Listen to Some of the Most
Important Voices in Video 

Thursday, June 29, 2023, at 11 am EST

Greening of Streaming:
Uniting the Industry for Energy Efficiency

One issue that should be paramount to all participants in the streaming media ecosystem - producers, engineers, product and service providers, and consumers - is power consumption. An organization called Greening of Streaming was recently “created to address growing concerns about the energy impact of the streaming sector.”

In this issue of Voices of Video, we meet with Dom Robinson, who is the founder of Greening of Streaming (and Chief Business Development Officer of id3as). 

In this conversation with Jan Ozer, Dom will lay out the challenges associated with a collective effort to reduce power consumption, starting with finding a common set of definitions and targets. Then, he’ll identify some low-hanging fruit that all companies can target to reduce their consumption immediately. 

He’ll then discuss power consumption at all streaming media stages, from production through encoding, transport, delivery, and viewing, and detail why a holistic view must be adopted for all potential modifications. For example, a decision to reduce the power consumed during encoding provides no overall benefit if it's more than offset by increases in power consumed during transport and playback to millions of devices. In this regard, you can download Dom’s brilliant schematic showing all power consumed during the production and playback of a live streaming production and conclude by detailing the short-term goals of the organization and the long-term vision.

DOWNLOAD THE DIAGRAM HERE: https://voicesofvideo.netint.com/hubfs/VoV/e2eenergyforstreaming.png

If you’ve ever wondered what you or your organization can do to reduce power consumption during streaming, be sure not to miss this edition of Voices of Video.

Join  live to ask your questions in real-time, or you may email your questions ahead of time to voices of video at netint dot com.

Can’t make it live?  We have you covered. Register for the event, and an on-demand replay will land in your inbox so you can watch at your convenience.

Past Conversations - replays

Thursday, May 25, 2023, at 11 am EST

Cloud Gaming is Real.
A conversation with the CEO of Blacknut

In this Voices of Video conversation, Mark Donnigan talked with Olivier Avaro, CEO of Blacknut, about what his company is doing to enable the transition from console and PC-based gaming experiences to streaming delivery of games from the cloud. 

Blacknut has built a complete solution for service providers and OTT video services wanting to expand their entertainment offerings. Blacknut offers the technical platform needed and licensed gaming content from more than 100 publishers. 

This conversation addressed the OPEX challenges with cloud gaming and the technical hurdles that come with using the open internet for latency-sensitive and quality-perceptive applications like gaming. A new architecture consisting of CPUs with GPUs for game rendering and VPUs for encoding was presented.

Thursday, May 11, 2023, at 11 am EST

How technology distribution is different in India
than in the rest of the world
(codecs, bandwidths, video production, UGC)

With the largest population in the world, India represents a fabulous opportunity for all streaming professionals. But virtually all key market factors, bandwidth, playback devices, content preferences, and others, are very different from US and European markets. Krishna Rao Vijayanagar has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and has worked for several companies in the US & India before starting his highly successful OTTVerse website and devoting himself to education focused on streaming production and delivery. 
 
In this conversation with Jan Ozer from NETINT, Krishna covers how producing, delivering, and consuming video in India is different from the rest of the world, digging into details like codec support, encoding ladder construction, delivery infrastructure and capacity, and device preferences and penetration. Krishna also shares his vision for expanding streaming-related knowledge and shares insights from what he found meaningful at NAB. 

Streaming professionals interested in providing streaming services, technology, or content to India will find this an invaluable introduction.

Thursday, April 27, 2023, at 11 am EST

Understanding the Benefits and Limitations
of FFmpeg, Gstreamer, and GPAC

In this very technical session, we spoke with Romain Bouqueau, a  main contributor to GPAC and founder and CEO of Motion Spell, the licensing arm of GPAC.

GPAC is an open-source encoding and packaging framework that competes with and relies on FFmpeg. It was recently licensed by Netflix for live streaming.

If you've ever attempted to deploy FFmpeg for complex transcoding operations, you may have experienced poor multithreaded performance. Romain discussed why that is, techniques you can use to minimize this effect, and how GPAC and other frameworks try to mitigate performance issues.

Romain also helped us explore the performance and feature set of projects like FFmpeg, Gstreamer, and GPAC. You shall leave with a solid knowledge of their transcoding and packaging options and a better understanding of FFmpeg's multi-threaded-related performance issues and how to minimize them.

Thursday, March 9, 2023, at 11 am EST

Building Localized OTT Networks

Streaming pioneer Jet Stream joined the conversation with a highly valuable but lesser-known use case – localized OTT video networks. 

In this discussion, Jet Stream's Stef van der Ziel and  NETINT’s Mark Donnigan discussed how individualized streaming applications can solve a unique challenge where bandwidth may be limited, but the customer expectation for quality is not.

Learn how Jet Stream enables live streaming platforms to be built and operated without needing deep engineering expertise or platform operators.

Thursday, February 16, 2023, at 11 am EST

The truth about encoding ASICs (Why YouTube and Meta encode with ASICs and how you can too)

Software running on commodity cloud-based servers is thought to represent the ultimate in flexibility, cost control, and implementation speed. Why, then, do the largest video platforms in the world, YouTube and Facebook, run largely on ASICs? The reason lies in the significant power and density advantages that purpose-built silicon delivers.

In this discussion, Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis and Alex Liu from NETINT will share secrets behind the development of large technology company ASIC projects and reveal the change driving massive investment in ASIC development.

Thursday, February 2, 2023, at 11 am EST

Live Streaming in a Box
Party talk or cutting-edge solution?

Curious how today, everyone can access the cost and performance benefits of hardware video encoding without needing to invest in massive development projects or special hardware? As software encoding in the cloud is getting more expensive, only hardware can deliver the performance and operational cost that is needed for live video streaming at scale.

Watch NETINT’s Mark Donnigan and StreamVX CEO Szymon Karbowski as they discuss how StreamVX is enabling services and platforms to deliver high-quality, low-latency video with their live streaming-in-a-box solution.

December 9, 2023, at 11 am EST

Streaming video industry challenges in a volatile world. Reflections upon the past year

2022 has been a tumultuous year where conventional norms have been upended in every facet of life. This is no less true in the streaming video industry, where new emerging platforms, including cloud gaming and the Metaverse, gain traction but are tempered by volatile markets, environmental pressures, and soaring energy costs driven by global events. 
Where do we go from here?  

While current global events and macroeconomic instability are troubling, they also represent an enormous opportunity to rethink streaming video business models ideally, by leveraging new advanced technologies that will lower both CAPEX and OPEX while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions. 

Watch Bob Fung and Ben Lee's intriguing discussion on the duality that the streaming video industry is facing.

November 11, 2022, at 11 am EST

Why use hardware for video encoding?
Streaming video industry insights

Transcoding with ASICs has gotten a lot of attention lately. From YouTube’s ARGOS VPU to Meta’s new ASIC that prompted noted compressionist David Ronca to comment that there are only two types of companies, “those that are using Video Processing ASICs in their workflows, and those that will.’

Based in Sweden, RealSprint provides live-streaming solutions to companies around the globe. When choosing a transcoder for the AV1 capabilities of its Vindral Live CDN, RealSprint considered software transcoding, as well as GPU and CPU acceleration and ASICs. Not surprisingly, RealSprint made the same decision as YouTube and Meta and chose ASICs.

Watch Jan Ozer from NETINT, and Daniel Alinder from RealSprint, as they discuss the role of hardware encoding and ASICs to enable ultra-low latency 4K streaming with the AV1 codec.