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Answered By
Dr. Abdul Rehman
Chief Product Officer
Why Did SSIMWAVE Join the Streaming Video Technology Alliance?
SVA is on a mission to make streaming better by fighting for viewers. SSIMWAVE’s Emmy® Award-winning team of world-leading scientists is on a mission to make viewing better by providing technology that automates video experiences based on human perception. We are thrilled to be working with SVA on the mission every step of the way and are proud of various important contributions across many SVA WGs since we joined the organization.
Now, more than ever we need to gather and discuss the issues that the industry is facing:
- Explosion of new services, workflows, resolutions, devices.
- Scaling to reach millions of customers globally in the most cost-effective way.
- Automation and the move to the cloud.
Video workflows are complicated with many parties involved in delivering video to end viewers. So many things can go wrong and affect millions of viewers. Having the opportunity to work with other key industry members on proof-of-concepts (POCs) and real-life trials has been pivotal in our ability to solve some of the most pressing problems.
We joined SVA because we believe it is a great driver for many positive changes. Working with SVA, we can create and drive adoption of solutions that will make the industry healthy and profitable in the next five years and even decades to come.
Our experience has been very positive; we have participated in working groups and produced the following documents:
- Best Practices for End-To-End Workflow Monitoring under QoE / Measurement Work Group.
- Ad Monitoring Group.
- Best Practices for Low Latency under Live Streaming Work Group.
What Do You Believe is the Biggest Technical Challenge Facing the Streaming Video Industry the SVTA Can Help Address?
Unprecedented growth of video content available to viewers has reached an inflection point, requiring unifying tools that can automate the video delivery process. Today’s manual and disjointed processes no longer support the scale required to ensure viewers are happy with the ever-rising bar of quality expectations. Adding to the challenge, managing lean production workflows to deliver better viewer experiences without high and variable operational costs is not simple. Ensuring an optimum balance between various practical constraints is difficult because quality assurance and optimization tools often do not correlate well with human vision and do not provide a standard scale to set a baseline quality score for internal and external stakeholders. One of the biggest technical challenges facing the streaming video industry is the lack of Video Experience automation, from content creation to consumption in a unifying fashion, that can satisfy the ever-increasing appetite of viewers for ultimate experience across all devices, platforms, and mediums.
At SSIMWAVE®, we created a Video Experience Automation Platform that connects to any workflow and operationalizes viewer experience data to remove the guesswork and inconsistency from manual QA and validation processes. By plugging into the content creation, contribution, distribution, and delivery steps, our customers can scale their quality assurance function beyond non-metric-based processes so that they can deliver targeted viewer experiences consistently.
Our Emmy®-awarded SSIMPLUS® family of algorithms has the ability to identify precisely what quality is acceptable to viewers on a per genre, per device basis across different resolutions, frame rates, and devices at scale. Our technology is used to address video quality issues across the entire library and all streams, including to:
- Validate third-party content quality per the SLA.
- Identify and correct subpar source assets or streams.
- Alert and remedy issues impacting viewer experience from content creation to consumption.
- Remove wasted delivery spends so that viewers receive a targeted video experience consistently regardless of content type, attributes, encoding approach, delivery network, and playback device.
Viewers have shown that they have huge appetites for content diversity. Success in delivery in the direct-to-consumer environment means being able consistently to meet viewer experience targets so that viewers keep tuning in and streaming businesses run profitably.
How Does an Organization Like the SVTA Bring Value to the Industry?
SVA provides a forum to solve tough problems that require collaboration across various stakeholders working on video streaming. There is incredible value when the organization tackles the most impactful problems faced by the media and entertainment industry and provides meaningful solutions in a tangible way to support unprecedented growth of video content. It’s especially important that SVA continues to promote the importance of solutions to challenging problems that take viewer-first approaches.
There are several ways that SVA is leading the way:
- Providing best-in-class practices. For example, we’ve been working with other key players on Best Practices for End-To-End Workflow Monitoring under the QoE / Measurement Work Group.
- POCs in which small scale experiments in controlled environments show how certain technologies affect the video experience.
- Real-life trials on a bigger scale to measure the effect of certain processes and workflows on the end-viewer experience.
- Sharing of best practices and experiences – what worked, what did not work, and what types of problems are most pressing – so we can identify them and start looking for solutions.
All of these activities drive the industry forward, helping to improve the viewer experience for millions of users and making streaming workflows more efficient.
Dr. Abdul Rehman
Chief Product Officer
About
SSIMWAVE is the creator of the Video Experience Automation category enabling assessment of video quality at scale so that video streaming services can reduce their distribution expenses and stop worrying about quality drop-offs and the high operational cost of traditional video assurance processes. With our VQ Dial and Video Intelligence Suite products, customers enjoy the peace of mind that comes from an end-to-end solution using the only quality metric that is correlated to human vision.
Powered by the two-time Emmy-awarded SSIMPLUS quality metric, the SSIMWAVE Video Experience Automation Platform connects to any workflow and operationalizes viewer experience data to remove the guesswork and inconsistency from manual video assurance processes. Plugging into the content creation, contribution, distribution, and delivery steps, our customers are able to scale their quality assurance function beyond non-metric-based processes so that they can deliver a consistent quality of experience to their distributors and subscribers. SSIMWAVE was founded in 2013, located in Waterloo, Canada and serves customers all over the world.