SMW 17: DVEO's Nick Joseph Talks DOZER, Lower-Latency HLS
Tim Siglin: Welcome back to Streaming Media West 2017. I'm Tim Siglin, contributing editor with Streaming Media magazine, and also Media Strategy Principal at ReelSolver, Inc. Today, I've got with me Nick Joseph from DVEO. What does DVEO stand for?
Nick Joseph: Digital Video Extraordinaire Ordinaire.
Tim Siglin: Okay interesting. And you're a senior sales engineer?
Nick Joseph: Pre-sales, post-sales, and then also a lot of test support and on new products and all that kind of stuff.
Tim Siglin: You have a number of products. What are sort of the basic categories of products that you have?
Nick Joseph: We have encoders, transcoders, then we have our own media servers. And then we have ad insertion and then we have monitoring products. Those are probably our main products. And then we have another product for traditional broadcasts like modulators.
Tim Siglin: Okay. Okay interesting. For the traditional QAM cable television?
Nick Joseph: Exactly.
Tim Siglin: And on the media server side, were you all the ones that took over the Helix server, or the Real server when Real sort of stepped away from that space?
Nick Joseph: They OEM'd our encoder, so they were using our encoder and then we just used their server at the time.
Tim Siglin: Because at that point they wanted to have both the encoder and the server in the same box?
Nick Joseph: Exactly.
Tim Siglin: Okay. Good. What kind of new products have you all shared at say NAB, IBC, and Streaming Media?
Nick Joseph: What we're showing off now is, as you probably heard before, we've had our DOZER, our transfer product or protocol for live. So now we're coming out one for file. So we're going to have a file transfer comparable to the other companies out there to give our customers another option.
Tim Siglin: And is it a reliable UDP approach?
Nick Joseph: Yes. Basically, it’s similar to the way DOZER is now, except this is geared more towards file transfer versus live.
Tim Siglin: interesting. And essentially you could open up multiple connections and move transfers and like that?
Nick Joseph: Yes, that's exactly right.
Tim Siglin: Good. I think Laszlo, when I interviewed him last year, was talking about some of those things around reliable UDP, so that product is shipping and out there is somebody wants it?
Nick Joseph: Yes.
Tim Siglin: Okay. What other kinds of products?
Nick Joseph: Well the transcoder and the encoder are not new, but we did add recently we were certified recently with Akamai for the HLS low latency. Akamai is really trying to push down, so that's kind of the new thing. Basically, we got the segments down low enough to where if someone wanted to have a lower-latency HLS, then they have that as an option.
Tim Siglin: And are you running into any problems over a long live event with HLS because of the fact that TCP, that sort of comes into play.
Nick Joseph: No, because what we did is, we did some testing with us and Akamai and we kind of found how low we can get it before we start to see that problem.
Tim Siglin: And where, out of curiosity because I wrote an article called Latency Sucks a couple of months ago, where is your sweet spot in terms of segment size?
Nick Joseph: It's right about like 1.5-2 seconds for the segments, because obviously we could lower it more-
Tim Siglin: You can always go lower.
Nick Joseph: ... but it's the players side and playing it is the problem.
Tim Siglin: Right, and especially if there's network intermittence where it doesn't have enough of a catch to play off of. All right Nick, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.
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