MoQ Trial: SVT and Vindral revolutionise real-time streaming at the World Rally Championship

At the forefront of innovation in live broadcasting, Swedish public service broadcaster SVT is taking bold strides toward modernizing its live streaming workflows. As part of this transformation, SVT has partnered with Vindral, a company specializing in next-generation, ultra-low latency live streaming solutions. Their joint mission is to streamline hardware usage, enable remote production, and push the boundaries of real-time media delivery by leveraging the emerging and evolving transport protocol Media Over QUIC (MoQ).

Software decoding and the future of mobile video

If you'll be encoding with SVT-AV1 or VVC, in this article you'll learn a bit about how to optimise your encodes, particularly the trade-offs that pre­sets deliver, and how many logical processors to use. With SVT-AV1, I also explore the qual­ity and playback efficiency of the fast decode option, although I didn't find much to show for it. You can also peruse the FFmpeg command strings used for all encodes.

Streamticker: The biggest streaming mergers and acquisitions of 2024

The 2024 edition of Streamticker, recapping the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2023, kicked off with Disney's gobbling up the last extant portions of Hulu, as Comcast ceded its re­maining 33% stake. But if the late-2023 deal marked only the quiet conclusion of an already-silent part­nership, the much noisier news of Jan. 6, 2025, found Disney absorbing sports-centric streamer Fubo and merging it with Hulu Live + TV. Here we'll review this and other done (or more nearly done) M&A deals that reshuffled the stream­ing industry in 2024.

The State of the Video Codec Market 2025

HEVC rode the 4K/HDR wave to success, but AV1, VVC, and LCEVC lack an equivalent killer app. With CDNs racing to the bottom on pricing and new royalty pools threatening to increase costs, codec adoption is no longer just about technical merit—it's about survival. These are the issues I'll explore in this article.

Buyers' Guide: Hardware Transcoders

Although software transcoding is accept­able for transcoding most VOD streams and even low-volume live programming, most high-volume live applications need hardware for efficient transcoding, both to save you money and to save the planet. This buyers' guide will cover: What hardware transcoders are, what you need to bring to the table to identify the best hardware transcoder, factors to consider when choosing one, choosing a hardware transcoder for cloud workflows, and choosing a hardware transcoder for on-prem workflows.

Review: Magewell Director Mini 3.0

All-in-One (AIO) live production devices leverage the latest mobile CPU and GPU power and integrated capability, with real hardware connections for multiple HDMI ports, ethernet, headphones, audio input, and more—all from one manufacturer so there's just one update cycle to track. Magewell recently came out with the 3.0 update to their Director Mini AIO production tablet (Figure 1), and they are pushing the envelope with what these little powerhouses can do.

Boosting Streaming Profitability with IMAX StreamSmart

Streaming organisations must be able to accurately measure and swiftly assess the impact of workflow changes to validate their effectiveness. Therefore, they must have access to the right metrics that can reliably predict viewer perceptions of quality for achieving bitrate savings without compromising the viewing experience.

The Streaming Media European Innovation Awards Winners

The 16th annual Streaming Media European Innovation Awards competition - formerly known as the Readers' Choice Awards - returns with 12 categories. With more than 9,000 votes, who are the finalists? And who are this year's winners?

AI and Streaming Media

This article explores the current state of AI in the streaming encoding, delivery, playback, and monetization ecosystems. By understanding the developments and considering key questions when evaluating AI-powered solutions, streaming professionals can make informed decisions about incorporating AI into their video processing pipelines and prepare for the future of AI-driven video technologies.

Decoding the Landscape: Recent Developments in Video Codec Licensing

Navigating the ever-changing world of video codec licensing can be complex. This article breaks down major IP-related events from the past 18 months, including the new European SEP licensing rules, Avanci's new video patent pool, and the Sisvel-RPX deal. Explore who's making deals, what technologies are involved, and the implications for royalty-free models.

The State of Video Codecs 2024

It's been 3-plus years since the MPEG codec explosion that brought us VVC, LCEVC, and EVC. Rather than breathlessly trumpet every single-digit quality improvement or design win, I'll quickly get you up-to-speed on quality, playability, and usage of the most commonly utilised video codecs and then explore new codec-related advancements in business and technology.

Review: NETINT Quadra T1U Video Processing Unit

This review will highlight the NETINT Quadra T1U and explore its capabilities as a video processing unit (VPU) for high-volume encoding and transcoding of single files, encoding ladders, and live streams.

Instant Replay: Streaming Media Connect November 2023

Streaming Media presented its 12th Connect virtual conference November 13 - 16, with media industry cartographer Evan Shapiro as host and MC. Shapiro kicked off the event with a dynamic keynote, digging deep into the Q3 earnings call data to hold the spin doctors accountable and giving an unvarnished view of the industry. Other highlights included The Future of Streaming with Shobana Radhakrishnan, Senior Director of Engineering at Google TV, and several panels covering topics such as Cloud Workflows for Streaming and CTV, Optimizing Live Streams at Scale, How Codec Patent Pools Will Impact Streaming in 2024, Making Live Streaming and VOD More Accessible, Live Streaming Technology Trends, and more.

Glass-to-Glass Report: Comparing Low-Latency Streaming Providers

In this article, I examine low-latency services provided by streaming CDNs, removing actual vendor names and making conclusions based on delivery method. I'll start with a discussion of the basics of latency before moving on to the testing results and analysis.

The Future of CDN Technology: Unlocking the Next Frontier in Video Streaming

The video streaming market is booming, and as video streaming consumption continues to soar, content delivery network (CDN) technology needs to evolve rapidly to keep up. Damien Sterkers of Broadpeak discusses the current challenges with streaming and what measures to take to face them.

Review: Ant Media Server (Enterprise Edition)

This review will highlight Ant Media Server and many of the features supported with the streaming server. Viewers will also learn how to configure the WebRTC streaming server on Amazon Web Services and how to get up and running with delivering live streams and video-on-demand streams.

Practical Approaches to Sustainable Streaming

In this article I'll expand on prior sustainability approaches, detail reasons to consider additional areas of power-consumption optimisation, and invite diverse stakeholders across streaming workflows to engage with Streaming Media magazine, GoS, and like-minded stakeholders in a mid- to late-2023 initiative around the LESS Accord, with an overall goal of readers recommending measurable best practices for consideration by September 2023.

The 2023 Streaming Media Innovation Award Winners

The 15th annual Streaming Media Europe Innovation Awards competition—formerly known as the Readers' Choice Awards—returns with 13 categories. With nearly 10,000 votes, who are the finalists? And who are this year's winners?

Review: Magewell USB Fusion

The USB Fusion is a device that can be used in a production environment for local content feeds/sources. It can be used to input various sources such as HDMI devices, webcams, USB microphones, videos, images, screenshares, and other items. The USB Fusion is touted as a tool to make your online lectures and virtual events more engaging and to easily combine numerous sources into attractive live presentations for remote education, webinars, live streaming, and video conferencing.

The State of VVC Adoption and Implementation

If you're a video publisher who doesn't rank high in the VVC patent list, it's likely that you won't consider VVC until 2026 or later. If you're looking to augment your H.264 encodes with a more efficient codec before then, your most likely choices are HEVC and AV1, with LCEVC also an option. However, if you're a product or service provider in the streaming media ecosystem, it's long past the time to start considering where and when VVC is going to fit in for you and your target customers.