Streaming Media Announces Best of NAB 2017

Streaming Media has announced the winners of its Best of NAB Awards for 2017, with the editors of Streaming Media and Streaming Media Producer recognizing the most significant releases and announcements for the online video and streaming industries at NAB 2017. The winners were revealed, for the first time ever, in a live-streamed broadcast direct from the NAB exhibit hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Watch the video to learn about our selections for the six best products or services from NAB 2017 or read the descriptions below, taken directly from the awards show transcript. Three awards were presented to companies in the Streaming Media space by editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, and three products in the Streaming Media Producer purview were recognized by Shawn Lam of Shawn Lam Video, who also produced the webcast.

Akamai, LiveOrigin

The first award goes to a company that it wins for the second year in a row. Akamai has upgraded their media services with something called LiveOrigin. Akamai won a Best of NAB award last year for their media services, but this year they've really kicked it up a notch. What they're really striving to do with LiveOrigin, is to help companies that are trying to take live linear channels and 24/7 live channels on-air, so to speak, and provide the same sort of quality, user experience, and video experience that viewers come to expect from broadcast. And they're able to help broadcasters, OTT providers, and telcos achieve as close to broadcast quality as they possibly can.
--Eric Schumacher Rasmussen

Bitmovin

Bitmovin is a company that really has made some leaps in the last year. They've gone from being a relatively small startup in Austria, to opening up a headquarters in the United States. They're now a truly global company. And this year they demonstrated at NAB, the first public live stream using the AV1 codec. Now the codec wars are ongoing in the streaming media world. Every time we think we've landed on a codec that's going to last us a few years, something new comes along.

These days, the one that people seem to be looking for, that the Alliance for Open Media has been working on building, is the AV1 codec. We're hoping to see something launched toward the end of 2017. Here at NAB, Bitmovin demonstrated a live stream with the AV1 codec that achieved better or equal quality to HEVC and H.264 but at much lower bitrates, and much better quality at the same bitrates.

It was really exciting to see Bitmovin, again, pushing the industry forward and bringing a proof of concept to the floor of something that has only been talked about in theory so far. Congratulations to Bitmovin for their AV1 live stream.
--Eric Schumacher Rasmussen

Hybrik

Our third Streaming Media Best of NAB award goes to Hybrik. We're not giving it to a particular product there, but we're giving it to Hybrik, which is a cloud transcoding company, that really sets itself apart from the other cloud-transcoding companies on the market. First of all, they've got rock-bottom pricing, and really pricing that none of the other vendors can match. But most importantly, they've introduced several new features into their cloud transcoding offering, including segmented transcoding, which allows them to take, for instance, a two-hour HD feature film encoding in segments rather than as a single file, and encode the entire film in about six minutes.

Along with that, Hybrik also offers analytics of in real time as well as video optimization using SSIM, but also using Netflix's VMAF video optimization standard. So you can really zero in on the best quality and you can set your parameters for the quality levels that are acceptable to you, and that aren't.

Finally, they're also doing encoding using Dolby Vision HDR. So that's really taking cloud transcoding to some places that it's never been before.
--Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen