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How QVBR Encoding Helped Stream the Super Bowl

Learn more about live sports streaming at Esports & Sports Streaming Summit.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Taylor Busch: QVBR is something that we looked a lot at because this really can improve the quality of your video. We worked with the Elemental team quite a bit to have them look at a previous Super Bowl so they had real content to work with, and really try to optimize the picture quality.

But you do get a lot of savings from this. These are the savings that we calculated. You know essentially when you've got a lot of motion, you've got a lot of action when the game is going on, you need to pump more bits in order to get that quality up. But when you go to let's say, a slate for something static you obviously don't need to have quite so much video being pumped through the entire stack and so QVBR basically just adjusts for that in real time. So it goes up and down as need be.

It's also good for the CDNs. Let's say there is some issue with a particular CDN and they're starting to get a little hot, for example. Let's say then the game goes to commercial or a static slate or something. This can actually help because you're already now asking the CDN to do less because you have less video that you're pumping through. But you do have to be aware of it with all the teams that you're working with because if you do see that dramatic drop that can look like a problem when its not. It's obviously happening by design but if you're not aware of it there can be some confusion there.

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