Earlier this year, ATEME made history by winning three Technology & Engineering Emmy® awards from The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) for its achievements in video compression and encoding for media delivery and distribution. In this blog series, I provide an overview of the technologies that were honored with this award and explain how they benefit our customers. We have looked already at the development of perceptual metrics for video compression, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize video compression. We now conclude the series by looking at the use of massive processing resources to optimize video compression.
Another use of the AQI perceptual quality metric pertains to the third Emmy award on the use of massive processing resources to optimize video compression, also referred to as elastic computing. With the increasing use of cloud resources for video processing, you can now customize the use of those resources to your specific needs. For instance, if a library of media assets needs to be encoded in a short period of time, but without any compromise in quality, then each asset can be divided into multiple chunks, and all the chunks can be encoded in parallel. Thanks to the AQI, the quality of all chunks can be maintained at the same level. Moreover, the chunk boundaries can be aligned with scene changes, as explained before. The cost of cloud resources (such as encoder instances) can also be incorporated into the design to determine how many chunks should be used per asset.
Some large SVOD and AVOD providers encode the same media assets multiple times with various encoding parameters to optimize the ABR ladder for OTT streaming. This is another case where the use of massive processing capabilities comes in handy. It is not only useful for the core video compression function, but also for pre-processing functions such as format conversions (such as between HDR and SDR, or between one color gamut and another), framerate conversions, denoising and down- or up-scaling.
The use of distributed processing can even enable optimal use between on-premises and cloud-based resources. This allows you to better control the costs of cloud use and maximize use of on-premises equipment.
ATEME has always strived to be a technology leader. The three technical Emmys are a testament to its technical prowess. Reach out to us to learn more about these technologies and how you might be able to benefit from them.