. It’s no surprise that North America is well represented as Streaming Media is US-based and both the USA and Canada have very strong broadcast markets in terms of publishers and vendors. Europe is represented to the tune of 14% and South America’s representation has doubled which is in line with other trends showing notable growth in the South American market. In terms of individuals, exec-level and ‘engineering’ respondents were equally balanced with a few changes in the types of institutions represented. Education and houses of worship have both grown in representation since the last survey.

Of responding companies, 66% said that they both create and distribute content, a percentage that continues to grow. This is indicative, the panel says, of the barrier to entry of distribution continuing to fall. CDNs are relatively low cost and the time to market can be measured in weeks. Answering which type of streaming they are involved in, live and on-demand were almost equal for the first time in this survey’s history. Robert says that he’s seen a lot of companies taking to using the cloud to deliver popups but also that streaming ecosystems are better attuned to live video than they used to be.

Reading the news, it seems that there’s a large migration into the cloud, but is that shown in the data? When asked about their plans to move to the cloud, around a third had already moved but only a quarter said they had no plans. This means there is plenty of room for growth for both cloud platforms and vendors. In terms of the service itself, video quality was the top ‘challenge’ identified followed by latency, scalability and buffering respectively. Robert points out better codecs delivering lower bitrates helps alleviate all of these problems as well as time to play, bandwidth and storage costs.

There have been a lot of talks on dynamic server-side ad insertion in 2020 including for use with targetted advertising, but who’s actually adopting it. Over half of respondents indicated they weren’t going to move into that sphere and that’s likely because many governmental and educational services don’t need advertising to start with. But 10% are planning to implement it within the next 12 months which represents a doubling of adoption, so growth is not slow. Robert’s experience is that many people in ad sales are still used to selling on aggregate and don’t understand the power of targetted advertising and, indeed, how it works. Education, he feels, is key to continuing growth.

The panel finishes by discussing what companies hope to get out of the move to virtualised or cloud infrastructure. Flexibility comes in just above reliability with cost savings only being third. Robert comes back to pop-up channels which, based on the release of a new film or a sports event, have proved popular and are a good example of the flexibility that companies can easily access and monetise. There are a number of companies that are heavily investing in private cloud as well those who are migrating to public cloud. Either way, these benefits are available to companies who invest and, as we’re seeing in South America, cloud can offer an easy on-ramp to expanding both scale and feature-set of your infrastructure without large Capex projects. Thus it’s the flexibility of the solution which is driving expansion and improvements in quality and production values.

Watch now!
Speakers

Tim Siglin Tim Siglin
Contributing Editor, Streaming Media Magazine
Founding Executive Director, HelpMeStream
Robert Gambino Robert Gambino
Director of Solutions,
Harmonic Inc.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen Moderator: Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Editor, Streaming Media