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 …
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. Ot…
What’s CMAF ingest? CMAF ingest is a collaboration between members of the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) and companies operating within the OTT industry. Es…
To misquote Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the 147th of times, it was the 45th of times.”In mid-July 2024, in Sapporo, Japan, MPEG — an allian…
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 y…
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 …
Guess what is no surprise? That the demand for high-quality video experiences keeps spiking. Streaming platforms that want to meet this demand firs…
Unified Virtual Channel debuted in Unified Streaming’s product portfolio in early 2023. Since then the company has enriched the product, adding more features…
As NAB Show 2024 nears (we’ll be there, booth W3220), we notice that FAST channels are living it up. They’re getting front rows at trade shows. They’re…
Recently a major telco, a client we’ve worked with for years, brought a problem to our attention. During most of their programs they noticed frames were bein…
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 cours…
If you’ve ever played the video game Grand Theft Auto, you’ve felt it. The thrill! Crashing your car, robbing people, and doing much worse. De…
Issues pop up outta nowhere. They try to corner you. They try to kill your streaming workflow. Never fear, streaming engineer.
Recently I sat at a café with my colleague Mark Ogle, senior streaming solutions engineer at Unified Streaming (and someone far smarter than I). Unified Vir…
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.
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. …
Now that you’ve got content, you want to stream it.But what else? Put in ads? Charge more for better quality? Create deeply personalized experiences? How abo…
We live in an extraordinary age. Even our grandparents are on TikTok! Social media platforms make it all so easy. But if you want to set up your own stream…
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.”…
A comparison between traditional broadcast TV and streaming linear TV workflows
“We are aligned.” So many people, so many things in this world need to align with others to work well. These things include audio tracks. With your video tracks. Oh, and your text tracks, too.
“Everyone’s talking about FAST channels.”That’s not quite true. Everyone who knows what FAST channels are, and either profits from them already, or plans to…
What’s that sound? Have you just started streaming that highly anticipated live sports match for the big streaming service you work for? Has that m…
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? Well, firs…
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 att…
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 so…
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…
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. No…
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. What is Manifest …
Certification programs not only help trainees develop workforce-ready skills. They can also help companies that lead the programs foster relationships with c…
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 Vide…
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. This began with…
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 part…
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 rem…
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. Consi…
As part of the launch of our Remix VOD2Live solution we created a demo to show how it can schedule a playlist of VOD assets and deliver it as a linear live str…
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. To…
As streaming service providers move to replace local storage solutions with cloud storage services, Unified Streaming is increasingly asked for …
This blog post presents an online (machine) learning bitrate adaptation solution, that focuses on low-latency applications. What makes streaming adaptive? …
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 t…
Channel zapping, sub-second, glass to glass, parity. What are we talking about? The confusing world of low latency. With multiple definitions, standards and so…
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 along…
This past summer marked the third anniversary of the announcement of CMAF, the Common Media Application Format developed to increase the interoperability of st…
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 mark…
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…
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 prac…
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a crucial component of many video streaming setups. If you run a commercial video streaming service, the technology to restr…
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 compli…
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 t…
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 o…
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 …
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…
As the latest release of the Unified Streaming Platform adds full WebVTT support for offline and dynamic packaging, all major delivery formats for text tracks …
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 de…
From April 25th 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 b…
Old habits die hard. This is true even for a fast-moving, technology-driven industry like video streaming. Ever since the introduction of Apple’s HLS specifica…
While streaming media is rapidly becoming the dominant way in which video is consumed, current technology only offers limited flexibility when it comes to maki…
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…
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 …
The next generation mobile network, sometimes referred to as 5G, targets extremely ambitious key performance indicators (KPIs) such as sub-millisecond latency,…
Video streaming on the Internet is an increasingly popular application that poses challenging bandwidth requirements, especially in mobile networks and when th…
Video streaming over the Internet is becoming an increasingly popular and important service to provide. It is a convenient way for content owners and distribut…