At BVE, Telestream (stand K06), a provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, will debut major new functionality within its Flagship enterprise-class software product, Vantage. The company reports that this new feature represents a quantum progression in Vantage’s multiscreen OTT distribution capabilities, empowering content owners, producers, and distributors to quickly, easily and efficiently package, monetize and distribute their media over multiple delivery networks.
The latest addition to the Vantage platform is an Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) Optimization feature that can significantly reduce delivery bandwidth needs and costs within multiscreen distribution applications. This advanced feature can achieve real-world bandwidth reductions of 25-40 percent while maintaining a premium viewing experience through high quality media distribution.
In the world of multiscreen media delivery, Content Delivery Network (CDN) costs are a significant issue for broadcasters. While traditionally they are used to fixed distribution costs, irrespective of viewing audience, this is not the case when distributing via CDN. These distribution partners charge on a “per-bit, per-viewer” basis, so the more multiscreen viewers, the higher the cost of distribution. Therefore, the ability of a product to produce high quality images at lower bit rates is a major consideration.
At the same time, numerous studies indicate a direct correlation between quality of the image (both in terms of spatial resolution and motion representation) and viewer retention. Today, viewers are not content to view postage-sized images running at 15 frames per second, and will not wait while the player buffers sufficient frames to restart the playback process.
ABR Optimize for Telestream Vantage Multiscreen intelligently manages delivery of adaptive-bitrate packages, which significantly reduce delivery bandwidth and distribution cost while ensuring high perceived quality. ABR Optimize enables service providers and content creators to set a guaranteed quality level for adaptive bitrate encoded video services that maintain a premium viewing experience. The guaranteed quality level is based on SSIMPlus, the Emmy-award-winning quality measurement suite from SSIMWave. SSIMWave used their research and expertise to develop a quality of experience (QoE) measurement technique that closely tracks the perception of actual viewers.
“In today’s competitive viewing environment, broadcasters and service providers live or die according to their ability to provide the best looking content on the broadest range of devices. And there is an entirely different business model which sees OTT distribution increase in line with audience size,” commented Paul Turner, VP of Enterprise Product Management at Telestream. “Vantage ABR Optimize provides users with a real competitive advantage – significant CDN savings reinforced by the best moving image quality, all the time, on every device.”
