--- title: News and Events | MediaMelon | Jan Ozer description: Jan Ozer --- [![MediaMelon logo color](https://info.mediamelon.com/hs-fs/hubfs/20200715_MM_logo_1000.png?width=1000&height=184&name=20200715_MM_logo_1000.png "MediaMelon logo color")](https://mediamelon.com) [![White Logo](https://info.mediamelon.com/hubfs/20200715_MM_logo_1000_white.png "White Logo")](https://www.mediamelon.com) - Platform - [Platform Overview](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-platform) - [SmartSight QoE](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-qoe) - [SmartSight Ads](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-ads) - [SmartSight QBR](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-qbr) - Solutions - [SVOD Services](http://www.mediamelon.com/streaming-intelligence-solutions#SVOD) - [AVOD Services](http://www.mediamelon.com/streaming-intelligence-solutions#AVOD) - [FAST Services](http://www.mediamelon.com/streaming-intelligence-solutions#FAST) - [Live/Low-latency](http://www.mediamelon.com/streaming-intelligence-solutions#Live) - [TVE Services](http://www.mediamelon.com/streaming-intelligence-solutions#TVE) - [OVP/Integrators](http://www.mediamelon.com/streaming-intelligence-solutions#OVP) - Resources - [Technology](http://www.mediamelon.com/core-technology-mediamelon) - [Partners](http://www.mediamelon.com/ecosystem-partners) - [Collateral](http://www.mediamelon.com/collateral-mediamelon) - Company - [News/Blog](https://info.mediamelon.com/news) - [Customers](http://www.mediamelon.com/our-customers-mediamelon) - [About Us](http://www.mediamelon.com/about-mediamelon) [![Contact Us](https://hubspot-no-cache-na2-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/cta/default/20646593/a4852500-8f72-4d3d-bba9-970873524d5e.png)](https://hubspot-cta-redirect-na2-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/cta/redirect/20646593/a4852500-8f72-4d3d-bba9-970873524d5e) # MediaMelon News & Events Posts by: ## Jan Ozer Jan Ozer ## Telecine: MediaMelon SmartSight QBR Case Study [Jan Ozer](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/author/jan-ozer) August 10, 2020 This post highlights the details of the Telecine customer experience deploying the SmartSight QBR solution to address a number of business critical issues that arose due to service growth. The recording of the webinar that the MediaMelon team... [Read More](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/telecine-mediamelon-smartplay-case-study) [![Telecine: MediaMelon SmartSight QBR Case Study](https://info.mediamelon.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Images/1x1.png?width=1&height=1&name=1x1.png)](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/telecine-mediamelon-smartplay-case-study) [![SmartSight QBR Integration](https://info.mediamelon.com/hubfs/Images/SDK-QBR_InfoGraphics-07.png)](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/integrating-smartplay-into-your-encoding-and-distribution-ecosystem) [Products,](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/tag/products) [Solutions](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/tag/solutions) ### [Integrating SmartSight QBR Within Your Video Workflow](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/integrating-smartplay-into-your-encoding-and-distribution-ecosystem) [Jan Ozer](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/author/jan-ozer) August 10, 2020 As covered in the previous post here [Saving Bandwidth Costs & Improving QoE](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/how-mediamelon-smartplay-saves-bandwidth-costs-and-improves-qoe), the key to SmartSight QBR run-time operation is the set of iMOS hintfiles generated by... [Read More](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/integrating-smartplay-into-your-encoding-and-distribution-ecosystem) [![SmartSight QBR](https://info.mediamelon.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/smartplay_qbr_dashboard1080608-1.jpg)](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/how-mediamelon-smartplay-saves-bandwidth-costs-and-improves-qoe) [Products,](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/tag/products) [Solutions](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/tag/solutions) ### [How SmartSight QBR Saves Bandwidth & Objectively Improves QoE](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/how-mediamelon-smartplay-saves-bandwidth-costs-and-improves-qoe) [Jan Ozer](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/author/jan-ozer) August 10, 2020   MediaMelon’s SmartSight QBR (aka SmartPlay) is a [streaming optimization solution](https://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-qbr) that reduces bandwidth use by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without re-encoding. As you’ll read in this post, SmartSight QBR works by analyzing the quality of every segment in an ABR package using a objectively researched technique that produces an iMOS hintfile, which is used by the SmartSight enabled video player to improve the logic that selects how video segments are retrieved. [Read More](https://info.mediamelon.com/news/how-mediamelon-smartplay-saves-bandwidth-costs-and-improves-qoe) [![MM_logo_white_transparent](https://info.mediamelon.com/hs-fs/hubfs/MM%20Logos/MM_logo_white_transparent.png?width=250&height=47&name=MM_logo_white_transparent.png "MM_logo_white_transparent")](https://www.mediamelon.com) Your source for  streaming intelligence 50 Francisco Street, Suite 265 San Francisco, CA 94133, USA +1 415 967 1256 ### Product - [Platform Overview](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-platform) - [SmartSight Ads](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-ads) - [SmartSight QoE](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-qoe) - [SmartSight QBR](http://www.mediamelon.com/product-smartsight-qbr) ### Resources - [Technology](http://www.mediamelon.com/core-technology-mediamelon) - [Collateral](http://www.mediamelon.com/collateral-mediamelon) - [Blog/News](https://info.mediamelon.com/news) ### Follow [Follow us on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/mediamelon) [Follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MediaMelon) [Follow us on Facebook](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTsVDCv-Tv6BjVWD6wB11Mg) [![Get our News/Blog](https://hubspot-no-cache-na2-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/cta/default/20646593/44f14b3a-6e8f-46ed-9e44-7a91592a1e0d.png)](https://hubspot-cta-redirect-na2-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/cta/redirect/20646593/44f14b3a-6e8f-46ed-9e44-7a91592a1e0d) © Copyright 2026, MediaMelon, Inc. All rights reserved. - [Privacy Policy](https://info.mediamelon.com/privacy-policy-mediamelon) ```json { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "articleBody" : "This post highlights the details of the Telecine customer experience deploying the SmartSight QBR solution to address a number of business critical issues that arose due to service growth. The recording of the webinar that the MediaMelon team delivered in conjunction with Telecine is available, but we also have included a number of the key slides and summary results below to illustrate the incredible potential of this solution. Telecine, Brazil’s leading movie streaming operator, is a joint venture of Globo Group with Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and The Walt Disney Company, and also streams content from Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. This case study will introduce Fabio Lima, who manages the Telecine Video Platform, and who selected MediaMelon SmartSight as a solution to some business challenges arising from substantial service growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Figure 1. Fabio Lima, Telecine Video Platform Product Owner In March, 2020, Telecine went live with MediaMelon SmartSight QBR aka SmartPlay solution. integrated with the Telecine encoding, delivery, and playback workflows, and drove a 42% cut in bandwidth usage while improving viewer quality of experience. The business improvements form this deployment helped Telecine manage the 4x increase in bandwidth during the lockdown associated with the COVID-19 crisis. The core content in this post case is taken from a MediaMelon webinar during which which Fabio described his experience and the results that SmartPlay delivered. The headline benefit is a significant improvement in objective video quality for the service, contributing to greater customer engagement while saving 42% of bandwidth costs. You can watch Fabio’s presentation from that webinar in this video - his section starts at the 35:00 mark. Our thanks and appreciation goes to the Telecine team for a collaborative approach to the implementation and their generosity and sharing the results achieved. SmartPlay Overview – Streaming Optimization Solution By way of introduction, SmartSight QBR aka SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that can reduce video service bandwidth costs by 35% or more while improving iMOS objective measures of consumer QoE. Even better, the solution works within any existing ABR content encoding/delivery workflow—including integration with existing device video players. Improvements can be achieved - as discussed in the presentation - even in workflows that have deployed content-adaptive encoding (also called per-title encoding). For a more detailed description of the QBR approach—including the iMOS measurement—can be found in the companion series of blog posts here: Part 1, Part 2. Telecine Overview – Operational Goals for Tool Selection It's interesting to start by understanding Telecine’s operational goals. By way of background, Telecine replaced its CEO in 2018 and implemented development squads as defined in Spotify’s Agile Scaling Model. They also implemented some very aggressive “stretch” goals as shown in Figure 2, including dropping the re-buffering ratio from 1.4% to 0.65%, lowering the startup time for 14 seconds to 3 seconds, and cutting the platform operational cost in half. One of the primary motivators for selecting additional optimization tools was to achieve the final goal of cutting platform costs in half. Figure 2. Telecine Goals for 2019. Telecine’s Streaming Operational Environment It's also useful to understand Telecine’s operating environment (Figure 3). As mentioned, Telecine is owned by the Globosat division of Brazilian conglomerate Grupo Globo in conjunction with several Hollywood studios. Globo also runs multiple linear broadcast channels and acquires all content that plays on Telecine. Before handing the content off to Telecine, Globo performs a variety of quality assurance checks to validate that the media meets their standards, and makes sure that subtitling and the necessary language tracks are available for the contents. Figure 3. Telecine Operational Environment After QA, all media goes to Comcast which encodes and packages the video using AWS Elemental MediaConvert and publishes and delivers to Telecine subscribers via the Akamai CDN. Telecine uses the Bitmovin player for Web (subscribers watching on computers via browsers), plus Android, and iOS viewers, which comprises about 50% of all sessions. The other half is consumed by SmartTVs, gaming platforms, and OTT devices like AppleTVs. Currently, the front end apps for these devices are managed by Deltatre, but Telecine is in the process of developing these players internally to increase their agility regarding implementing and debugging new features. Lastly, Telecine uses Conviva for QoE analytics, which historically has provided the measurements used to set and validate the performance-related goals detailed above. Concept Validation Prior to SmartPlay Deployment Prior to selection of new solutions, Telecine performed a proof of concept to validate the methodology of delivering the cost reductions they were seeking without degrading the quality of experience or introducing bugs or other instabilities into their ecosystem. This was performed by Telecine employees consuming QBR enabled content on a variety of devices and computers in many environments and many connection speeds. For example, several users watched movies in traffic as that is a common use case, and tried mobile phones that were known to experience poor connection or video playback performance. During these trials, analytics tracked by Telecine proved that the bandwidth reductions QBR delivered were substantial without noticeable quality reductions, and Telecine selected the MediaMelon solution. The SmartSight Streaming Intelligence Platform As shown in Figure 4, the installation involved two integrations with the overall SmartSight Platform: The iMOS Content Analyzer that produced the iMOS hintfiles as an adjunct to the other components of the video origin file system. Telecine integrated the iMOS Content Analyzer with the Comcast publishing system via a watch folder, so content analysis and iMOS hintfile generation initiate when the CMS publishes a Content Information File in the Watch Folder. The Watch Folder Monitor application detects the new Content Information File, parses it, and submits a job request to the iMOS Content Analyzer. According to Lima, the Content Analyzer integration took less than 15 days to complete and debug after Comcast started on the integration. The real-time device player system. The choice of the Bitmovin player—a long time MediaMelon solution partner—meant that integration the SmartSIght SDK into the player logic was very straightforward. Lima stated was “the easier portion of the whole installation,” which took less than two days. As highlighted above, the source assets are sent from Globo to Comcast which encodes using AWS Elemental MediaConvert. To implement SmartPlay, Comcast needed to transfer ABR assets to the iMOS Content Analyzer service to validate the file and generate the iMOS hintfiles. In particular, Comcast needed to be assured that the integration wouldn’t interrupt the workflow or cause security-related issues. Figure 4. High-level view of Telecine’s production, delivery, and playback infrastructure. Incremental Rollout Plan for Content and Players By design, SmartPlay enables incremental rollout for both content and players. So, if iMOS hintfiles don’t exist for specific content, the QBR-enabled player logic uses standard ABR algorithms to play the video. If the iMOS hintfile does exist, and the QBR logic hasn’t been integrated with that specific device or player, the existing ABR player ignores the hintfiles and plays the video using standard ABR logic. Figure 5. Telecine’s rollout plan for SmartPlay. Telecine started the rollout slowly, deploying on the Bitmovin-based web player and creating iMOS hintfiles for new movies released each week. According to Lima, “for new content, we introduced five to ten movies a week and that was intentional. We made sure that we started small but with some relevant consumption. So, we started with new movies which are always a big hit for Telecine.” Regarding the smoothness of the rollout, Lima continued, “We examined the initial results and we had zero issues. This is something I was really cautious about. We have had lots of issues on the platform overall, which is one of the reasons we are taking ownership of the code. I was very cautious about adding something new that had the potential to generate new bugs.” Recounting the user response, Lima added, “So, we started slow and after a month or so we were free to move on because there were zero bugs and zero complaints about quality. I’m sure if the quality was not good we would hear about it and there were zero complaints.” COVID-19 Impact on Telecine’s Traffic – Demand Spike Telecine was in production with SmartPlay since early March 2020. About two weeks into the deployment, COVID-19 hit Brazil, the nation shut down, and Telecine traffic increased by 3X – 4X. Here’s where another SmartPlay feature kicked in to help Telecine manage the spike in demand. Specifically, operators can run SmartPlay using business rules tuned to specific goals; Quality, Bitrate, and Cost Save. Both Quality and Bitrate modes improve quality and reduce bandwidth usage, with Quality mode delivering higher quality and lower bandwidth savings and Bitrate mode delivering greater bandwidth reductions and fewer quality improvements. In Cost Save mode, SmartPlay prioritizes bandwidth savings while maintaining quality constant (i.e. not attempting to improve it by buffering ahead). Telecine launched SmartPlay in Quality mode. Then COVID-19 hit, and reducing outbound bandwidth became a priority for all large operators. As Lima recounts, “We had a discussion with the CEO and he was seeing all the other players cutting down bandwidth usage. For us, with SmartPlay, the solution was already there. So, I spoke with the MediaMelon team over Slack, and within a couple of hours, we changed from Quality to Bitrate mode and we started delivering much lighter video. Even though the growth related to COVID 19 affected us we had zero issues in addressing a new consumption behavior.” Commenting on subscriber response to the change, Lima added, “Again, no users noticed the difference. We immediately saw the reduction of bandwidth in the analytics but there were no quality complaints from users and that’s something I had focused on in the beginning and throughout the rollout.” Going Forward – SmartPlay Implementation on Android & iOS Going forward, Telecine is focusing on taking the front-end player code in house. After that, Lima expects that it will be very easy to implement SmartPlay on Android and iOS, which are the other platforms being validated at this moment. As shown in Figure 5, Lima next expects to start porting to Smart TVs but will manage these integrations carefully, commenting, “Smart TVs are about 50% of our consumption, so ideally making a good impact on Smart TVs will save a lot of bandwidth for us. But we need to be very cautious because on a big screen we need to make sure that the quality is as good as we can get. So, we are developing the code for Smart TVs and plan to launch several POCs in the second semester.” Case Study Deployment Results During the webinar video, Lima displays multiple charts detailing the case study results. The first is the average bitrate chart shown in Figure 6. For reference, the blue line is all Telecine traffic, and the yellow line represents web browser viewing— essentially subscribers watching on computers via the Bitmovin player with QBR enabled. During the webinar, Lima points out that Comcast changed to AWS Elemental QVBR encoding in November 2019. Though QVBR is a form of per-title encoding, you see only a modest and slow reduction in bandwidth from November through March. Figure 6. The average bitrate per subscriber over the deployment timeframe. Telecine implemented SmartPlay in early March on the web browser clients, and you see a very profound and immediate impact on bandwidth in the yellow line. However, since the browser consumption was only about 10% of total Telecine traffic, the overall numbers represented by the blue line show only a small impact. Re-buffering Ratio Reduced to 0.56% for Overall Traffic The deployment also clearly exhibited that SmartPlay also had a significant impact on re-buffering ratio for devices that included the QBR solution, as shown in Figure 7, with overall results again in blue and browser related traffic in yellow. As described earlier, one of Telecine’s stretch goals was to drop the re-buffering ratio from 1.4 to 0.65%. In Figure 7, you see that Telecine achieved this for the web clients soon after installing SmartPlay in March 2020. Recent system tweaks have reduced the re-buffering ratio down to 0.4% for the web clients, and 0.56% for overall traffic. Not surprisingly, Lima commented, “We are very happy with that result as well.” Figure 7. SmartPlay helped drive Telecine’s re-buffering ratio down to 0.4%. Streaming Intelligence Reduced Video Bitrate by 42.17% The final results Lima shared related to bandwidth savings produced by SmartPlay over ten days in April 2020 on web clients web. As you can see in Figure 8, SmartPlay reduced the video bitrate by 42.17% while improving the iMOS score by 0.24. Commenting on these savings, Lima shared, “We chose April because of the huge consumption we had relating to COVID. So, you see that the reduction is clear. You see that that there are lots of gigabytes saved which is something that we are happy about.” Improved Customer Retention – Key Business Outcome Lima commented on how these numbers were not just operational improvements - they also improved customer retention, stating, “But, bandwidth savings are not the first priority for us at the moment. We are making sure that the experience of users is optimal and retaining subscribers is a big plus. We want to make sure that everyone can play a Telecine movie and for that, we want our movies to be as light as possible and SmartPlay allows us to address that.” Figure 8. Bitrate saved and quality improvements over ten days in April. Lima concludes with a look at Telecine’s goals for the platform and QBR going forward (Figure 9). As mentioned several times, Telecine wants to work to gain greater control of the web and mobile apps, and then to fine-tune performance and eliminate bugs. Figure 9. Telecine’s short term goals for the video platform and SmartPlay. SmartTV apps for Samsung and LG are next on the development roadmap. Since SmartTVs are such a major platform for consumption, Lima wanted to ensure that the “video experience is incredible.” Once the front end is finished on all these platforms Lima wants to continue to optimize playback as much as possible. Lima takes considerable pride that goals relating to startup time and re-buffering ratios transitioned from seemingly unattainable stretch goals to day-to-day health metrics. To explain, he stated, “To us, these things seemed like stretch goals because we were delivering a really bad experience for users, but now they are considered normal health metrics, which for us is an amazing achievement. We’ll keep attempting to improve these metrics in the future, but it’s definitely not a major concern as it was in the past.” SmartPlay Case Study – Improved QoE and Reduced Cost Simultaneously Summarizing the benefits that the SmartSight QBR /SmartPlay deployment produced: “We deployed SmartPlay to improve QoE and reduce costs after implementing a content-aware encoding solution we thought would deliver most of our data saving goals, but didn’t. In contrast, the SmartPlay results have been extraordinary! We reduced the average subscriber bitrate from 4 Mbps to almost 2.8 Mbps while improving quality and minimizing spikes in our web traffic. As a result of lower traffic, we’ve further reduced re-buffering and video start time. Overall, our QoE has gone up while our costs have gone down, which is a fabulous result.”", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Jan Ozer", "sameAs" : "", "url" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/news/author/jan-ozer" }, "dateModified" : "10/08/2020", "datePublished" : "10/08/2020", "headline" : "Telecine: MediaMelon SmartSight QBR Case Study", "image" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "height" : 400, "url" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/smartplay_telecine_bandiwdth1080608-1.jpg", "width" : 750 }, "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/news/telecine-mediamelon-smartplay-case-study", "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/hubfs/20646593/20200715_MM_logo_1000.png" }, "name" : "MediaMelon, Inc.", "url" : "https://www.mediamelon.com" } } ``` ```json { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "articleBody" : "As covered in the previous post here Saving Bandwidth Costs & Improving QoE, the key to SmartSight QBR run-time operation is the set of iMOS hintfiles generated by the iMOS Content Analyzer. The hintfiles contain quality measurement data for each video asset at the various ABR presentation bitrates. QBR enhanced players use this data to qualify selection of the segments to retrieve for each time slot, enhancing their typical ABR logic. SmartSight QBR is the perceptual video quality optimization tool as the operations team see it. In this post, we will discuss how to integrate SmartSight QBR into your encoding, delivery, and playback infrastructure. System Overview The diagram here shows the two integration points for SmartSight QBR into customer’s content preparation and deployment infrastructure. At the head end, the iMOS Content Analyzer must be integrated with the customer’s CMS/MAM to trigger the production of the hintfiles which are stored with the ABR assets through the delivery pipeline. Figure 1. SmartSight integrates with your CMS/MAM to create hintfiles, and support QBR player delivery. On the end-user device side, to enable SmartPlay operation, operators must integrate their players with the SmartPlay plug-in. During installation and startup, the MediaMelon Support team works with the Operator’s team to deploy and validate the integration between the Content Analyzer and the customer’s CMS/MAM and the player and the SmartPlay plug-in. iMOS Content Analyzer Approach In terms of installation, MediaMelon will support a customer to integrate Content Analyzers on their cloud accounts, and provide examples templates for on-prem and other setups. In terms of player integration, the SmartSight SDK is integrated into the majority of the commercial ABR plater offerings, and can be added to additional or bespoke players with a rapid turn-around time. It is important to note that QBR enhanced players seamlessly support partial deployments of hinted video assets. If hintfiles don’t exist for a given asset, players simply use existing ABR logic. If hintfiles do exist but the player doesn’t yet support QBR, it will ignore the hintfiles and use standard ABR logic. Most customers start with deployment of the simplest or the most popular device platform at first, and add other players incrementally over time. They can also start with adding hintfiles for the top 10% of existing video assets or most popular channels. In this manner, customers can deploy SmartSight QBR in small incremental steps, validating costs and quality ROI at each step, and achieve the full benefits for supported assets and players over time. Installing and Integrating the Content Analyzer The iMOS Content Analyzer processes, on the fly, an unencrypted snapshot of all content in an ABR package during encoding, giving each segment a rating on a scale from 1-5, to produce an encrypted hintfile for streaming delivery. As described below, this hintfile is delivered to the video player at the start of the playback session and is used by the SmartSight SDK to better inform the playback segment request process. The iMOS Content Analyzer produces at least two hintfiles; one for mobile devices and another for all other devices. If the ABR technologies deployed by the operator use different segment sizes, the Content Analyzer creates separate hintfiles for all technologies. In operation, the Content Analyzer utilizes a Machine Learning engine that is trained on the operator’s content. During installation, the system is trained on a subset of customer content. During the deployment, SmartSight QoE provides feedback on the performance of the QBR algorithm across the entire deployment which is fed back into the system to further improve the quality-related accuracy of the Content Analyzer. Content Analyzer Speeds and Feeds MediaMelon can, for example, provide the iMOS Content Analyzer as a Docker container, to be installed either in a stand-alone machine on-prem or in the cloud on a virtual compute instance. Customers can deploy as many instances as needed to produce hintfiles for their existing libraries as well as for their newly acquired content. The Content Analyzer is codec agnostic but must be tuned separately for each codec. MediaMelon has tested very extensively with all currently deployed codec variants and supported video formats, including MP4, TS, and fMP4 wrappers, either unsegmented or segmented for HLS or DASH. Figure 2. You can run the Content Analyzer manually (shown), via batch commands, watch folders, or a REST API. Typically, operators integrate the Content Analyzer using watch folders or REST API calls with their CMS/MAM and MediaMelon offers a web-based interface for manual asset processing (see above). In addition to the Content Analyzer GUI and REST API, operators can generate QBR hintfiles using the QBRPrep command-line utility. This does not contain the database and backup capabilities of the Content Analyzer tool but is suitable for direct integration into a workflow via a command-line interface. A single instance of the Content Analyzer on a modern system runs at about 10x real-time, assuming a typical ABR asset. Processing speed depends on NAS and network speed as well. Operators can deploy multiple Content Analyzers in parallel and feed off of the same queue (watch folder or other automation). As a rough calculation, assume an operator has 10,000 hours of existing content. Depending upon their priorities (e.g. time-to-market vs. compute availability), they can choose to deploy one or more Content Analyzers. Simple math, for 10k hours of content, they will need 10k/10=1k hours = 42 days for a single Content Analyzer instance, or ~ 5 days for 10 CA instances. It’s safer to also budget a 10% overhead for delays, reruns etc. As mentioned, most operators produce hintfiles for their content incrementally, as any content without a hint file is simply distributed via existing ABR logic. Integrated Operation As mentioned, most operators produce hintfiles for their content incrementally, as any content without a hintfile is simply distributed via existing ABR logic. Most operators run the Content Analyzer via integration with their CMS/MAM. These steps describe the sequence of events from the time a new media asset becomes available to the time it is played by the end-user device: 1. New media asset. A new media asset becomes available in the main media storage repository. The asset is already transcoded to the customer’s encoding ladder and optionally segmented/packaged in ABR delivery protocols (such as HLS or MPEG-DASH). 2. New Job file. The CMS/MAM creates a new Job file (Figure 3) and lists the properties of the new media asset and its variants. The Job file is placed in the shared repository that has been configured for the SmartPlay Service. Figure 3. The new Job file tells the Content Analyzer to produce the hintfiles. 3. New Analysis job. Once the new Job file is detected in the shared repository, the SmartPlay Service generates a new analysis job task and adds it to the processing queue. The job file is removed from the shared storage. The queued jobs are executed in FIFO fashion by one or more worker instances that analyze all segments in the ABR package and create the hintfile. 4. New Hintfile(s). Once the analysis is done, one or more hintfiles are produced, depending on the segmentation variations (e.g. 2 sec vs 6 sec segment duration) and the target playback device families (e.g. big vs small screen sizes). The hintfiles are stored in the shared storage repository and the corresponding media assets are removed. 5. Publishing of new media content. Once the hintfiles are detected in the shared storage, the CMS/MAM service publishes them to the VoD Portal where the ABR assets of the media content reside already. 6. Playback of new media content. When the end-user starts to watch the new media content, the corresponding assets and hintfiles are downloaded (from the VoD Portal or the CDN) and the SmartPlay-enabled player is able to control which segments are retrieved for playback. Working with Just-In-Time or Dynamic Packagers The use of just-in-time or dynamic packagers does not impact SmartPlay unless the segment duration is changed from the duration used to create the initial hintfiles, which typically isn’t the case. When the segment duration is changed for some reason, the operator must generate a new hintfile. In these cases, the Content Analyzer doesn’t have to start from scratch. Rather it can use quality-related metadata stored during the initial content analysis to accelerate hintfile generation. SmartSight QBR Live During live streaming, the Content Analyzer takes RTMP or MPEG2TS streams as input and produces a metadata stream in a sliding-window fashion similar to HLS and DASH manifests as opposed to a metadata file. Players subscribe to the stream to access the hintfile information which uses a presentation time stamp to correlate between the metadata stream and the video stream. The process of analyzing and generating hints itself takes less time than the segment length, typically around 200 ms, which can be reduced even further using certain optimizations like not decoding all the profiles, and other techniques. For this process, the Content Analyzer can use a different feed than what is being sent to the packager to eliminate any chance of disruption or delay. In some instances, the Content Analyzer can provide the hintfile before the video reaches the player, which happens because of inherent delays in the OTT stream or delays for regulatory reasons. In these cases, the player has an advance view of video quality and if the buffer space is available, it can fully implement quality mode and increase bitrates of the video to improve quality. If the advance view is not available, SmartPlay can only reduce bitrates, providing cost savings but no quality increase. MediaMelon has tested SmartPlay Live with a number of tier-1 operators. The results showed that SmartPlay can reduce CDN costs even when videos are encoded with content-aware encoders like Harmonic EyeQ and Elemental QVBR. The test also showed that if the hint file stream gets to the player in advance, SmartPlay can improve quality as well. Player Integration The SmartSight SDK is available in JavaScript, Java, C++, and Roku’s Brightscript and is compatible with any platform that provides access to buffer status and the ability to direct the player to select an alternate bitrate / ABR track. The plug-in’s memory and CPU footprints are minimal as it doesn’t decode or display video, it just downloads the hintfile, parses the data, and communicates with the media player and the SmartSight platform. In MediaMelon lab tests, the plug-in adds about 5% to CPU overhead and consumes about 200 KB of memory. Installing the plug-in requires a minor integration with the player to add communication calls that the SmartSight SDK needs for the switching decisions, which is briefly described below. MediaMelon has existing integrations with most commercial and open-source players, which provide compatibility with any mobile device, smart TV, browser or STB. For currently unsupported players, MediaMelon staff works with the player vendor to enable the necessary communication between the player’s software development kit and the SmartSight SDK, which typically requires less than 10 lines of code. SmartSight QBR Operation SmartSight QBR operation involves the ABR Player, the SmartSight SDK, and the SmartSight QBR tool itself, in conjunction with the other components of the SmartSight platform. When a player is initialized (i.e. when the player window is shown but before the user presses play), the SmartSight SDK is also initialized, and contacts the SmartSight platform to register the user (operator, device, network etc) and obtain the SmartSight QBR initialization parameters, such as operating mode (Quality vs. Bitrate), target quality levels, the location of hintfiles, etc. Figure 4. Signal flow diagram for SmartSight QBR integration. When the ABR player loads a new manifest file, the SmartSight SDK initiates a parallel load process for the corresponding hintfile. The critical video delivery path is never altered/disrupted, so the manifest files are not modified and do not carry any QBR signals. The core player is never aware of the existence of hintfiles, which are loaded and used by theSmartSight SDK to inform the switching decisions. During operation, the ABR player provides track information from the master manifest to the SmartSight SDK, along with any incompatible tracks and any protected tracks, such as advertisements, that the plug-in should not attempt to optimize. Before retrieving a segment, the ABR player sends that recommendation to theSmartSight SDK which either confirms the decision or sends the ABR Player a different segment to download. Periodically, throughout the play session, the SmartSight SDK communicates with the SmartSight platform to deliver usage statistics and update its configuration. Redundancy and Fallback SmartSight QBR is designed to ensure against any service interruptions. If the customer instance of the SmartSight platform is not accessible during the player initialization (e.g. before the play starts), the SmartSight SDK will default back to standard ABR mode. If the platform is accessible during the player initialization and becomes inaccessible after the asset began playing, then the SmartSight SDK continues to operate normally, though playback statistics may not be reported accurately during the outage. MediaMelon’s ROI expectations for ROI assume a 25% bandwidth saving and a 10% reduction in churn due to quality of experience improvement. If you factor in only the bandwidth savings, which appear modest given the real-world numbers from Telecine in a prior post, the ROI is approximately 3X. If you factor in the additional revenue from customer retention, the potential ROI increases to over 10X.", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Jan Ozer", "sameAs" : "", "url" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/news/author/jan-ozer" }, "dateModified" : "10/08/2020", "datePublished" : "10/08/2020", "headline" : "Integrating SmartSight QBR Within Your Video Workflow", "image" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "height" : 400, "url" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/hubfs/Images/SDK-QBR_InfoGraphics-07.png", "width" : 750 }, "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/news/integrating-smartplay-into-your-encoding-and-distribution-ecosystem", "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/hubfs/20646593/20200715_MM_logo_1000.png" }, "name" : "MediaMelon, Inc.", "url" : "https://www.mediamelon.com" } } ``` ```json { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "articleBody" : "MediaMelon’s SmartSight QBR (aka SmartPlay) is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth use by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without re-encoding. As you’ll read in this post, SmartSight QBR works by analyzing the quality of every segment in an ABR package using a objectively researched technique that produces an iMOS hintfile, which is used by the SmartSight enabled video player to improve the logic that selects how video segments are retrieved. Rather than simply retrieving the highest bitrate stream the viewer’s bandwidth supports, operators can set quality preferences on a per-content or per-subscriber basis. This saves bandwidth and allows the player to buffer ahead for hard-to-encode scenes that require a high-bitrate segment to achieve target quality. The principle of QBR works for live and VOD delivery, supports static and dynamic packaging and dynamic ad insertion, and doesn’t increase latency. This makes SmartPlay a practical, affordable and easy to implement solution for any operator looking to control costs or quickly reduce outbound bandwidth for COVID-19 related limitations. This is the first of three posts on SmartSight QBR, and it will cover some of the unique iMOS and QBR technology - and how they combine to optimize the business approach to streaming. The second post in the series will discuss how to implement SmartSight QBR and its ROI. The final post will be a case study from Telecine, Brazil’s leading movie streaming service. How Most ABR Technologies Work Most ABR technologies implicitly try and optimize video playback by seeking to retrieve the highest quality stream in the encoding ladder that the viewers device bandwidth can support. Particularly for operators using a fixed bitrate ladder, with a lot of less detailed content, the quality of the top rungs of the bitrate ladder may be perceptually indistinguishable from lower rungs, so the operator is paying for the extra bandwidth of each and every delivery without improving the quality of experience experienced by the viewer. This could be termed economic madness! Figure 1. Typical ABR operation (on top) is bandwidth driven. SmartSight QBR operation is quality driven. SmartSight QBR (Streaming Optimization Solution) Overview SmartSight QBR has two fundamental,, but very simple, elements that must be added within your production workflow and playback architecture. The first is the iMOS Content Analyzer, which uses a MediaMelon technology called iMOS (for Mean Opinion Score) to analyze every ABR segment of any encoded video asset and score it on a simple quality scale from 1-5. After analyzing the ABR package, the iMOS Content Analyzer produces at least two “hintfiles;” for the video asset one for small screens and one for larger ones. The iMOS process is trainable via machine learning, and during installation, MediaMelon will tune the algorithm for the operator’s content and encoder, a process that continues to be enhanced periodically as the system collects more asset data. The second SmartSight QBR integration is via the SmartSight SDK installed within each device player, which is accomplished using formal APIs and callbacks offered by all commercial and open-source players. The SmartSight SDK here is the same SDK used to instrument all stream delivery and generate rich analytics via SmartSight QoE and SmartSight Ads. QBR Enhanced Video Player Operation During playback, the QBR enhanced video player targets the quality level specified for that subscriber, which can be driven by business rules related to subscriber level, content type, and other variables. Operationally, the QBR player uses the hintfile to retrieve segments that meet the specified quality level, which is often less costly in bandwidth used than those offered by the higher bitrate ladder rungs, particularly for operators using a fixed bitrate encoding ladder. Figure 2. QBR downloads lower bitrate streams in simple scenes to reduce bandwidth and buffers ahead to download complex scenes to improve quality. In operation, SmartSight QBR reduces bandwidth costs by downloading the stream that meets the quality level specified for that subscriber, as opposed to the highest bitrate stream that the viewer’s bandwidth can support. QBR enhancement improves quality by looking ahead for complex scenes that require a higher bitrate to maintain target quality. If there is sufficient buffered content on the player, the player will download these scenes in advance, improving the overall quality of the session. The QBR process has three operating modes, Quality, Bitrate, and Cost Save, that allow the operator to tune the system to meet their specific QoE and cost saving goals. Both Quality and Bitrate modes improve quality and reduce bandwidth usage, with Quality mode delivering higher quality and lower bandwidth savings and Bitrate mode delivering greater bandwidth reductions and less quality improvements. In Cost Save mode, QBR prioritizes bandwidth savings and never buffers ahead to improve quality. In all modes, retrieving the lowest possible bandwidth stream that meets the target quality level saves bandwidth and reduces the possibility of re-buffering and other bandwidth-related issues. Beyond these three operating modes, operators can set video quality delta targets that minimize the perceptible quality shifts in the video, which can degrade viewer QoE. You see the results in the Statistics screen in Figure 3, in the upper right of the video player window (click the figure to see at full resolution). The Segment uplift of 13.79% indicates the number of retrieved segments that improved video quality scores. This uplift positively impacts two other statistics shown on the screen. First is the 40.17% increase in quality consistency, which means many fewer perceptible quality shifts during playback. Second is the 1.1 increase in the Least iMOS score from 3.4 to 4.5, meaning that the quality of the lowest quality segments viewed by the subscriber jumped from 3.4 to 4.5, which should eliminate most, if not all, short-term quality glitches. Both statistics impact viewer QoE which QBR significantly improved in this case. Figure 3. SmartSight QBR improves Quality Consistency and Least MOS score as well. This short (4:19) YouTube video further demonstrates how SmartSight QBR works to improves overall quality and QoE: SmartSight QBR and Content Adaptive Encoding Content Adaptive Encoding (CAE) techniques, also called per-title encoding, adjust the encoding settings for the ABR package to reflect the encoding complexity of the video content. There are many CAE technologies and they all operate differently, so it’s impossible to create a blanket statement about how CAE impacts SmartSight QBR performance and benefits. That said, as you’ll see in the next section, all of the real-world data shown from Telecine’s SmartSight QBR installation was generated with video encoded using AWS Elementals QVBR, a form of per title encoding, and SmartPlay still produced a bitrate savings of 42.45% while slightly improving quality. In addition, SmartSight QBR has several key advantages over CAE, most notably that you don’t have to re-encode your entire library to use it. Also, where CAE is fixed, the QBR process is dynamic and network sensitive, so if you need to adjust bandwidth and quality on-the-fly, as many producers have had to with COVID-19, you can. With CAE, you can’t. Now that we’ve covered how SmartSight QBR works let’s have a look at the benefits it delivers. Analytics Detail the Bandwidth Savings and Quality Improvements SmartSight QBR is built on the same platform as SmartSight QoE which produces the data you see in the figure below. The metrics shown on this and the following pages are from 24 hours of Telecine operation in Bitrate mode while encoding with AWS Elemental’s QVBR, which is a form of per-title encoding. Figure 4. SmartSight QBR shares a common platform with SmartSight QoE, here showing the performance from 24 hours of real-world operation. As you see, high-level metrics compare QBR-enhanced service delivery to default ABR operation and tracks data bandwidth saved, quality density increase, the bitrate reduction produced by SmartPlay, and iMOS change. The dashboard also graphically displays the difference between QBR and ABR performance over the tracked period and presents quality buckets for the content actually delivered. Data saved and bitrate reduction are obvious and need no definition. As the name suggests, Quality Density is a measure of the video quality achieved over the bandwidth that you deliver. Consider an example. Assume you encoded a static newsreader with a fixed bitrate ladder. For most of the video, the 1080p rung would deliver little perceivable quality over the 720p rung but the data rate might be 2 Mbps higher. In this case, the 1080p rung has a much lower quality density than the 720p rung. If SmartPlay can meet the quality target by delivering the 720p stream, it has increased the Quality Density, and the quality bang for your bandwidth buck. The iMOS change is the difference between the quality of the QBR delivered segments and what the ABR player would have delivered without enhancement. In this case, despite a bitrate reduction of over 40%, iMOS quality actually improved slightly. Finally, iMOS bucketing groups the iMOS quality scores into the five MOS buckets and shows the number of segments delivered in each bucket. During the covered period, the vast majority of segments delivered were in the top two quality buckets. This, the improvement in quality density, and the positive iMOS change of 0.23 shows the SmartPlay increased viewer QoE while reducing bandwidth by 42.45%. File-by-File Results Operators can also view the results on an asset-by-asset basis as you see below, again real-world stats for 24 hours of operation. As you can see, columns show ABR bitrate, QBR bitrate, and bitrate reduction. Figure 5. File-by-file performance. The next two columns show the Quality Density of the ABR and QBR streams with QBR significantly higher, indicating a much more efficient use of bandwidth. For these files, which were sorted for highest average QBR iMOS, ABR iMOS scores were slightly higher, though as you saw in the previous figure, SmartPlay improved iMOS overall by 0.23. The last column shows the Quality Density increase, measured as the percentage increase from ABR quality density (2.82) to QBR quality density (7.59). Telecine’s Real-World Savings Telecine is a joint venture of Globo Group with Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and The Walt Disney Company, and also streams content from Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. I present the Telecine case study in the third SmartPlay blog post and the data below as a teaser. For perspective, Telecine implemented SmartPlay in Bitrate mode and streams video encoded using AWS Elemental’s QVBR per-title encoding technology. Figure 6. One week of real-world Telecine results. The chart above shows one week of Telecine results. As you can see, SmartPlay saved 79.26 TB of bandwidth over those 7 days while slightly improving quality as shown by the 0.24 iMOS change. This short (3:23) video shows SmartPlay analytics in action using 4 days of actual results from the Telecine installation. Summary Let’s summarize the SmartSight QBR key features, benefits, and advantages: Reduces bandwidth costs, particularly for delivery to mobile devices Improves subscriber Quality of Experience by: – Improving overall MOS scores – Reducing buffering events – Improving quality consistency – Improving the Least MOS Score Key implementation features – Works for both live and VOD – Works with existing VOD content – no re-encoding required – Operators can choose between three operating modes to best match operating goals – Operators can customize quality level on a per-subscriber or per-content basis – Operational efficiency improves over time via machine learning", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Jan Ozer", "sameAs" : "", "url" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/news/author/jan-ozer" }, "dateModified" : "10/08/2020", "datePublished" : "10/08/2020", "headline" : "How SmartSight QBR Saves Bandwidth & Objectively Improves QoE", "image" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "height" : 400, "url" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/smartplay_qbr_dashboard1080608-1.jpg", "width" : 750 }, "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://info.mediamelon.com/news/how-mediamelon-smartplay-saves-bandwidth-costs-and-improves-qoe", "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/hubfs/20646593/20200715_MM_logo_1000.png" }, "name" : "MediaMelon, Inc.", "url" : "https://www.mediamelon.com" } } ```