The movie industry has been around for over 100 years, but the cinematic experience hasn’t changed much: Basically, you watch the action happening on a screen in front of you.  This is true from the earliest silent movie theatres to the latest iPad tablet apps and OTT streaming to Smart TVs. 3D movies give some depth to the experience, and large screens such as IMAX can make it more immersive, but the core experience of watching a movie is the same. Over the years, some attempts to enhance the experience have been made, for example scratch-and-smell Odorama cards,  or 4D movies where some action in the theatre is synchronized to events on screen, but these have not gained wide acceptance in the market.

Now, imagine a movie that is all around you.  You are in the middle of all the action, you can look to the right, to the left, behind you and even upwards; and see what’s happening all around.  This is the experience enabled by a new type of media: 360-degree videos.  Somewhat similar to Virtual Reality (VR), 360-degree movies are best watched with a VR headset such as the Oculus Rift or HTC Valve.  But in contrast to VR, the content of 360-degree videos is not computer-generated graphics, but real-world content, captured by a set of cameras or a special spherical camera.

March 2015 marked an important milestone for this emerging segment: YouTube started supporting 360-degree videos in the Google Chrome browser, and in the YouTube Android app (iOS support followed a few weeks later).  This opened new opportunities for content creators to showcase their surround video storytelling capabilities. Recently, YouTube announced support for 360-degree video ads, and 3D support for these videos is expected later this year.  In this post, I will show you how 360-degree videos are captured, and what are the challenges in creating and delivering them to viewers.

Capture The World

The most common way to capture 360-degree videos today is using a rig that holds several GoPro video cameras, each one of them positioned at a different angle, which together capture a spherical field of view around them.  Examples of such rigs include the Freedom360 which holds 6 GoPro cameras, and the Google Jump that holds 16 GoPro cameras and captures 3D 360-degree video.  These rigs and the required GoPro cameras can easily cost a few thousands dollars, at the same time they produce high-quality video and are available today.

If you are looking for a less expensive solution, and much more lightweight, you can use the Ricoh Theta M15 or the Kodak SP360 spherical cameras, which are available for around $200-$300.  And just around the corner are the next generation of these cameras, such as the 360Fly, Giroptic, Bubl and SpheriCam, which are being funded on Kickstarter.  These cameras cost between $300 and $1000, and produce higher quality videos than the current generation single-camera solutions.  Last week Nokia made a surprise comeback to the consumer electronic scene, with its announcement of the OZO professional 360-degree video camera, expected in Q4 2015.

If you’re using a rig of cameras, you also need to go through the extra step of “stitching” the separate videos from each camera into a single 360-degree video file.  There are two major brands for stitching software: Videostitch, and AutoPano Video by Kolor (which was acquired by GoPro).  After stitching your movies, they are ready for upload to YouTube.

See All Around

For viewing 360-degree content, the most popular apps are those which support YouTube content: Currently the Google Chrome browser, and YouTube apps on iOS and Android. When viewing on Chrome, you can pan in all directions using your mouse, or use click on the on-screen navigation bar.  In the YouTube apps, navigation is more natural: You simply move your device around to pan in different directions.  When you do this, make sure you are either standing up or sitting on a swivel chair, otherwise when you reach certain angles you can easily strain your neck…

Kolor also makes the Kolor Eyes free software for PC, Mac, iOS and Android that lets you view 360-degree videos.  With the Kolor Eyes software, you can even zoom in and out and of the video, and try alternative projections of the video such as Mirror Ball, Little Planet and FishEye.

But without a doubt, the best way to view 360-degree videos is with a VR headset, or the cheaper smartphone holder alternatives such as the Google Cardboard.  When using these devices, you simply move your head in the direction that you want to view, and since the screen (or screens) fill your whole field of view, you get a truly immersive experience.

The Delivery Challenge

While 360-degree videos create a new and exciting experience for viewing, delivering them over today’s network infrastructure can be quite challenging. The reason is that the total resolution of the video is 4 to 9 times higher than the viewport resolution (the part of the video that you actually see on your screen at any given time).  So if you want the video viewport to be in full HD resolution (1920×1080) on your screen, your 360-degree video should be at least 4K resolution (3840×2160).  The challenges in delivering 4K video over the Internet are well known, but for 360-degree videos there is an additional challenge: 4K video is mostly viewed on 4K TVs, which support the new HEVC codec, providing better bandwidth efficiency than the current H.264 (AVC) codec.  But 360-degree videos are viewed on the current generation of PCs and mobile devices, which don’t support HEVC yet.  This results in very high bitrates, or more often,  very low quality for the resulting video.  Luckily, we have the technology to reduce the bitrate of H.264 video streams by up to 50% without compromising their quality, so we welcome 360-degree videos and are up to the challenge of delivering them in high quality and low bitrate to viewers everywhere.

I’m passionate about 360-degree videos.  If you feel the same, you are welcome to contact me at dror@beamr.com or through our Facebook and Twitter channels.

Do we have any hope of surviving the multi-screen, place shifting consumer?

If you are reading this post then you already know that video has taken over the Internet, so I will spare you a paragraph of needless recitals from the latest industry polls stating as such.  Instead I wish to discuss an overlooked solution, known as media optimization, to the video congestion problem, and the positive impact it can have on revenue in the form of ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).

Though the death of TV is a popular blogging subject these days, the fact is, consumers are watching more entertainment content than ever.  However, today’s entertainment experience is now spread across multiple devices and screens.  For a content distributor or streaming service provider, the day to day operational challenges are coming from the ever widening device platforms that need to be supported, as well as the ever-increasing “unmanaged” environments where the consumer expectation for quality is higher than ever.  Accenture in their 2015 Digital Consumer Survey found that 33% of TV viewers who watch long form video on IP connected devices complained about buffering or slow start-times as a result of their expectations for a seamless HD content experience.

It seems in the consumer’s view, an iPad Retina should be streaming the same gorgeous video quality as their 60” premium quality HDTV connected to a cable or satellite box.  Lost to the customer is the fact that the iPad is streaming over a Wi-Fi network which is likely connected to a congested Internet connection, while the HDTV is connected to wired set-top box.  Do you remember when a 20mbps Internet package felt like overkill?

As in life, it’s easy to identify problems but more difficult to find solutions, so rather than dwell on the challenges presented by shifting user behavior and an increasingly crowded Internet I want to introduce a viable solution called media optimization.

Media optimization is a method whereby a digital video file is further compressed beyond the limits of modern day encoder technologies.  Though different techniques and approaches are used, only solutions that are able to retain the original perceptual quality can be viable, as sacrificing video quality in order to save bit-rate is a recipe for customer complaints, reduced ARPU and lost revenue opportunities.

 

How media optimization impacts ARPU

The subject of streaming quality is a complex one since there are multiple technologies and platforms that must all come together at precisely the right time and in the right way in order for a viewer to have a satisfying experience.  For this reason, it’s no wonder that a perfect streaming experience continues to be elusive for even the biggest players in the field.  However, it is possible to deliver a better experience today than yesterday with the addition of a single step to your workflow, and this is media optimization.

Media optimization can reduce buffering events by nearly 50%, and improve stream start times by up to 20% across viewing sessions.  This can be a huge service differentiator as Conviva reported in their most recent 2015 Viewer Experience report that 28.8% of video views in 2014 suffered from buffering.  Furthermore, 58.4% of views suffered from low resolution, which was likely driven by the nature of ABR (Adaptive Bit Rate) switching down profiles as the player attempted to maintain a steady consistent stream rather than buffer.

It stands to reason that a smaller file will transverse the network with greater ease than a larger file.  Which means media optimizations is an ideal tool for improving streaming user experience for any service that wishes to increase viewing time and customer satisfaction.  These will create higher revenues for ad-driven services by increasing ad viewing time, reduce churn for subscription services, and create more frequent rentals for transactional VOD models.

Thank you for reading.  I love digital media and have an excellent understanding of the challenges today’s streaming service operators face, as well as the solutions that are available to them and I would be happy to discuss your specific needs.  You may contact me at: mark@beamr.com.

Hi, my name is Mark Donnigan.  As the Vice President of Marketing at Beamr, I am responsible for the corporate communications, market development and commercial success of Beamr products.

My formal education is in computer science and music, a combination which lead me to Cornell University where I completed MBA Certificate courses, and in the process became extra passionate about combining business, technology, movies and music to create and deliver amazing entertainment experiences. Today, I am excited and inspired to be delivering next generation media optimization solutions for digital distributors and publishers seeking to create the best consumer experiences possible.

Specific areas of expertise include streaming delivery technology, digital content business models, content licensing, content security and DRM. As a result of the ecosystem experience I’ve amassed, I feel most fortunate to be able to travel and speak widely on behalf of Beamr, addressing the rising need for media optimization solutions in today’s network congested reality where video commands more than one-third of all Internet traffic during peak hours. Streaming Media, Digital Hollywood, Media Summit NYC, OTT Executive Summit and Fierce Online Video are some examples of conferences I have spoken at or media outlets where my thought leadership was featured.

I look forward to sharing insights into the exciting world of media and entertainment distribution in future posts; ideas which I hope can shape the future of digital entertainment and new media distribution. I’d love to hear back from you at our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts. Let’s lean into this exciting golden age of entertainment together.

The first and foremost challenge today for anyone delivering video is meeting customer expectation for a perfect viewing experience.

I’ll explain why: As more and more cord-cutters are dropping their cable and satellite TV subscriptions in favor of OTT online streaming services, they expect the same high-quality image they used to get from their traditional TV service. Unlike in the past, when Internet video viewers were accustomed to watching streamed videos on small monitors and compromised on quality, today’s viewing is done on big TV screens. And naturally, viewers want the same TV-like experience from their OTT providers.

The recent Conviva report demonstrates the effect of user experience on monetization and churn. According to the report, “consumers no longer simply expect a service to work, they demand that it provide a high-end experience.” Conviva declares, “2015 is the year of the OTT consumer”. Hence, current typical consumers will not only demand high-quality content, but will quickly quit using a service that doesn’t deliver well.

Clearly, today’s consumers are not as loyal as they used to be. In fact, according to the Conviva report, if the streaming service is not good, 75% of them will try switching to a different service in less than just five minutes.

On top of that, by 2018, 84% of the Internet traffic will be video content. And as more and more consumers are streaming more and more content, network congestion is only getting worse. On the one hand there are viewers already annoyed with long start times, recurring buffering events and other types of interruptions. On the other hand, network congestion will not be resolved overnight – and the effect this can have on content owners may be beyond repair.

Imagine having angry subscribers calling customer support to complain about your service, when in reality your service is great and it’s the network capacity (or should I say incapacity) that is the source of the problem. Or, finding yourself offering time-consuming explanations about network operation, only to realize that the customer doesn’t understand, and/or doesn’t care, and in any case still blames you.

Here’s what can be done: Let’s look at this problem from a different angle and focus on the video file itself. What if we decreased the size of video files, without compromising the quality of those videos in any way.  How would that affect the main user experience metrics –  video start time and re-buffering events? Hold onto that thought, we will explore it further in our next posts.

Video streaming users assume it’s basic and obvious that they’ll get the best viewing experience – always, wherever they are, and on any device they choose. So to stay competitive you need to understand what your customers already do: It’s all about the viewing experience, that’s what they care about, and that’s what will keep them around.

Hi, my name is Dror Gill, and in the coming months you’ll be hearing quite a lot from me on this blog.  So I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself.  I’ve been with the company since day one, back in 2009, and I wear two hats: CTO and VP Marketing.  The only thing I need to remember is to wear the right hat at the right time, otherwise our algorithms might include some marketing messages by mistake, or our website will be filled with formulas and code…

My background is technical: I studied electronics engineering, and my first job was at IBM Research, where back in the 90s we pioneered the fields of Voice over IP and video streaming.  Then I joined a startup called Zapex, which developed video compression chips, and was soon acquired by Emblaze – another pioneering company, this time in the field of mobile video.  During this period I chaired the technical committee of the WMF (Wireless Multimedia Forum), a consortium of companies that defined the standards for video streaming over cellular networks.

After Emblaze, I worked for a few years as an independent consultant on multimedia technologies and markets, advising firms such as NEC, Samsung, Comverse, Radvision and Zoran on their product and technology strategies.  I also had the pleasure of being Entrepreneur in Residence at Giza Venture Capital, which gave me a fascinating inside view of how VCs actually operate.

And then I joined Beamr, and began my third pioneering journey: Creating a way to remove unnecessary bits from already-compressed photos and videos, without altering their formats or compromising quality.  I knew that if we succeeded, such a technology would create huge value across the media value chain – and luckily we did!  More about that soon…
Nice to meet you, and I look forward to hearing back through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

It all started in March 2009.  Beamr’s Founder and CEO, Sharon Carmel, was on a plane back from a meeting with a top executive at one of the world’s largest technology companies.  In the meeting, Sharon outlined his vision for storing photos in the cloud and delivering them to any device.  The executive thought it would be cost-prohibitive for a company to host all of the user’s photos due to the huge amount of cloud storage required.  Reflecting back on the meeting, Sharon thought: how can it be that in 2009, storage requirements for photos are still so high?  The JPEG standard was defined in the 1980s; didn’t we make technology advances since then, which could enable us to reduce file sizes of photos?

A few weeks later, I met Sharon at Yossi Vardi’s Kinnernet Unconference.  “I have an idea related to images” he said, “and I need your help.”  Soon enough, we started prototyping various methods for reducing the file size of photos – from storing a series of photos as a video clip, to taking techniques developed originally for video compression and applying them to still images.  During the course of these experiments, we realized that the missing piece of the puzzle was a quality measure; a reliable metric that can judge whether a file with reduced size has the same perceived quality as the original file.  And since none of the existing quality measures out there were good enough, we invented one of our own…

It turned out that this quality measure became the key ingredient in our image and video optimization solutions.  We began by optimizing JPEG images, making their file size as small as possible without lowering their perceptual quality.  The process was performed by encoding the original JPEG image at different compression levels, checking the value of our quality measure and then picking the deepest compression level, which still produced a perceptually identical image.  Using this method, we were able to reduce the size of high-resolution photos by up to 5 times (80% reduction) with no quality decrease, and JPEGmini was born.

We started a free web service, where users could upload an unlimited amount of photos, and download the optimized versions of their photos.  Communicating with our users, we learned that over half of them were web developers, using JPEGmini to reduce the size of web images in order to make their web pages load faster, especially on mobile devices.  Soon enough we launched our first product: JPEGmini Server, a Linux command-line app that enables websites and online photo services to automatically optimize millions of photos on-premises, without uploading them to our web service.  Shortly after, we launched JPEGmini desktop apps for PC and Mac, which enables users to free up valuable disk space on their computers, share photos much faster and store more photos on Dropbox and other cloud services.  To cater for the specific requirements of professional photographers we developed JPEGmini Pro, which features higher resolution and performance and includes a plug-in for Adobe(R) Lightroom(R).

With a successful release of JPEGmini products, we were able to concentrate on video.  It was clear that optimizing video files would solve a much bigger problem: The video file size is huge, and only getting bigger with 4K UltraHD resolutions.  Video already accounts for over 50% of Internet traffic, and by 2018, 84% of Internet traffic will be video content.  Both fixed and mobile networks are struggling to deliver high-quality video to their users during peak viewing hours.  So we decided it was time for action: We took the basic principles of our image optimization technology, modified some aspects to provide a better fit to video content, and created Beamr Video, a perceptual video optimizer that can reduce bitrate by up to 50% with no visible quality loss.  In Beamr Video, we applied our perceptual quality measure on a frame-by-frame basis, ensuring that each video frame was compressed to the smallest size possible, while still retaining a quality that was indistinguishable from the original video by a human viewer.

Fast forwarding to 2015, Beamr Video is already being used by major over-the-top service providers, including Sony Crackle and M-GO, a joint venture of Technicolor and DreamWorks Animation.  We are happy to see that our customers are reporting significant user experience improvements after deploying Beamr Video in their video processing workflow.

It looks quite simple when laid down in a short blog post, but naturally a lot of hard work and intensive research was required from the initial ideas we formed in 2009, until we reached the mature technology and products we have today.  During the development process we filed for 60 international patents, and 5 of them have already been granted.  Last year we raised $9.5M from Marker LLC, Innovation Endeavors and private investors, and we plan to move full steam ahead, continuing to build the world’s best media optimization tools.

 

It’s no secret that customers today demand the best possible viewing experience when streaming videos online. You can offer the best shows, but if the streaming isn’t smooth, customers are going to lose their patience and leave.
If there’s a company out there who understands this, it’s M-GO. Their goal is to provide a premium viewing experience. How can a company measure streaming video experience? Well, there are three key metrics:
1) Video start time
2) Rebuffer events
3) Quality of video

Would you like to know how M-GO improved all three key metrics? The full results of the M-GO case study analyzing the benefits of Beamr Video optimization can be downloaded here.