SAN DIEGO—DVEO will unveil Brutus Cloud, a new platform designed to transform video distribution, at IBC 2024, Sept. 13-16, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

Brutus Cloud offers advanced capabilities to meet the growing demands of IPTV, OTT, and FAST TV services, providing high-performance, flexible video transcoding and streaming, DVEO said.

Brutus Cloud is engineered to deliver top-tier video transcoding and streaming solutions and provides seamless integration and quality across various platforms, it said.

Features include:

• Transcode multiple channels for IPTV. Manage and deliver numerous HD channels, enhancing the viewer experience with reliable and high-quality IPTV service.
• Transcode multiple resolutions in HLS DASH ABR for OTT. Adaptively transcode videos into different resolutions using HLS and DASH protocols.
• Insert SCTE35 ad insertion markers into HLS DASH for FAST TV. Enhance ad delivery and monetization for Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST TV) services by inserting SCTE35 markers into HLS DASH streams.
• Live video distribution: Distribute live video streams with high quality and low latency.

In addition, Brutus Cloud has been integrated with 1Legion, a cloud computing innovator. 1Legion offers a cost-effective GPU compute rental service and renewable energy-powered private cloud. Its unique model aggregates third-party compute resources through advanced API integration, offering scalable, on-demand access to powerful GPU technology, it said.

This approach not only democratizes access to high-powered computing but also significantly reduces costs and minimizes environmental impact. By partnering with 1Legion, Brutus Cloud leverages these cutting-edge capabilities to enhance its global video distribution and security features, ensuring superior performance and sustainability in video transcoding and streaming, it said.
See DVEO at IBC 2024 Stand 5.B5.

More information is available on the company’s website.

PARIS—Dalet has unveiled significant updates to the Dalet AmberFin transcoding platform that feature seamless integration with cloud-native Dalet Flex media logistics and Dalet Pyramid unified news operations platforms as well as new transcoding capabilities.

“Dalet AmberFin sits at the heart of the rapidly evolving streaming workflow,” explained Patrick Devlin, product manager for Dalet AmberFin. “Because it is a cornerstone technology for our customers, we are focused on its continuous improvement and integration in the wider ecosystem. This release threads the recognized Dalet AmberFin conversion quality and media processing technology across our flagship SaaS solutions, Dalet Flex and Dalet Pyramid. As a critical pillar of these solutions, Dalet AmberFin bridges the gap for Dalet customers who need a fully cloud-native media ecosystem with proven end-to-end production and distribution workflows that can support any existing or emerging market vertical.” 

Dalet AmberFin also provides a cloud-first approach that has been verified by the AWS Foundational Technical Review, the company said. 

“It is no longer sufficient to simply take an on-premises system and run it on EC2 instances in the cloud, customers want cloud-native applications that can take full advantage of containerized services, scale up and scale down and the security best practices in the cloud,”  Devlin said. 

The company also stressed the convenience, agility and power provided by the new update. The solution’s advanced ingest management and conversion combined with elastic cloud resources enables enterprise users to cost-effectively facilitate large-scale projects, the company said. 

In addition, the newly updated Dalet AmberFin Kiosk, which supports macOS and offers expanded support for formats including ProRes RAW and NEF, helps users quickly offload and back up large amounts of content. Utilizing cloud storage, it concurrently verifies content integrity and enriches metadata so that content is organized and ready to drive further operational workflows easily.

Dalet said this new capability is particularly useful for teams out on location for long production shoots. Processing pipeline improvements leverage Netflix Photon validation tools to enable key IMF workflows in the cloud. 

Other production efficiency enhancements include support for UHD input and output with a standard transcode node and support for writing ABR packages DASH & HLS while content is being ingested. 

Dalet also reported that its accelerated development plans include an entire suite of cloud-native solutions in 2022. 

As part of that, Dalet Flex will be made available as a multi-tenanted SaaS offering, providing customers with scalability and elasticity when needed while offloading the costs of infrastructure investment and time spent on maintenance to Dalet. With Dalet Pyramid, newsrooms will be able to virtualize their entire operation with increased production and distribution capabilities that enable digital-first news story workflows anytime, anywhere, Dalet said. 

For more information watch the latest Dalet AmberFin video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMLoYySpOKs .

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream is making a number of enhancements to the transcoding capability of its Vantage media processing platform that are designed to enable more integration with third-party technology, the company has announced.

Among these new integrations is the Grass Valley HQX, which Vantage can use to transcode acquisition formats to Grass Valley HQX, as well as transcode Grass Valley HQX to delivery formats. Vantage also now works with Grass Valley Alchemist through a third-party connector to create orchestrated workflows that include their technology.

The update also provides Vantage users with access to the Colorfront Engine advanced color volume remapping tools that use the Human Perceptual Model for multiple display mastering.

Other enhancements with this latest version of Vantage include FFV1 encoding; support for Sony’s XAVC HD and HD Intra, as well as XAVC 4K and 4K Intra; an automated interface to Harmonic Spectrum video playout servers; HDR10+; and support for AS-11, DVCPro and DVC Pro HD, AV1, Tachyon 9.

All of these capabilities, except the connector to Grass Valley Alchemist, are available in the cloud with Vantage Cloud Port.

In addition, Telestream says that Vantage has enhanced, automated composition.

For more information, visit www.telestream.net.  

SINGAPORE—Torque Video Systems is launching the Torque Pelican platform, a scalable mass transcoding platform.

Pelican features multichannel overlay that allows for superimposing custom graphics, text or RSS feeds onto live content, all done in the compressed domain. The system also has mass decode-encode functionality for H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC for live IP transcode and file-based transcode workflows. Pelican can  also allow users to encode contribution links with high-quality HEVC before sending to a studio.

Pelican is available in two models: a 1RU platform that provides up to eight HD encoders, and a slot-based model that provides user-expandability for up to 64 HD encoders, also in a 1RU space. Each model offers a web-based GUI for direct control, as well as REST API for integration into other control systems. They each also use NetInt Codensity hardware codec technology, which offloads intensive operations to parallel VLSI compute elements.

For more information, visit www.torquevideo.tv.  

ONTARIO—When you think about artificial intelligence (AI)–specifically software capable of performing self-directed tasks historically performed by human intelligence–it conjures up images of Skynet; the evil AI in the Terminator movie franchise.

That’s fiction. But in real-life, AI is finding its way into the workplace, and that includes the encoding, transcoding and decoding of compressed video. Using the power of AI in their programs, vendors such as Bitmovin, Cobalt Digital, MediaKind, Telestream and V-Nova are speeding up their encoding programs while reducing bandwidth demands; resulting in faster, more affordable products for their customers.

“AI is starting to play an important role in encoding, where it has enormous potential to dramatically improve workflows,” said Stefan Lederer, CEO and co-founder of Bitmovin, a developer of cloud-based media streaming technology. “With the emergence of new codecs, new video file formats and delivery methods, the TV and media industry needs solutions that improve encoding in the automated, immediate and highly efficient way that AI offers.”

[Read: How We See: The Human Visual System]

That said, there is a debate underway among vendors as to the limits of AI in the encoding process. Certainly AI–also known as “machine learning”–can accelerate the encoding process. But can it do everything that a human observer can to detect and remedy artifacts in compressed video? No one really knows.

It’s important to remember that the the improvement in speed is in the process of removing humans from the review stage after an encode has happened, according to Paul Turner, of Turner Media Consulting. “Encode parameters can be set to a predefined set of values, but you still have to look at the result and assess if the encoded output is of sufficient quality,” he said. “If not, you have to iterate on the settings.”

(For the record, ML is a narrower version of AI, in which AI-enabled software is charged with making decisions about specific data within predefined parameters; rather than becoming self-aware and choosing to annihilate the human race. In this article, we will use the two terms interchangeably, as the people who were interviewed tended to.)

HOW AI CAN IMPROVE ENCODING

Today’s video codecs use algorithms to analyze video imagery, to determine which bits can be removed to reduce file size without degrading the subjective image quality perceived by the viewer.

Injecting AI into the encoding process takes this process a step further. AI allows the software to proactively assess the quality of the compressed video before transmission. This lets the encoding system detect and remedy any artifacts inadvertently generated by the codec. As the AI does this, it “learns” from its actions, and uses this knowledge to improve its performance over successive applications.

The result: “By using AI, encoding solutions can make smart decisions about the compression settings and visual parameters of each frame, speeding up processing and improving encoding efficiency,” said Lederer. “Trained AI models can even predict the optimal encoding settings, as well as preprocessing tools, for every given source asset.”

There are other ways that AI can be used in encoding, according to Guido Meardi, CEO and co-founder of V-Nova, a U.K.-based developer of codecs. One of the most common is to improve an existing codec’s predictive capabilities, for deciding which bits can be safely removed.

“The better you predict the image, the less residuals you have to eventually encode,” Meardi said; “therefore the less you have to send down the pipe without compromising quality.”

THE LIMITS OF AI

In each of these examples, AI is trying to improve the video production process by automating quality control. This is meant to reduce much-slower (and more costly) human intervention to perform the same tasks.

“What you’re fundamentally trying to do is emulate human assessment,” said Shawn Carnahan, CTO for Telestream in Grass Valley, Calif. “You’re trying to use machine learning to emulate how the viewer perceives the quality of the content, and use that to decide questions such as ‘can I drive the bitrate even further, or do I need to increase the bitrate to maintain subjective quality?’”

If this sounds like a daunting task, it is. AI software is literally trained “to look for things in the image that human viewers would find objectionable,” Carnahan said. “You are training a machine to spot things that shouldn’t be there.”

This is where the limits of AI-enabled video encoding come to bear. “Mapping or trying to best represent the human visual system using software is near impossible,” said Carl Furgusson, vice president of Portfolio Management for MediaKind (formerly Ericsson Media Solutions). “People have been trying to do it for 20 or 30-plus years without success, and I don’t think anyone will ever really get to an accurate mapping of the human visual system.”

The problem is the subjective nature of human viewing, compared to a metrics-based AI viewing model. “You will always get different results between what people think in reality is better picture quality, and what the measurement tools will give you,” Furgusson said; no matter how sophisticated the AI viewing model may be.

Quality assessment isn’t only about absolute picture quality; there are artifacts that non-trained human viewers will not notice, according to Turner.

“That has to be factored in to the AI training too,” he said.

Does this mean that AI is doomed to play a minor role in video compression? V-Nova’s Guido Meardi doesn’t think so. Even with its limits, he predicts that AI will become “an integral part of compression engines in the future.”

Still, until this technology can actually match the complexities and nuances of the human visual system, human intervention will remain a necessary element of high-quality video compression. At best, AI will continually drive down the percentage of instances when humans have to step in to fix the picture quality.

PARIS, DENVER & SINGAPORE–ATEME has announced that it is supplying Sinclair Broadcast Group with live video encoding technology for Sinclair’s Dallas experimental ATSC 3.0 test for single frequency networks.

ATEME is providing its TITAN encoding platform for ATSC 1.0 (MPEG-2) “Host Station” encoding and “NextGen” 3.0 (HEVC) encoding, providing efficient, Live/Mux statistical multiplexing enabled VBR encoding across both transmission platforms. Two years ago, ATEME introduced HE-MPEG2, a high-efficiency MPEG-2 codec, which is compatible with MPEG-2 compliant decoders, including legacy set-top boxes, digital televisions and digital to analog MPEG-2 converters.

[Read: Q&A: Mark Aitken On Dallas Next-Gen SFN Trial]

Based on the bandwidth efficiency of HE-MPEG2 in conjunction with ATEME’s TITAN Live/Mux statistical multiplexing, the ATSC stations have increased mux density by 30 percent without compromising video quality, according to ATEME. TITAN is a pure software encoder-transcoder that can provide a migration path to ATSC 3.0, HEVC or SHVC (scalable HEVC) and runs on any private/public and on/off-premises cloud infrastructure.

For a comprehensive list of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.

I watched some amazing fireworks this past Fourth of July weekend, with powerful rockets screaming skyward to burst among the clouds and fantastic fountains erupting brilliantly at ground level. After the excitement, I found myself musing on the show’s parallel to the question of whether it is better to transcode in the cloud or to use on-premise servers. People want to understand how cloud-based transcoding might benefit their business. Do we even need on-premise transcoding anymore?

The truth is that you can’t discuss transcoding without considering the workflow around it. Let’s start with two basic definitions:

1. Transcoding is the adaption of a media file from one format to another: converting a 1080i file to 720p or Avid DNxHD to H.264 web-compatible format, changing the bit rate, or making numerous other changes needed to deliver content to a particular platform.

2. Workflow is the path content takes between creation and delivery. A workflow can include manual processes such as Standards & Practices, machine-automated processes such as quality control, and, yes, transcoding.

In other words, transcoding is just one activity within the overall journey we call a “workflow.” What happens upstream and downstream of transcoding matters. We are really asking about content operations, which come in two flavors: Production Content that is in the process of being created and Distribution Content that is relatively complete but needs to be adapted for one or more distribution platforms.

Production content is the “raw material” of the production factory, from a YouTube producer creating a workout video to a broadcast newsroom creating this evening’s newscast. Transcoding may be needed to bring in external content (such as from a news-wire service, archive or external library) or to share content between departments running different systems (such as production and promotions departments). Production content workflows tend to be heavily time-dependent, frequently operate on smaller files and typically require very few destination formats and variations.

Distribution content is the finished goods that need to be packaged for delivery. The destination could be a network’s master control, iTunes, Roku, SVOD or any other distribution path. It tends to be longer in duration, although it may also include commercials and promos, and generally requires conversion into significantly more formats and varieties.

With all that in mind, let’s re-ask the question: cloud-based or on-premise transcoding? The answer often comes down to three simple factors:

TIME

Transcoding large files can take significant time; uploading large files to the cloud, potentially even longer. If the delivery need is measured in minutes, as is frequently required with production operations, it’s unlikely cloud services will reliably meet that demand. If the need is measured in days, which is normal in distribution operations, the cloud becomes a more realistic option.

Internet connection speed also greatly affects time. Just comparing one recent Positive Flux client with a 100Gig internet backbone and another with only 200Mb, the client with the faster pipe was far better positioned to utilize cloud services for a wider variety of services. 

DISTANCE

A widely-dispersed team whose members need to operate on the content at the same time could benefit from a cloud-based solution, if it has the workflow tools they need. For them, the “time cost” of bringing content to the cloud is offset by the benefits in freedom of location.

If the content is destined for multiple off-site locations, then time spent to upload it into the cloud is not wasted. In fact, it has the effect of moving the content closer to all its destinations and potentially reducing the number of uploads to just one. We can then leverage cloud-based workflows and transcoding to deliver the many variations to the different destinations. 

If the content is only destined for an in-house master control facility, then cloud-based operations make less sense. Why go to the cloud only to return to the same starting point?

MONEY

Moving transcoding and workflow operations to the cloud trades capital investment for operational cost. Cloud-based operations could help avoid buying some servers and software licenses, or building a data room or complex networks, but careful financial modeling and good estimates of content volumes are critical. The pay-as-you-go model might help with cash-flow, but those with higher volumes may find themselves penalized. Cost calculations need to include upload, storage, transcode operations, and other processing and delivery charges from the cloud service provider. It is also important to amortize the incremental internet service used to and manage content operations.

On-premise solutions provide an all-you-can-eat solution with fixed pricing that should be easier to budget. Licenses can be used for years, although they incur annual support fees. Right-sizing is critical here: buy too many licenses and engines sit idle; buy too few and content piles up like flights into O’Hare. In our practice, 4,000 one-hour transcodes per year is the rule-of-thumb for the economic break-even point for one server.

People ask if there are maintenance or IT cost savings associated with using cloud services. It seems like this should be the case, but the reality is that web services need to be managed and monitored just like local servers. Companies find themselves needing the same size team either way.

WHY NOT HAVE IT ALL?

For many workflows, the decision of where to perform transcoding is not an A/B choice. One of the cloud’s many advantages is its elasticity. It’s easy to spin up additional transcode engines in the cloud when a big job comes through or when many projects need to be accomplished at the same time. Although on-premises solutions do not offer this capability today, it’s conceivable that on-premise technology providers could soon provide the same elasticity, providing a hybrid on-site licensing/virtualization model or hybrid onsite/cloud service, which would manage the flow of content and scale on demand.

Like the fireworks, perhaps the best show of all ties together earth-bound launch platforms and cloud-based firepower.

Share your experiences in deciding to cloud or not to cloud media workflow operations in the comments.

Larry Thaler is the President of Positive Flux, a consulting firm that specializes in helping media companies take advantage of the rapid changes occurring in the industry. He can be reached via TV Technology.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.—Hybrik has covered all its bases for the transcoding of Apple ProRes operating points, announcing that its cloud-based media processing now supports encoding and decoding for the format.

Hybrik’s transcoding pipeline allows for the transcoding of ProRes content directly from an Amazon AWS S3 storage object without creating an intermediate file. This new capability will enable more ProRes-based workflows in the cloud.

Based on Amazon’s AWS cloud platform, Hybrik’s service provides transcoding, quality control, accelerated file transfer, large-scale storage, and streaming to deliver optimized video.

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.—Philippine’s ABS-CBN media and entertainment company has acquired Telestream’s Vantage media processing platform. The Vantage system will offer the broadcasters a transcode farm that will be installed at ABS-CBN’s Quezon City-based iPost post production facility.

Vantage will transcode and capture video feeds from other channels within the network and also from external sources, according the press release, managing materials from acquisition through delivery. In addition to serving ABS-CBN’s transcoding needs, Telestream reports that the Vantage system will also help with watermarking and captioning needs.

ABS-CBN operates two national channels, two regional radio networks, 11 cable channels and six international channels.

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.—Jerusalem-based Channel 2 News has implemented a major transcode farm, file-based content ingest platform and intelligent workflow automation system from with the help of Telestream. This allows that station to move away from tape-based production to a digital tapeless technology environment.

Channel 2 main studio

Telestream Vantage was initially tapped as the central transcode farm for all of Channel’s newsgathering needs. Vantage then became the main production workflow platform for the broadcaster’s Arab Desk, requiring a combination of Telestream Pipeline, Vantage Transcode, Check-in to Avid Interplay and Avid storage systems.

The new production environment features asset management, an advanced news production system, 20 suites of post-production resources, server-based playout, two foreign desks with 22 acquisition channels and a transcode farm that supports ultra-fast news turnaround workflows.

Telestream Vantage provides the primary ingest channel for the file-based environment. The platform can take the widest spectrum of content and transcode it into a production format that is required by Avid.