Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way to really gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of the streams. However, by measuring stream quality via metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VQM, you can precisely assess the quality delivered by each stream and its relevancy to the adaptive group. This presentation identifies several key objective quality metrics, teaches how to apply them, and provides an objective framework for analyzing which streams are absolutely required in your adaptive group and their optimal configuration.

Given the fractured delivery landscape faced by most video distributors, few develop their players from scratch. Rather, most distributors choose from an array of off-the-shelf (OTS) players from vendors like Bitmovin, JW Player, OpenTelly, and Flowplayer or from open-source options such as Shaka Player or Video.js. This session covers the factors you should consider when evaluating and selecting the best OTS player for your video stack and, in particular, when and how open source players provide the best alternative.

With the speed of technology today, one of the most important parts of software is adaptability. By taking control of your own encoding and packaging, you can greatly reduce cost and maintain high adaptability and agility to meet your needs now and in the future. When working with cloud encoding, there are several transcoding and packaging options, and the APIs for these options will change over time. We talk about how to build a more dynamic cloud encoder that can use the best tool for a specific job by decoupling the tools from the core application, as well as how to mix and match multiple operations concurrently on a single encoding task. Operations include WebVTT and AAC sidecar manifests, DASH assets, metadata, video quality, and stream muxing/demuxing. This session covers some of the strategies we’ve used to handle dynamic cloud encoding and packaging for live and VOD delivery.

Ensuring a great user experience is key to retaining customers and growing market share. This session explores points along video workflows that are ideal for quality checks, including various types of monitoring from ingest to playout, and real-world examples of operational benefits of each. This discussion covers the impact of machine learning on improving accuracy of monitoring and the importance of getting ad insertion right.

The SRT video transport protocol enables the delivery of secure, high-quality, and low-latency video across the public internet. This presentation will explore the SRT protocol and its open source software stack, explaining how it works and how it accounts for latency, packet loss recovery, jitter, security, firewall traversal, and bandwidth optimization. It will also provide data on real-world network behavior, as well as several examples of SRT’s performance in existing live video workflows.

VMAF (Video Multi-Assessment Fusion) is a quality metric that combines human vision modeling with machine learning. It demonstrates high correlation to human perception and gives a score that is consistent across content. VMAF was released on Github in 2016 and has had considerable updates since that time. This talk focuses on the latest VMAF improvements and enrichments, such as speed optimization, accurate models to predict mobile and 4K TV viewing conditions, and adding a confidence interval to quantify the level of confidence in the quality prediction. In addition, we discuss VMAF use cases and look at the VMAF road map for the near future.

Given the now-certain “end of life” date for Flash, you need to be ready for a Flash-less world. For those who deliver live video within a web browser, HTML5 has had plenty of time to play catch-up and surpass Flash capabilities—or has it? In this session, learn which transport technologies from HTTP, WebRTC, RTSP, and even RTMP work best, when to use them, and where to put your development dollars for maximum return.

A number of cloud providers have launched video-centric services to gain all manner of AI/machine learning-based insights and autogenerated sidecar information on your video assets. This session compares and contrasts Microsoft Azure Video Indexer, IBM’s Watson Media, AWS Rekognition, and Google Cloud Video Intelligence. We cover the basics and give you an unbiased look into which service will be the best bet for your needs. Whether it’s speech-to-text, object recognition, scene detection, or even speech sentiment, there’s a service out there for you. Let’s find it.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) bring a new tool to any publisher's belt, allowing them to more easily deliver the power of native apps through the web. Easy to install and bringing advanced features compared to normal web apps, PWAs open up new business cases and possibilities to the media industry. This presentation looks at the advantages of PWAs and how they can best be leveraged to unlock their full potential.