Category: OTT

Microservices – Good on a Bad Day [podcast]

Live streaming is arguably the least forgiving industry in today’s market. Anyone involved with live streaming workflows understands the sensitivity and high stakes involved with live streaming any event. Your viewers, on the other hand, don’t factor in the complexities of what happens behind the scenes when it comes to their quality expectations – but […]

Are viewers the new content aggregators?

Consumer spending on video streaming services is expected to rise 39% this year to about $13 billion, according to the Consumer Technology Association—a staggering factoid, especially when one considers that the average consumer around the world already views 4.4 hours of video a day. That CTA data point, released at the just-wrapped Consumer Electronics Show […]

CES 2018: Connected TV Tunes into the User Experience

As we roll into 2018, almost half of all US broadband households (45%) now own a smart TV, according to Parks Associates research – and it’s now the most commonly used platform for watching online video content. At the same time, consumers are getting choosy about their user experience (UX), meaning that key points of […]

How to deal with the tension on the mobile network – part 2 (VIDEO Interview)

In late July, I reported on the “news” that Verizon was throttling video traffic for some users. As usual, the facts around this seemingly punitive act were not fully understood, which triggered this blog post. At IBC last month (September 2017), I was interviewed by RapidTV where much of the conversation was around the Apple […]

The Need for Speed: x265 & Beamr 5 Epic Face Off

UPDATE 11/15/2017: Be sure to check out part 2 of this post which covers Beamr 5 performance on the new Intel Scalable Platinum processor.   This article offers a comparison between the performance and quality of the Beamr 5 HEVC software encoder, and the open-source x265 software encoder.  There should be no debate over which […]

How to deal with the tension of video on the mobile network – Part 1

Last week, the Internet erupted in furor over Verizon’s alleged “throttling” of video streaming services over their mobile network. With a quick glance at the headlines, and to the uninitiated, this could be perceived as an example of a wireless company taking their market dominance too far. Most commenters were quick to pontificate calling “interference” […]

2016 Paves the Way for a Next-Gen Video Encoding Technology Explosion in 2017

2016 has been a significant year for video compression as 4K, HDR, VR and 360 video picked up steam, paving the road for an EXPLOSION of HEVC adoption in 2017. With HEVC’s ability to reduce bitrate and file sizes up to 50% over H.264, it is no surprise that HEVC has transitioned to be the […]

Before you evaluate x265, read this!

With video consumption rising and consumer preferences shifting to 4K UHD this is contributing to an even faster adoption rate than what we saw with the move to HD TV. Consumer demand for a seamless (buffer-free) video experience is a new expectation, and with the latest announcement from HEVC Advance removing royalty uncertainties in the […]

The State of Commercially Available 4K UHD Services

In a recent article we did a little investigative research on the state of 4K and four significant trends: The upgrade in picture quality is significant and will drive an increase in value to the consumer – and additional revenues for services. Competitive forces are operating at scale – Service Providers and OTT distributors will […]

4 Facts about 4K

We recently did a little investigative research on the state of 4k and here are four highlights of what we found. To start, as an industry, we’ve been anticipating 4K for a few years now, but it was just this past April that DIRECTV launched the first-ever Live 4K broadcast from the Masters Golf Tournament. […]