This year we presented at the NAB show – the world’s largest electronic media show covering the creation, management and delivery of content across all platforms – in two booths, following the recently announced acquisition of Vanguard Video.
Double demos
At the Beamr booth, we demonstrated our content-adaptive optimization solutions, which reduce the bitrate of H.264 and HEVC streams by 20-50%. Our booth visitors were especially impressed by the demo, which showed our ability to reduce the bitrate of a 4K HEVC file from 14.2 Mbps to only 6.8 Mbps, with no quality loss. We challenged the industry’s “Golden Eyes” to tell them apart, but not one visitor to our booth could find any difference…
We also demonstrated our compliance with MPEG-2 Transport Stream and Blu-ray, playing optimized streams on a Cable set-top box over QAM, and on a Blu-ray disc player.
In the Vanguard by Beamr booth, we showed our V.265 HEVC encoder, which supports 8/10/12-bit video with both Dolby Vision and HDR 10. We also let our visitors put PACE (Parallel Architecture for Cloud Encoding) through its paces, showing a significant performance boost for distributed encoding on multiple servers. Another demo which caught the eye of our visitors was the streaming of live 720p60 HEVC video, captured on an iPad, encoded in real-time by our V.265-ARM SDK in pure software, and played back on an Apple TV device.
Double excitement
Our week at NAB was packed with back-to-back meetings, as we introduced Beamr’s customers to Vanguard Video’s solutions, and vice versa. We were flattered and excited by the positive reactions of our customers and visitors at both booths to the acquisition, and we heard from everyone that they are looking forward to the huge potential of the combined product line. We are ready for this challenge, and have already started working on bringing the benefits of Beamr’s perceptual optimization into Vanguard Video’s encoders.
An interesting trend that we witnessed at the show was that content providers are holding back on deployment of 4K content offerings and broadcast channels, opting instead to put a stronger focus on HD content with HDR, and on VR content that was clearly the strongest emerging trend at the show. It seems that industry players have realized that the viewing experience enabled with HDR, and the storytelling techniques made possible with VR video, are more compelling to viewers than 4K content which “just” has more pixels.
Regardless of the type of video being used by the industry moving forward, it is clear that the amount of video delivered will continue to grow, and we are now even more excited to produce the world’s most optimized encoding solutions, enabling the highest video qualities at the lowest bitrates.
Hope to see you all again at NAB 2017!
