Encoding/Transcoding

Encoding and transcoding video is at the heart of online video, and Streaming Media offers deep dives into encoding parameters, bitrate ladders, per-title encoding, content/context-aware encoding, CBR, VBR, and ABR. Here you’ll find the latest news, reviews, tests, and analysis to help you stay on the top of your encoding/transcoding game.

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Features

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.

Sponsored Articles

Tech Talk: Making the Most out of BRIDGE LIVE with AJA's Mike Boucke

From facilitating live-event streaming to remote production and beyond, AJA's multi-channel UltraHD and HD live video solution BRIDGE LIVE supports a wide range of streaming and contribution codecs. Join AJA product manager Mike Boucke to learn more about this powerful device and all it offers for live-stream workflows—from ultra-low latency to support for NDI and more.

Interview with Pieter-Jan Speelmans, Technical Working Group Chair of HESP Alliance

An interview with Pieter-Jan Speelmans, Technical Working Group Chair of HESP Alliance. Over the past three years, he has been working actively to reduce the complexity in video pipelines and improve the viewer Quality of Experience (QoE) from perspectives beyond the video player with the High Efficiency Streaming Protocol, a highly scalable ultra-low latency streaming protocol for the next generation of streaming services.

Live Streaming Interactive Content: A New Landscape

Despite the comeback of in-person events in 2022, online audience engagement remains important with a steady demand for interactivity in live streaming.

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