Which Emerging Codecs Should You Support?

Learn more about emerging codecs at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media East, VES201. Multiple Codec Live Streaming at Twitch, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Tarek Amara: All these encoders are good as long as they can deliver compression gains, but, What to use, what to pick? And why at all actually, you need a new encoder? AVCs, they are stable, universal. You need new encoders for these three simple reasons: Save on bitrates. Deliver lower bitrate at the same quality. Cheaper cost on... The growth. So you don't need to have, accommodate for more bandwidth if you can deliver lower bandwidth at same content. Better visual quality as well.

You do want to deliver new technologies like 4K, 8K, HDR, high-frame-rate, which are very fancy technologies. VR... High frame rate is very important for Twitch or gamers in general where p60, why not p120 at some point. The bigger the size, the higher frame rate have a better effect. 10-bit, which I didn't mention here, and also to reach new markets. You know, some areas of the world cannot watch our 1080p60 at 6Mbps or more than that. So it's good to have a technology where we can deliver our best quality at a lower bitrate so that we have more customers.

I don't think people would disagree that beyond AVC, no codec would be universally used. Already if you look at the current states of the market, lots of platforms support HEVC, lots of platforms support VP9. Lots of them support either. Some of them support both. So there is definitely if you want to keep your mark then move into a new codec. You need to really study carefully where you wanna go.

This is from Bitmovin's website. Just to show you how the browser market, which is growing, and the video consumption is being split actually. If you look at the middle two rows, H.265 and VP9, you can see HEVC is mainly on exploring Safari, where VP9 is on Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. And again, here is a point where, it depends on where my customers or my viewers are, which codec is more suitable for me to move on.