Adaptive Bitrate Streaming – An Overview

In an age of rapidly increasing mobile computing, tablet use, and internet video streaming, adapting to user preferences relative to their current device and providing a great user experience on that device has become a chief objective within the technology community.  With the sharp increase in mobile use, wireless connectivity has been steadily improving, whether for mobile (LTE) or wireless internet (wifi and some other interesting protocols).  However, the problem with wireless connections and mobile usage, as many users know is that they are inconsistent.  With an inconsistent connection, a streamlined user experience becomes more difficult to attain.

The answer to this problem is adaptive bitrate streaming.  The basic premise is that the video is encoded at several different rates, and adjusts in real time to the quality of the user’s connection to change the quality or resolution of the stream, depending on the bandwidth available to the user at a given time.  The burden of this technological advance comes down on the encoders – it is a much more complex technology than previous fixed-rate streaming protocols.  However, the results for user experience make the technology much more desirable – so much so that there are several different adaptive protocols on the market, from Apple and Microsoft and other businesses that create proprietary solutions for their own products , as well as a new industry-standard protocol called MPEG_DASH (for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). 

Whether a universal standard is eventually adopted or not, adaptive bitrate streaming is an exciting and still-evolving topic of conversation that affects consumers and technology companies alike.  The task here for encoder manufacturers like Telairity here is not to dictate the standards that will be used by the industry to dynamically adapt video to fluctuations in bandwidth, but rather to support the standards that emerge for this purpose as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The Short Life of the 3D TV Trend

A few years ago, it appeared that the next big trend in video technology would be 3D viewing.  The manufacturers and sellers of TVs were enthusiastically marketing new 3D-capable sets, while content providers were lining up to announce plans for 3D programming. However, continuing lackluster sales of 3D sets and recent announcements—like the one in June from ESPN, an early and prominent enthusiast for 3D technology, that it was going to discontinue its pioneering 24/7 3D channel—indicate that reality took a sharp left turn somewhere on its way to the promised future of 3D TV. What happened?

As is usually the case with new technologies, the failure of 3D TV to really take off is not the result of any one factor, but due to a combination of issues. The first issue is that adding 3D capability to a TV makes it more expensive to manufacture, which means it is not free, but a feature that consumers must pay extra to get. This, by itself, wouldn’t be an insurmountable issue, if the extra capability provided an obvious benefit (like HD over older SD technology), but some viewers find the 3D experience annoying,  uncomfortable, or even distressing, while the rest tend to regard it, at most, as suitable only for special occasions. So getting consumers to pay extra for a feature they believe will be rarely if ever used has proven to be a hard sell. This lack of everyday viewers, in turn, has translated to poor ratings for new 3D channels, resulting in announcements from the provider side of the TV equation like the recent one by ESPN discontinuing their service.

The combination of extra cost, limited usefulness, and little (but still declining) programming has conspired to perpetually maintain 3D TV in its status as a technology of the future. To be sure, there is some research being done to surmount the biggest obstacle keeping 3D TV from being an everyday technology, namely, the need to wear special glasses. Whatever the merits or demerits of different types of glasses (active or passive), by their mere existence, 3D glasses frustrate any semblance of normal TV viewing by preventing multi-tasking and hindering normal social interaction. Only if glasses can be entirely eliminated will it be time to reopen the discussion of the future of 3D TV on new and more promising grounds.

Pending that breakthrough, however, other newer technologies hold much more promise as a realistic future for TV. We’ll take some time in our next blogs to examine the particular advantages of 4K and UHD standards, and how Telairity fits into the adoption of those technologies.  Make sure you stop back here for more of the latest information on interesting trends within video technology – you won’t be disappointed!

The Translation of Video Transmission

The modes by which we receive and interact with video as a culture are undergoing a shift.  As internet streaming speeds improve, and a more á la carte approach to television increases, the broadcasting industry is experiencing a potentially radical shift.  Much like the music industry, subscription services are changing the way many consumers understand and enjoy video:  Youtube is ever increasing in popularity; businesses like Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, and Hulu Plus are gaining more traction; and products like the Apple TV, Roku, and the new Chromecast are enabling this rising tide of video to easily reach your TV via the internet.

While some are quick to forecast the end of broadcast TV, the reality is that typical broadcast  services don’t quite overlap with what is available on the web.  There are still some things that subscription and streaming services can’t offer.  News is one example – the digital transmission of live events for a public audience is something uniquely offered by broadcasters.  Additionally, local programming, emergency alert systems, and other real-time services are staples of the broadcasting industry that can’t be as effectively disseminated by any other current method.

The staple of broadcasting is video, the rising tide that increasingly floats all internet boats. The pressing need of the internet age is not for established broadcasters to be replaced by new entrants, providing some analog of the news and other services now offered by today’s cable, satellite, and over-the-air broadcasters. Rather, the need is for broadcasters to fully embrace the internet’s potential as an interactive, world-wide delivery channel in order to adapt, expand, and enhance the services they already know how to provide uniquely well.

It is precisely at these exciting crossroads of change and evolution that businesses involved in  video technology must understand and analyze the shifting nature of today’s landscape in order to better provide their customers with what they want and need.  Though the method and markets for broadcast media are undoubtedly changing, you can be sure that our experts at Telairity are on top of the trends, and intent on providing broadcasters together with all other professional video providers the latest innovative technology to answer the demands of new media.

Living A Mobile Life: The future is now

Living a mobile life has quickly moved from what was once considered a luxury to become a basic every day necessity.  As each hour passes, another business or service is shifting their focus from brick and mortar to full scale mobile connectivity.  The numbers are staggering.  According to the latest report from the GSMA, total mobile ecosystem revenues account for 2.2% of global GDP or, to be more specific, a whopping $1.6 trillion.

Corporations are not only the only ones profiting from this seismic communications shift. Regular, everyday people from all across the globe and socio-economic spectrum are getting the opportunity to live a more mobile life, one that is not confined by class, caste, or even arbitrary borders.  

Over 3.2 billion people, nearly half the world’s total population, are now mobile subscribers. The GSMA expects this number to hit an overwhelming majority of about 80% among adults and teens by 2018.  That means 80% of the world will rely on mobile technology in their work, education and personal communication as well as a wide variety of business, informational, and entertainment needs.

This astronomical growth in usage, which includes the exponential rise in data traffic, creates an equal or greater need to improve on existing networks as well as to build newer, faster ones.  Phones, tablets, and computers will only function if they operate on reliable networks. This means products like mobile video encoders will need to offer even greater flexibility, strength, and affordability.  

The task ahead is in no way easy or even guaranteed. There will be numerous roadblocks along the way as mobile society evolves, some technical, some economic, some regulatory. It will take herculean efforts on the part of businesses and governments to make living a truly mobile life a sustainable reality for  the large majority of the world’s population.

Mathematics and Broadcast Technology

Video technology is expanding rapidly and revolutionizing the way we do business.  With the advent of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, innovations like Netflix and Hulu, and every other mode in which we absorb video, we can now watch our news, movies, or other entertainment from devices in the convenient location of our pockets and purses and with several new and interesting services.  Those of us in the broadcast and television industries are quickly realizing that these technologies and innovations are the way forward.  Our youth, particularly, are more readily adopting and participating in this emerging culture of varied video options– it’s new, exciting, and increasingly ubiquitous.

To sustain and build upon these technologies, however, we need to channel that energy and excitement for new technology into education that provides for its sustenance – namely STEM education.  April was national Mathematics Awareness Month, and we at Telairity want to do our part to spread the word, throughout the year.  Mathematics, and for us particularly the mathematics used in data compression algorithms, is a vital discipline to the television industry.  Without data compression, the entire digital video industry would collapse; moreover, encoding technologies must continually improve, to enable evolving video resolution standards, from MPEG-2 for SD in the 1990s, to H.264 for HD in the2000s, to new HEVC technology for new 4K digital standards in the 2010s.

As ever, education is imperative for growth and progress, and STEM education holds the key for technical industries everywhere.  The flexibility inherent in the media consumer culture must be paralleled by companies that are able to innovate and adapt quickly to the changing technological demands.  This is only achievable with a technically-oriented  workforce, to whom STEM education is a priority.  Join Telairity in encouraging the education that will allow our industry to flourish, and help inspire young minds to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. 

Reliable Encoding Platforms for Digital Media Startups

In the realm of the digital media startup, when it comes to the difference between a successful new venture and a failed one, concept and execution of content remain – quite obviously – paramount. But for those digital startups that depend on transmitting large quantities of visual content to their users in a live, moment-by-moment fashion, there is an added need: they must find the proper digital encoding platform, ideally one with the necessary compression to allow for high-speed, high-definition A/V services.

One particularly interesting case example would be the Duke University campus-founded startup, Radius. As the company’s CTO, David Herzka, describes the overall Radius concept: “Radius allows users to attach digital files to a specific location… For example, a dance group on [a college] campus can set up a beacon [from its current location], post multimedia content online and people walking nearby can retrieve the information with their smartphones.”

Sounds like a pretty great concept for a company, right? Absolutely and without hesitation. That being said, in order that tomorrow’s livestreaming digital media companies retain their competitive edge, there are practical issues to consider and navigate through, one of them being what kind of encoding system to use. Making sure that a livestreaming video performs as advertised (i.e. moment-by-moment) is an absolute must. In a recent survey conducted by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the conclusion is frank and stark: “viewers have little patience for videos that don’t start immediately… For every additional one second wait, the abandonment rate goes up by nearly six percent.” In short, what good can great, live content amount to if the delivery system is slow to start, or transmitted in a “stuttered” manner? Given that your average, neighborhood startup has limited financial resources to spare – and given that everything depends on user-friendly functionality for it to be successful – the livestreaming must come off without a hitch or glitch.

At Telairity, our low-cost, high-speed encoding systems allow for just that sort of reliability. Whether you want to stream via mobile and/or otherwise, our H.264 platforms allow for interface with just about any type of device on the market. If you’re a startup that’s looking to help usher in the livestreaming phenomenon and take advantage of a massive potential user-base, you can’t choose any better than to choose working with a company like Telairity.

An Ivy League in Every Home: the Live-Streaming of University Classes Worldwide

It’s simply a given that a large percentage of the top-ranked colleges and universities in the world are located in the United States. With perennial powerhouses like MIT and Harvard University vying for the coveted “#1 spot”, the quality of top-tier education has, in some degree, never been healthier than it is now. As evidence of this fierce competitiveness, a “building boom” of sorts is happening among Ivy League and other renowned American institutions of higher learning, all of which seem to be in friendly competition with each other in attracting a larger percentage of the global student body. Cornell University, for example, is slated to open a new Manhattan-based campus that focuses on developing technology directly applicable to entrepreneurial business. Yale University has developed a joint program (and a sprawling new campus) in conjunction with the National University of Singapore. Duke University is set to open a new business administration campus in Kunshan, China come 2014.

But while these universities are making inroads into cities across the Middle East and East Asia, all of them bristling with new, state-of-the-art campuses geared for the high-end needs of elite global students, another and different sort of program is taking shape in Cambridge, MA. A partnership between MIT and Harvard University that’s dubbed “edX”, the program seeks to livestream Harvard and MIT classes onto the laptops and desktops of students across the world. These aren’t simply “recorded classes” posted online for anyone to access via YouTube. We’re talking about live, interactive web experiences for students living anywhere in the world; anywhere that has access to the necessary broadband encoding systems. Suddenly, students from Kampala to Kamchatka will have the ways and means (for a nominal fee) of receiving a truly world-class education.

Using open-source software that can be accessed at other college classrooms around the world, MIT and Harvard have contributed $30M apiece in order to make this program into reality. Here at Telairity, we make it our business to help develop and facilitate such groundbreaking new means of higher education. With our livestreaming H.264 encoding platforms and our HD graphics, we see a strong potential to help usher in a new era of trans-global learning. The world remains a vast space, to be certain. But more and more, the speed of its student body moves  at the speed of Telairity. 

Mission Completely Possible: the Coordination of Big-Budget Hollywood Productions through Livestreaming

Their audiences know them by various and iconic names: James Bond, Jason Bourne, Lara Croft, Indiana Jones – all of them globe-trotting, multi-lingual, high-kicking movie characters known the world over. What makes these characters so appealing? Well, many things of course, but part of their appeal has something to do with the fluency and ease by which they’re able to transfer between two utterly, upsettingly different locations: from the medieval alleys of a Moroccan city to the high-wire skyline of New York; sprung from the depths of some MI6 basement and into the throes of a Russian blizzard; racing just ahead of a fast-moving boulder in the depths of the Amazon, making it back (just in time!) to teach the morning archaeology class at a preeminent university.

Our culture idolizes speed, motion, fast-moving spreadsheets of skyline and vista. We love the wild closeness all distances share with each other. This love of ours has always been embodied by the Hollywood characters we spend our money to see time and again. We as a planet are only now, in dribs and drabs, catching up to the speed of these first, pioneering globe-trotters. With H.264 MPEG encoding technology that allows for livestreaming of enormous quantities of audio-visual data from a movie-set in, say, London to a digital production facility in Los Angeles, the lives of filmmakers are gradually assuming the dimensionless versatility of characters in a film.

Let’s say a director based in Los Angeles needs to see the results of the last three takes of a particular shot taken in London. He or she needs to decide – very quickly – which take is the “right” shot to go with. In the olden days, the director would have needed to be onset for those takes. Today, with minute-by-minute digital transmutation of vast amounts of data, the gulf between the director and his or her director’s chair has never been wider – or more irrelevant. Films can be made that much more cost-effectively and within the given timeframe of a production. There is little or no need to go into overtime when it comes to shooting a picture.

We aren’t Hollywood scriptwriters or producers here at Telairity. But what we can do is help coordinate a studio production, or a multi-studio collaborative production, in such a way as to make the experience seamless and “real” as if two different production teams shared the same space. Let us know how we can be of service. We’re quite sure Lara Croft would approve this message.

Brazil, FIFA, the Olympics, and H.264 Encoding

You’ve probably seen and read the reports of cities across Brazil, most notably Rio de Janeiro, gearing up to host both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. The sports-crazed nation of lush rainforests and bikini-less beaches is on the brink of a tourist boom of truly epic proportions. As Brazilian authorities race to reduce crime and pollution throughout their cities in anticipation of the influx of millions upon millions of Northern Hemisphere tourists, Brazilian broadcasting networks similarly are working round the clock to insure that FIFA and the Olympics are visually and digitally on par with 2012’s own London Olympics, which saw the introduction of new digital broadcasting platforms and ultra high definition visual standards that ooh’d and awed the world almost to the same degree as did the performances of world-famous athletes. What London succeeded at so perfectly this summer is a feat that Rio and other cities across Brazil are going to seek to repeat, and even surpass. With the advent of cost-effective H.264 encoding systems that can livestream sporting events to any corner of the globe, it’s only a matter of time before Brazil fully upgrades its digital services to place it among the world’s leading “broadbanded” nations. 

Brazil’s own TV Globo has already experimented with the likes of ultra high-definition technology for its broadcasts. The federal government of Brazil, meanwhile, is promoting the new digital broadcasting technologies by offering various financial incentives to companies and municipalities in order that they implement the new encoding standards before primetime, 2014. It is not beyond reason to speculate that Livestream sportscasts boasting this level of visual clarity and “realism” will be of great benefit to Brazil’s burgeoning Ministry of Tourism, which sees Brazil as a leading global vacation destination.

We at Telairity believe strongly that our user-friendly, cost-effective, highly-adaptable encoding technology will be of great, practical benefit in presenting Brazil to a global audience. Brazil has it all: a strong economy, beautiful natural spaces, iconic cities, and gorgeous beaches. Now it’s also got beautiful H.264 encoding to capture it all.

Real-Time Encoding for Telemedicine

One of the fastest-growing sectors of the medical industry is the phenomenon known as telemedicine. In brief, telemedicine is a livestreamed medical service that allows doctors in hospitals and clinics in (oftentimes) developed areas of the world to “perform” vital medical procedures on patients who would otherwise never be able to access that level of healthcare in that given timeframe. Someone who goes into cardiac arrest in a rural area of North America, or someone in India or South Africa who needs a tumor removed by a specialist surgeon, will most likely need “stronger medicine” than their local healthcare system is able to provide. Nevertheless, as our North American grid gets ever more interconnected, and as more and more people in developing countries have the financial wherewithal to pay for expensive medical treatment performed traditionally only in the so-called “West,” telemedicine is a market that promises –indeed already delivers – lucrative growth in just a short span of years.

Surgery is, to put it understatedly, a “fine art” both in terms of timing and visual precision, the need seems obvious for high-speed, HD technology like Telairity’s to pave the way for effective, globalized health services. Our encoders are able to digitally compress enormous quantities of data in minute-by-minute real-time, digitizing this data while providing superior visual quality all the while. That’s no small feat when it comes to a question of life-or-death. Already, hospitals in Georgia and India have partnered with each other in jointly using of our encoding technology, allowing each facility to benefit the other in ways which neither could have foreseen just a few, scant years ago. Healthcare is rapidly and stealthily becoming available (at least technologically speaking) to a vast number of the planet’s population. Through its high definition and powerful bit-rate compression applications, Telairity continues to interweave and link the world’s most essential services with one another.