Boosting the efficiency of OTT delivery with state-of-the-art streaming optimizations

An increase in streaming capacity has driven OTT service providers to look for ways to reduce the cost of video streaming without decreasing the overall quality of experience (QoE). Through the latest streaming optimizations, video service providers can achieve significant bandwidth savings, while retaining exceptional video quality. This paper examines the current state of the art in streaming innovations by looking first at the popularity of deployed codecs (AVC, HEVC, AV1), then seeing how Content Aware Encoding (CAE) can be used to improve their respective performances. It then looks beyond CAE at additional AI-based techniques such as dynamic parameter selection, dynamic frame encoding, dynamic resolution encoding that can further improve the compression efficiency. It then looks at additional techniques impacting the QoE that can be deployed to further reduce the bandwidth such as zero rating deployed in the mobile space, resolution reduction on PC, or 1080p for sports on TV. Last, it looks at encoding orchestration where content popularity will impact the processing power allocated to encoding to reduce the bitrate adaptively based on content popularity. The paper develops a model that shows starting from a Constant Bit Rate (CBR) HD AVC solution, and depending on the tools used, with or without QoE reduction, what bandwidth reduction can be achieved.

Thierry Fautier | Your Media Transformation | Los Altos, Calif., United States