The Dan Rayburn Podcast
The Dan Rayburn Podcast
Episode 108: IBC News Recap: Edge Compute Video Workflows, Codecs, and AI's Impact on Transcoding
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This week, we recap news from IBC about using cloud-based compute services for video workflows, encoding optimization, AV1/codec adoption, live encoding use cases, and AI's potential impact on encoding platforms. We also give updates on the Venu/Fubo lawsuit, price increases for NBA League Pass, the upgraded Roku Ultra device, Google rebranding their FAST channels, and some viewership numbers from Peacock. Finally, we discuss some interesting statements from Netflix regarding their ad tier, the NFL games on Christmas and how they view one-off sporting events versus full seasons.
Companies mentioned include Akamai, Amagi, AOM, ATEME, AWS, Bitmovin, Brightcove, CDN77, Disney+ Hotstar, Dolby, Edgio, Harmonic, iSIZE, Neilsen, Netflix, NETINT, NVIDIA, THEO Technologies, Visionular, WaveOne, YouTube.
Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor: Integrated Digital Solutions
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
Welcome to this week's edition of the Dan Rayburn podcast, the show that curates the streaming media industry news that matters most, unvarnished, unscripted and providing you with the factual data you need to know, without any of the hype, the Pulse of the Streaming Media Industry.
Speaker 2Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn. Well, I'm with co-host Mark Donegan back from IBC. Yes, and that just monstrosity, I guess, is a good word for it. Hey look, same with NAB. I get it. It's a lot, I didn't go. Also, just a heads up to listeners we're recording this on Tuesday, september 24th. Mark and I primarily only record on Fridays, so recording on Tuesday we'll get to a little bit more news as a result of it being the beginning of the week. So, mark, we're going to spend a good portion of this time talking about IBC, what you saw, some of the news that came out.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2But let's first jump into some of the other news items that have come out this week, and before that I want to thank two podcast sponsors. So a company called IDS If you guys don't know who they are, it's integrated-digitalcom, real. Simply, these guys are some of the most efficient backend developers in the industry for OTD platforms and done some really cool stuff with content discovery systems and custom video processing in the cloud. So you can check them out integrated-digitalcom. The other one's, netskirt. I've mentioned them a few times before on LinkedIn. They're focusing on delivering video within ISPs that serve remote and rural areas, urban areas. So a unique use case there. They're also doing a delivery for specific video applications with hard to reach subscribers, for things like rail operators and airlines.
Speaker 2So interesting approach to content delivery. They're at Netskrt N-E-T-S-K-R-T it's probably not how you think to spell it, but dot? Io. You can check them out as well. So, mark, let's jump in the news. Not surprising, we knew this was coming. Paramount global said they were going to do three rounds of layoffs in total. Uh, today was the second wave of cuts. Uh, they didn't break down where they all came from, uh, but in a note to employees they did say that that after today's, 90% of the reductions will be complete.
Speaker 3Okay.
Speaker 2They did previously obviously mention in August that they're going to cut about 15% of the workforce.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Which was estimated to be around 2,000 employees. We don't know the exact number, not surprisingly because of the planned merger with Skydance Sure.
Speaker 3So that's all we got from them. So the 90% complete means 2,000 total employees, and so there's roughly what would that be? 1,800?
Speaker 2Well, the 2,000 employees is an estimate.
Speaker 2They've never put out what the actual number is yeah, got it and we were going off of the headcount they had, I believe at the end of last year. Yeah, and they announced it in August. So now that's a number that's eight months old, sure, so don't know, but it sounds like the vast majority are now done. A couple hundred still to go. Yeah, let's do an update quickly on Disney, WBD, fox and Venue. So last Friday they were back in court for the expedited hearing appeal on the venue sports injunction. Note this is not the case jury trial. That's going to court. It'll start next October 2025. This is the hearing on the injunction.
Speaker 2The company said that a couple sort of new statements from them. So what they're saying is because by creating Venue, they're now competitors in the same market as Fubo, instead of just what they're calling, you know, being content providers. They're saying legally they're under no obligation to offer Fubo or any other multi-channel programming distributor products that might be good for those rivals' businesses. And now I'm not taking sides in anything here, I don't know the legalities of all this, I'm just putting out what they said. Now, the other thing they said is they addressed the argument that they've never allowed Fubo or other competitors to sell a venue like product of their own and this is something we've heard Fubo and others say is they're preventing us from selling skinny bundles, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, venues owners are saying they're. They have not done that.
Speaker 2The other interesting thing here and this is this is a valid point, just from a factual standpoint they're saying that the judge never defined what a type of channel bundles would constitute the products that Fubo is upset it never got the chance to sell for itself. So that's a fair point. What exactly is that bundle? Is that bundle mean only two channels? Is it six channels? The judge never defined it. So that's interesting.
Speaker 2So what they say is the district court quote never defined what products would qualify for its skinny sports bundle segment. Nor did the district court explain why certain products available to consumers today, such as various Sling TV sports packages, would be excluded from its skinny sports bundle segment. That is interesting, yeah. And then finally, here, one of the things Fubo was saying is well, if this launches, it'll potentially takes customers away from us. That's interesting because that's not a violation of antitrust laws, yeah, so what Venue's backers are saying here is, quote each defendant makes its own independent licensing decisions upstream in a wholesale market for programming licensing. Each remains free to license MVPDs on whatever terms each deems appropriate. Venue does not charge or restrict anything about those licensing practices, and this is the most important sentence. Thus, even if Venue were to squeeze that's their term Fubo's profits by charging consumers lower prices than Fubo can given its existing licenses, that would not be anti-competitive.
Speaker 3Well, it makes sense, Dan. I mean, if you and I got together, we raise a little money and we decide to go out because we think we want to build the market and we undercut Fubo, I mean we have every right to do that.
Speaker 2Yes, but the difference here is these are the content owners. I understand, but what they're trying to, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3But. But then the case that they're making is hey look, we're building a service using in whole or in part, in part, you know, our own license, license content, but they're paying for it. Venue has to pay, exactly. So in other words, we have to enter into a deal as well.
Speaker 2You know, even though it's sort of, you know, family dealing with family, right, but you know, in case some listeners don't understand that, because I've seen some people mention this online then you doesn't get this content for free, Then you have to pay Exactly Disney, WBD and.
Speaker 1Fox, they have to pay.
Speaker 2Yeah, and that's an important piece, so that's the latest that we have.
Speaker 3I would think mfn clauses, by the way, you know it does that applies it doesn't matter if it's internal dealing or it's external dealing correct yeah, so, anyway, these things are very, very complicated and I think the my, my takeaway, and what you just read is uh, you know, for those that are trying to make these quick-witted comments, as if you know, waving of the hand like this is what you know should happen, shouldn't happen. This is what's going on. We, you know, we don't know because we're not yeah, it's too early, so interesting though.
Speaker 2We will, sounds like, have an answer by the end of November.
Speaker 3Well, they're going to want to get all this resolved, because then you need to get off the ground.
Speaker 2Yeah, they'll make a decision quickly, yeah, yeah, the final rebuttal is due, I believe, November 20th, so it sounds like we're going to have an answer by the end of November, hopefully. Now let's go into another one here WBD. They filed a memorandum last Friday with New York Supreme Court. Uh, basically saying that the NAB negotiated its its rights deal in bad faith. They're still asking the court to deny yeah, sorry, nba. Yes, still asking the court to deny the the league's motion to dismiss WBD's matching rights lawsuit. Yeah, so, um, you know, basically what's going to happen here is we're going to have an answer pretty soon. The NBA is bound to reply to the WBD memo by October 2nd. That's where it stands as far as dates. It's been reported by multiple sources that if the judge sides with the plaintiffs and does not dismiss this case, there's going to be a push from both sides to just negotiate a settlement. Someone's going to pay somebody. Yeah, and it's important because you don't want this appeal process dragging to the 2025-2026 season. That's problematic, but also this is important Both parties have already agreed to an expedited resolution of the matter, so they're basically saying they want to solve this either way.
Speaker 2Let's jump into a little quick news on NBA League Pass, because we've got another price increase. No shocker here. The price of its two annual plans for the 2024-25 season are going up by $10. Its monthly plan is also increasing by $2. So it's now $17 per month or $110 for the season. For League Pass, if you want League Pass Premium, it's $25 a month or $160 for the season. And then, finally, to date the NBA has never disclosed how many subscribers it has to NBA league pass. Ever in the history of the service they haven't even hinted like give us something, nba, come on. But they've never even hinted at that. So we don't know if that service is growing, not growing, why they're doing the price increase. Just don't know, sure.
Speaker 2So let's jump into some comments Netflix put out in the last few days. It's pretty interesting last week. So first again, this is Tuesday, september 24th. Netflix hit a new 52-week high today at $722 a share. I didn't see what they closed at. They were down from that. But Netflix is still doing well on the stock side. It has been fluctuating. There's days where it's up $16 to $20 or down.
Speaker 2So at a Financial Times conference last Friday, netflix co-CEO Greg Peters gave out some very interesting pieces of the business here background on the business we hadn't heard before. So first let's talk about the two NFL games on Christmas this year on Netflix. The way he said that Netflix is approaching this is, quote for one day, football will be on Netflix. So what he's saying is we're thinking of this as a one-off event. When it was asked well, why don't you do this all the time? Why don't you get Thursday night football games? He said, quote having Thursday night football or the NBA or things like that. We'd love to do those things. It would be amazing. But we also want to do it in a way that works for the business, and those have been typically challenging deals to go and do. And make it work for the business End quote. What's he saying is it costs too much to license that for the entire year and it's just not good for our business. If we come up with one-off, live large sporting events, we're into it. Yeah, now, this was interesting, mark. I had not seen Netflix ever talk about this anywhere.
Speaker 2So for listeners that remember when Netflix all of a sudden decided they were going to do start offering ads after all the years of saying no, and many were shocked when Reid announced it on the earnings call, when many people internally didn't know.
Speaker 2What Peter said was that the pandemic forced that forced their hand. Yeah, what he said was quote we realized that what had happened? Because of the pandemic, we had pulled forward about two years worth of growth in those two quarters and then it hit a wall. Hit a wall. So at this point we're like, okay, all the things that we had been planning to do for the next two years we sort of have to do now. And he said there's nothing like a desperate situation to force sorry, to focus the decision-making apparatus of the company a little bit more tightly. And we decided very quickly okay, it was time to go do advertising, to do it as rapidly as we possibly could. I'd never heard them talk about the ad business that way, which now makes sense, because when they announced it, the fact that it was so shocking to many people internally tells you how quickly they made that decision.
Speaker 3Yeah, and the armchair analysts, as I like to call them, were so quick to comment about their decision to partner with Microsoft and some of those early partnerships around the uh. You know, partnerships around the technology stack. Well, it makes sense Like they had to make a few phone calls and say how quickly can you get us a solution? Get us, you know, advertising content, get an exchange stood up and, um, you know, get a pro programmatic uh platform. And, you know, go live.
Speaker 2I mean, and they've done it quickly. Yeah, and they did it quickly, and we'll get more details soon, no doubt, in terms of how that is that is.
Speaker 3that is very fascinating. I want to also comment, because I think it was Ted Sarandos that made almost an identical comment to what Greg Peters said, which you know. They're co-CEOs, so you would assume they um, they're on a subject of sports, but wasn't it Ted Sarandos that also said a while back the same thing about sports licensing? Oh, they've said it a dozen times or more. It doesn't pencil out the economics For their business. For their business. Correct, right, correct.
Speaker 2For an entire season.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly, and you know what? Those games are now locked up for multiple years. And now they're locked up so it many articles covered what he talked about with ai and he's saying, look, it's interesting we're using some of that today. But, yeah, the um, the shine is kind of worn off. The bubbles burst, like we need to figure out just how these things are actually going to scale over time and impact our business. Makes sense, yeah, uh. And then the final piece. Here is uh, two more um. The first half of 2024 netflix customers watch them. More than 94 billion hours of content. That's a stat directly from Netflix. They put out like to do twice a year viewing viewership data. So they did January to June. They recently released that. You can check that out online.
Speaker 2And one of the things too here to cover Mark is there's been quite a few headlines too. Here to cover mark is there's been quite a few um headlines. Uh, this one was youtube plans major revamp of tv app after overtaking netflix. So still a lot of language out there of youtube is the winner. Youtube has beat everybody. Netflix is the loser and of course, all of this is because they're using flawed data from nielsen and their gate port, which says YouTube. The last one said YouTube accounted for 10.6% of viewing on connected TV devices in August, compared to 7.9% for Netflix, 3.1% for prime. Now, of course, nielsen's not taking into account premium content, length of content, user generated content. You'll also notice the numbers didn't say of tv, uh, you know premium content. It just said on connected tv devices. Yeah, yeah, right, so ridiculous that this is still being compared. Not surprising that's what nielsen does, but unfortunate that so many this hollywood reporter, so many have headlines of, now that youtube is one. And it's like what is youtube one?
Speaker 2right, let's look at some numbers so, according to pew research center, the average youtube video is between 11 and 12 minutes long. The average youtube shorts is 30 to 40 seconds. But but in 2022, youtube said that more than 50% of videos were reported as under three minutes in length. For videos five minutes or length, the average viewing time is two minutes. So we're comparing content that is anywhere between two to five to 10 minutes long on YouTube, the majority of which is not professionally produced or what you or I would call premium content. We're comparing that to Netflix and then Nielsen's putting that in the chart and and saying, because they had more viewership, they're the winner. Yeah Right, it's just not not accurate. Now also in, in somewhat fairness to Nielsen, they're not calling Netflix the winner. I mean, sorry, youtube, tv, youtube. Not calling netflix the winner. I mean, sorry, youtube, tv, youtube. The winner it's the media taking that data and saying youtube's the winner.
Speaker 2But at the same time, remember that part of what nielsen's also doing here is they're wrapping up a lot of different companies in one bucket and now doing another chart on top of that. That's saying, well, this company has more viewership of that company. But, as we've broken out before, they're also comparing companies with services, which is not apples to apples. That's right. So you know the media. I'm not too surprised. They're writing for headlines, but, man, some of these headlines based on the August numbers is just. You know, netflix is really trailing YouTube and YouTube's the winner.
Speaker 2And you know, meanwhile, I also find it interesting these articles didn't mention any of the numbers I just gave out, which wasn't hard to find with Pew Research Center and some of YouTube's own stats. They're not doing a true comparison.
Speaker 3Yeah.
Speaker 2So put out the numbers, let others decide who the winner is, based on whatever metric they want.
Speaker 1Sure.
Speaker 2We'll get to IBC here in just a second. Two quick pieces here. On hardware Roku's upgraded its Roku Ultra Actually, they announced it today. It's got Wi-Fi 6 and a new quad-core processor. Roku says it's 30% faster. It's also got a new remote, their Voice Remote Pro, which is their second edition, backlit buttons, things like that still 99 dollars.
Speaker 2Google also for you fast listeners out there, google's now officially rebranded their google t. Google tv's free tv channels, as they called it, um, are now called google tv free play. Oh okay, thanks google. I don't really get that. But all of this is ahead of the launch of Google's new device called the Google TV Streamer.
Speaker 2They also announced a whole host of new features coming to Google's platform, their TV platform, so you can now control smart home devices lights, thermostats, cameras, some other things here I'd say the biggest one, mark thermostats cameras, some other things here I'd say the biggest one, mark, listeners might care about is there's a new sports page under the For you tab and also they're giving out more synopsis of television series and films. So it now gives audience ratings, comprehensive descriptions, which is great, more metadata, basically. Why don't you just come out and say we're giving you more metadata? It'd be a lot easier. Three other things here Average minute audience for the live stream via Peacock and NBC Sports Digital platforms, and NFL. For let's see, this is Peacock, so that would have been Sunday, right Sunday night football.
Speaker 1AMA was 2.6 million.
Speaker 2Now what's interesting here is NBC Sports says that's the fourth most simul-streamed events. In other words, when it's not exclusive on Peacock, 2.6 million is the fourth largest audience ever across every digital platform combined. It's offered on. It's a small number. Yeah, it's reality. Nbc's media group chairman said that Peacock quote added a lot of subs end quote, thanks to the Olympics. But he didn't give out a number. Yeah, no surprise, we will get them during Q3 earnings. Comcast did announce our Q3 earnings will be on October 31st. And then finally, here as we get into IBC, egeo was suspended from trading on NASDAQ as of Monday September 18th. They were removed from the listing and registration on the exchange. They are no longer publicly traded. So with that Mark, let's jump into IBC here for the next 10 or 15 minutes.
Speaker 2So a couple of things you and I were discussing. Just after sort of IBC back and forth was interesting just how much news came out around encoding, transcoding, moving some of that functionality to the edge, tied to cloud, tied to cloud. So I'll let you break down some of the different vendor news and things you saw, but two of the ones I'll highlight here is I put up on LinkedIn. Disney plus Hotstar put out a, started talking to the media and put out a little post talking about how they deployed what they're calling new AI powered video optimization technology. And they're saying it's cut video bit rates, but sorry, not video bit rates. Let me get that right. It cuts video bits delivered, which is the bit rate, but it's cutting the video bits delivered by 25%. Yeah, they're saying, without anyone noticing a bad video quality, and that they've applied it to over 700 titles in Disney plus hot stars catalog. It's very important, it's Disney plus hot star, yeah.
Speaker 2So what are we continuing to say all the time? Consume companies looking to do more with the less lower cost, right, not impact the quality. We're seeing more of that. Here's another one. And then, secondly, amazon announced that it's VOD support for AV1, which has had for a long time a few years has now expanded to live, so customers can now package AV1 encoded content, insert ads. So AV1 and MediaLive, they're saying they're the, they're the first cloud provider to offer AV1 encoding for live. So interesting news there. So, mark, why don't you jump into some of the other pieces here? Because there was other news out tied to live, tied to Akamai, um, netin, bitmovein. Let's go through what's most important.
Speaker 3Yeah, you know, and I I think I'll start by Start, by what you saw, or you know even the three that are the largest, but they're the three that I certainly care about and that I think a lot of our listeners probably care about. The first one is it's really interesting the announcement of CDNs that are talking about adding compute and not just talking about're announcing they're doing it. Some of them have been in the market for a little while, like Akamai with Linode, for example, um, adding compute to their network. And you know there might be some if you're not watching this closely who you know would just think okay, it's aren't. Isn't that edge computing? And people have been talking about that for years and you know it was supposed to be a thing, never really a thing, but there's some real progress being made here. And you know look, we're not going to get into whether you know they're going to become a.
Speaker 3You know NetEnt, for example, at IBC, and this announcement is pretty significant because they're building hardware, building the NetEnt VPUs into the network. This is going to initially be available as you think of it, as basically infrastructure, as a service or kind of bare metal instances, but it's the first case where there is purpose-built video processing, video encoding hardware that's being built into a major CDN, into a network that then anybody could access and could custom build a solution on top of it. Could, you know, integrate their own into it. They can do what they want, and there's other examples of this happening. You know Tata is doing similarly, you know I know there's some other. You know CDN 77, you know Annexia is going after this, and I think these are trends that we should be watching. You know.
Speaker 2I think it's careful to note that and I think let's make sure listeners understand this. This is not to your point mentioning Akamai. This is not Akamai getting into the media services business.
Speaker 3Yeah, akamai is not selling this right into the media services business? Yeah, yeah, akamai is not selling this right?
Speaker 2sorry, they're not selling transcoding. Yeah right, akamai is basically saying you can use a distributed cloud platform and you can build on top of the compute power that we have and one of the applications you see first being built onto is video.
Speaker 2That's's right and that's to your point, and I'm glad you brought that up in the beginning. That's different than edge. Yeah, edge compute is a service. Edge is a location in a network. Yeah, they're two very different things. Also, akamai made it clear that what they're also allowing here is media companies can choose from multiple software partners. Yes, across transport, deliver. You know encoding, so they're not selling a solution. Yeah, and I like that to make it similar to mark when, um, microsoft and media services in the market. Hey, we're providing a cloud service. All these different vendors can come to it. You can build your service on top of this on media, azure, media services and then a customer pick whoever you want to work with.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's right I think it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3Yeah, and, by the way, you know, akamai in fact I think it was NAB made the announcement with NVIDIA about GPU Right. So About GPU Right. So it's not even that. Akamai is, you know, choosing just one technology to support. You know, vpu or GPU. They're saying, hey, we have CPU compute, you want to run software? Awesome, we're happy to sell you. You know those instances. You need to use GPU? We've got those too. Oh, by the way, you want to use VPU? You're interested in what you know high performance ASICs can do? We've got that too. And it's just feeling like this this is a, this is a trend. And you know, look, I don't know that anybody AWS is, you know, shaking in their boots at these announcements, but they've got to be looking at this and just thinking, extrapolating down the road. You know what does this mean If all of a sudden you know what does this mean if all of a sudden, you know, these customers who traditionally have been on these large public clouds, begin to build on these networks.
Speaker 2So yeah, interesting if they begin to build, but I think that's also a very unique subset of the market. So, for instance, netflix is working on their own live encoder. I think we've been talking about this.
Speaker 1We mentioned it once.
Speaker 2I can't go into too much detail here, but what I can tell you is that for the Paul fights and the Jake Paul, mike Tyson fight, one, not multiple, and the NFL games, they're going to be relying on Amazon. Yeah, Right, they're not going to have theirs up and running yet. For that, now, they're a unique example of a company who could build their own. For that, now, they're a unique example of a company who could build their own, yeah. But yeah, it's interesting to see how the cloud infrastructure companies are playing here, because Bitmoven also announced general availability GA of its video transcoding service on Oracle Cloud's infrastructure.
Speaker 2Now, oracle, their cloud infrastructure looks in many cases very different than footprint employment. Right, how, how they're doing it. Um, so there's also not a one-size-fits-all model here. That's right. I think that's also important. And bitmoven also announced it's encoding on akamai's cloud as well. So, interesting here. How to our point, like, akamai is playing the neutral party here, which is smart, which is like hey, all you guys that want to develop transcoding engines or whatever you're building, bring it to our compute platform.
Speaker 3Bring it to our compute platform.
Speaker 2In the end, that's the winner.
Speaker 3Yeah, they get everybody's business yeah. Yeah, absolutely, which is?
Speaker 2smarter than for the OGs listening when Akamai was actually competing in the market with StreamOS, when they bought nine systems but then quickly realized we don't want to be in the business of offering our proprietary video platform for transcoding and ingestion. We're a network, we're an infrastructure provider, we're a cloud. Let everyone else build that on top of us. So I think very smart the way that's going. What?
Speaker 3else did you see at?
Speaker 2IBC Mark. That either was like interesting or not at all.
Speaker 3Yeah, so a couple in the theme direction. So something else I thought was very interesting and I can't cite specific examples, but you can go look at job listings and just validate that what I'm about to say is true. Vod encoding teams inside pretty much all of the major platforms are now focused on live. Just go look at job postings and they are looking for live stream engineers or looking for engineers who are familiar with live encoding.
Speaker 2True but I think let's just make it clear.
Speaker 3You know, I can think of a video asset going to be the case. No, obviously, still, the majority of entertainment video will probably be a VOD, but there's just a lot of focus. There's a lot of engineering, there's a lot of very, very smart people who are now looking after this whole new people who are now looking after this whole new. How do we scale? How do we deliver high quality, at scale live experiences that look great, that, you know, have all the attributes of what we deliver when we have a file. So that is. You know that's one theme and you know that may or may not be applicable to you know some or a lot of the listeners, but I am seeing this. The third one is no surprise, but it's, you know, ai everywhere or nowhere. Obviously, at IBC, you know a lot of AI, but I do want to make one comment, because I think it's so easy to you know, kind of like you know, brush it off Like AI, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't want to hear about it. It's all just buzz. None of it's real. The reality is that there are becoming pockets and to this Hotstar announcement of which, by the way, I wasn't able to find any real reference to what this AI technology is that they have deployed. So I can't comment really. I just we don't have the information. But there are folks building real, true AI into encoding pipelines, into other video workflow optimizations.
Speaker 3There's a lot of interesting things going around. There were multiple companies showing like clipping of short videos, and some of them are like on the fly, like nearly real time, and you know these are demos. The demos I saw were clearly demos and they were very plain about that. Like hey, this is a demo, so I don't know how far it is from production, but I think you know. My point is is that, on one hand, yes, there's AI everywhere. You know it was all over everybody's marketing their booth and half of it you can just walk by. You know it's just there's nothing there, but be careful. It you know kind of like you know hand waving it all the way. So that's so.
Speaker 2Yeah, and you know you. You. You bring up a good point there, mark, because if we think about just what is going on with with ai and encoding, you know uk-based iSize. They built an ai-based solution yeah, that, that's right they said, allowed third-party encoders produce higher quality video and they got acquired by sony interactive entertainment. Yeah, that's, and then the second one was WaveOne. They were developing this entirely new AI codec. They were bought by Apple in March of 2023.
Speaker 3Apple bought them.
Speaker 2And now you have DeepRender. I don't know if anyone's heard of those guys, but they're a London-based startup. And they're basically doing something they say is completely different, where they're creating the first native AI coding.
Speaker 2Yeah, and they're talking about an opportunity for 10 to 100 times gains in compression performance. Now, again, this is all speculation until you prove it. But interesting what we're seeing in AI, which I think is relevant, of course, to the encoding side. And look, you know, apple doesn't buy technology, it thinks just has no chance of light of day. Yeah, usually what they buy actually goes into the product at some point somewhere. So interesting what we're seeing with that. Also interesting, mark tying into sort of codecs and AI. Aom Alliance for Open Media launched its new adoption showcase right before IBC, talking specifically to AV1. You know Vision, lure, video, land, vimeo. There was some adoption of the AV1 codec they were talking about. So interesting to see AV1 getting played up a little bit as well. Yeah, and on the Disney Hotstar, I did reach out to them and just okay, we still have six months to go. Hopefully it happens, but they're interested in coming to the NAB Streaming Summit next year and talking about the technology.
Speaker 3So we'll see if we get a presentation on that.
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. And speaking of AV1, it was a real demonstration. It wasn't sort of a fake or it wasn't like a P60 stream using, you know, dolby IO millicast from their booth. They had four sources and they stitched together four 1080p frames into 4K P60. They streamed it to a data center in Frankfurt using web RTC, their technology, and came back and you know, they had the, you know the clock running and you know everything, so you could see like it really was 300 milliseconds. It was super impressive.
Speaker 2Any of that tied back to the recent Theo acquisition or no, that's all.
Speaker 3Um, yes, yes, Very good, very good question. Um, they were on the connected television. Uh, they did tell me that they were using the uh theo player. Okay, now I I it was unclear to me. I sort of got the impression I may be wrong here. So if if someone from dolby hears this and wants to clarify, please reach out. But I think it was sort of for demo purposes. I don't think this was. You know, like you know, this wasn't an SDK that you could just deploy. Again, I might be wrong, but it was a Theo player. I know that they also happen to be using the NetEnt Quadra T1U. Very impressive demonstration 300 milliseconds. It just, it just shows that AV1 is real, that you know. And again, you and I have, you know, slightly different views on the ultra low latency, although we're largely in alignment, you know. Do you need 300 milliseconds? Maybe, maybe not, but you know there are applications where, where that could matter.
Speaker 2There are I would say, the piece here that we're not discussing and we're not going to stay but in all these instances where people are showing, uh, ultra low latency taking place, they're all looking at encoding and playback but none of them are thinking about because they're not responsible for the distribution is how hard it is for the c, because you go talk to the cds, they'll tell you yeah, you want to do ultra low latency at five or 10 million concurrent streams.
Speaker 3It ain't happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So that's so. That's a very, very good point, and you know this was obviously showcasing. You know a single, literally a point to point solution.
Speaker 2but you got to start somewhere Like you got to prove. You got to start somewhere Like look, you got to prove it works in every aspect, starting with ingestion, transcoding playback. Now you just need scale. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3No, nothing wrong at all, so that was really cool. Let's see what else do we have here. So you know, getting into the announcement, Harmonic made a slew of technology showcases and announcements.
Speaker 2Yeah, they had quite a few. Again, it was all. How do we help customers deliver better video quality?
Speaker 3Exactly, exactly, that's it. You know Bitmovin is. You already mentioned that they're. You know a lot of partnership. That's something else. That there, um, you know a lot of partnership, that's something else. And I I'm I made this observation I know around NAB is that I felt like NAB was was the partnership show. I think I even said that on the podcast. I think IBC was even more IBC. Oh, a hundred percent, it was you. You went into literally every single booth and you know, in some cases, you're like wait, what booth am I in? Because there were, you know so many logos. And you know, in some cases, you're like wait, what booth am I in? Because there were, you know so many logos. And you know sometimes even compete. You're like, wait, aren't you guys like supposed to be enemies?
Speaker 2you know well, you know, yeah, sometimes we are, but now we're friends you know, so I I did notice 99 of every release I got or saw it was all vendors tying up with vendors and look, I think that's good. But the bottom line is I you know I hate to have to point this out we have too many vendors in the market for the size of the market in the, in the services out there. It's not a big enough market to where all these vendors can grow five or ten percent a year cannot happen yeah, yeah. So that's the downside yeah, yeah tim also had a. Uh yeah, announced with aw.
Speaker 3AWS.
Speaker 2Right, and that's.
Speaker 3Graviton, which is arm based you know processors which is very interesting.
Speaker 2Yeah, I found that there were a lot of really good technology releases, announcements, talking about features and functionality and whatnot, which is great because a lot of customers are looking at that.
Speaker 2But now it's like Brightcove had one, too, around AI how we're now putting AI into the whole platform. But the issue and what most of the vendors aren't talking about is okay, that's great, but there's an additional cost to the company to deploy these. Like the AI functionality is not free. Now Brightcove is giving it away for free for a limited time, but then there's an additional cost. So companies are then going to have to determine customers, I should say, what is the additional benefit we're getting? Does it justify the cost? Does it justify us upgrading or moving from on-prem to cloud? There's still a lot of decisions they're going to have to make. Yeah, yeah for sure, but there was quite a lot of technology announcements and amazing how many were tied to encoding, transcoding, compression, codecs of some kind, and we tend to not get, I think, at least that many releases tied to such one silo in the media workflow. But we got a lot at.
Speaker 3IBC. We got a lot, so I'm wondering what we'll see at NAB.
Speaker 2NAB, yeah, what's it going to be more about there? I don't think delivery I still think it's going to be cloud play out, I think is going to grow, just in terms of what everyone's talking about. Look at what Amagi and others are doing and I think also just the ingestion, transcoding and syndication. If I now have to push the stream out to multiple locations and repackage it, like many are doing, I think that we're going to see more at neb, but of course, we're going to get the ai alphabet soup. There's no way around. Yes, it's gonna happen. Yeah, right, um, so I'm interested for for neb next year, super excited just to sort of see what brings. And mark.
Speaker 2I was making a list of what I'm going to talk about in my keynote and I'm going to highlight just some of the things that have happened over the last 12 months since I was last on stage, you know, come April, and just calling out big, big things to highlight and I suddenly realized I'm going to have to put this list down In 12 months. The amount of things that have happened that have been gigantic, right, just Paramount merging with Skydance, right, this company getting acquired, this one raising another round. There's so many things that are structurally going to change our industry over the next couple of years. That happened in a 12-month period.
Speaker 3Well, can you imagine, you know, the fallout of this whole Egeo situation, like who's going to end up acquiring you know? Are they going to? Is it, you know? Is it going to be split up in pieces?
Speaker 2Honestly, that I don't think is that big of a deal, just because we're not talking about billions of dollars here. We're talking about a couple hundred million dollars in revenue, and if they only get rid of one of the business units and keep the other two themselves, then we're talking less than a hundred million dollars. Yeah, and some of those are not even tied to video right app security.
Speaker 2That's really kind of different industry, but I'm thinking of the mergers, the lawsuits. Yeah, uh, think of nfl on netflix. Would we have thought of that two years ago? No, there's no chance. Anybody would have thought on christmas, that's right on christmas day christmas, of all things and next year at nab we're going to be able to talk about in person.
Speaker 2Now I hope Netflix will do this in person, we'll see but they're going to have the largest live streaming event ever in history in the have some of these OTC services now getting to free cashflow, but that's as a result of a lot of layoffs. But also we have to think about the money aspect. We've just now gotten the first cut from the Fed. If we continue to get that and money gets cheap again and it's back down to three or 5% interest compared to what some people have been paying, I mean we've seen deals at 10, 13, even 17%. What does that mean? It means companies can once again invest in the business, which means they will also hire Now. Hopefully they will hire smarter, right Quality over quantity. But 12 months, 16, 18 months from now, it definitely has a big impact on the industry. So just incredible to think as I started making the list of just how much takes place in a 12 month period. And yet look at what took place in three days at IBC. Yeah, just in terms of news, or four days. How long is I?
Speaker 3Yeah, four days. Yeah it it. It used to be a five day show, it's now four days, five days.
Speaker 2I actually looked up because obviously a lot of people ask me, dan, can I meet you at IBC? And I'm like I'm not going. And I looked up. The last time I went to IBC was 1999. Really yeah, with Globix that was the last IBC show I went to.
Speaker 3Wow.
Speaker 2But I will say for listeners that I am looking at potentially going to the 2025 show, maybe even doing a little bit of speaking and some some other speaking with others.
Speaker 3I think you should. I think you should, it's, it's, it's a good event and there's a lot more us based or, you know, North American companies that are there.
Speaker 2Well, that's what I don't want to be honest, like hey because we cover so much of that just here being in america and at neb.
Speaker 2Like what I want to do is go focus on the european view european, but also super interesting what's going on in india right now apac as well. Like I want to continue to build my knowledge around that, because even though I talk to a lot of those companies, I don't feature them as much. So I I always think that we're a little too US centric in terms of what we look at.
Speaker 2Yeah, and now that we think about, years later, where's the growth of Netflix coming from? It's not the US. It's not the US. No, as we've seen with Max as well, right, so interesting what's going on internationally. So that's what we got this week. We kept that to 45 minutes. That's good. Now, thanks again to podcast sponsors IDS you can check them out at integrated-digital and Netskrt, n-e-t-s-k-r-t dot I-O. We'll be back next week with actually, we don't have anything in the agenda next week, mark, as far as what we're covering.
Speaker 2So that's good Now, believe it or not. Let's see, Mark, if you actually know this number. Or close, when is Netflix's earnings? How many days away do you think it is? Oh, I don't know the number.
Speaker 3It's three weeks Wow.
Speaker 2Yeah, just about. So we are going to go.
Speaker 3It feels like we just I know, I know.
Speaker 2Really you know why I looked it up. It's interesting compared to, say, say, two years ago with the podcast. Public companies are now spacing out their earnings further in terms of when they're starting, like early. Netflix's does the earliest earnings. Anyone but disney and some others are now spacing them out even further at the end of the quarter. So now many times we're now covering earnings over a five or six weeks period where we used to cover it in two or three weeks. But yeah, we've got Netflix earnings in about three weeks.
Speaker 2Three weeks, yeah, so we'll have more to cover, but in the meantime, you guys have any questions, let Mark and I know Most of what we talked about today, certainly all the numbers, everything I've put up online I haven't put up Mark a lot of the stuff we talked about around transcoding and coding and everything we saw at IBC. So you guys have questions, reach out to Mark. Certainly, in the IBC stuff We'll be back with another podcast episode, probably in about just a little over a week, unless any crazy news drops, which is always possible. But in the meantime we appreciate everyone listening. Have any questions, reach out Everyone. Stay safe, have a great week. We'll talk to you again soon.
Speaker 1If you enjoyed the show, send it to a friend, have questions for Dan or Mark, connect with them on LinkedIn at any time, and be sure to check out Dan's blog at streamingmediablogcom.