February 6, 2025 • 44 mins
Join us for a groundbreaking conversation with Krishna Rao Vijayanagar, the visionary founder of OTTverse, who offers an insider’s perspective on conquering the Indian streaming market’s distinct challenges. Ever wondered how major streaming platforms like Disney Plus Hotstar and GeoCinema craft their strategies to captivate a young, tech-savvy audience in a price-sensitive landscape? Krishna reveals the intricate balance between national and regional streaming triumphs, and the innovative tactics telcos employ to aggregate OTT services for a diverse audience.
Krishna shares his vast knowledge of the technological ecosystem within India, where the adoption of smart TVs and OTT devices is skyrocketing in urban areas, while traditional broadcasting holds sway in rural locales. We discuss how cutting-edge video codecs, innovative encoding techniques, and adaptive bitrate streaming are redefining the viewing experience, alongside the pivotal role of DRM technologies in safeguarding content. The episode also uncovers how CDN providers like Akamai and CloudFront are shaping the future of content delivery in India, offering listeners deep insights into both the technical and business fronts of the streaming world.
The conversation takes an educational turn as Krishna discusses the critical need for video technology knowledge in India. Discover how OTTverse is leading the charge with initiatives to bridge educational gaps, upping the ante for students and professionals eyeing careers in the OTT industry. We also explore the nuances of multilingual film production, the transformative potential of AI in video optimization, and the artistry behind personalization in content discovery. This episode promises a wealth of insights for anyone interested in the dynamic landscape of Indian streaming and the technological marvels that drive it.
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Voices of Video.
Voices of Video.
The Voices of Video.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Voices of Video.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to NetEnt's Voices in Video, where we
explore criticalstreaming-related topics with
experts in the field.
If you're watching and havequestions, please post them as a
comment.
On whichever platform you'rewatching, we'll answer live if
time permits.
Otherwise, we'll respond afterthe show.
Today we chat with Krishna RaoBajanagar, who is founder of
OTTverse, which covers OTTtechnologies and business topics
(00:41):
.
By way of education, krishnahas an MS and PhD in electrical
and computer engineering fromthe Illinois Institute of
Technology.
I met Krishna years ago at oneof the several positions he's
held in both US and Indiancompanies.
Today, our conversation willfocus on streaming in India,
which now has the largestpopulation in the world.
We'll cover the market forcesthat impact OTT strategies in
(01:03):
India and then focus on thetechnical decisions that these
market forces entail, like codecselection, ladder formation,
player support, CDN selectionand other issues.
Then we'll spend some timediscussing OTTverse and
particularly the issues thatOTTverse readers are finding
most compelling today.
Krishna, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Thank you so much, Jan.
Thank you, Anita as well, forhaving me on this podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Okay, well, we're glad to have you and I know it's
late for you and we appreciateyour working with our time
constraints, but let's you and Ispoke about this a couple of
days ago, you know it seems likethe Indian market is a very
challenging market to get intoin a number of ways.
Could you cover that?
I mean, what's the Indianmarket like to get into as a
content provider?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
India is a very beautiful, complex and ancient
multicultural country thatcreates an atmosphere of
challenges and opportunities aswell.
To give you an example, we haveapproximately 26 different
languages, each with their ownscript, each with their own
(02:11):
vocabulary, each with their owndictionaries.
So when you want to communicatewith somebody and all the
states in India are dividedbased on linguistic, based on
the languages.
So I come from Bangalore, thetech capital of India If I go to
my neighboring state, there's avery small likelihood I'd
understand their language.
(02:31):
So, if you think about this interms of OTT, if I produce a
language, if I produce a moviein my language, distributing it
to other parts of the countrybecomes a challenge primarily
because people wouldn'tunderstand it.
So this, though it looks like achallenge, it's very interesting
from a technical perspective,brings in interesting concepts
(02:55):
of dubbing.
Can you create one language andtranslate it or dub it in five
or six different languages?
Can you do closed captioning?
Can you five or six differentlanguages?
Can you do closed captioning?
Can you do subtitles indifferent languages and
different scripts?
How do you deliver?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
all of this.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I was just thinking about this with a couple of
friends after our discussion andwe realized that several OTTs
have to struggle with the UI.
So in the US you're probablyaccustomed to having the UI in
English.
In India, most of the OTDplayers have an English UI, but
how do you change the entire UIto a different language and how
(03:38):
do you do it for five differentlanguages in India if you want
to be a national player?
So it's a beautiful, complexcountry country a lot of
challenges and it's a it's agood place to be if you want to
solve interesting problems atscale.
So I'll leave it at that andpick up these topics one by one
I guess, okay, what aboutpricing?
because, um, it felt likepricing was also, uh, pretty
(04:01):
pressured over there I would saymost vendors who have probably
come to india have also facedthis.
So india is a price sensitivemarket.
It's primarily because the thepopulation is very young.
They're coming out of the towns, villages, coming to the metros
.
Recent stats show that 65percent of the population is
(04:22):
below the age of 35.
So it's a very young populationearning their first dollars,
getting their first paychecks.
So people want to pay less forcontent.
People appreciate free stuff inIndia.
So it makes it quite complex torun a business over here.
(04:42):
How do you produce content?
How do you set up producecontent?
How do you set up thetechnology?
How do you deliver it?
Do the marketing while chargingsomething which is sensible.
So, for example, disney plusHotstar I think their top tier
comes roughly to a few dollarsper year, probably 1010, $20 a
(05:04):
year.
So that's how competitive it is.
On the other hand, you haveforces like GeoCinema, who's
running this year's IPL andrunning their entire app for
free on a pure award model.
So this is a conglomerate withvery, very deep pockets, so they
can do a market exercise likethis to capture the audience.
(05:27):
So if you're an OTT, if youwant to enter the market, how do
you actually counteract such aforce.
So that's something interestingto think about as well.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Who's doing a good job coming in from the outside.
You know, here in the States wehave, you know the big names
Netflix, prime, hulu.
You know Paramount.
Who's doing a good jobpenetrating the Indian market
and what are they doing toaccomplish that?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So when you look at the Indian context, it is
interesting.
You have to kind of look at itas the national play versus the
regional play, just because ofthe language differences that I
spoke about.
So if you look at the nationalplayers, there are the likes of
Zee, sony Live, you have AltBalaji, you have Amazon Prime
(06:11):
Video, which does a very goodjob aggregating content, geo
Cinema.
So these are interestingplayers.
Then you have the regionalplayers like Sunnext, which is
for the Tamil market, aha, whichis Telugu.
You have Marathi, you havePlanet Marathi, then you have
Gujarati Shemaru me.
So you have a bunch of regionalplayers who are doing fantastic
(06:34):
work capturing their audiences.
And then you have a veryinteresting phenomenon in India
where the telcos are aggregatingall these OTPs.
So you have these superaggregators.
So GeoCinema is one, airtelExtreme is another one, tata
Play, binge, hindustan Times,ott Play.
What they do is they tie upwith all these OTTs.
(06:57):
They provide all the content ona single app through a single
searchable interface.
So they charge a single price.
I remember Airtel Extreme wouldcharge roughly one and a half
dollars a month to access 50note-eaters, more than 3-4
thousand titles.
So it's a price war on one sidemarket forces?
(07:21):
How do you compensate thecontent creators?
How do you still pay your billsand keep the lights on?
It's a market trying to figureitself out and it's in a very
interesting phase.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Let's start to look at some of the technical issues
that producers are facing.
What's the typical bandwidththat people are streaming their
videos over?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Again, if you look at it geographically, we typically
divide India into the metrocities, which are the largest
ones, like Delhi, mumbai,calcutta, bangalore, chennai.
These regions typically havepretty high bandwidths, good
mobile penetration, all of this.
Then you have the tier one,tier two, tier three cities
where the bandwidth kind ofdrops.
(08:03):
But from a business perspective, many people would agree that
the metros are kind of saturated.
People have two, threesubscriptions and that's not
where they're going to get newsubscriptions.
They have to penetrate into thecities and the towns that do
not have very good connectivity.
(08:24):
So this goes into the mind whenyou actually decide a bitrate
ladder If that's what you werealluding to, the bitrate ladder
and the bandwidths.
So typically you would seepeople streaming at 720p, around
the 1, 1.25 Mbps range, and alot of lower bitrates like the
(08:45):
640p, 480p, 360p goes down.
Your 1080s are generallybetween 2 and 3 Mbps and with
the caveat that I'm only talkingabout X.264 right now For
mobile consumption being around2.5 and above till around 3 Mbps
, and then when it goes to largescreen it comes to around 5, 6,
(09:08):
7 Mbps.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Looking at the encoding ladder, are companies
doing a different encodingladder for metro areas and also
for the outlying regions, or dothey have one encoding ladder
that's going to serve everywherein India?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
From what I know and there might be a few exceptions
to this it is typically on thedevice profile rather than the
geography.
This is what I've seen.
So you have these per devicemanifest sort of configurations
where when you're using Edge.264, you kind of cap it at close to
3 Mbps for 1080p and you can gohigher for large screen.
(09:45):
And I should add that India isa mobile first country.
There was a report by Hotstartwo, three years ago Disney plus
Hotstar where they analyzed anentire year streaming and they
said that 94% of theirsubscribers accessed it through
an Android phone, through aphone, and most of it was
Android.
Ios has a very low penetrationjust because of the price point,
(10:09):
but if you look at it that way,it doesn't really make sense
going up having very high bitrates, hdr all these
capabilities when 90% of yoursubscriber base is going to
access it on a handheld phone.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Typical ladder might go up.
What's the top bit rate youwould see, Is it?
I think you said five megabitsper second?
Is that where you're cappingout?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, five, especially if you're on a large
screen.
But with the OTTs I've workedwith and I've inspected just out
of curiosity over the last fewyears it's typically been two to
three MVPs.
The top the quality on yourmobile phones is fantastic.
On a laptop it's great it doesthe job.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
What's the player situation look like?
You mentioned that most of theplayback is on Android phones.
Apple is very premium, verycostly here in the States.
What about smart TVs and OTTdevices, Even in the big cities?
Are those making penetration?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
They are.
So I was in a talk a couple ofweeks ago where a person from
Samsung Ads actually said thatthere are 14, 15 million TVs
being sold every year.
So it's not well penetrated inthe Indian market primarily
because it requires data.
To get your, you have to end upusing your bandwidth or your
(11:29):
internet connection.
So DTH and normal linear TV arevery, very prevalent in the
towns and villages of India.
Smart TVs are catching up asdata is getting cheaper and as
bandwidths are improving.
So we aren't there yet.
Cord cutting isn't such a bigphenomenon as it is probably in
(11:49):
the US.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
We've talked about the streaming side.
What about the broadcast side?
I mean, is there a broadcastinfrastructure over the air that
makes up a substantialpercentage of what people are
actually watching?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
So cable TV, iptv, is very, very common over here.
It isn't as expensive.
I remember when I was in the USI had a Comcast Xfinity
connection $100 a month and I'vegot internet, probably a phone
and a lot of channels.
It's really not that expensive.
In India it's probably 300 or400 rupees, which roughly around
(12:23):
five dollars, and you get ahost of channels, probably 100,
150 channels.
And again, it was a governmentregulation that you actually get
a sheet of paper to your housewhere you can tick and you can
mark what channels you want andonly those will be provided to
you.
So I still remember rememberdoing that.
(12:44):
So in our house we speak acouple of languages, just
because how my parents cametogether.
So we just choose channels fromthose two languages and we're
done.
We don't need all 100, 150channels.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
And that's all.
Mpeg-2 or H.264?
.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I believe it's MPEG-2 .
Speaker 1 (13:04):
What about codecs over there?
I mean, I heard talk a fewyears ago about VP9 making good
penetration because, a it'ssupported on Android devices and
B it's more efficient thanH.264.
Are you seeing other codecsbeing used over there?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I was speaking to a friend a few hours back and he
said yes, there's a differencebetween penetration and adoption
.
Yes, there's a differencebetween penetration and adoption
.
People are trying to adopt newcodecs like HEVC, but generally
when you deploy, when you'redeploying on smartphones, avc is
good enough.
You don't have any royaltyissues and for the bitrates
we're streaming, I think it doesa perfectly good job.
(13:39):
Plus, hardware support is there.
It's a legacy codec by now.
So a large number of thesemobile devices aren't your
high-end Android devices.
It's not your Samsung or yourOnePlus devices.
A lot of them are Chinesephones which you get for roughly
$50.
So massive consumption on thosedevices as well.
(14:01):
So anyone trying to deploy acodec has to keep this in mind.
They might not have the bestDRM support on board as well, so
that kind of restricts you onwhat you can actually do.
You might not be able to serve1080p on certain devices just
because of the hardwarecapabilities.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
We talked about the high end of the encoding ladder.
What's the low end of theencoding ladder?
What's the low end of theencoding ladder?
What's you know?
Resolution and bit rate.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I have seen it go down lower than 360p at some
cases, but 360 is roughly whereI see it cap off 360 at roughly
200, 300 kbps.
I don't see what people couldmake out of that resolution.
But yeah, that's the lower endto keep the streaming going, I
guess yeah, I remember when 640by 360 was pretty high quality.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
You know when you're.
When you're streaming at 200,it's running the kilobits per
second.
It feels like you want a prettyconsistent stream.
Are you seeing a lot of cbrover there, or is it?
You know, two pass vbr or even,uh, exotic things like
constrained CRF.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So, speaking from experience and having been a
vendor in the compression space,people do pick up, I would say,
platforms like Elemental.
You have a few people runningtheirs off of Brightco, certain
other vendors in the space, sowhatever they've provided is
(15:27):
typically what they use.
But people who kind of do ityourself or choose certain
vendors in India, I've seen thatthe common use case is either
CBR not 2Pass, but plain CBR,two pass but plain CBR or capped
CRF.
I personally have dabbled withcapped CRF in my previous role.
(15:48):
We found it to be a very goodapproximate to CBR in terms of
quality.
It was very good.
It didn't overshoot theconstraints that we had put too
badly and was perfectly goodenough for streaming in India
without any buffering issues orany of that.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Can you just briefly describe what CRF is and what
CapCRF is for people who may notknow?
Speaker 2 (16:10):
CRF, so we are talking about Constraint Rate
Factor.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Constant Rate Factor.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Constant Rate Factor right.
So this is a mode in FFmpegwhich is probably the most
popular open sourceimplementation of video codecs
out there where essentially theytry and hit a video quality by
adjusting the number of bitsallocated throughout the video
sequence.
This is in contrast to CBR,where CBR tries to maintain a
(16:40):
certain bit rate by adjustingthe video quality.
So you would start off let'ssay you start off with an
I-frame that would get thehighest quality, then your
P-frames would get the mostallocation of bits and then it'd
be distributed amongst theB-frames trying to hit your bit
rate caps.
Crf obviously has to do similarstuff, but it pays a greater
(17:05):
emphasis on the quality ratherthan maintaining a very constant
bitrate.
So you might see it overshoot.
You will see it overshootactually.
So a modification of this isthe capped CRF, where you can
put a cap and tell CRF maintainyour video quality while not
exceeding a particular bitrateby a certain percentage.
(17:28):
So this makes it very suitablefor ABR streaming and if
somebody asks why?
to that question I would saybitrate is, in my understanding,
is a contract between theplayer and the server.
So when the player is told thatthis stream is 5 Mbps, it
(17:53):
expects and believes that theserver will send five megabits
per second.
Anything more or less by alarge amount will cause problems
at the player.
So it's almost like a contractCRF will end up violating the
contract.
Capped CRF not much and itprovides very good quality.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So for CBR you would set a bit rate and then you
would set the maximum bit rate,and for CBR those two would be
the same.
What do you do in a CRFsituation?
What's the setting that you usein the command string?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I believe it's the max that you set the hyphen bV.
And then you also mentioned theCRF setting.
So FFM Pic has the CRF settingwhere zero is almost lossless,
pristine quality which no humancan make out, and 51 is really
poor.
Typically.
In practice we have gonebetween 20 and 25.
(18:51):
And this is through just goldeneye testing and vmaf scores,
where we realize certain genresdon't require 18, 17.
We didn't see any difference ona mobile phone.
So this is why I kind of goback to the business side of
things, where you understand thegeography, you're streaming at
the devices you're streaming andif you realize that 95% is
(19:15):
going to be consuming on anAndroid phone, there just isn't
a lot, they will make out if youchange your CRF setting from 24
to 25.
You might save a lot on yourCDN card bills and your storage
bills, but you're not harmingthe user experience at all.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, you and I talked about this issue just, I
guess, a couple of weeks ago.
I gave a presentation at MileHigh Video earlier this week and
I sent you some two-pass VBRencodes and you said, well, it
looks great, but you're doublingyour encoding cost.
And then you relayed yourexperience where you use ca, cap
(19:54):
, crf with a CRF value of 25, Ibelieve, and then the maximum
setting.
That turned out.
It was a really thank you forthat because it was a really
interesting portion of thepresentation.
But we did.
The overall VMAF scores wereabout the same.
The encoding time was cut inhalf.
There were some variabilityissues, you know I sent you that
(20:15):
data, but overall it seemedlike a pretty good strategy.
Are you using you know wetalked about VMAF or you
mentioned that really brieflyAre you using the phone version
with the phone profile for VMAF?
Have you experimented with thator are you using the default?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
So again, we do this sort of comparisons where we run
it on the phone model and thenon the desktop model.
I know there is a 4K model, oram I wrong on that?
There is, there is one right.
I've never tried that, to behonest.
I was never in the situation totest 4K.
So the phone model and this,and we actually see a very big
(20:57):
difference.
You could change your bit ratesquite a bit and the phone model
, the scores wouldn't budge.
So we realized that hey, hereis something that would actually
save us a lot on CDN bills andstorage costs and that naturally
leads to per device manifestsdoing something, figuring out
(21:18):
who's asking for a manifest andserve the right manifest, doing
edge manipulation of themanifest.
So I think it naturally tendsitself to a lot of innovation
just having those scores.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
And how do you see that working?
I mean, what different profilesare the typical publishers
supporting?
You've got a mobile profile.
Is there a smart TV profile atthis point, or is computer
playback?
I guess it's not such a bigdeal for premium content here in
the States, but what about inIndia?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
I honestly have worked with only a couple of
them who have seriously thoughtabout per-device manifests.
It has been tried.
But if I look at the premiumpublishers, yes, they are
looking into this, they aredoing experiments.
They are delivering it this way.
But then you have a bunch ofOTTs which are very sure about
(22:08):
where their audience is and theyknow their quality is good at
certain bit rates.
So some of them don't havethese considerations also.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
So HDR, you said there's not a lot.
I mean if you're, unless you'redistributing to the living room
and unless you're using ATVC,HDR is not a factor.
What about DRM?
Is that typically used overthere?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
DRM is a big thing.
So either people roll out theirown using this AES-128 or they
go with multi-DRM vendors whoprovide them with the common
Widevine, fairplay streaming andMicrosoft's PlayReady.
There isn't, I wouldn't say, amajor innovation going on in the
DRM space.
It's just pick up a vendor andgo with it.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
And what about the CDN side?
Are there multiple CDNs thatare covering the different
regions, or is there one big CDNthat everybody uses?
How does that work?
Speaker 2 (22:58):
So Akamai and CloudFront are pretty popular in
India.
I have seen several companiesdo multi-CDN switching between
these two.
You also have Airtel, who hasentered the race with a tie-up
with Quilt to do the rollout oftheir own CDN, and Jio is also
doing the same.
So you have these local, thehomegrown vendors, and plus you
(23:20):
have Akamai CloudFront.
These are the big guys in themarket.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Are people doing multiple CDN support with
switching it?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
is becoming a thing over here.
But to be very frank and I'vebeen looking at data also for
the past few years CDNs havebecome very reliable and very
good at streaming.
You only hear of an occasionalhiccup and crash.
They are pretty good.
Right now.
You might do multi-CDN forcertain issues, probably in a
(23:51):
tier two, tier three city wherecertain transmission isn't very
good, or to save costs.
I might have a better rate fromA versus B and then I switch
them during the prime time.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
It sounds like overall, the market is a
challenging market to get intobecause of the languages and the
regional, but the encodingpicture is actually pretty
simple.
I guess it's not that hard.
Multiple codecs are not a thing.
Hdr isn't a thing.
Exotic encoding ladders aren'ta thing.
(24:26):
So it seems straightforward.
It's the content play, andgetting people to buy your stuff
, I guess, is the big thing.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, so it's the business side, sorry to
interrupt.
It's actually the business side, which is being on all these
technical decisions.
So I'm sure a lot of the teamsare dying to deploy HEVC VP9 and
try the data stuff.
But does it actually pay off?
That's the question.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
What percentage of revenue if I'm an Indian OTT
provider, what percentage of myrevenue and percentage of
revenue, not number ofsubscribers what percentage
comes from inside India andoutside India?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Oh, Jan, probably I don't have the right answer to
that question.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
We were talking and you were mentioning that there's
a huge market outside of Indiafor all the people who have left
and they're paying US prices.
They're not paying, they are.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, so that point is true.
I don't know the exact split,but definitely Indians are there
across the world.
I think the biggest hotspotsare the US, uk, canada, middle
East and a sizable population inAfrica as well South Africa.
So people streaming to theseregions they end up paying in
(25:42):
their local currencies.
I think the example that I wastalking to you the other day was
a particular streaming servicewhich charges like 60 Canadian
dollars over there and probablytwo or three US dollars in India
.
So you can make a lot of moneyover there and it's also
profitable to stream outsideIndia just because of the ad
(26:02):
CPMs, when you can earn severaldollars in double digits
probably in the US, whereas inIndia it's probably $1, $2 CPMs.
That's where it caps off at.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
And just I should have asked this back when we
started talking about thecontent.
But the subscription rates arelow.
Is it advertising supported oris it subscription only?
Speaker 2 (26:29):
So most of the OTTs today do a hybrid or are going
towards hybrid, having startedoff only subscription.
So in India it's a thing tohave a mobile-only plan where
you can play back only on amobile device.
You can't play back on anything.
So that's your lowest price,which might come with ads, might
(26:51):
not come with ads.
And then you say, okay, here'sanother tier where it's on large
screen, it's on mobile, but youwill see the occasional
pre-roll ad, mid-roll ad, and ifyou want to turn it off, go to
the premium plan, ad-freestreaming for one year.
That's typically what happensover here, I mean the IPL is an
(27:13):
oddity in this entire schemewhere they're streaming
everything for free with an adsupport to play, but there have
been talks that they'll berolling out a subscription play
in the next couple of monthsafter the IPL.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Let's switch gears and talk about OTTverse.
You know I have my siteStreaming Learning Center and
I've contributed a lot tostreaming media over the years.
You kind of came out of nowhereand really grabbed a big share,
and in a big way.
What was the idea behindOTTverse and what has it grown
into over the years?
Speaker 2 (27:43):
So the story is very simple.
I was tired of working 12 yearson the trot, so when the
pandemic hit, I just took abreak and I started writing.
So when the pandemic hit, Ijust took a break and I started
writing.
I had always blogged andwritten about obscure stuff
recipes, cricket and stuff likethat.
So I had a lot of notes lyingaround, so I cleaned them up,
(28:04):
put them online and it suddenlybecame popular.
People approached me to sponsorarticles and put ads on the
website, and then one thing ledto the other and we decided to
make it a business.
So that's how it started off.
I think our foundation and ourgoal is always spreading
(28:27):
knowledge.
I found it very tough to switch.
I was in Harmonic earlier, so Ifound it very tough to switch
between transcoding and OTT.
I just couldn't find propermaterial which would go in depth
, so I tried to just put mynotes online and help others as
well.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
So what statistics do you share about viewership?
How many eyeballs, how manyeyeballs.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Geographically we are 55% US and EU put together, 20%
India and the rest is spreadacross Asia and Latin and the UK
.
That's our geographical spread.
It's mostly from the US and theEuropean Union.
Then, in terms of viewership,we are flirting with 100,000
(29:12):
views per month number.
Sometimes it's up down.
We'll probably be consistentlyabove that in the next couple of
months.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
What's the distribution?
Who's looking?
Is it big company, smallcompany developer, ott
programmer?
Who do you see coming to yoursite?
Speaker 2 (29:28):
That's interesting.
Actually, A lot of statisticsactually we get out of LinkedIn
because we have a pretty activechannel over there.
So what we've seen is, whenit's deeply technical, we have
the folks who love tech who comein.
So it might be a programmer, itmight be an entry level
engineer, it could be as high asa CTO, but mostly on the tech
(29:50):
side of things.
And we have a lot of explainerarticles which kind of simplify
stuff, like what is client sidead insertion?
So I've actually met a lot ofmarketing teams who read that
and find it easy to understandand then explain it to others.
And then we've also started afew opinion pieces interviewing
(30:11):
OTTs business owners.
So that drives that obviouslyattracts a slightly different
crowd the C-levels and directors.
So we have a healthy mix and Ithink that's how we'd like it to
be.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
What other you know?
You and I talked about some ofthe educational initiatives that
you're producing from OTTverse.
What are you doing there?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Like inspired by a lot of your workshops, I think
there is a need, truly there isa need, for concentrated
workshops on probably usingFFmpeg for compression, for also
pre-processing, post-processing, in terms of packaging,
actually putting DRM together.
(30:50):
A lot of this knowledge ishidden and it doesn't have to be
, because FFmpeg is also opensource.
Why can't the knowledge be alsoopen out there?
So these are where we want todo a bit of educational
initiatives and specificallytargeting colleges in India,
(31:10):
universities, because videoisn't really a big topic which
is taught over here, so theykind of go on the more
mathematical concepts like imageprocessing, signal processing,
they skim over the video, theentire topic of video, despite
it being a super complex place.
(31:30):
You can probably enter and exit, you can retire working on this
OTT pipeline.
There's enough work for thenext 20, 30 years.
Students aren't really aware ofthat when I interact with them,
so that's something that wewant to do as well.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
So what does this translate to you?
And I talked about potentiallydoing workshops.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
So this is probably going to be a couple of days.
Workshops.
If it's in person, go down toan office.
Oh sorry, that's the otherthing, right, we see a lot of
engineers coming into theworkforce not really
understanding what it's what is?
OTT specifically.
I would even go around sayingthat teams, when they test the
(32:11):
tests are pretty simple I pressplay.
If it doesn't play, hey, that'sa bug.
But can you go a little deeper?
Is there a problem in themanifest?
Or can you create test cases bydeleting certain files but
having them on the manifest sowhen the player tries to play it
, something happens?
Is the player supposed to crash?
Is it supposed to fail greatspeed?
(32:31):
We don't know right.
So so just a general education,either in the corporate region
or the educational region, itcould be a couple of hours or a
half a day, online posts, orthey actually go in person and
walk them through an entire weektalking to them about
end-to-end right, from contentupload to playback,
(32:52):
recommendation, search, and thenget their hands dirty.
It's not very difficult.
End-to-end right, from contentupload to playback,
recommendation, search, thatsort of thing, and then get
their hands dirty.
It's not very difficult, right?
If you have like five hours onyour hand, you could learn
compression, how to use FFA withcommand line, do the HLS, set
up a server and actually streamit to Videojs, and I think when
(33:12):
somebody presses play and itactually works, that much is
enough to encourage them to takethe next step.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
It does light you up when it actually works.
What are the topics that yourreaders are finding interesting
today?
Looking at your page views,what topics are most compelling?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
We find a healthy mix between transcoding, a healthy
mix between transcoding and intranscoding.
We see a lot of questions stillon cbr, crf to pass.
There are very good articlesonline.
I mean, I don't say mine is thebest, so there are very good
explainers.
There are good guides from thefflp website itself, but people
(33:50):
still want to understand more.
They ask about the fundamentalsof compression, like what's an
IDR frame, what's a CRA, what'san IPB?
People want to understand that.
Those articles are prettypopular.
How to package.
That seems to be trending.
Then it goes on to DRM and adinsertion client-side versus DRM
(34:13):
and ad insertion Client sideversus server side ad insertion,
because these are the jargonwhich are thrown out there in
meetings.
So people want to understandwhat's the difference, how?
Speaker 1 (34:23):
do they work?
Speaker 2 (34:24):
and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Getting some questions in One question.
I guess more specifics on thepublishers who are succeeding in
India.
Wanted to know how is Netflixdoing, how is Prime doing, how
is Hulu doing?
Do you have any, you know, Anyinformation to share about how
successful those companies havebeen?
I know you mentioned Prime.
Seem to be doing pretty well.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Prime is doing well.
They have a lot of original CDsthat they've produced and
released.
So Prime's good Netflix hasn'thad that sort of penetration
because they're primarily, Iwould say, a premium platform.
Price point is also high.
They were forced to reducetheir price because they didn't
(35:06):
find any traction in India, sothey have a mobile only plan
which is 149 rupees.
Prime is still restricted, Iwould say, from my guess is to
the metro and the Englishspeaking pockets of the country,
English-speaking pockets of thecountry, but it won't have many
takers in the large part ofIndia where 80% of the
(35:29):
population lives.
But Prime is big.
Jio has recently tied up withHBO and Warner Brothers, so all
of that can now be accessed onJio in a couple of months.
I suppose they were early onDisney Hotstar but that
relationship broke and theymoved over to Jio.
Hollywood content is alsoavailable through Lionsgate.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Lionsgate.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Play.
I don't know if they have anapp of their own, but they are
available on aggregators.
They are available on IntelExtreme.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
A question came through about what's being used
in terms of packaging.
Is it more HLS or Dash?
I guess it's more Dash, right.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
It's actually both.
Funnily enough, most of thenews channels in India also live
stream onto their websites, andall of these are unprotected
HLS.
So HLS is big and Dash is alsobig.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
What about CMF?
Is that making any penetrationat all?
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Just because of the fact that a single DRM cannot be
used.
I don't see a lot of singlefile format across all DRMs.
I've spoken to somebody a monthago and they said that it's
still not on the radar to try asingle file.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
That's kind of an off-the-wall question.
What has been the impact of thesuccess of Plumdog Millionaire?
I guess that's a few years back, but I mean, how did that
change?
Is it the perception of contentin India, or what changes did
that kind of deliver?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
I don't know from the Indian context.
It was just great that anIndian movie won an Oscar.
But a lot of things for examplethe music producer, ar Rahman,
who won, I think, the best musicas well for Slumdog.
He composed 11 songs.
This is a guy who, from 1992,has probably been producing like
(37:22):
50 to 100 songs every year,every song different across
different languages.
So when Rahman won, everybodywas like high time he won
something.
So I would say it had a massiveimpact because the Bollywood
industry has been a thrivingindustry for 70 odd years.
(37:42):
Several superstars were beingpopular across the world as well
.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
How did they do it?
I mean, how do you produce amovie?
You know Slumdog Millionairewas one language in the US.
How do you do it, for you knowdozens of languages in India?
What did they?
What does that look like in thetheater?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
So, honestly, it's a voiceover For most movies.
It's where you have multipledubbing artists, so I've seen
two.
The most common phenomenon isyou shoot a movie in one
language and you dub, so youhave dubbing artists for every
actor.
So it's the right language, theright accent, all of that, or
(38:19):
the movie is completely reshot.
I've seen that as.
So you have a very popularseries of a super cop Dabang In
one language.
The storyline is the same, butit's one actor who's popular in
that region and then gets shotin another language Same
storyline but with a differentactor.
So it's either that or veryexpensive ways to actually have
(38:43):
the same cast, the samebackground, everything.
Have different people come andshoot their parts and move on
Organizational nightmare.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
We have a question about NAB.
You were at the show.
What did you see?
That was kind of impressive toyou.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Before NAB, I was talking to a few friends and we
were kind of guessing what isthe next big thing.
We were kind of guessing whatis the next big thing.
From the Indian context atleast, we realized that OTT
content the same content isgoing to be on multiple
platforms very soon.
It's either Sony on Jio, sonyon Airtel Extreme or Tata.
(39:17):
Now, it's the same content,same time of the day.
You get it on the same day.
What makes you decide where togo?
Is it price or is it content?
Is it quality of the app or isit the quality of
recommendations?
So that's when we realized thatprobably the next thing which
people are trying to crack formany years is churn reduction,
(39:41):
personalization and reducing theamount of time you have to
spend searching for something.
I think that's a persistenttopic in every trade show.
How do you reduce the amount oftime?
I spent nine minutes trying tofind a movie.
How do you reduce that?
So that kind of stood out thisyear in NAV, at least for me.
I saw a couple of companieslike Think Analytics
(40:02):
personalizing the EPG page,which to me, struck a chord out
this year in nav, at least forme.
Uh, I saw a couple of companieslike think analytics
personalizing the epg page,which to me, struck a chord
because in my house we subscribeto probably 20 channels on our
table but we still have toscroll through like 600, 700
channels or memorize all thenumbers.
Now why can't you justpersonalize the epg for me?
(40:23):
I watch those 10.
Why can't you just pull them upto the top or create my own
channel?
Virtual channels are nowbecoming common.
What to live?
Speaker 1 (40:32):
have you covered the personalization side?
Because I've that's notsomething I've looked into.
I know it's a thing but I'venot ever written about it.
Pretty hard to test, I guess acouple of articles.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
we actually have a contributed article which will
come out next week.
I won't mention who, but it'llbe coming out in the next two
weeks.
It's by a popular OVB.
They're talking aboutpersonalization and data
collection, like where's theboundary, how much data do you
collect and to personalize.
So it's a very interesting take.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
One last question Did you see anything AI-related in
the Codex space that you thoughtwould be impactful in the next
two to five years?
Speaker 2 (41:14):
So I've always loved the use of AI in Codex, and it
doesn't have to be super complex.
I've done tests myself whereyou can actually use a genre of
Codex and you'll know what arethe popular settings which work
very well for them.
That's itself a use of machinelearning, right?
The thousands of parameterswhich are generated every frame
if you can run them through, uh,ai is a buzzword to me.
(41:36):
So I I typically say machinelearning, which is the more
technical in the right way, butif you run certain algorithms on
it it makes your nextcompression easier.
So that's where I would love tosee everyone kind of go towards
a scene understanding,understanding the different
scenes of a movie, which Ibelieve couple of them are
(41:59):
working towards.
A movie can have multiplescenes where you have people
sitting in a coffee shop.
Can it dip into a repository ofsettings to come and compress
that particular scene, versusthen somebody's running behind a
football and use a differentset of settings over there.
I would love for some machineto be able to look at every
(42:23):
frame and say this is the idealbitrate distribution.
Go for it, do it.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Interestingly, at mile high, there were a bunch of
codec vendors we're not notreally even codec vendors as
much as encoding and you knowNetflix talked about what they
were doing, sky talked aboutwhat they were doing and there's
a lot of.
It feels like there's going tobe a lot of machine learning
based innovations coming out inthe next two to five.
(42:49):
I don't know.
You know I don't know how it'sgoing to hit something like
FFmpeg.
You know it's going to beinteresting to see.
I mean, you and I specialize inmaking technology usable to the
average Joe.
I don't know.
You know Netflix showed someAI-based scaling technologies
that you know it's great, butit's not something that you can
(43:10):
access from MPEG unless theyopen source it.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
But I would actually suggest a different route.
Perhaps something like theVMath library, where you don't
have to understand what happensinside because it's pretty
complex, but you can actuallyuse it.
So if somebody creates adatabase or let's say, 100,000
clips, and then you're able tosomehow connect FFmpeg to that
(43:34):
database that's good enough itunderstands, sends some
statistics there.
That server sends back sayinghere are your optimal bit rates.
Go for it.
That itself is good enough for99% of the population, I'd say.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
I'll keep an eye on it for that.
Listen, we're out of time andwe're out of questions.
I really appreciate youspending time with us.
I know it's late at night, butit's always great to chat with
you and I appreciate your takingthe time today.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Oh, thank you so much , Jan.
This has been our.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
This episode of Voices of Video is brought to
you by NetInt Technologies.
If you are looking forcutting-edge video encoding
solutions, check out NetInt'sproducts at netintcom.
Voices of Video.
Voices of Video.
The Voices of Video.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Voices of Video.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to NetEnt's Voices in Video, where we
explore criticalstreaming-related topics with
experts in the field.
If you're watching and havequestions, please post them as a
comment.
On whichever platform you'rewatching, we'll answer live if
time permits.
Otherwise, we'll respond afterthe show.
Today we chat with Krishna RaoBajanagar, who is founder of
OTTverse, which covers OTTtechnologies and business topics
(00:41):
.
By way of education, krishnahas an MS and PhD in electrical
and computer engineering fromthe Illinois Institute of
Technology.
I met Krishna years ago at oneof the several positions he's
held in both US and Indiancompanies.
Today, our conversation willfocus on streaming in India,
which now has the largestpopulation in the world.
We'll cover the market forcesthat impact OTT strategies in
(01:03):
India and then focus on thetechnical decisions that these
market forces entail, like codecselection, ladder formation,
player support, CDN selectionand other issues.
Then we'll spend some timediscussing OTTverse and
particularly the issues thatOTTverse readers are finding
most compelling today.
Krishna, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Thank you so much, Jan.
Thank you, Anita as well, forhaving me on this podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Okay, well, we're glad to have you and I know it's
late for you and we appreciateyour working with our time
constraints, but let's you and Ispoke about this a couple of
days ago, you know it seems likethe Indian market is a very
challenging market to get intoin a number of ways.
Could you cover that?
I mean, what's the Indianmarket like to get into as a
content provider?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
India is a very beautiful, complex and ancient
multicultural country thatcreates an atmosphere of
challenges and opportunities aswell.
To give you an example, we haveapproximately 26 different
languages, each with their ownscript, each with their own
(02:11):
vocabulary, each with their owndictionaries.
So when you want to communicatewith somebody and all the
states in India are dividedbased on linguistic, based on
the languages.
So I come from Bangalore, thetech capital of India If I go to
my neighboring state, there's avery small likelihood I'd
understand their language.
(02:31):
So, if you think about this interms of OTT, if I produce a
language, if I produce a moviein my language, distributing it
to other parts of the countrybecomes a challenge primarily
because people wouldn'tunderstand it.
So this, though it looks like achallenge, it's very interesting
from a technical perspective,brings in interesting concepts
(02:55):
of dubbing.
Can you create one language andtranslate it or dub it in five
or six different languages?
Can you do closed captioning?
Can you five or six differentlanguages?
Can you do closed captioning?
Can you do subtitles indifferent languages and
different scripts?
How do you deliver?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
all of this.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I was just thinking about this with a couple of
friends after our discussion andwe realized that several OTTs
have to struggle with the UI.
So in the US you're probablyaccustomed to having the UI in
English.
In India, most of the OTDplayers have an English UI, but
how do you change the entire UIto a different language and how
(03:38):
do you do it for five differentlanguages in India if you want
to be a national player?
So it's a beautiful, complexcountry country a lot of
challenges and it's a it's agood place to be if you want to
solve interesting problems atscale.
So I'll leave it at that andpick up these topics one by one
I guess, okay, what aboutpricing?
because, um, it felt likepricing was also, uh, pretty
(04:01):
pressured over there I would saymost vendors who have probably
come to india have also facedthis.
So india is a price sensitivemarket.
It's primarily because the thepopulation is very young.
They're coming out of the towns, villages, coming to the metros
.
Recent stats show that 65percent of the population is
(04:22):
below the age of 35.
So it's a very young populationearning their first dollars,
getting their first paychecks.
So people want to pay less forcontent.
People appreciate free stuff inIndia.
So it makes it quite complex torun a business over here.
(04:42):
How do you produce content?
How do you set up producecontent?
How do you set up thetechnology?
How do you deliver it?
Do the marketing while chargingsomething which is sensible.
So, for example, disney plusHotstar I think their top tier
comes roughly to a few dollarsper year, probably 1010, $20 a
(05:04):
year.
So that's how competitive it is.
On the other hand, you haveforces like GeoCinema, who's
running this year's IPL andrunning their entire app for
free on a pure award model.
So this is a conglomerate withvery, very deep pockets, so they
can do a market exercise likethis to capture the audience.
(05:27):
So if you're an OTT, if youwant to enter the market, how do
you actually counteract such aforce.
So that's something interestingto think about as well.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Who's doing a good job coming in from the outside.
You know, here in the States wehave, you know the big names
Netflix, prime, hulu.
You know Paramount.
Who's doing a good jobpenetrating the Indian market
and what are they doing toaccomplish that?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So when you look at the Indian context, it is
interesting.
You have to kind of look at itas the national play versus the
regional play, just because ofthe language differences that I
spoke about.
So if you look at the nationalplayers, there are the likes of
Zee, sony Live, you have AltBalaji, you have Amazon Prime
(06:11):
Video, which does a very goodjob aggregating content, geo
Cinema.
So these are interestingplayers.
Then you have the regionalplayers like Sunnext, which is
for the Tamil market, aha, whichis Telugu.
You have Marathi, you havePlanet Marathi, then you have
Gujarati Shemaru me.
So you have a bunch of regionalplayers who are doing fantastic
(06:34):
work capturing their audiences.
And then you have a veryinteresting phenomenon in India
where the telcos are aggregatingall these OTPs.
So you have these superaggregators.
So GeoCinema is one, airtelExtreme is another one, tata
Play, binge, hindustan Times,ott Play.
What they do is they tie upwith all these OTTs.
(06:57):
They provide all the content ona single app through a single
searchable interface.
So they charge a single price.
I remember Airtel Extreme wouldcharge roughly one and a half
dollars a month to access 50note-eaters, more than 3-4
thousand titles.
So it's a price war on one sidemarket forces?
(07:21):
How do you compensate thecontent creators?
How do you still pay your billsand keep the lights on?
It's a market trying to figureitself out and it's in a very
interesting phase.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Let's start to look at some of the technical issues
that producers are facing.
What's the typical bandwidththat people are streaming their
videos over?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Again, if you look at it geographically, we typically
divide India into the metrocities, which are the largest
ones, like Delhi, mumbai,calcutta, bangalore, chennai.
These regions typically havepretty high bandwidths, good
mobile penetration, all of this.
Then you have the tier one,tier two, tier three cities
where the bandwidth kind ofdrops.
(08:03):
But from a business perspective, many people would agree that
the metros are kind of saturated.
People have two, threesubscriptions and that's not
where they're going to get newsubscriptions.
They have to penetrate into thecities and the towns that do
not have very good connectivity.
(08:24):
So this goes into the mind whenyou actually decide a bitrate
ladder If that's what you werealluding to, the bitrate ladder
and the bandwidths.
So typically you would seepeople streaming at 720p, around
the 1, 1.25 Mbps range, and alot of lower bitrates like the
(08:45):
640p, 480p, 360p goes down.
Your 1080s are generallybetween 2 and 3 Mbps and with
the caveat that I'm only talkingabout X.264 right now For
mobile consumption being around2.5 and above till around 3 Mbps
, and then when it goes to largescreen it comes to around 5, 6,
(09:08):
7 Mbps.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Looking at the encoding ladder, are companies
doing a different encodingladder for metro areas and also
for the outlying regions, or dothey have one encoding ladder
that's going to serve everywherein India?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
From what I know and there might be a few exceptions
to this it is typically on thedevice profile rather than the
geography.
This is what I've seen.
So you have these per devicemanifest sort of configurations
where when you're using Edge.264, you kind of cap it at close to
3 Mbps for 1080p and you can gohigher for large screen.
(09:45):
And I should add that India isa mobile first country.
There was a report by Hotstartwo, three years ago Disney plus
Hotstar where they analyzed anentire year streaming and they
said that 94% of theirsubscribers accessed it through
an Android phone, through aphone, and most of it was
Android.
Ios has a very low penetrationjust because of the price point,
(10:09):
but if you look at it that way,it doesn't really make sense
going up having very high bitrates, hdr all these
capabilities when 90% of yoursubscriber base is going to
access it on a handheld phone.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Typical ladder might go up.
What's the top bit rate youwould see, Is it?
I think you said five megabitsper second?
Is that where you're cappingout?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, five, especially if you're on a large
screen.
But with the OTTs I've workedwith and I've inspected just out
of curiosity over the last fewyears it's typically been two to
three MVPs.
The top the quality on yourmobile phones is fantastic.
On a laptop it's great it doesthe job.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
What's the player situation look like?
You mentioned that most of theplayback is on Android phones.
Apple is very premium, verycostly here in the States.
What about smart TVs and OTTdevices, Even in the big cities?
Are those making penetration?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
They are.
So I was in a talk a couple ofweeks ago where a person from
Samsung Ads actually said thatthere are 14, 15 million TVs
being sold every year.
So it's not well penetrated inthe Indian market primarily
because it requires data.
To get your, you have to end upusing your bandwidth or your
(11:29):
internet connection.
So DTH and normal linear TV arevery, very prevalent in the
towns and villages of India.
Smart TVs are catching up asdata is getting cheaper and as
bandwidths are improving.
So we aren't there yet.
Cord cutting isn't such a bigphenomenon as it is probably in
(11:49):
the US.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
We've talked about the streaming side.
What about the broadcast side?
I mean, is there a broadcastinfrastructure over the air that
makes up a substantialpercentage of what people are
actually watching?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
So cable TV, iptv, is very, very common over here.
It isn't as expensive.
I remember when I was in the USI had a Comcast Xfinity
connection $100 a month and I'vegot internet, probably a phone
and a lot of channels.
It's really not that expensive.
In India it's probably 300 or400 rupees, which roughly around
(12:23):
five dollars, and you get ahost of channels, probably 100,
150 channels.
And again, it was a governmentregulation that you actually get
a sheet of paper to your housewhere you can tick and you can
mark what channels you want andonly those will be provided to
you.
So I still remember rememberdoing that.
(12:44):
So in our house we speak acouple of languages, just
because how my parents cametogether.
So we just choose channels fromthose two languages and we're
done.
We don't need all 100, 150channels.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
And that's all.
Mpeg-2 or H.264?
.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I believe it's MPEG-2 .
Speaker 1 (13:04):
What about codecs over there?
I mean, I heard talk a fewyears ago about VP9 making good
penetration because, a it'ssupported on Android devices and
B it's more efficient thanH.264.
Are you seeing other codecsbeing used over there?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
I was speaking to a friend a few hours back and he
said yes, there's a differencebetween penetration and adoption
.
Yes, there's a differencebetween penetration and adoption
.
People are trying to adopt newcodecs like HEVC, but generally
when you deploy, when you'redeploying on smartphones, avc is
good enough.
You don't have any royaltyissues and for the bitrates
we're streaming, I think it doesa perfectly good job.
(13:39):
Plus, hardware support is there.
It's a legacy codec by now.
So a large number of thesemobile devices aren't your
high-end Android devices.
It's not your Samsung or yourOnePlus devices.
A lot of them are Chinesephones which you get for roughly
$50.
So massive consumption on thosedevices as well.
(14:01):
So anyone trying to deploy acodec has to keep this in mind.
They might not have the bestDRM support on board as well, so
that kind of restricts you onwhat you can actually do.
You might not be able to serve1080p on certain devices just
because of the hardwarecapabilities.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
We talked about the high end of the encoding ladder.
What's the low end of theencoding ladder?
What's the low end of theencoding ladder?
What's you know?
Resolution and bit rate.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
I have seen it go down lower than 360p at some
cases, but 360 is roughly whereI see it cap off 360 at roughly
200, 300 kbps.
I don't see what people couldmake out of that resolution.
But yeah, that's the lower endto keep the streaming going, I
guess yeah, I remember when 640by 360 was pretty high quality.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
You know when you're.
When you're streaming at 200,it's running the kilobits per
second.
It feels like you want a prettyconsistent stream.
Are you seeing a lot of cbrover there, or is it?
You know, two pass vbr or even,uh, exotic things like
constrained CRF.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So, speaking from experience and having been a
vendor in the compression space,people do pick up, I would say,
platforms like Elemental.
You have a few people runningtheirs off of Brightco, certain
other vendors in the space, sowhatever they've provided is
(15:27):
typically what they use.
But people who kind of do ityourself or choose certain
vendors in India, I've seen thatthe common use case is either
CBR not 2Pass, but plain CBR,two pass but plain CBR or capped
CRF.
I personally have dabbled withcapped CRF in my previous role.
(15:48):
We found it to be a very goodapproximate to CBR in terms of
quality.
It was very good.
It didn't overshoot theconstraints that we had put too
badly and was perfectly goodenough for streaming in India
without any buffering issues orany of that.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Can you just briefly describe what CRF is and what
CapCRF is for people who may notknow?
Speaker 2 (16:10):
CRF, so we are talking about Constraint Rate
Factor.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Constant Rate Factor.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Constant Rate Factor right.
So this is a mode in FFmpegwhich is probably the most
popular open sourceimplementation of video codecs
out there where essentially theytry and hit a video quality by
adjusting the number of bitsallocated throughout the video
sequence.
This is in contrast to CBR,where CBR tries to maintain a
(16:40):
certain bit rate by adjustingthe video quality.
So you would start off let'ssay you start off with an
I-frame that would get thehighest quality, then your
P-frames would get the mostallocation of bits and then it'd
be distributed amongst theB-frames trying to hit your bit
rate caps.
Crf obviously has to do similarstuff, but it pays a greater
(17:05):
emphasis on the quality ratherthan maintaining a very constant
bitrate.
So you might see it overshoot.
You will see it overshootactually.
So a modification of this isthe capped CRF, where you can
put a cap and tell CRF maintainyour video quality while not
exceeding a particular bitrateby a certain percentage.
(17:28):
So this makes it very suitablefor ABR streaming and if
somebody asks why?
to that question I would saybitrate is, in my understanding,
is a contract between theplayer and the server.
So when the player is told thatthis stream is 5 Mbps, it
(17:53):
expects and believes that theserver will send five megabits
per second.
Anything more or less by alarge amount will cause problems
at the player.
So it's almost like a contractCRF will end up violating the
contract.
Capped CRF not much and itprovides very good quality.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So for CBR you would set a bit rate and then you
would set the maximum bit rate,and for CBR those two would be
the same.
What do you do in a CRFsituation?
What's the setting that you usein the command string?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I believe it's the max that you set the hyphen bV.
And then you also mentioned theCRF setting.
So FFM Pic has the CRF settingwhere zero is almost lossless,
pristine quality which no humancan make out, and 51 is really
poor.
Typically.
In practice we have gonebetween 20 and 25.
(18:51):
And this is through just goldeneye testing and vmaf scores,
where we realize certain genresdon't require 18, 17.
We didn't see any difference ona mobile phone.
So this is why I kind of goback to the business side of
things, where you understand thegeography, you're streaming at
the devices you're streaming andif you realize that 95% is
(19:15):
going to be consuming on anAndroid phone, there just isn't
a lot, they will make out if youchange your CRF setting from 24
to 25.
You might save a lot on yourCDN card bills and your storage
bills, but you're not harmingthe user experience at all.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, you and I talked about this issue just, I
guess, a couple of weeks ago.
I gave a presentation at MileHigh Video earlier this week and
I sent you some two-pass VBRencodes and you said, well, it
looks great, but you're doublingyour encoding cost.
And then you relayed yourexperience where you use ca, cap
(19:54):
, crf with a CRF value of 25, Ibelieve, and then the maximum
setting.
That turned out.
It was a really thank you forthat because it was a really
interesting portion of thepresentation.
But we did.
The overall VMAF scores wereabout the same.
The encoding time was cut inhalf.
There were some variabilityissues, you know I sent you that
(20:15):
data, but overall it seemedlike a pretty good strategy.
Are you using you know wetalked about VMAF or you
mentioned that really brieflyAre you using the phone version
with the phone profile for VMAF?
Have you experimented with thator are you using the default?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
So again, we do this sort of comparisons where we run
it on the phone model and thenon the desktop model.
I know there is a 4K model, oram I wrong on that?
There is, there is one right.
I've never tried that, to behonest.
I was never in the situation totest 4K.
So the phone model and this,and we actually see a very big
(20:57):
difference.
You could change your bit ratesquite a bit and the phone model
, the scores wouldn't budge.
So we realized that hey, hereis something that would actually
save us a lot on CDN bills andstorage costs and that naturally
leads to per device manifestsdoing something, figuring out
(21:18):
who's asking for a manifest andserve the right manifest, doing
edge manipulation of themanifest.
So I think it naturally tendsitself to a lot of innovation
just having those scores.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
And how do you see that working?
I mean, what different profilesare the typical publishers
supporting?
You've got a mobile profile.
Is there a smart TV profile atthis point, or is computer
playback?
I guess it's not such a bigdeal for premium content here in
the States, but what about inIndia?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
I honestly have worked with only a couple of
them who have seriously thoughtabout per-device manifests.
It has been tried.
But if I look at the premiumpublishers, yes, they are
looking into this, they aredoing experiments.
They are delivering it this way.
But then you have a bunch ofOTTs which are very sure about
(22:08):
where their audience is and theyknow their quality is good at
certain bit rates.
So some of them don't havethese considerations also.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
So HDR, you said there's not a lot.
I mean if you're, unless you'redistributing to the living room
and unless you're using ATVC,HDR is not a factor.
What about DRM?
Is that typically used overthere?
Speaker 2 (22:26):
DRM is a big thing.
So either people roll out theirown using this AES-128 or they
go with multi-DRM vendors whoprovide them with the common
Widevine, fairplay streaming andMicrosoft's PlayReady.
There isn't, I wouldn't say, amajor innovation going on in the
DRM space.
It's just pick up a vendor andgo with it.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
And what about the CDN side?
Are there multiple CDNs thatare covering the different
regions, or is there one big CDNthat everybody uses?
How does that work?
Speaker 2 (22:58):
So Akamai and CloudFront are pretty popular in
India.
I have seen several companiesdo multi-CDN switching between
these two.
You also have Airtel, who hasentered the race with a tie-up
with Quilt to do the rollout oftheir own CDN, and Jio is also
doing the same.
So you have these local, thehomegrown vendors, and plus you
(23:20):
have Akamai CloudFront.
These are the big guys in themarket.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Are people doing multiple CDN support with
switching it?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
is becoming a thing over here.
But to be very frank and I'vebeen looking at data also for
the past few years CDNs havebecome very reliable and very
good at streaming.
You only hear of an occasionalhiccup and crash.
They are pretty good.
Right now.
You might do multi-CDN forcertain issues, probably in a
(23:51):
tier two, tier three city wherecertain transmission isn't very
good, or to save costs.
I might have a better rate fromA versus B and then I switch
them during the prime time.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
It sounds like overall, the market is a
challenging market to get intobecause of the languages and the
regional, but the encodingpicture is actually pretty
simple.
I guess it's not that hard.
Multiple codecs are not a thing.
Hdr isn't a thing.
Exotic encoding ladders aren'ta thing.
(24:26):
So it seems straightforward.
It's the content play, andgetting people to buy your stuff
, I guess, is the big thing.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, so it's the business side, sorry to
interrupt.
It's actually the business side, which is being on all these
technical decisions.
So I'm sure a lot of the teamsare dying to deploy HEVC VP9 and
try the data stuff.
But does it actually pay off?
That's the question.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
What percentage of revenue if I'm an Indian OTT
provider, what percentage of myrevenue and percentage of
revenue, not number ofsubscribers what percentage
comes from inside India andoutside India?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Oh, Jan, probably I don't have the right answer to
that question.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
We were talking and you were mentioning that there's
a huge market outside of Indiafor all the people who have left
and they're paying US prices.
They're not paying, they are.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, so that point is true.
I don't know the exact split,but definitely Indians are there
across the world.
I think the biggest hotspotsare the US, uk, canada, middle
East and a sizable population inAfrica as well South Africa.
So people streaming to theseregions they end up paying in
(25:42):
their local currencies.
I think the example that I wastalking to you the other day was
a particular streaming servicewhich charges like 60 Canadian
dollars over there and probablytwo or three US dollars in India
.
So you can make a lot of moneyover there and it's also
profitable to stream outsideIndia just because of the ad
(26:02):
CPMs, when you can earn severaldollars in double digits
probably in the US, whereas inIndia it's probably $1, $2 CPMs.
That's where it caps off at.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
And just I should have asked this back when we
started talking about thecontent.
But the subscription rates arelow.
Is it advertising supported oris it subscription only?
Speaker 2 (26:29):
So most of the OTTs today do a hybrid or are going
towards hybrid, having startedoff only subscription.
So in India it's a thing tohave a mobile-only plan where
you can play back only on amobile device.
You can't play back on anything.
So that's your lowest price,which might come with ads, might
(26:51):
not come with ads.
And then you say, okay, here'sanother tier where it's on large
screen, it's on mobile, but youwill see the occasional
pre-roll ad, mid-roll ad, and ifyou want to turn it off, go to
the premium plan, ad-freestreaming for one year.
That's typically what happensover here, I mean the IPL is an
(27:13):
oddity in this entire schemewhere they're streaming
everything for free with an adsupport to play, but there have
been talks that they'll berolling out a subscription play
in the next couple of monthsafter the IPL.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Let's switch gears and talk about OTTverse.
You know I have my siteStreaming Learning Center and
I've contributed a lot tostreaming media over the years.
You kind of came out of nowhereand really grabbed a big share,
and in a big way.
What was the idea behindOTTverse and what has it grown
into over the years?
Speaker 2 (27:43):
So the story is very simple.
I was tired of working 12 yearson the trot, so when the
pandemic hit, I just took abreak and I started writing.
So when the pandemic hit, Ijust took a break and I started
writing.
I had always blogged andwritten about obscure stuff
recipes, cricket and stuff likethat.
So I had a lot of notes lyingaround, so I cleaned them up,
(28:04):
put them online and it suddenlybecame popular.
People approached me to sponsorarticles and put ads on the
website, and then one thing ledto the other and we decided to
make it a business.
So that's how it started off.
I think our foundation and ourgoal is always spreading
(28:27):
knowledge.
I found it very tough to switch.
I was in Harmonic earlier, so Ifound it very tough to switch
between transcoding and OTT.
I just couldn't find propermaterial which would go in depth
, so I tried to just put mynotes online and help others as
well.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
So what statistics do you share about viewership?
How many eyeballs, how manyeyeballs.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Geographically we are 55% US and EU put together, 20%
India and the rest is spreadacross Asia and Latin and the UK
.
That's our geographical spread.
It's mostly from the US and theEuropean Union.
Then, in terms of viewership,we are flirting with 100,000
(29:12):
views per month number.
Sometimes it's up down.
We'll probably be consistentlyabove that in the next couple of
months.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
What's the distribution?
Who's looking?
Is it big company, smallcompany developer, ott
programmer?
Who do you see coming to yoursite?
Speaker 2 (29:28):
That's interesting.
Actually, A lot of statisticsactually we get out of LinkedIn
because we have a pretty activechannel over there.
So what we've seen is, whenit's deeply technical, we have
the folks who love tech who comein.
So it might be a programmer, itmight be an entry level
engineer, it could be as high asa CTO, but mostly on the tech
(29:50):
side of things.
And we have a lot of explainerarticles which kind of simplify
stuff, like what is client sidead insertion?
So I've actually met a lot ofmarketing teams who read that
and find it easy to understandand then explain it to others.
And then we've also started afew opinion pieces interviewing
(30:11):
OTTs business owners.
So that drives that obviouslyattracts a slightly different
crowd the C-levels and directors.
So we have a healthy mix and Ithink that's how we'd like it to
be.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
What other you know?
You and I talked about some ofthe educational initiatives that
you're producing from OTTverse.
What are you doing there?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Like inspired by a lot of your workshops, I think
there is a need, truly there isa need, for concentrated
workshops on probably usingFFmpeg for compression, for also
pre-processing, post-processing, in terms of packaging,
actually putting DRM together.
(30:50):
A lot of this knowledge ishidden and it doesn't have to be
, because FFmpeg is also opensource.
Why can't the knowledge be alsoopen out there?
So these are where we want todo a bit of educational
initiatives and specificallytargeting colleges in India,
(31:10):
universities, because videoisn't really a big topic which
is taught over here, so theykind of go on the more
mathematical concepts like imageprocessing, signal processing,
they skim over the video, theentire topic of video, despite
it being a super complex place.
(31:30):
You can probably enter and exit, you can retire working on this
OTT pipeline.
There's enough work for thenext 20, 30 years.
Students aren't really aware ofthat when I interact with them,
so that's something that wewant to do as well.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
So what does this translate to you?
And I talked about potentiallydoing workshops.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
So this is probably going to be a couple of days.
Workshops.
If it's in person, go down toan office.
Oh sorry, that's the otherthing, right, we see a lot of
engineers coming into theworkforce not really
understanding what it's what is?
OTT specifically.
I would even go around sayingthat teams, when they test the
(32:11):
tests are pretty simple I pressplay.
If it doesn't play, hey, that'sa bug.
But can you go a little deeper?
Is there a problem in themanifest?
Or can you create test cases bydeleting certain files but
having them on the manifest sowhen the player tries to play it
, something happens?
Is the player supposed to crash?
Is it supposed to fail greatspeed?
(32:31):
We don't know right.
So so just a general education,either in the corporate region
or the educational region, itcould be a couple of hours or a
half a day, online posts, orthey actually go in person and
walk them through an entire weektalking to them about
end-to-end right, from contentupload to playback,
(32:52):
recommendation, search, and thenget their hands dirty.
It's not very difficult.
End-to-end right, from contentupload to playback,
recommendation, search, thatsort of thing, and then get
their hands dirty.
It's not very difficult, right?
If you have like five hours onyour hand, you could learn
compression, how to use FFA withcommand line, do the HLS, set
up a server and actually streamit to Videojs, and I think when
(33:12):
somebody presses play and itactually works, that much is
enough to encourage them to takethe next step.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
It does light you up when it actually works.
What are the topics that yourreaders are finding interesting
today?
Looking at your page views,what topics are most compelling?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
We find a healthy mix between transcoding, a healthy
mix between transcoding and intranscoding.
We see a lot of questions stillon cbr, crf to pass.
There are very good articlesonline.
I mean, I don't say mine is thebest, so there are very good
explainers.
There are good guides from thefflp website itself, but people
(33:50):
still want to understand more.
They ask about the fundamentalsof compression, like what's an
IDR frame, what's a CRA, what'san IPB?
People want to understand that.
Those articles are prettypopular.
How to package.
That seems to be trending.
Then it goes on to DRM and adinsertion client-side versus DRM
(34:13):
and ad insertion Client sideversus server side ad insertion,
because these are the jargonwhich are thrown out there in
meetings.
So people want to understandwhat's the difference, how?
Speaker 1 (34:23):
do they work?
Speaker 2 (34:24):
and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Getting some questions in One question.
I guess more specifics on thepublishers who are succeeding in
India.
Wanted to know how is Netflixdoing, how is Prime doing, how
is Hulu doing?
Do you have any, you know, Anyinformation to share about how
successful those companies havebeen?
I know you mentioned Prime.
Seem to be doing pretty well.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Prime is doing well.
They have a lot of original CDsthat they've produced and
released.
So Prime's good Netflix hasn'thad that sort of penetration
because they're primarily, Iwould say, a premium platform.
Price point is also high.
They were forced to reducetheir price because they didn't
(35:06):
find any traction in India, sothey have a mobile only plan
which is 149 rupees.
Prime is still restricted, Iwould say, from my guess is to
the metro and the Englishspeaking pockets of the country,
English-speaking pockets of thecountry, but it won't have many
takers in the large part ofIndia where 80% of the
(35:29):
population lives.
But Prime is big.
Jio has recently tied up withHBO and Warner Brothers, so all
of that can now be accessed onJio in a couple of months.
I suppose they were early onDisney Hotstar but that
relationship broke and theymoved over to Jio.
Hollywood content is alsoavailable through Lionsgate.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Lionsgate.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Play.
I don't know if they have anapp of their own, but they are
available on aggregators.
They are available on IntelExtreme.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
A question came through about what's being used
in terms of packaging.
Is it more HLS or Dash?
I guess it's more Dash, right.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
It's actually both.
Funnily enough, most of thenews channels in India also live
stream onto their websites, andall of these are unprotected
HLS.
So HLS is big and Dash is alsobig.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
What about CMF?
Is that making any penetrationat all?
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Just because of the fact that a single DRM cannot be
used.
I don't see a lot of singlefile format across all DRMs.
I've spoken to somebody a monthago and they said that it's
still not on the radar to try asingle file.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
That's kind of an off-the-wall question.
What has been the impact of thesuccess of Plumdog Millionaire?
I guess that's a few years back, but I mean, how did that
change?
Is it the perception of contentin India, or what changes did
that kind of deliver?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
I don't know from the Indian context.
It was just great that anIndian movie won an Oscar.
But a lot of things for examplethe music producer, ar Rahman,
who won, I think, the best musicas well for Slumdog.
He composed 11 songs.
This is a guy who, from 1992,has probably been producing like
(37:22):
50 to 100 songs every year,every song different across
different languages.
So when Rahman won, everybodywas like high time he won
something.
So I would say it had a massiveimpact because the Bollywood
industry has been a thrivingindustry for 70 odd years.
(37:42):
Several superstars were beingpopular across the world as well
.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
How did they do it?
I mean, how do you produce amovie?
You know Slumdog Millionairewas one language in the US.
How do you do it, for you knowdozens of languages in India?
What did they?
What does that look like in thetheater?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
So, honestly, it's a voiceover For most movies.
It's where you have multipledubbing artists, so I've seen
two.
The most common phenomenon isyou shoot a movie in one
language and you dub, so youhave dubbing artists for every
actor.
So it's the right language, theright accent, all of that, or
(38:19):
the movie is completely reshot.
I've seen that as.
So you have a very popularseries of a super cop Dabang In
one language.
The storyline is the same, butit's one actor who's popular in
that region and then gets shotin another language Same
storyline but with a differentactor.
So it's either that or veryexpensive ways to actually have
(38:43):
the same cast, the samebackground, everything.
Have different people come andshoot their parts and move on
Organizational nightmare.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
We have a question about NAB.
You were at the show.
What did you see?
That was kind of impressive toyou.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Before NAB, I was talking to a few friends and we
were kind of guessing what isthe next big thing.
We were kind of guessing whatis the next big thing.
From the Indian context atleast, we realized that OTT
content the same content isgoing to be on multiple
platforms very soon.
It's either Sony on Jio, sonyon Airtel Extreme or Tata.
(39:17):
Now, it's the same content,same time of the day.
You get it on the same day.
What makes you decide where togo?
Is it price or is it content?
Is it quality of the app or isit the quality of
recommendations?
So that's when we realized thatprobably the next thing which
people are trying to crack formany years is churn reduction,
(39:41):
personalization and reducing theamount of time you have to
spend searching for something.
I think that's a persistenttopic in every trade show.
How do you reduce the amount oftime?
I spent nine minutes trying tofind a movie.
How do you reduce that?
So that kind of stood out thisyear in NAV, at least for me.
I saw a couple of companieslike Think Analytics
(40:02):
personalizing the EPG page,which to me, struck a chord out
this year in nav, at least forme.
Uh, I saw a couple of companieslike think analytics
personalizing the epg page,which to me, struck a chord
because in my house we subscribeto probably 20 channels on our
table but we still have toscroll through like 600, 700
channels or memorize all thenumbers.
Now why can't you justpersonalize the epg for me?
(40:23):
I watch those 10.
Why can't you just pull them upto the top or create my own
channel?
Virtual channels are nowbecoming common.
What to live?
Speaker 1 (40:32):
have you covered the personalization side?
Because I've that's notsomething I've looked into.
I know it's a thing but I'venot ever written about it.
Pretty hard to test, I guess acouple of articles.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
we actually have a contributed article which will
come out next week.
I won't mention who, but it'llbe coming out in the next two
weeks.
It's by a popular OVB.
They're talking aboutpersonalization and data
collection, like where's theboundary, how much data do you
collect and to personalize.
So it's a very interesting take.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
One last question Did you see anything AI-related in
the Codex space that you thoughtwould be impactful in the next
two to five years?
Speaker 2 (41:14):
So I've always loved the use of AI in Codex, and it
doesn't have to be super complex.
I've done tests myself whereyou can actually use a genre of
Codex and you'll know what arethe popular settings which work
very well for them.
That's itself a use of machinelearning, right?
The thousands of parameterswhich are generated every frame
if you can run them through, uh,ai is a buzzword to me.
(41:36):
So I I typically say machinelearning, which is the more
technical in the right way, butif you run certain algorithms on
it it makes your nextcompression easier.
So that's where I would love tosee everyone kind of go towards
a scene understanding,understanding the different
scenes of a movie, which Ibelieve couple of them are
(41:59):
working towards.
A movie can have multiplescenes where you have people
sitting in a coffee shop.
Can it dip into a repository ofsettings to come and compress
that particular scene, versusthen somebody's running behind a
football and use a differentset of settings over there.
I would love for some machineto be able to look at every
(42:23):
frame and say this is the idealbitrate distribution.
Go for it, do it.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Interestingly, at mile high, there were a bunch of
codec vendors we're not notreally even codec vendors as
much as encoding and you knowNetflix talked about what they
were doing, sky talked aboutwhat they were doing and there's
a lot of.
It feels like there's going tobe a lot of machine learning
based innovations coming out inthe next two to five.
(42:49):
I don't know.
You know I don't know how it'sgoing to hit something like
FFmpeg.
You know it's going to beinteresting to see.
I mean, you and I specialize inmaking technology usable to the
average Joe.
I don't know.
You know Netflix showed someAI-based scaling technologies
that you know it's great, butit's not something that you can
(43:10):
access from MPEG unless theyopen source it.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
But I would actually suggest a different route.
Perhaps something like theVMath library, where you don't
have to understand what happensinside because it's pretty
complex, but you can actuallyuse it.
So if somebody creates adatabase or let's say, 100,000
clips, and then you're able tosomehow connect FFmpeg to that
(43:34):
database that's good enough itunderstands, sends some
statistics there.
That server sends back sayinghere are your optimal bit rates.
Go for it.
That itself is good enough for99% of the population, I'd say.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
I'll keep an eye on it for that.
Listen, we're out of time andwe're out of questions.
I really appreciate youspending time with us.
I know it's late at night, butit's always great to chat with
you and I appreciate your takingthe time today.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Oh, thank you so much , Jan.
This has been our.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
This episode of Voices of Video is brought to
you by NetInt Technologies.
If you are looking forcutting-edge video encoding
solutions, check out NetInt'sproducts at netintcom.
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