Announcing Jan Ozer Encoding Workshops at Streaming Media East Connect

Steve Nathans-Kelly: Today I'm going to be speaking with Jan Ozer, Contributing Editor to Streaming Media and Principal of StreamingLearningCenter.com. Jan, of course, is our resident expert on codecs and all things encoding, and later this month at Streaming Media East Connect, he's going to be presenting 2 in-depth online workshops on Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) Encoding and Improving Your Encoding Skills. Now Jan's workshops have been a great part of Streaming Media events for years, but in the past if you wanted to attend one, of course you had to get yourself to New York or California. This year--thanks to Streaming Media East Connect--we're bringing Jan Ozer to you.

So, Jan, who is the ABR workshop for? Is it for people who are already experienced with adaptive bit rate streaming? Is it for novices?

Jan Ozer: This particular workshop is for people who are just beginning to get involved with adaptive bit rate streaming or streaming in general. And that can be either VOD (video on demand) or live. But it's a novice-oriented course, and we're going to work on getting them up to speed on the key terms, concepts, and technologies involved with adaptive bit rate streaming. So they'll know what it means, they'll know what they have to do to get it implemented, and they'll know what they need to do to distribute to the different platforms that they want to distribute to. I think this is a good fundamental course to teach them the basics. And after that they can start exploring advanced techniques for making distribution more efficient, while keeping up the same quality of experience with our end users.

Steve Nathans-Kelly: You're doing another workshop the next day. This one is more about specific to encoding skills and techniques. Would you say that these workshops could be Part One and Part Two?

Jan Ozer: Yeah, that's a good point. I think certainly if you're new to the business, or even a recent transplant, do you want to take the first course to get really solidly knowledgeable about the fundamentals and concepts? The second one really delves into opportunities to make things more efficient, to save money and to implement the new codecs and implement new technologies like per-title encoding. And to really take a look at your encoding ladder by using video quality metrics to make sure you're delivering optimal quality video all up and down the encoding ladder.

Steve Nathans-Kelly: What's the learning experience like in your workshops?

Jan Ozer: Each of the workshops will be set up not as one long course, but between 10 and 15 discrete lessons that last anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. And I kind of do it that way because I want to keep the learning experience discrete and have a real stopping point where we can explore concepts further, if necessary, or answer any questions. And I think the benefit of the live experience is going to be not only will I be there to answer questions, but there's a lot of cross-pollenization between some of the more experienced participants who may be doing stuff that even I don't know about who can talk back to the participants and explore and explain the benefits they've gotten from some of the new techniques that they're using now. I really try and plan well to make sure that we have time, not only at the end, but also after each module for questions and also to allow people to participate during each module because that's important as well.

It's an interesting time. This is the first time for a lot of us to be teaching a three-hour session online and perhaps for a lot of the people who are taking the course, same thing. So we all know that streaming media is increasing in importance because of what's happening around us. And it's going to be a great learning experience, both for me as an instructor and also hopefully for the students, not only in helping me learn the lessons I need to learn, but learning what they need to learn to take this to technology out and better serve the community and their viewers.

Steve Nathans-Kelly: So that's all the news that's fit to print on Jan Ozer's upcoming workshops. The first one is Introduction to Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) Production and Delivery. It's Tuesday, May 26th, 11:00 AM East Coast time, 8:00 AM Pacific time, and the second more advanced workshop, which builds on the first, is the following day. That's Key Encoding Skills, Technologies, and Techniques, Wednesday, May 27th, 11:00 AM East Coast time, 8:00 AM Pacific time. You can find more information on the Streaming Media East Connect site and we hope we'll see you there.