Beamr Blog

Beamr Video is Heading to Streaming Media West

Posted on November 18, 2014by Dror Gill

We are headed to Streaming Media West in Huntington Beach, California! This is the place to learn all about cutting-edge online video technologies, and new business strategies, filled with case studies, how-to sessions, panel discussions, and in-depth tutorials.
On Wednesday, November 19 at 1:45 PM, our very own Mark Donnigan will moderate the panel “Using Media Optimization to Improve Streaming Performance”. For this panel, we are bringing together some of the biggest experts in media and entertainment:
Brad Collar, SVP – Warner Bros. Technical Operations (GDMX)
Samir Ahmed, CTO – M-GO
Glen Marzan, VP, Information Technology Production Services & Studio Operations – Sony Pictures Entertainment
Tim Miller, Director, Back-end Engineering – Yahoo! Flickr

Come and learn how these companies apply media optimization to solve the most common problems with streaming like slow stream starts, chronic buffering and network peering congestion.
We are 100% focused on improving the quality, speed and user experience of both photo and video sharing. Our technology is installed in three of Hollywood’s largest studios, and its clients include Sony Crackle, a premium advertising sponsored SVOD service, Interlude, Netflix, Groupon and others. We hope you can join us for this exciting session!

4K TV

How Clogged Will the Internet be by 2020?

Posted on October 15, 2014by Dror Gill

How clogged will the internet be by 2020? Well, let’s take a look at a few things. The number of TV sets connected to the internet will reach 965 million by 2020, that’s up from 103 million at the end of 2010 and the 339 million expected at the end of 2014.The number of televisions connected via media streaming devices and dongles is forecasted to reach 183 million in 2020, up from 36 million by the end of 2014. By the end of this decade, nearly half of television households worldwide will be watching some form of online television or video, with around 200 million homes subscribing to an online video on demand package.

So what does all this mean for internet service providers? Massive companies like AT&T and Comcast have spent the first two months of 2014 announcing plans to close and control the internet through additional fees, and pay-to-play schemes. Today’s consumer is streaming more video than ever before, and they see it from their congested network. ISPs and infrastructure providers can’t keep up with the consistent bandwidth required to enable a high-quality service for OTT customers.

This is just the beginning of the internet bottleneck issue, and it’s only 2014. What’s going to happen when 2020 hits? Cisco recently reported in its Visual Networking Index report that by 2018, video will comprise a whopping 79 percent of global consumer Internet traffic.

An obvious solution to unclog the internet is to reduce video bitrates in order to lower the bandwidth requirements of the streamed video files. However, because the video quality is directly related to the bitrate allocated to the video stream, blindly lowering the bitrate will result in a poor viewing experience and unsatisfied customers—an option that is unacceptable in the age of retina displays and UHD 4k televisions.

Another solution is caching the most frequently viewed video files at the network edges. This ensures that when a popular video file is being requested by a user, it can be streamed from a location that is close to the user’s physical location, and does not have to travel again over the Internet backbone. Since most of the online video traffic is generated by a relatively small number of popular streams, caching those streams can be cost-effective when taking into account the storage costs of the cached files vs. the delivery costs of each copy that travels over the network.

Adaptive bitrate streaming is another common solution used by content delivery networks. This method detects a user’s bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time, then adjusts the quality of a video stream accordingly. While this strategy can provide consistent streaming on high-end and low-end connections, it incurs additional storage and encoding costs, and has a challenge to maintain overall quality on a global scale.

Finally, there’s media optimization, which takes an already-compressed video stream, analyzes its perceptual properties, and encodes it to a lower bitrate to increase streaming speeds without affecting the original video quality. This would be like taking a ball of modeling clay and squeezing it to make it smaller: It still has the same amount of clay, but occupies a smaller amount of space. Some forms of media optimization may struggle to maintain the quality of the video while reducing file size, but when done correctly using a reliable perceptual quality measure, this process can reduce a bitrate and file size by 20-50 percent while retaining the full perceptual quality. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Beamr Video.

While these major players continue to sort through the congestion issues, utilizing current solutions like caching, adaptive bitrate streaming and media optimization can alleviate the bandwidth bottleneck problem while providing a win-win-win situation for content providers, telcos and end users.

4K TV IBC

Beamr Video Optimizes Videos and. . . T-shirts?

Posted on September 29, 2014by Dror Gill

As we were getting ready for IBC a few weeks ago, we started thinking about how making the visit to our booth more special. The idea of giving away T-shirts came up, and since we didn’t think people would be happy to go around wearing a Beamr Video logo, we decided to put a nice slogan on them: “Network Friendly”. This is the essence of what Beamr Video does: It reduces the bitrate of videos without compromising their quality, resulting in video files that are more “network friendly” – they don’t clog the network as much as regular videos, and provide a better streaming experience to the end user. So who wouldn’t want to wear a T-shirt saying that they’re Network Friendly? It’s a very friendly statement and a conversation starter…

But now we faced a problem: We estimated that we could give away 200 T-shirts at the show, but we had no room to store this many T-shirts in our booth – only a small storage space was provided by the organizers. And, shipping the T-shirts to the show would cost us a lot of money. So we thought: How can we reduce the storage requirements and the delivery costs of our T-shirts? And then it hit us: Optimization! This is what we must do to the T-shirts! In the same way that Beamr Video optimizes the videos to reduce storage and delivery costs, we would do the same by compressing our T-shirts.

Immediately we started looking for vendors of compressed T-shirts that could deliver the goods in time for IBC. Luckily we encountered GoTeez, that said the T-shirts would be ready on time. How is a compressed T-shirt even made? Check out this video.

So: Problem solved! And, we now had the perfect pitch for IBC. This is what we told every visitor after explaining the benefits of Beamr Video, and just before they left the booth:
“Oh, and one more thing: We also compress T-shirts! We had a problem of storage and delivery costs in bringing the T-shirts to the show, so we optimized them for delivery – which is exactly what Beamr Video does to your videos. And just like Beamr Video, the T-shirts are fully standard, and you can use a standard “decoder” to de-compress them: Just open the packaging, unfold the shirt and iron it using a standard iron, and you have your full-sized T-shirt!”. The result: Everyone left the booth with a big smile, and we were confident that our message came across clearly…

IBC

Hottest Trends From IBC 2014 in Amsterdam

Posted on September 22, 2014by Dror Gill

We’re back after 5 intensive days at IBC 2014 in Amsterdam, where we presented Beamr Video 2.0 to over 200 potential customers. After catching our breath, we are now ready to share some of our insights from the show.

First and foremost: Everyone and everything is moving to IP. Whether you’re a TV station, cable or satellite operator, content producer or rights owner, you know that IP-based over-the-top delivery of your content will become a growing part of your business, and will eventually take over traditional delivery methods. The reason is obvious: Consumers today are connected through a variety of devices, such as smartphones, phablets, tablets and laptops, and they expect to have access to your content anytime and anywhere. Every major TV service operator, whether it is cable, satellite or IPTV has some form of “TV Everywhere” service, where subscribers can access content without being tied to their set-top box at home. And vendors at IBC had a large variety of solutions for OTT video delivery, including workflow, transcoding, content management, delivery, conditional access and monetization.

Another important trend that ties into the move to IP is the move to the cloud. Companies are offering solutions for “cloud-based everything” – from content editing to management to transcoding to DVR. In fact, our feeling was that today you can become a virtual TV operator in the cloud without owning any equipment other than a camera and an Internet connection. All you need to do is to produce good content and start counting the revenues (we wish it was that easy…).

On the more technical side, we saw MPEG-DASH gaining more ground as the standard for media streaming services. On the codecs front, HEVC has emerged as the dominant next-generation codec, with many companies showing offline and real-time encoders, chips, set-top boxes and smart TVs that support the new standard. Google’s VP9, which at CES seemed like a viable competitor to HEVC, being a royalty-free, open source codec (including royalty-free silicon IP cores for chips), was hardly noticeable at IBC, and the general feeling was that HEVC is the only way to go. HEVC is being introduced first to solve a real issue: Delivery of Ultra-HD (4K) content over the Internet. But as more and more capture and playback devices support HEVC, it is likely that it will also be used for HD resolutions and below.

Speaking of Ultra-HD, you can imagine that it was one of the main themes of the show, but it seems that the industry has not yet decided on the set of parameters that will be used for initial deployments: Frame rate, bit depth, and color space are still in the open. Increasing each of these parameters improves visual quality but also increases the overall bitrate, which is already quite high due to the 4x increase in pixel count over HD. Obviously if you use Beamr Video you can get the bitrate down again, but that will be the subject of another post..

4K TV IBC

Cutting Bitrate by 50% Just Became a Reality

Posted on September 10, 2014by Dror Gill

It is with great joy and excitement that we announce the launch of Beamr 2.0 today. It was just one short year ago that we launched Beamr Video and set out to reduce the bitrate of any H.264 or HEVC video stream by up to fifty percent, enabling a smoother streaming experience with reduced buffering and a faster stream start. So what’s new in Beamr 2.0?

Beamr Video 2.0 now offers a web dashboard and multi-core processing capabilities. The dashboard lets you easily monitor and control the video optimization process. With the dashboard, users can view the progress and optimization parameters used for each job, check the overall and average bitrate savings across all jobs, and monitor the system resource utilization for CPU and memory.

The multi-core processing capabilities enables the most efficient usage of computing resources. Once a user selects the number of cores allocated for processing, the tool divides the video file into multiple segments and processes them in tandem on different cores, ensuring the maximum performance and fastest turn-around times for a user’s video optimization jobs. Once the optimization is complete, Beamr Video 2.0 “stitches” the segments back together to create the output file.

Will be at IBC 2014 in Amsterdam? Stop by our booth, RAI, Hall 3, Booth B20, to see Beamr 2.0 in action. If you can’t meet us at IBC, you can always request a free trial by clicking here.

IBC

Visit Us at IBC in Amsterdam, September 12-16

Posted on September 9, 2014by Dror Gill

Beamr Video is heading to IBC in Amsterdam to show off some demos, meet our customers, say hello to old friends, and give out compressed T-shirts.

The first demo we’ll be showing off will be a split-screen video demo displayed on a 4K screen. One half of the screen shows the original video, and the other half shows the video after Beamr Video optimization, with 30-50% of the bitrate shaved off. Can you tell which is which? You’ll have 30 seconds before we reveal the answer… .

In the second demo you’ll see the Beamr Video software in action. This is where you get to see how the software runs, what parameters can be tweaked, and what are the results of the optimization. Here’s an added bonus – if you bring your own video, we’ll optimize it on the spot, and you’ll travel lighter when you go back home with it…

See you at IBC 2014, September 12-16 at the Amsterdam RAI, Hall 3, Booth B20.

4K TV

Is the Market Ready for 4K TV?

Posted on September 1, 2014by Dror Gill

4K TV, also known as Ultra-HD or UHD TV, is the hottest buzzword at the moment in the entertainment tech scene. It’s redefining what we know about image quality, and shaking up the markets of video capture, editing, management, delivery and consumption.

Ultra HD is a resolution of 3840 × 2160 pixels, or 8.3 megapixels. That’s twice the horizontal and vertical resolution of the current 1080p “Full HD” format, with four times as many pixels overall. But UHD doesn’t mean just more pixels: While upgrading the resolution, industry players also want to offer “better pixels”, by increasing the bit depth, color depth and frame rate of the video to improve the overall viewing experience. More pixels and better pixels meant that more data is captured, edited and encoded, meaning that more bits are needed to faithfully represent the video content.

TV manufacturers are unveiling and pushing 4K TVs now. Sharp has unveiled an update to its line of Aquos 4K TVs to hit the market this fall. Doubling down on the 4K trend later this year is the new UD27 line of Sharp’s Aquos 4K Ultra HD LED TVs in both 60 and 70-inch varieties. Sharp was also keen to point out that these models will be able to stream 4K content from providers like Netflix, and all four of the TVs’ HDMI ports will accept UHD signals at up to 60 frames per second.

Samsung bets on 4K Amazon and Netflix streaming to make UHD TV more tempting. The Samsung TVs will be able to stream movies and TV in UHD from Amazon’s video streaming on-demand service from October. That will be available “globally”, although Samsung hasn’t confirmed exactly which countries that includes. Netflix launched UHD back in April across the US and other countries, starting with “House of Cards”. Samsung will now show Netflix UHD streaming for viewers in Europe.

In the recent 2014 World Cup, the interesting news wasn’t that USA was doing better than England, but that 4K TV was being pushed surprisingly hard. One of the main ads around the edge of the pitch was for Sony 4K. Sony was filming three games in 4K, including the World Cup final. Sony used its own PMW-F55 CineAlta 4K cameras to shoot these games, (the camera is priced at $30,000 each before lenses), and its own custom workflow to handle and edit all of the 4K footage. This “Official 4K World Cup film” will then be made available to Sony Bravia 4K TV owners at some point in the future.

There is one famous question that keeps coming up when discussing 4K TVs. Where do I find 4K content? There’s really nothing to watch on 4K. Why not? Every 4K frame contains four times the information, so the size of files and streams is increased by 4 times compared to current 1080p HD content. This makes it quite challenging to get the content to you. Broadcast TV hasn’t made the 4K switch yet, nor did Cable or Satellite TV. There’s not even a 4K standard for optical discs. in fact, most of the news around 4K content lately is related to streaming, which fits perfectly with the trend of “cable cutting” and content delivery over the Internet.

But here lies the problem: 4K requires a bitrate of 15-20 Mbps even when using the newest codec – HEVC. We all know that this is beyond the average consumer bandwidth. In fact, Akamai’s 2014 “State of Internet” report found that global “4K readiness”, meaning the percentage of subscribers that have an average bandwidth of 15 Mbps or more, is only around 11%. This means that even if 4K streaming services are launched this year, they will be available to a very limited audience.

Here at Beamr Video, we came up with a solution that will take away the challenge of getting 4K to you. We can reduce HEVC bitrates by 30-50%, bringing the bitrate down and enabling streaming 4K HEVC over broadband to a much wider range of consumers. Not only do we cut the bitrate down, but we also preserve the full resolution and quality of the video – giving you a true 4K TV experience that is delivered smoothly over your existing broadband connection.