Klagenfurt, Austria / 21 January 2020 – Bitmovin, a world leader in online video technology, is teaming up with the University of Klagenfurt and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Digital and Economic Affairs (BMDW) in a multi-million Euro research project to uncover video transmission technology techniques that will enhance the video streaming experiences of the future.
The joint project establishes a dedicated research team to investigate potential new tools and methodologies for encoding, transport, and playback of live and on-demand video using the HTTP Adaptive Streaming protocol that is widely used by online video and TV providers. The resulting findings will help empower the creation of next-generation solutions for higher quality video experiences at lower latency, while also potentially reducing storage and distribution costs.
**This is a crossposted article originally featured here on Platform Comms and here in German**

Fierce competition increases the need for innovation

Ministry of Economic Affairs provides support through the Christian Doppler Research Association

The Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA is jointly funded by Bitmovin and the Christian Doppler Research Association, whose primary public sponsor is the Federal Ministry of Digital and Economic Affairs. The budget for 7 years of research is approx. 4.5 million Euros, with the public sector providing roughly 2.7 million of this total. Martin Gerzabek, President of the Christian Doppler Research Association, sees great potential for cooperation between science and industry, as in this case: “ATHENA is our first Christian Doppler Laboratory at the University of Klagenfurt. We are very pleased about the expansion of our funding model, which facilitates cooperation between outstanding science and innovative companies on an equal footing. We congratulate the University of Klagenfurt on this great success and confidently look forward to furthering CD labs and JR centers in the region.” 
According to Oliver Vitouch, Rector of the University of Klagenfurt, “ATHENA offers a fantastic opportunity for further pioneering developments in global leading-edge technologies. Video streaming has permeated our everyday lives; most of us use it on a daily basis. This lab of the future is an ideal blend of research and innovation”. In Klagenfurt, members of the Institute for Information Technology have been working on the development of innovative video transmission technology for around 20 years. Bitmovin, which operates on a global scale and maintains sites on three continents today, originally began its operations in Klagenfurt: The three founders (Stefan Lederer CEO, Christopher Müller CTO, and Christian Timmerer CIO) first collaborated on the development of the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard during their time at the University of Klagenfurt. This standard is currently used by YouTube, Netflix, ORF-TVThek, Flimmit and many more besides. 

About Bitmovin

Bitmovin was founded in 2013 by Stefan Lederer, Christopher Müller, and Christian Timmerer as a spinoff of the University of Klagenfurt, where they both worked on the standardization of MPEG-DASH, a major standard for video streaming, during their time as students. The start-up company found its first home in the neighboring Lakeside Science & Technology Park. Today, the company provides the world’s most powerful products for highly efficient video streaming on the Internet. Large, international customers such as the BBC or Hulu Japan rely on solutions developed in Carinthia.

Since participating in the renowned Y Combinator program in the USA, the official corporate headquarters are located in San Francisco. However, the two locations in Austria remain the centers of excellence for research and development – not least due to the strong ties to the University of Klagenfurt. Over the course of two financing rounds in 2016 and 2018, the company was able to secure over 40 million dollars in venture capital from international investors.

Industry-Leading Video Technologies

Bitmovin technology innovations focus on video encoding, playback, and analytics around user experiences. Another feature is industry-leading transcode speeds, reaching 100 times real-time. The Bitmovin Player runs on the widest array of compelling consumer devices, ranging from mobile handheld devices to large screen televisions fed by dongle devices or with native smart TV capabilities – providing a rich feature set with consistent UI’s and API’s. Bitmovin’s newest analytics product provides multi-screen audience and QoS data to analyze and optimize every play in real-time.
Most recently, Bitmovin was granted up to 20 million euros by the European Investment Bank to finance research and development as well as investments in sales and marketing in the coming years. Market-oriented, forward-looking product development and research at the cutting edge earn Bitmovin awards time and again, such as the “Phoenix” start-up prize in 2016, one of the most prestigious start-up prizes in Austria, with which the Austria Wirtschaftsservice GmbH (AWS), the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and the Federation of Austrian Industries (IV) recognize outstanding research achievements and innovative product ideas.

About Christian Doppler Laboratories

In Christian Doppler Laboratories, application-oriented basic research is carried out at a high level, which involves outstanding scientists cooperating with innovative companies. The Christian Doppler Research Association is internationally regarded as a best-practice example for the promotion of this type of cooperation. Christian Doppler Laboratories are jointly financed by the public sector and the participating companies. The primary public sponsor is the Federal Ministry of Digital and Economic Affairs (BMDW). 

About the University of Klagenfurt

Since its foundation in 1970, the University of Klagenfurt has successfully established itself as one of six state universities with a broad range of subjects in Austria. More than 11,600 students pursue their studies and research at the University of Klagenfurt; around 2000 of these are international students. Approximately 1,500 employees strive for top quality in teaching and research. According to the QS World University Rankings (“Top 50 under 50”) the university belongs to the 150 best young universities worldwide. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020, which endeavor to rank the top 1,400 universities across the globe, it placed in the 301-350 range. In the discipline of Computer Science, the University of Klagenfurt was third place among Austrian universities in the 201-250 range. One of the university’s key research strengths lies in “networked and autonomous systems”.
 
Further inquiries:
Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Christian Timmerer
+43 463 2700 3621
Christian.Timmerer@aau.at

The post Bitmovin & Austrian University to team up for innovative Video Transmission Technology research appeared first on Bitmovin.

At Bitmovin’s Southeast Asia Internet Video Debate 2019, video executives shared hot OTT topics ranging from AI to multi-codec and low-latency

As the orange sun set over the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai, senior executives and video engineers from India’s leading Internet video streaming companies gathered together at our first APAC Internet Video Tech Social for a one-of-a-kind debate on the future of Internet Video in India and Southeast Asia.
The industry leaders provided insights directly from the front lines of the quickly evolving OTT video landscape at the half-day event. Here were our learnings from this unique event.

The sun sets over Four Seasons Hotel Mumbai, Tuesday, October 15, 2019

“Reverse conference” led to robust debate

The event brought together a unique mix of attendees ranging from senior executives to engineers, product leaders, sales and marketing. Companies represented an industry cross-section of both customer facing OTT providers such as Vuclip and back office technology providers such as Accedo and Irdeto.
Instead of coming to a main event — the attendees were the main event! Throughout the room Bitmovin had set up tables for groups of 5 or 6 people each from a diverse cross section of the industry. The MC at the front of the hall led a quick pace of new topics and questions to get the discussion and debates heating up!

India is now a multi-codec country!

This was a debate, so there were many disagreements. But one thing almost everyone agreed was that India is now a multi-codec country — H.264 is no longer the only codec in town!

For years, the venerable video codec H.264, also known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC), has remained king of video codecs partially because of its value as a “lowest common denominator” codec: almost every device with a screen supports some sort of H.264 video codec playback whether iOS, Android, PCs, set-top-box or even a knockoff phone.
But this convenience comes with a cost to viewers: the newer phones we have in our pockets now come with beefier processors and dedicated hardware decoders with fancier, next generation codecs beyond that go far beyond H.264. This means most consumers and OTT providers waste bandwidth — and viewer battery life — on low quality video.
But the ecosystem of VP9 is here to the rescue! Thanks to the proliferation of Android and Chrome across India, VP9 came up time and again in discussions as a compelling alternative to H.264 with excellent bitrate profiles and deployment capabilities. Device and browser support across much of India and South Asia more generally is increasing to the point where all service providers of reasonable volume are already transcoding into VP9 if not at least exploring next steps to enter the multi-codec world.

Lower latency and sports are fast friends

Low latency through CMAF is seeing continued interest, especially for sports, betting and other live situations where lower latency can add significant viewer value. Attendees seem to accept the importance of a low latency standard and specifically mention CMAF and the positive impact it could bring to the streaming business.

Agree to disagree on AI

The discussion of artificial intelligence brought out genuine disagreement. Viewpoints ranged from true believers who are already exploring AI into their video workflow to skeptics who can’t see past the marketing hype.
Of supporters, some are already integrating AI in the form of object detection, audio transcription or enhanced encoding. These supporters point to those examples proving early commercial viability.
AI detractors made statements that can be summarized as “Examples of speech-to-text have been around for decades and while AI is continuing to get better, things like transcription still show best results having a human in the loop” — especially needed for regulatory compliance such as FCC compliant captions. Others go further to say AI is really just a recycled marketing hype — instead of AI using the word “algorithm” is just not as exciting as the prospect of a sentient computer. 

Focus on developing your core value

Keynote speaker Praveen Singh helped the audience apply ideas to reality. In his role as Head of OTT content and video platforms at Vuclip, a PCCW Media Company, he’s collected a large collection of shared tales on creating multi-region OTT technologies.
His practical advice for entrepreneurial OTT platforms and growing video distributors is to be sure to focus on your unique advantage. Don’t reinvent the wheel! Instead, outsource commodity technology rather than reinventing what’s already been commoditized. Spend time focusing on developing IP in your core business.

Keynote presentation from Praveen Singh, Head of OTT content and video platforms at Vuclip, a PCCW Media Company, Four Seasons Hotel Mumbai, Tuesday, October 15, 2019

One word?

When we asked David Godfrey, Head of APAC for Bitmovin how to summarize the debate and India OTT market in one word: “VP9.” Adoption of Android and Chrome in India is significant — it’s a multi-codec world!

The post State of OTT: India Joins the Multi-Codec World appeared first on Bitmovin.

Challenges

Telekom Slovenije needed a player that was able to offer high-quality online experiences by seamlessly delivering streams to all major browsers on different devices, such as TVs, Smartphones, Tablets, PCs. The number of devices being used by consumers to access NEO led to another challenge: the ability to provide customizable UIs that are consistent across all devices. Finally, Telekom Slovenije needed all content to adhere to the stringent content protection standards required by broadcasters and studios. Telekom Slovenije previously had challenges with multi-DRM integration via open source players. What the operator needed was a multi-DRM player that could simplify the process, while ensuring that premium content was fully protected.

The Solution

The Bitmovin player was chosen for its multi-DRM support and cross-platform compatibility, which enables NEO’s users to seamlessly stream content, regardless of which device they are using. The unified API approach of the Bitmovin Player and its SDKs for iOS and Android were also a deciding factor, allowing Telekom Slovenije to bypass specialized, disparate player stacks for the initial development and ongoing support.
This enabled the Telekom Slovenije engineering team to focus on developing unique features on top of Bitmovin’s technology. Close collaboration between the development teams ensured the compatibility of these features across all platforms.

Benefits

With NEO, Telekom Slovenije took the boundaries of multiscreen services to the next stage, enabling users across multiple geographies to watch the content they want, on the platform they want, whenever they want. As the cord-cutting phenomenon continues to grow, being able to innovate through services that consumers truly want to use was a real game-changer for Telekom Slovenije. The use of Bitmovin’s Player and Analytics also enabled Telekom Slovenije to focus its effort on activity that truly makes a difference.
 

The post How Telekom Slovenije leveraged streaming video for the next generation of home entertainment appeared first on Bitmovin.

The global audience for video games is projected to be somewhere around 650 million by 2022. It’s no surprise then that eSports is booming right now with competitive gaming expected to be a billion dollar industry in 2019, with its global audience expected to increase by more than 50% between now and 2023.

Znipe.TV’s platform offers its users a bespoke viewing experience by empowering them to select the players and streams they want to follow and options on how to split the screen, giving them a unique perspective on every match.

The Challenge

To ensure that they could continue to deliver high-quality experiences to viewers, while having the agility to deliver innovation quickly, Znipe.TV needed a cloud encoding service that:

• Could handle a high level of complexity at scale, as gaming content is very complex to encode
• Could be deployed in any cloud region around the world
• Is system agnostic to avoid tying them to a specific cloud vendor, offering maximum flexibility
• Encodes multiple streams at 60 frames per second (FPS)
• Is future proof to make sure that Znipe.TV stayed up to date with ongoing market innovations

The Solution

After looking at a number of technologies available on the market, Bitmovin’s encoding solution quickly became the obvious choice to address Znipe.TV’s needs.

Bitmovin’s solution was chosen because it offers the most flexible encoding on the market. It can be deployed in any cloud region of Znipe.TV’s preference, which means that streams can be encoded in the closest location to the respective eSports event. This guarantees fast turnaround times, reduced latency and an enhanced viewing experience.

Bitmovin’s flexible and customizable technology has helped us in our unique broadcasting challenges: to seamlessly generate a vast amount of parallel live video feeds and present them to the user in the highest quality, wherever they are in the world. Znipe.TV’s unique service broadcasts a time-synchronized video stream covering multiple angles, increases the demand placed on a transcoder service. Bitmovin has proven it is able to deliver all of our needs now and in the future with their fantastic technical roadmap. To achieve the unique Znipe. TV viewing experience, we chose Bitmovin’s encoding to handle the video transcoding so that we can focus on what we do best, providing world-class entertainment for fans globally, live and on demand.

Erik Åkerfeldt, CEO and Co-Founder, ZnipeTV

With Bitmovin’s help, Znipe.TV is able to offer a cutting edge service that gives viewers the opportunity to watch tournaments from their preferred perspective. This innovative way for viewers to experience the thrills and spills of the best players in the world on titles like CounterStrike: Global Offensive, has been a huge success and cemented its position as a leading eSports broadcaster.

Want to learn more? Download the full Case Study!

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Snapchat. Instagram stories. LinkedIn autoplay. Video, the next wave of communication. Consumer communication trends often have an impact on product development, as app creators cater to the ways users expect to interact both with their products and each other. Developers have to accommodate these requests and it’s not a problem we can ignore.

Here’s why:

• By 2020, according to Cisco online videos will make up more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic.
• 51% of all video plays are on mobile devices.
• 59% of executives say they would rather watch a video than read text.
• Shoppers who view videos are 1.7 times more likely to make a purchase than non-viewers.
• 100 million hours of video are watched each day on Facebook.
• Netflix users spent 100 million hours a day watching content.

But unlike when social media hit its apex, integrating video into your app is not as easy as installing a “share this” button. Adding video to your SaaS product, or making it an integral publishing offer for your users, can be a headache. Most product teams don’t have the video development resources to match those of Facebook or Netflix.

We’ve believed in online video since the beginning. Our founders, Stefan Lederer and Christopher Mueller, studied computer science, specializing in multimedia streaming and video compression. As their knowledge grew, one question persisted: how can we stream video better?
Bitmovin was built on this passion and the pursuit to make video better by solving complex streaming problems. Ever since then we’ve been innovating – building and deploying the first commercial HTML5 player, achieving 100x realtime encoding speeds in the cloud, and constructing the first containerized video encoding solution. You read about Netflix and YouTube’s dominance above; we co-created MPEG-DASH, a universal standard utilized by the streaming giants. Now, our team is several times bigger, which means that we can tackle more complex video problems and enable more use cases for our users, the developers.
We also doubled our commitment to research, and the list of firsts continues – last year we deployed the first end-to-end AV1 livestream (winning Best of NAB Streaming Media). This year we saw the introduction of artificial intelligence in video workflows, starting with the first commercially available AI-powered Per-Title Encoding solution, using machine learning to determine optimal encoding settings for each type of content. Of course, the research and development is only the start, the real reward and motivation are seeing these innovations implemented by the customer’s dev teams.

Why We Believe Component Solutions Make Developers Better Developers

The open web means all things are possible. For developers, the open web is utterly important since it is a source of inspiration and lead to exciting collaborations with tech giants. It’s also a lot of pressure. DIY starts to get in the way of GSD. This challenge can become a lethal businesses problem.
Video is a highly engaging addition to apps, or sometimes core to the app offering, but developers with deep knowledge in video are in short supply. Developers need the ability to improve their product without having to take the time and resources to educate themselves on an entirely new skill set. APIs and component solutions are the best option. The reasoning? Web development is becoming standardized. Component solutions allow for quick development and lightning fast POCs because they function like an assembly line; plug and play. Because of this, you can adopt new technologies, like advanced codecs, quickly while using the SaaS model to reduce the overheads of maintenance and feature upgrades.
Using a video encoding API, like Bitmovin, and the hands-on developer resources and support that comes with it, Developers can successfully achieve their goals at scale, while still focusing on their core value proposition. This is why Bitmovin exists. We’re here to simplify video and help you get “un-stuck.”

How Video Encoding APIs Simplify Workflow Problems

Whether you’re utilizing the open web or a paid service, you’re looking to overcome challenges quickly and prove the value of a solution. The developers that find and try Bitmovin are searching for component parts already. Among the top 10 queries are: dash player, av1 encoder, cmaf and hls player.
Finalizing your list of options, you have to test, and it needs to be easy. But then, what happens when it’s not? We’ve all been there- evaluating an open source tool and dedicating more time to investigating the API documentation and sifting through the community forums. This is why we support our APIs not just with robust documentation and tutorials, but also demos and direct dev-to-dev communication channels (like Slack).

We’re obsessed with our customers, asking, what are the steps we can take to make them successful as quickly as possible? After all, we are a solutions-oriented business, which means we’re eager to help. The support team is essential to this, but our focus on making your solution work starts early. Even in the sale process, we want to avoid the disconnect that can happen when a sales rep is paired with a developer. We bring on support engineers to solve the issue early on.

What Developers Can Do to Add and Test Video Capabilities Quickly

The open web has trained developers that they should see results first before deciding to pay for a tool. So we have created numerous video solutions demos that developers can integrate with to see options personalized for their product and business. Below are a few of the most popular,

5 Types of Video-Specific Integrations and APIs for SaaS Platforms

1. Stream Test for DASH, HLS, and Progressive: Test your video files in the Bitmovin Player, simply by pasting the location of your manifest file and selecting the file type. You’ll see firsthand just how good your videos look in any browser and on any device, no plugins- with a super-fast startup.
2. DRM Stream Test: Try a protected DRM stream live and get immediate insights into which DRM system and codecs are supported by your browser. Integrating DRM into your video workflow is much easier than you think.
3. Native Player SDKs: Bitmovin’s Native SDKs give you everything you need to get your video playing anywhere, any device, any platform. The unified configuration, UI and API gives you a single point of control  across all the different platforms that you support, creating a consistent experience for your users, whichever device they use.
4. UI Styling: A unified UI config ensures that your player will look the same, regardless of which device or platform it is rendered on. This demo includes some simple interactive color controls to change the user interface along with code examples showing you how to take your branding to the next level.
5. Ad Scheduling: Generate more advertising revenue using quick, seamless ad insertion within platforms and apps. Try our player and see how it can integrate with different advertising standards, namely VAST, VPAID, IMA, and VMAP. Just connect to your ad server for testing.

Want more options? 25 New and Improved Online Video Delivery Demos
We solve complex video problems. The Bitmovin API offers the support to scale quickly and know it will work. Video component solutions are the best option for developers who want to power their apps and Saas products with video, but don’t have video development skills in their “developer toolbox.” In the Age of APIs it’s no longer necessary! Implement, test, and make it a success. We’ll be here when you need us.
Should We Work Together? Let’s Find Out.

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Leveraging microservices and containers to create an advanced, scalable and powerful video encoding service.

Video encoding is a complex and compute intensive task which is well suited to leverage the cloud thanks to its ability to quickly scale compute intensive operations. In other words, you can get massive computing power that scales very quickly to deal with the heavy requirements of encoding software.
Until recently, however, the majority of cloud solutions have operated as large, monolithic cloud services that require one or more discrete servers to operate (or an entire virtualized operating system for each task). This leads to relatively high operation costs and large integrated code bases that can be difficult to maintain. Furthermore, many commercial cloud services only allow access to their product through a single, bulky API, making it difficult to allow customers to use and fine tune individual services or manage the cost structure to allow the service to scale for their needs.

Microservices and containers to the rescue

Enter microservices and containers: these programming patterns and deployment structures allow developers to more cost effectively harness the power of cloud computing while reducing code base complexity. Further, customers of previously monolithic commercial cloud services can now leverage containerized versions to more effectively take advantage of their existing computing resources — whether on premise or in the cloud.
But what exactly are microservices and containers? And how do they help ship high quality, reliable code?

What’s the difference between microservices and containers?

Let’s start with some definitions. The pattern of “microservices” is a type of software architecture, designed to work with fine-grained, portable services and lightweight protocols to ensure a high level of modularity and flexibility. This allows for an architecture that works well with automated testing and automated deployment, as each microservice can be modified individually enabling updates and rollouts with virtually no downtimes.

Containers, on the other hand are lightweight, stand-alone, executable packages of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings. Microservices are often packaged and run inside of containers. They provide everything a given service needs to run, but put the software in isolation from other parts of the operating systems or other services running on the same machine. This enables a precise attribution of processing resources on operating-system-level, so that processes can be managed efficiently. Docker is a popular software containerization platform used by Bitmovin to implement a “chunk-based” approach to video encoding in a cloud environment.

Why are microservices and containers useful?

Compared to monolithic style architectures where code and library dependencies are more static in nature and the whole construct grows with the expanding complexity, software architecture based on microservices offers two major benefits:

• Deployment: Monolithic-based structures tend to grow too large to keep up with short release cycles. Microservices allow for shorter release cycles as every single service can be updated individually. This way, updates can be deployed almost instantly and without service interruptions.
• Engineering culture: Microservices enable development teams to work relatively independently and in different locations. Teams can be organized more loosely, tasks and responsibilities can be split up among them more effectively.

In a software architecture based on microservices, only APIs are exposed externally which means that the processes delivering up to the API can be organized and arranged freely. For example, at Bitmovin we created our video encoding platform as a service-based architecture from the very beginning. The encoders used are each microservices which can be scaled horizontally and have been designed to provide a high degree of portability and flexibility.

Containers as an alternative to monolithic third-party cloud services

One of the newest trends making use of the container model is to allow third-party applications to run in your own server environment deployed as nicely packaged containers. Instead of accessing a cloud-based service through a single API and paying a volume-based usage fee, instead you can pay a fixed software license fee and then leverage your existing server infrastructure resulting in potentially significant savings.
For example, Bitmovin’s encoding services are available both as a cloud-based API and as a downloadable containerized package that can run on your own infrastructure. This allows you to determine the right mixture of deployment environment depending on your needs — ranging from a shared cloud like Amazon Web Services to on-premise with your own hardware, or even a hybrid combination of both.
Another important advantage of containerized deployment of third-party services is that they are by design capable of running virtually anywhere – on commodity hardware, on heterogeneous clusters, on homogenous clusters, on high-performing instances or on weaker instances.
Using containerized encoding instances with on-premise commodity hardware provides a very compelling cost savings when compared to traditional dedicated broadcast encoding hardware. Further, the ability to instantly scale to the cloud for peak loads and to repurpose local hardware for alternate uses provides a killer combination of benefits, finally delivering on the promise of a virtualized infrastructure for broadcast video workflows.

Deploying containerized microservices

Whether you’re managing your own custom containerized microservices or leveraging containers from third-party vendors all are managed by an orchestrator, a piece of software which attributes resources and handles scheduling. Most any Docker orchestrator is sufficient as all systems are supported. Bitmovin uses Kubernetes as an orchestrator for our own infrastructure, so we are familiar with the system and know it in and out.
Prioritization in handling encoding jobs is another major challenge which impacts upon live content distribution as well as video on demand. Again, these requirements create an environment in which cloud-based video encoding using orchestrated containerization really shines: Encoding jobs can be prioritized between instances, jobs can be queued, stopped and resources shifted. Using this feature, encoding jobs can be sped up temporarily. For example if there is live content, which has to be processed practically in real time, other encoding jobs can be stopped to free up resources for the job with a higher priority.
You can configure your orchestration system along with your specific cloud environment to allow for a balance between cost efficiency and accelerated encoding. Resources can be freed up as soon as a time-critical encoding procedure has been finished. Big cloud providers are realizing the need for on-demand resource booking and flexible price structures and adjust accordingly, like Amazon’s AWS with their spot instances or Google’s preemptible VM instances.

Closing

Containerization of microservices is a truly groundbreaking application delivery mechanism, finally allowing content publishers to implement the long promised dream of video infrastructure virtualization in a cost effective and efficient manner. It’s about time you started thinking inside the box — containers are going to be your friend.
We’re here to help as you plan your next generation online video workflow. Use us and abuse us for both our video and cloud infrastructure technical geekery.

Resources:

https://bitmovin.com/cool-new-video-tools-five-encoding-advancements-coming-av1/
http://www.businessinsider.de/amazon-web-services-is-battling-microsoft-azure-and-google-cloud-2017-10?r=UK&IR=T
https://bitmovin.com/containerized-video-encoding-will-change-video-landscape/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-spot-instances.html
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible

The post Video Encoding: Using Microservices and Containers appeared first on Bitmovin.

A New Challenge for Broadcasters

Major broadcasters have become addicted to the convenience of a Flash-based development and publishing workflow. Let’s face it, whatever your opinions are of Flash as a runtime environment and ActionScript as a language, Adobe’s unified ecosystem running across a broad range of devices and operating systems with solid features like integrated DRM has been a major selling point for broadcasters of all sizes. Adobe’s vertical integration with creative products, cloud hosting, encoding, ad serving, analytics and other video streaming add-ons (many packaged under the Primetime brand) offered an attractive set of tools all nicely packaged from one vendor.
Just like traditional hardware replacement lifecycles, a video streaming technology also has a limited lifespan with regular investment cycles. Flash was a dominant player in the last cycle, now HTML5 is the dominant player in the current investment cycle. Compounding the complexity of this next technology lifecycle, the death of Flash comes at a time when the media landscape’s fragmentation is accelerating. With the addition of newer devices and platforms like mobile, OTT, smart TVs, streaming sticks, and the next generation of Android-based set-top-boxes, it’s hard for broadcasters to keep tabs on what devices are available, let alone to maintain a unified publishing workflow to reach new audiences!

What’s a Broadcaster to do?

In a Flash-less world with increasing fragmentation, it can be challenging for broadcasters to forge a path ahead. To help you on this journey, first we’ll review the internals of the modern HTML5 video workflow.

HTML5 Video Began a Decade Ago

It’s been more than 10 years since the video element was first proposed to be included as part of the HTML5 standard. Opera brought attention to the fact that at the time, video playback was supported only by “proprietary closed solutions that rely on plugins to display in a web page” (e.g. Flash), and they took aim to make video a “first-class web citizen.”  While they were successful in adding the element to the HTML5 standard, their well-intended and necessary effort created the unintentional side-effect of fragmentation. HTML5 video is plagued with competing standards for codecs, captions, content protection, and advertising. For Broadcasters, HTML5 video still presents considerable challenges.

Standardizing On A Codec

One of the many things that users took for granted with Flash video playback was its built-in support for the AVC/H.264 codec.  H.264 has many patent holders and is licensed by the MPEG-LA.  This prevented open source projects like the Mozilla Foundation from adopting the format.  Fortunately, in 2013 CISCO stepped forward with a major contribution:

“We [CISCO] plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use…I’m also pleased that Mozilla has announced it will enable Firefox to utilize this module, bringing real-time H.264 support to their browser.”

While AVC/H.264 has become the current de facto standard, the road ahead brings uncertainty with new formats like HEVC and now AV1.  New codecs are needed to satisfy our ever increasing desire for better picture quality at lower bitrates.  Broadcasters seeking to deliver premium video must work continuously to ensure that they are meeting the demands of an evolving ecosystem.

Handling Advanced Use Cases

With HTML5 video, it is up to the browser itself — not Flash — to retrieve video segments, decode them, and play the media data.  This makes playback of a video relatively simple for non-broadcast use cases, but presents a bit of an issue for publishers that want more visibility and control. The Media Source Extension (MSE) is a JavaScript API that was introduced by the W3C to allow publishers to have control over things such as adaptive bitrate (ABR) logic, splicing, ad insertion, and time-shifting.
The MSE API allows a JavaScript player to dynamically pass media segments to the HTML5 video element by creating a “MediaSource object”.  The MediaSource buffer takes the place of a file URL for the src of the video elements.
While all of the leading desktop browsers, Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox have adopted Media Source Extensions, the individual implementations vary slightly between browsers, which can make life difficult for broadcaster development teams.
It’s important to understand that when leveraging the Media Source Extension API, the responsibility for parsing the manifest file (i.e. the m3u8 or mpd) falls to the player JavaScript logic. Broadcasters must therefore carefully evaluate their choice of HTML5 player technology providers to be sure that it provides optimal ABR heuristics and is capable of properly extracting metadata that would be used to drive things like ad insertion, CDN redundancy, and DRM playback.

Content Protection

Another major obstacle that prevented broadcasters from adopting HTML5 was their need to protect content with DRM.  Flash offered the closest thing to a “silver bullet” by including support for Adobe Primetime DRM (formerly known as Adobe Access).  In order to satisfy the need for protected content, browsers now offer the Encrypted Media Extension (EME).
An EME is a JavaScript API that allows web applications to communicate with content protection systems.  A web application will use the EME API to pass messages between the Content Decryption Module (CDM) and a Key Server that provides the decryption keys.  The CDM is defined outside the EME specification.  The CDM can be software or hardware, and its primary role is to decrypt the media in a secure way.
It is the Hollywood studios that make the rules when it comes DRM requirements.  One of the biggest failings of Adobe Primetime DRM is that it did not have “hardware root-of-trust,” which means that in the eyes of the Hollywood studios it was more susceptible to an attack.  Most broadcasters are required to use a DRM technology that is natively supported by the device.  While there is rising standard called CMAF that may bring an easier solution, the current reality is that broadcasters must deploy a multi-DRM approach.  This means generating both DASH and HLS, and leveraging some combination of Widevine, PlayReady, and Fairplay.
It should be noted that the HTML5 Encrypted Media Extension standard is not a complete content protection solution in and of itself.  A web application must confirm the user’s identity and determine whether or not they are authorized for viewing the content before supplying them with a token that can be exchanged for a DRM license.  This means that broadcasters must either stand-up their own licensing backend, or work with an existing provider such as BuyDRM, ExpressPlay, or others.
Find more information about DRM in our DRM Whitepaper.

Adopting the Browser Security Model

When delivering video on the web, it is very common for the video to be hosted on a CDN using a different domain than that of the web page.  With Flash, all that was necessary was to host a small text file, called the cross-domain policy file.  The cross-domain policy file was an XML document that granted the Flash player permission to handle data across domains.
In the HTML5 world, broadcasters must be certain to understand and implement Cross-Origin Resource Sharing or CORS.  Instead of defining the permissions in a stand-alone file, the policy information must be contained within the HTTP response header.
Complicating things further is that browsers don’t like mixed HTTP / HTTPs content.  With mixed content the browser will either display an error or stop the content from loading altogether.  Broadcasters will need work with their CDN to make sure they are able to deliver their video over HTTPS.

Advertising

In its day, Flash provided a standard interface with which ad technology companies could integrate and provide an SDK module.  Most all ad technology vendors, including Google and FreeWheel, have since created new SDKs for HTML5.
The IAB is a standards body that helps define advertising formats.  VPAID is a commonly used format that provides support for rich interactivity with a player UI.  The initial definition, VPAID 1.0, was deprecated in November 2016 as it defined the media creative as a Flash SWF.  The more recent VPAID 2.0 format uses JavaScript instead, and is compatible with HTML5 players.  In June of 2017, Google ceased support for their IMA SDK for Flash and Flash VPAID ads in the HTML5 SDK.
Server-side ad insertion is also possible with HTML5, and the complexity between browser environments is a contributing reason for its growth in popularity.  However, it’s important to remember that an ad must be measured in order for the advertiser to actually pay for it.  While server-side beaconing exists most advertisers will prefer client-side ad beaconing (at least until VAST 4.0 is adopted), which means that careful consideration must be made to ensure that the HTML5 player can listen for the ad events such as ad start and completion.

Flash to HTML5 Comparison Table

Finally, How to Choose an HTML5 Player Technology

Now that we have a good understanding of the foundations of HTML5 video, it’s time to consider which player implementation will meet your needs.
The universe of options for HTML5 players includes everything from completely open-source players like HLS.js and DASH.js, to hybrid open-source with additional licensing and paid support options such as video.js (via Brightcove) or JW Player, or closed-source with licensing and paid support such as Bitmovin or THEOplayer.
When evaluating these player options it’s important to ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the true total cost of ownership (TCO) of each option? This TCO goes far beyond licensing costs and extends into cost of maintenance and support — whether that’s provided by your team or outsourced. How much R&D does your engineering team need to put into both the initial implementation and ongoing support? When bugs are found, how much is it costing you to fix these issues? What is the cost of lost revenue when tickets on bugs in open-source projects remain unfilled? What is the cost of maintaining separate codebases and API integrations for web vs. native players?
2. Do you need commercial support or will you handle everything internally? If you pay for support, does your player vendor own the entire playback stack, or are they simply wrapping their UI on top of an open source project? This affects the ability to quickly rectify issues found in production.
3. Will your chosen technology allow you to have control over the roadmap?  Consider these features:
   1. Multi-codec support, and the addition of new formats.
   2. Advertising insertion, both client-side and server-side.
   3. Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) handling and tweaks.
   4. Metadata handling
   5. DRM integrations
   6. Speed

Now What?

We may never return to the simplicity of Flash’s “write once run anywhere” value statement, but well-designed cross-platform player systems offer many of the same conveniences as Flash while also adding in newer adaptive streaming technology, advanced QoS monitoring and next generation client and server-side ad insertion features.
At Bitmovin we’re experts in helping video publishers make the transition to this brave new generation of online video. If you’re ready to make the jump, or need help improving your existing architecture, please contact us and we’ll be happy to work with you to map out the right path to success for your needs.

Image credit for the Flash gravestone: Joel Oughton

The post HTML5 Guide for Broadcasters: DRM and Advertising in a Flash-Less World appeared first on Bitmovin.

And it wasn’t just us, other industry professionals echoed the same sentiments including Matt Frost, head of media strategy and partnerships for Google’s Chrome team. “It’s definitely a pretty significant development and a sign of how times change and persistence pays off,” he was quoted saying by CNET.

What does this mean? What is AOMedia and AV1?

How are video publishers and viewers affected by this announcement? To understand the implications, first, you’ll need a bit of background on AOMedia, AV1, and HEVC (you can skip this if you’re already a video geek):

• AOMedia – Alliance for Open Media is a consortium of companies that are contributing resources such as labor time, money, or patent legal research to create a truly open video codec that is unencumbered by high royalty fees seen in older codecs.
• AV1 – This is the open-source video codec created by the Alliance for Open Media. It offers significant bandwidth savings, especially compared to popular codecs in use today such as H264. The goal of AV1 is to offer high quality at a lower bit rate without royalty payments required from publishers or viewers.
• HEVC – This is a direct competitor of AV1 that is in use today in a limited capacity as an improvement upon H264. The online video streaming industry has expressed concerns over the high cost of licensing HEVC which was a partial motivation to create AV1.

Why is this announcement so important?

This announcement is surprising because Apple has previously committed to supporting the HEVC codec across macOS and iOS devices and has been implementing HEVC across multiple platforms for the past few years. Further, Apple has historically been very selective in joining any industry consortia, typically favoring only official standardization groups such as ISO/IEC, W3C, DVB, IETF, 3GPP, etc. As such, one could interpret Apple’s joining AOMedia as a strong accolade for the consortium and the AV1 codec.
Finally, by adding Apple (Samsung, and Tencent) to the already impressive list of AOMedia founding members companies like Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and NVIDIA, all major brands and companies are now involved in AOMedia which is a strong signal that AV1 is becoming a mature codec and a real alternative to HEVC and the standards groups MPEG and VCEG.

Bitmovin and AV1

Bitmovin has been a long-time contributor to AOMedia and the implementation of the AV1 codec. Bitmovin was the first company to integrate AV1 support for both live streaming and video-on-demand which contributed to Bitmovin winning an award of Best of Show for NAB 2017 from Streaming Media Magazine.
In addition, Bitmovin and Mozilla, the creator of the open-source Firefox browser, collaborated to create the first end-to-end AV1 workflow from cloud encoding to browser playback. At the time Apple hadn’t announced their involvement with AOMedia and AV1 and some media outlets went so far as to characterize this collaboration as a threat to Apple! CNET’s headline on the partnership read “Firefox challenges Apple with 4K-friendly video tech.”

Getting started with AV1

Unfortunately, despite AV1s growing interest in the world of video streaming we have yet to see widespread adoption of the AV1 codec (in 2021), so we’re thrilled to have Apple join the AOMedia consortium and accelerate these efforts. If you haven’t explored AV1 for your video workflow, now is the time to learn more, and we’re here to help!
AV1 is the next generation video codec and is on track to deliver a 30% improvement over VP9 & HEVC – Learn about Bitmovin and AV1

More AV1 Resources:

• 4K Video at SD Bitrates with AV1
• Bitmovin Improves Support AV1 Video Encoding for VoD




• Bitmovin’s AV1 Encoding Gift Guide




• Cool New Video Tools: Five Encoding Advancements Coming in AV1

The post Apple joins AV1 codec consortium. What does it mean for you? appeared first on Bitmovin.