Video Breakthroughs

In one of the first significant pre-NAB announcements, cloud encoding companyZencoder is releasing the Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding service, an open API that offers simple and scalable encoding for live video.

Using the API, publishers upload an RTMP stream from a lightweight encoder on a laptop. Once uploaded, Zencoder creates adaptive bitrate HLS and RTMP streams for viewers.

With EDC Private Cloud, Jeff Malkin, president of Encoding.com, says his company has solved the problem of premium content, finally bringing cloud encoding to major players. The solution includes fast and secure file ingest and upload (with partner Aspera), high-end processors, and vast storage. One key advantage is EDC Private Cloud's ability to move files quickly: Malkin says it can move files five to six times faster than Amazon can from S3 to EC2.

EDC Private Cloud offers Dolby Surround Sound audio, Widevine DRM, and UltraViolet compatibility.

Besides winning on speed, Malkin asserts that EDC Private Cloud, which uses an automated workflow, also wins on price. In its beta period, he says, it won RFPs with Synacor and Midwest Tape, turning in prices that are 20 percent of current market pricing.

The experts weigh in on when companies should encode and transcode their own content, and when it makes sense to move to the cloud.

Economies of scale, faster deployment and format responsiveness, plus drastically reduced CAPEX (capital expenditures): All of these are reasons why it can make sense to move video transcoding and distribution from your company to a third-party cloud-based service.

At the same time, there are instances where it makes sense to keep transcoding and distribution in-house. Here’s how to decide when the cloud makes sense, and when it doesn’t.

“Client-aware cloud” is one of the buzzwords that Intel was pushing at IDF 2011, and despite the chipmaker’s ulterior motive for wanting to see synergy (read: “vendor lock-in”) between (x86-powered) cloud clients and (x86-powered) cloud servers, there’s definitely something to larger idea that the cloud should know something about and tailor data for the clients that are connected to it. HTTP proxies like Amazon’s Silk and Opera Mini before it (not that these are the same thing) are part of this client-aware cloud trend, as is Skyfire‘s new Rocket Optimizer 2.0 service.

Skyfire is probably best known as a maker of mobile browsers, and specifically as the company that snuck porn Flash onto the iPad via some clever transcoding and a proprietary browser. But in an echo of Google’s 411 strategy, in which the search giant launched a free directory service in order to gather the voice samples that would later power Android’s voice recognition features, Skyfire has been using the data that it gathers from its 10 million iOS and Android users for a larger R&D project.

That project is Rocket Optimizer, the 2.0 version of which launched on Tuesday. Optimizer is aimed not at consumers but at wireless carriers, where it takes tower- and mobile device-specific data and uses it to transcode and optimize video data on-the-fly to fit users’ screens and network conditions. As with Silk, all of Rocket’s real-time video transcoding and resizing is done in the cloud.

When it comes to video processing, the biggest story from NAB Show, and indeed the spring trade show season generally, was not the continued progress in HEVC or UHD. Though very important, these were largely anticipated. It was instead the growing interest in the virtualization of video processing, whether that is using on-premise or cloud-hosted compute resources. Most of the major compression vendors made significant announcements to outline their virtualization capabilities.

Ericsson unveiled its Ericsson Virtualized Encoding, a unified software solution that can be implemented on processing platforms containing a combination of dedicated programmable hardware, like Ericsson’s video processing chip, in customer premises, and software or GPU-based servers that are on premise or potentially deployed in the cloud. Using a software abstraction layer, the solution is completely task and service-oriented, intelligently allocating encoding resources regardless of where they are, based on the task in hand and on operator priorities such as deployment speed, video quality and output.

There is also the performance element in that state-of-the-art cloud transcoding platforms can be best for live streaming where latency must be kept to a minimum. Elemental Technologies, exhibiting at NAB, has scored heavily with leading broadcasters by touting high transcoding performance based on massively parallel processing within the cloud. By using clusters of off the shelf graphical processing units, Elemental keeps costs down while being able to boast that it can transcode both SD and HD content “faster than real time”, which is not quite as magic as it sounds. It merely means that transcoding is not on the critical time path and is executed more quickly than some of the other functions involved in end to end content delivery. Transcoding then does not add to the latency budget.

Cloud services are perfectly suited for processor-intensive jobs, although bandwidth constraints can present a challenge. Discover 12 cloud video specialists that can save companies time and money.

Hype frequently exceeds reality when it comes to new technologies, and cloud computing is no exception. Media enterprises recognise the key benefits of the cloud as an opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with a project. They know that with the cloud, they no longer need to plan for and procure servers and other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance. Producers of broadcast TV programming, B2B, or live events streamers can spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes-and scale them down after use.

Yet while media companies have begun outsourcing their back office functions to the cloud, it's been a slower evolution to transition production and digital assets. There are concerns about the privacy and security of premium and exclusive content on servers owned by a third party.