Blog

Meet Playlist Delta Updates: a wiser way of managing big HLS playlists. A story of a single feature, from customer request to reality. 

Unified Streaming’s research and development division kept itself occupied with all sorts of projects this past year. In the streaming industry, just as it is in the R&D team at Unified Streaming, a big share of technological progress can be chalked up to collaboration.

Unified Streaming considers accessibility vital for streaming and good for people. We support this positive social initiative, so we make sure accessibility is simple to implement and deliver.

Video piracy’s a big, tricky thing for content creators, streaming platforms, and studios. Annually, the cost of imposters passing programming off as theirs can soar into the billions of dollars.

Immersive home entertainment tech: what’s not to love? You flop down on your sofa, fire up your device, and as the content plays, all sorts of good feelings come up.

At some point, everyone goes on a quest. And just like there’s all sorts of people, there’s all sorts of quests. Some people go on a quest to find love.

CMAF ingest is a collaboration between members of the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) and companies operating within the OTT industry.

To misquote Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, ​“It was the 147th of times, it was the 45th of times.”

Let’s explore what DTS audio means, how Unified Streaming integrates DTS audio, why DTS audio is crucial, and which benefits the unique combo of Unified and DTS gives to customers.

In streaming, there’s a simple relationship between quality and satisfaction. If the streaming quality is good, users are happy and don’t complain. But if the streaming quality is poor, users howl and head for the exits.

There are gobs of content out there. Even on a good day it’s hard to tell the difference between one gob of content and another gob. So how do you set your content apart?

Unified Virtual Channel debuted in Unified Streaming’s product portfolio in early 2023. Since then the company has enriched the product, adding more features and refining its operation. Frankly, industry interest in Unified Virtual Channel has been keen.

FAST channels. They’re getting front rows at trade shows. They’re getting bullet points at business meetings. They’re getting headlines and eyes on screens. Is the hype real?

Recently a major telco, a client we’ve worked with for years, brought a problem to our attention.

The other day, a peer in the streaming community reached out via our Unified Certified Slack channel (our forum for exchanging advice with our software course grads). He had a question about live transcribed subtitles.

If you’ve ever played the video game Grand Theft Auto, you’ve felt it. The thrill!

Issues pop up outta nowhere. They try to corner you. They try to kill your streaming workflow.

I sat at a café with my colleague Mark Ogle, senior staff engineer at Unified Streaming (and someone far smarter than I). Coffee was our drink. Unified Virtual Channel was our subject.

Do you know the phrase ​“cut to the chase”? It comes from early Hollywood. Movie execs said it, meaning, Let’s skip extra dialogue and go straight to the action. Like a chase scene. The saying caught on with the public. Now ​“cut to the chase” means ​“get to the point.”

Size. In tech, we deal with it daily. We’re growing our profits. The meeting’s going longer than expected. The client wants a short turnaround. Video streaming devs can relate. In particular, the size of language codes has been flummoxing some of you recently.

Let’s say you’re a content creator, a content owner, a broadcaster, or an OTT streaming service.You’ve got some programming that’s not pulling its weight. It just … sits there.

Now that you’ve got content, you want to stream it. But what else? Put in ads? Charge more for better quality? Create super-personalized experiences? How about this, though: how about . . . all of it?

We live in an extraordinary age. Even our grandparents are on TikTok! Social media platforms make it all so easy.

Where I come from, we have a phrase that I didn’t think was odd or absolutely horrific until I began writing this blog. “There are many ways to skin a cat.” I don’t know how many weird individuals are out there thinking of the various ways they could peel their pet . . .

Slogans come and slogans go. If visitors pay any attention to a tagline on your site, at best they think, ​“huh.” Then they move on with their lives. So maybe we’d better explain what we mean by ​“streaming meets linear TV.”

“We are aligned.” So many people, so many things in this world need to align with others for them to work well. These things include audio tracks. With your video tracks.

“Everyone’s talking about FAST channels.” That’s not quite true.

What’s that sound? Have you just started streaming that highly anticipated live sports match for the big streaming service you work for?

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?

Our company uses Slack. I’m an active member of about 5 channels, where I post comments, replies, and emojis. My comments and replies are either jokes or attempts at jokes.

The term ​“Hyrum’s Law” was brought up in a tech standup meeting the other day. I think a developer said some customer had jerry-rigged our source code for some peculiar (and, only to my mind, evil) purpose. Then he said, ​“So, yeah — it’s basically a classic case of Hyrum’s Law.”

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.

Children are often praised for ​“playing well with others.” That same quality prized in kids can pay off for OTT (over-the-top) video streaming companies.

This blog’s about the history and mystery of Manifest Edit: how it started; how user feedback helped to improve it; and how it’s evolving.

Certification programs not only help trainees develop workforce-ready skills. They can also help companies that lead the programs foster relationships with customers, enabling these customers to use the company’s products to their full potential.

Today I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to create new virtual live linear channels using Remix VOD2Live by repurposing existing content prepared for Video on Demand.

Over the past year we have been working on making it easier for us to demonstrate our product features and for users to get started using them.

In this third blog of our multi-part series on load testing video streaming at scale, we evaluate different Media Processing Functions (MPFs) in different parts of the network. We focus on achieving the best results when streaming linear Live channels.

In this second blog of our multi-part series on load testing video streaming at scale, we evaluate different Video On Demand (VOD) setups that rely on remote object-based cloud storage services like S3.

The cloud has become a pillar for the deployment of many streaming video services, which often run different functions in different parts of the network.

The Unified Streaming Platform now supports Remix VOD2Live, a new way of creating a linear live channel from VOD assets without the need for a live encoder.

As streaming service providers move to replace local storage solutions with cloud storage services, Unified Streaming is increasingly asked for best practices to optimize performance, reduce the cost and intelligently scale cloud-based video on-demand (VOD) deployments.

This blog post presents an online (machine) learning bitrate adaptation solution, that focuses on low-latency applications.

‍How the DASH-IF Live Media Ingest Protocol — Interface 1 using the CMAF file format can be utilised when ingesting media to a smart origin (just in time packager) within a live adaptive-bitrate streaming workflow.

Channel zapping, sub-second, glass to glass, parity. What are we talking about?

The average person now has access to more streamable material than they could wish to watch in a lifetime. This means viewer capriciousness is increasing alongside their expectations on quality of experience.

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.

The next generation mobile network, sometimes referred to as 5G, targets extremely ambitious key performance indicators (KPIs) such as sub-millisecond latency, 10 – 100 times higher data rates, 10 – 100 times more devices and 1000 times higher mobile data volume.

Video streaming on the Internet is an increasingly popular application that poses challenging bandwidth requirements, especially in mobile networks and when the number of users increases.

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.

More and more video is streamed over the internet every day. To be able to target a big audience, while still keeping control over the way in which you deliver your videos, a tailored solution of hardware and software is called for.