This month’s question, which we’ve been getting a lot, is: How do I run a containerized setup of your software on my new Apple Silicon-based Mac?

I’d like to discuss free ad-supported TV, or FAST: how it can keep your streaming service more relevant, and how to run FAST without breaking the bank. Which I believe is possible if you can skip the need for a live encoder.

This past summer marked the third anniversary of the announcement of CMAF, the Common Media Application Format developed to increase the interoperability of streaming video.

Server-side Dynamic Ad Insertion for VOD is hard and expensive, right? You’ll have to re-encode your entire content library, find a way to add the SCTE 35 markers necessary for ad insertion … and you may even need to upgrade your encoders to make it all work.

Deploying a setup in the cloud can vastly enhance your flexibility. Without the need to actually own any servers you can quickly spin up instances, so that you can scale up or down instantly.

With the latest release of the Unified Streaming Platform, it becomes possible to do Dynamic Ad Insertion for Live. This new solution is based on industry practices and relies on SCTE 35 markers to signal advertisement opportunities, in combination with third-party ad services that insert the actual ads.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a crucial component of many video streaming setups.

Content protection is one of the most important topics in video streaming and as it becomes more advanced and harder to circumvent, it also becomes more complicated to implement.

Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) Live streaming is a demanding way of delivering video. In addition to the need for real-time encoding of the source video into tracks that represent different qualities, all of the different tracks must remain time-aligned and perfectly in sync.

As the video streaming market has matured over the past years, quality of experience has improved a lot: consumers can choose from a wider variety of content offered by a wider variety of services, and almost all devices on the market can handle playback of high definition content.

Signaling information about media content, what’s so fancy about that? Metadata may seem like the most boring part of a video streaming setup, but it is vital and adaptive bitrate streaming would not be possible without it.

As the 2017 edition of one of the biggest trade shows in the broadcasting business has just finished, this blog post provides an overview of interesting topics presented at this year’s International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam.

No large scale video streaming setup can be successful without supporting multiple playout formats. Such is the law dictated by the wide variety of end user devices, many of which have their own playout requirements for video.

From April 25th, 2017 onwards, when Chrome 58 is scheduled for release, DRM encrypted video streams served from a non-secure origin will no longer work in Google’s browser.

Old habits die hard. This is true even for a fast-moving, technology-driven industry like video streaming.

In June of 2016, the committee draft of the Common Media Application Format (CMAF) specification was released, bringing the promise of a single format for use in the encoding and packaging of media.

While streaming media is rapidly becoming the dominant way in which video is consumed, current technology only offers limited flexibility when it comes to making on the fly changes to content, such as serving specific parts of a stream or inserting clips.

Video streaming over the Internet is becoming an increasingly popular and important service to provide. It is a convenient way for content owners and distributors to reach a wider audience compared to linear broadcasts.