Voices of Video
Explore the inner workings of video technology with Voices of Video: Inside the Tech. This podcast gathers industry experts and innovators to examine every facet of video technology, from decoding and encoding processes to the latest advancements in hardware versus software processing and codecs. Alongside these technical insights, we dive into practical techniques, emerging trends, and industry-shaping facts that define the future of video.
Ideal for engineers, developers, and tech enthusiasts, each episode offers hands-on advice and the in-depth knowledge you need to excel in today’s fast-evolving video landscape. Join us to master the tools, technologies, and trends driving the future of digital video.
Voices of Video
A Deep Dive into India's Content Delivery Future
Join us for a groundbreaking conversation with Krishna Rao Vijayanagar, the visionary founder of OTTverse, who offers an insider’s perspective on conquering the Indian streaming market’s distinct challenges. Ever wondered how major streaming platforms like Disney Plus Hotstar and GeoCinema craft their strategies to captivate a young, tech-savvy audience in a price-sensitive landscape? Krishna reveals the intricate balance between national and regional streaming triumphs, and the innovative tactics telcos employ to aggregate OTT services for a diverse audience.
Krishna shares his vast knowledge of the technological ecosystem within India, where the adoption of smart TVs and OTT devices is skyrocketing in urban areas, while traditional broadcasting holds sway in rural locales. We discuss how cutting-edge video codecs, innovative encoding techniques, and adaptive bitrate streaming are redefining the viewing experience, alongside the pivotal role of DRM technologies in safeguarding content. The episode also uncovers how CDN providers like Akamai and CloudFront are shaping the future of content delivery in India, offering listeners deep insights into both the technical and business fronts of the streaming world.
The conversation takes an educational turn as Krishna discusses the critical need for video technology knowledge in India. Discover how OTTverse is leading the charge with initiatives to bridge educational gaps, upping the ante for students and professionals eyeing careers in the OTT industry. We also explore the nuances of multilingual film production, the transformative potential of AI in video optimization, and the artistry behind personalization in content discovery. This episode promises a wealth of insights for anyone interested in the dynamic landscape of Indian streaming and the technological marvels that drive it.
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
Voices of Video. Voices of Video. The Voices of Video.
Speaker 2:Voices of Video.
Speaker 1:Welcome to NetEnt's Voices in Video, where we explore critical streaming-related topics with experts in the field. If you're watching and have questions, please post them as a comment. On whichever platform you're watching, we'll answer live if time permits. Otherwise, we'll respond after the show. Today we chat with Krishna Rao Bajanagar, who is founder of OTTverse, which covers OTT technologies and business topics. By way of education, krishna has an MS and PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. I met Krishna years ago at one of the several positions he's held in both US and Indian companies. Today, our conversation will focus on streaming in India, which now has the largest population in the world. We'll cover the market forces that impact OTT strategies in India and then focus on the technical decisions that these market forces entail, like codec selection, ladder formation, player support, CDN selection and other issues. Then we'll spend some time discussing OTTverse and particularly the issues that OTTverse readers are finding most compelling today. Krishna, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Jan. Thank you, Anita as well, for having me on this podcast.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, we're glad to have you and I know it's late for you and we appreciate your working with our time constraints, but let's you and I spoke about this a couple of days ago, you know it seems like the Indian market is a very challenging market to get into in a number of ways. Could you cover that? I mean, what's the Indian market like to get into as a content provider?
Speaker 2:India is a very beautiful, complex and ancient multicultural country that creates an atmosphere of challenges and opportunities as well. To give you an example, we have approximately 26 different languages, each with their own script, each with their own vocabulary, each with their own dictionaries. So when you want to communicate with somebody and all the states in India are divided based on linguistic, based on the languages. So I come from Bangalore, the tech capital of India If I go to my neighboring state, there's a very small likelihood I'd understand their language. So, if you think about this in terms of OTT, if I produce a language, if I produce a movie in my language, distributing it to other parts of the country becomes a challenge primarily because people wouldn't understand it.
Speaker 2:So this, though it looks like a challenge, it's very interesting from a technical perspective, brings in interesting concepts of dubbing. Can you create one language and translate it or dub it in five or six different languages? Can you do closed captioning? Can you five or six different languages? Can you do closed captioning? Can you do subtitles in different languages and different scripts? How do you deliver?
Speaker 1:all of this.
Speaker 2:I was just thinking about this with a couple of friends after our discussion and we realized that several OTTs have to struggle with the UI. So in the US you're probably accustomed to having the UI in English. In India, most of the OTD players have an English UI, but how do you change the entire UI to a different language and how do you do it for five different languages in India if you want to be a national player? So it's a beautiful, complex country country a lot of challenges and it's a it's a good place to be if you want to solve interesting problems at scale. So I'll leave it at that and pick up these topics one by one I guess, okay, what about pricing?
Speaker 2:because, um, it felt like pricing was also, uh, pretty pressured over there I would say most vendors who have probably come to india have also faced this. So india is a price sensitive market. It's primarily because the the population is very young. They're coming out of the towns, villages, coming to the metros. Recent stats show that 65 percent of the population is below the age of 35. So it's a very young population earning their first dollars, getting their first paychecks.
Speaker 2:So people want to pay less for content. People appreciate free stuff in India. So it makes it quite complex to run a business over here. How do you produce content? How do you set up produce content? How do you set up the technology? How do you deliver it? Do the marketing while charging something which is sensible. So, for example, disney plus Hotstar I think their top tier comes roughly to a few dollars per year, probably 1010, $20 a year. So that's how competitive it is. On the other hand, you have forces like GeoCinema, who's running this year's IPL and running their entire app for free on a pure award model. So this is a conglomerate with very, very deep pockets, so they can do a market exercise like this to capture the audience. So if you're an OTT, if you want to enter the market, how do you actually counteract such a force. So that's something interesting to think about as well.
Speaker 1:Who's doing a good job coming in from the outside. You know, here in the States we have, you know the big names Netflix, prime, hulu. You know Paramount. Who's doing a good job penetrating the Indian market and what are they doing to accomplish that?
Speaker 2:So when you look at the Indian context, it is interesting. You have to kind of look at it as the national play versus the regional play, just because of the language differences that I spoke about. So if you look at the national players, there are the likes of Zee, sony Live, you have Alt Balaji, you have Amazon Prime Video, which does a very good job aggregating content, geo Cinema. So these are interesting players. Then you have the regional players like Sunnext, which is for the Tamil market, aha, which is Telugu. You have Marathi, you have Planet Marathi, then you have Gujarati Shemaru me. So you have a bunch of regional players who are doing fantastic work capturing their audiences. And then you have a very interesting phenomenon in India where the telcos are aggregating all these OTPs. So you have these super aggregators.
Speaker 2:So GeoCinema is one, airtel Extreme is another one, tata Play, binge, hindustan Times, ott Play. What they do is they tie up with all these OTTs. They provide all the content on a single app through a single searchable interface. So they charge a single price. I remember Airtel Extreme would charge roughly one and a half dollars a month to access 50 note-eaters, more than 3-4 thousand titles. So it's a price war on one side market forces? How do you compensate the content creators? How do you still pay your bills and keep the lights on? It's a market trying to figure itself out and it's in a very interesting phase.
Speaker 1:Let's start to look at some of the technical issues that producers are facing. What's the typical bandwidth that people are streaming their videos over?
Speaker 2:Again, if you look at it geographically, we typically divide India into the metro cities, which are the largest ones, like Delhi, mumbai, calcutta, bangalore, chennai. These regions typically have pretty high bandwidths, good mobile penetration, all of this. Then you have the tier one, tier two, tier three cities where the bandwidth kind of drops. But from a business perspective, many people would agree that the metros are kind of saturated. People have two, three subscriptions and that's not where they're going to get new subscriptions. They have to penetrate into the cities and the towns that do not have very good connectivity.
Speaker 2:So this goes into the mind when you actually decide a bitrate ladder If that's what you were alluding to, the bitrate ladder and the bandwidths. So typically you would see people streaming at 720p, around the 1, 1.25 Mbps range, and a lot of lower bitrates like the 640p, 480p, 360p goes down. Your 1080s are generally between 2 and 3 Mbps and with the caveat that I'm only talking about X.264 right now For mobile consumption being around 2.5 and above till around 3 Mbps, and then when it goes to large screen it comes to around 5, 6, 7 Mbps.
Speaker 1:Looking at the encoding ladder, are companies doing a different encoding ladder for metro areas and also for the outlying regions, or do they have one encoding ladder that's going to serve everywhere in India?
Speaker 2:From what I know and there might be a few exceptions to this it is typically on the device profile rather than the geography. This is what I've seen. So you have these per device manifest sort of configurations where when you're using Edge.264, you kind of cap it at close to 3 Mbps for 1080p and you can go higher for large screen. And I should add that India is a mobile first country. There was a report by Hotstar two, three years ago Disney plus Hotstar where they analyzed an entire year streaming and they said that 94% of their subscribers accessed it through an Android phone, through a phone, and most of it was Android. Ios has a very low penetration just because of the price point, but if you look at it that way, it doesn't really make sense going up having very high bit rates, hdr all these capabilities when 90% of your subscriber base is going to access it on a handheld phone.
Speaker 1:Typical ladder might go up. What's the top bit rate you would see, Is it? I think you said five megabits per second? Is that where you're capping out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, five, especially if you're on a large screen. But with the OTTs I've worked with and I've inspected just out of curiosity over the last few years it's typically been two to three MVPs. The top the quality on your mobile phones is fantastic. On a laptop it's great it does the job.
Speaker 1:What's the player situation look like? You mentioned that most of the playback is on Android phones. Apple is very premium, very costly here in the States. What about smart TVs and OTT devices, Even in the big cities? Are those making penetration?
Speaker 2:They are. So I was in a talk a couple of weeks ago where a person from Samsung Ads actually said that there are 14, 15 million TVs being sold every year.
Speaker 2:So it's not well penetrated in the Indian market primarily because it requires data. To get your, you have to end up using your bandwidth or your internet connection. So DTH and normal linear TV are very, very prevalent in the towns and villages of India. Smart TVs are catching up as data is getting cheaper and as bandwidths are improving. So we aren't there yet. Cord cutting isn't such a big phenomenon as it is probably in the US.
Speaker 1:We've talked about the streaming side. What about the broadcast side? I mean, is there a broadcast infrastructure over the air that makes up a substantial percentage of what people are actually watching?
Speaker 2:So cable TV, iptv, is very, very common over here. It isn't as expensive. I remember when I was in the US I had a Comcast Xfinity connection $100 a month and I've got internet, probably a phone and a lot of channels. It's really not that expensive. In India it's probably 300 or 400 rupees, which roughly around five dollars, and you get a host of channels, probably 100, 150 channels. And again, it was a government regulation that you actually get a sheet of paper to your house where you can tick and you can mark what channels you want and only those will be provided to you. So I still remember remember doing that. So in our house we speak a couple of languages, just because how my parents came together. So we just choose channels from those two languages and we're done. We don't need all 100, 150 channels.
Speaker 1:And that's all. Mpeg-2 or H.264?.
Speaker 2:I believe it's MPEG-2.
Speaker 1:What about codecs over there? I mean, I heard talk a few years ago about VP9 making good penetration because, a it's supported on Android devices and B it's more efficient than H.264. Are you seeing other codecs being used over there?
Speaker 2:I was speaking to a friend a few hours back and he said yes, there's a difference between penetration and adoption. Yes, there's a difference between penetration and adoption. People are trying to adopt new codecs like HEVC, but generally when you deploy, when you're deploying on smartphones, avc is good enough. You don't have any royalty issues and for the bitrates we're streaming, I think it does a perfectly good job. Plus, hardware support is there. It's a legacy codec by now. So a large number of these mobile devices aren't your high-end Android devices. It's not your Samsung or your OnePlus devices. A lot of them are Chinese phones which you get for roughly $50. So massive consumption on those devices as well. So anyone trying to deploy a codec has to keep this in mind. They might not have the best DRM support on board as well, so that kind of restricts you on what you can actually do. You might not be able to serve 1080p on certain devices just because of the hardware capabilities.
Speaker 1:We talked about the high end of the encoding ladder. What's the low end of the encoding ladder? What's the low end of the encoding ladder? What's you know? Resolution and bit rate.
Speaker 2:I have seen it go down lower than 360p at some cases, but 360 is roughly where I see it cap off 360 at roughly 200, 300 kbps. I don't see what people could make out of that resolution. But yeah, that's the lower end to keep the streaming going, I guess yeah, I remember when 640 by 360 was pretty high quality.
Speaker 1:You know when you're. When you're streaming at 200, it's running the kilobits per second. It feels like you want a pretty consistent stream. Are you seeing a lot of cbr over there, or is it? You know, two pass vbr or even, uh, exotic things like constrained CRF.
Speaker 2:So, speaking from experience and having been a vendor in the compression space, people do pick up, I would say, platforms like Elemental. You have a few people running theirs off of Brightco, certain other vendors in the space, so whatever they've provided is typically what they use. But people who kind of do it yourself or choose certain vendors in India, I've seen that the common use case is either CBR not 2Pass, but plain CBR, two pass but plain CBR or capped CRF. I personally have dabbled with capped CRF in my previous role. We found it to be a very good approximate to CBR in terms of quality. It was very good. It didn't overshoot the constraints that we had put too badly and was perfectly good enough for streaming in India without any buffering issues or any of that.
Speaker 1:Can you just briefly describe what CRF is and what CapCRF is for people who may not know?
Speaker 2:CRF, so we are talking about Constraint Rate Factor.
Speaker 1:Constant Rate Factor.
Speaker 2:Constant Rate Factor right. So this is a mode in FFmpeg which is probably the most popular open source implementation of video codecs out there where essentially they try and hit a video quality by adjusting the number of bits allocated throughout the video sequence. This is in contrast to CBR, where CBR tries to maintain a certain bit rate by adjusting the video quality. So you would start off let's say you start off with an I-frame that would get the highest quality, then your P-frames would get the most allocation of bits and then it'd be distributed amongst the B-frames trying to hit your bit rate caps. Crf obviously has to do similar stuff, but it pays a greater emphasis on the quality rather than maintaining a very constant bitrate. So you might see it overshoot. You will see it overshoot actually. So a modification of this is the capped CRF, where you can put a cap and tell CRF maintain your video quality while not exceeding a particular bitrate by a certain percentage. So this makes it very suitable for ABR streaming and if somebody asks why?
Speaker 2:to that question I would say bitrate is, in my understanding, is a contract between the player and the server. So when the player is told that this stream is 5 Mbps, it expects and believes that the server will send five megabits per second. Anything more or less by a large amount will cause problems at the player. So it's almost like a contract CRF will end up violating the contract. Capped CRF not much and it provides very good quality.
Speaker 1:So for CBR you would set a bit rate and then you would set the maximum bit rate, and for CBR those two would be the same. What do you do in a CRF situation? What's the setting that you use in the command string?
Speaker 2:I believe it's the max that you set the hyphen bV. And then you also mentioned the CRF setting. So FFM Pic has the CRF setting where zero is almost lossless, pristine quality which no human can make out, and 51 is really poor. Typically. In practice we have gone between 20 and 25. And this is through just golden eye testing and vmaf scores, where we realize certain genres don't require 18, 17. We didn't see any difference on a mobile phone. So this is why I kind of go back to the business side of things, where you understand the geography, you're streaming at the devices you're streaming and if you realize that 95% is going to be consuming on an Android phone, there just isn't a lot, they will make out if you change your CRF setting from 24 to 25. You might save a lot on your CDN card bills and your storage bills, but you're not harming the user experience at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you and I talked about this issue just, I guess, a couple of weeks ago. I gave a presentation at Mile High Video earlier this week and I sent you some two-pass VBR encodes and you said, well, it looks great, but you're doubling your encoding cost. And then you relayed your experience where you use ca, cap, crf with a CRF value of 25, I believe, and then the maximum setting. That turned out. It was a really thank you for that because it was a really interesting portion of the presentation. But we did. The overall VMAF scores were about the same. The encoding time was cut in half. There were some variability issues, you know I sent you that data, but overall it seemed like a pretty good strategy. Are you using you know we talked about VMAF or you mentioned that really briefly Are you using the phone version with the phone profile for VMAF? Have you experimented with that or are you using the default?
Speaker 2:So again, we do this sort of comparisons where we run it on the phone model and then on the desktop model. I know there is a 4K model, or am I wrong on that? There is, there is one right. I've never tried that, to be honest. I was never in the situation to test 4K. So the phone model and this, and we actually see a very big difference. You could change your bit rates quite a bit and the phone model, the scores wouldn't budge. So we realized that hey, here is something that would actually save us a lot on CDN bills and storage costs and that naturally leads to per device manifests doing something, figuring out who's asking for a manifest and serve the right manifest, doing edge manipulation of the manifest. So I think it naturally tends itself to a lot of innovation just having those scores.
Speaker 1:And how do you see that working? I mean, what different profiles are the typical publishers supporting? You've got a mobile profile. Is there a smart TV profile at this point, or is computer playback? I guess it's not such a big deal for premium content here in the States, but what about in India?
Speaker 2:I honestly have worked with only a couple of them who have seriously thought about per-device manifests. It has been tried. But if I look at the premium publishers, yes, they are looking into this, they are doing experiments. They are delivering it this way. But then you have a bunch of OTTs which are very sure about where their audience is and they know their quality is good at certain bit rates. So some of them don't have these considerations also.
Speaker 1:So HDR, you said there's not a lot. I mean if you're, unless you're distributing to the living room and unless you're using ATVC, HDR is not a factor. What about DRM? Is that typically used over there?
Speaker 2:DRM is a big thing. So either people roll out their own using this AES-128 or they go with multi-DRM vendors who provide them with the common Widevine, fairplay streaming and Microsoft's PlayReady. There isn't, I wouldn't say, a major innovation going on in the DRM space. It's just pick up a vendor and go with it.
Speaker 1:And what about the CDN side? Are there multiple CDNs that are covering the different regions, or is there one big CDN that everybody uses? How does that work?
Speaker 2:So Akamai and CloudFront are pretty popular in India. I have seen several companies do multi-CDN switching between these two. You also have Airtel, who has entered the race with a tie-up with Quilt to do the rollout of their own CDN, and Jio is also doing the same. So you have these local, the homegrown vendors, and plus you have Akamai CloudFront. These are the big guys in the market.
Speaker 1:Are people doing multiple CDN support with switching it?
Speaker 2:is becoming a thing over here. But to be very frank and I've been looking at data also for the past few years CDNs have become very reliable and very good at streaming. You only hear of an occasional hiccup and crash. They are pretty good. Right now. You might do multi-CDN for certain issues, probably in a tier two, tier three city where certain transmission isn't very good, or to save costs. I might have a better rate from A versus B and then I switch them during the prime time.
Speaker 1:It sounds like overall, the market is a challenging market to get into because of the languages and the regional, but the encoding picture is actually pretty simple. I guess it's not that hard. Multiple codecs are not a thing. Hdr isn't a thing. Exotic encoding ladders aren't a thing. So it seems straightforward. It's the content play, and getting people to buy your stuff, I guess, is the big thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's the business side, sorry to interrupt. It's actually the business side, which is being on all these technical decisions. So I'm sure a lot of the teams are dying to deploy HEVC VP9 and try the data stuff. But does it actually pay off? That's the question.
Speaker 1:What percentage of revenue if I'm an Indian OTT provider, what percentage of my revenue and percentage of revenue, not number of subscribers what percentage comes from inside India and outside India?
Speaker 2:Oh, Jan, probably I don't have the right answer to that question.
Speaker 1:We were talking and you were mentioning that there's a huge market outside of India for all the people who have left and they're paying US prices. They're not paying, they are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that point is true. I don't know the exact split, but definitely Indians are there across the world. I think the biggest hotspots are the US, uk, canada, middle East and a sizable population in Africa as well South Africa. So people streaming to these regions they end up paying in their local currencies. I think the example that I was talking to you the other day was a particular streaming service which charges like 60 Canadian dollars over there and probably two or three US dollars in India. So you can make a lot of money over there and it's also profitable to stream outside India just because of the ad CPMs, when you can earn several dollars in double digits probably in the US, whereas in India it's probably $1, $2 CPMs. That's where it caps off at.
Speaker 1:And just I should have asked this back when we started talking about the content. But the subscription rates are low. Is it advertising supported or is it subscription only?
Speaker 2:So most of the OTTs today do a hybrid or are going towards hybrid, having started off only subscription. So in India it's a thing to have a mobile-only plan where you can play back only on a mobile device. You can't play back on anything. So that's your lowest price, which might come with ads, might not come with ads. And then you say, okay, here's another tier where it's on large screen, it's on mobile, but you will see the occasional pre-roll ad, mid-roll ad, and if you want to turn it off, go to the premium plan, ad-free streaming for one year.
Speaker 2:That's typically what happens over here, I mean the IPL is an oddity in this entire scheme where they're streaming everything for free with an ad support to play, but there have been talks that they'll be rolling out a subscription play in the next couple of months after the IPL.
Speaker 1:Let's switch gears and talk about OTTverse. You know I have my site Streaming Learning Center and I've contributed a lot to streaming media over the years. You kind of came out of nowhere and really grabbed a big share, and in a big way. What was the idea behind OTTverse and what has it grown into over the years?
Speaker 2:So the story is very simple. I was tired of working 12 years on the trot, so when the pandemic hit, I just took a break and I started writing. So when the pandemic hit, I just took a break and I started writing. I had always blogged and written about obscure stuff recipes, cricket and stuff like that. So I had a lot of notes lying around, so I cleaned them up, put them online and it suddenly became popular. People approached me to sponsor articles and put ads on the website, and then one thing led to the other and we decided to make it a business. So that's how it started off. I think our foundation and our goal is always spreading knowledge. I found it very tough to switch. I was in Harmonic earlier, so I found it very tough to switch between transcoding and OTT. I just couldn't find proper material which would go in depth, so I tried to just put my notes online and help others as well.
Speaker 1:So what statistics do you share about viewership? How many eyeballs, how many eyeballs.
Speaker 2:Geographically we are 55% US and EU put together, 20% India and the rest is spread across Asia and Latin and the UK. That's our geographical spread. It's mostly from the US and the European Union. Then, in terms of viewership, we are flirting with 100,000 views per month number. Sometimes it's up down. We'll probably be consistently above that in the next couple of months.
Speaker 1:What's the distribution? Who's looking? Is it big company, small company developer, ott programmer? Who do you see coming to your site?
Speaker 2:That's interesting. Actually, A lot of statistics actually we get out of LinkedIn because we have a pretty active channel over there. So what we've seen is, when it's deeply technical, we have the folks who love tech who come in. So it might be a programmer, it might be an entry level engineer, it could be as high as a CTO, but mostly on the tech side of things. And we have a lot of explainer articles which kind of simplify stuff, like what is client side ad insertion? So I've actually met a lot of marketing teams who read that and find it easy to understand and then explain it to others. And then we've also started a few opinion pieces interviewing OTTs business owners. So that drives that obviously attracts a slightly different crowd the C-levels and directors. So we have a healthy mix and I think that's how we'd like it to be.
Speaker 1:What other you know? You and I talked about some of the educational initiatives that you're producing from OTTverse. What are you doing there?
Speaker 2:Like inspired by a lot of your workshops, I think there is a need, truly there is a need, for concentrated workshops on probably using FFmpeg for compression, for also pre-processing, post-processing, in terms of packaging, actually putting DRM together. A lot of this knowledge is hidden and it doesn't have to be, because FFmpeg is also open source. Why can't the knowledge be also open out there? So these are where we want to do a bit of educational initiatives and specifically targeting colleges in India, universities, because video isn't really a big topic which is taught over here, so they kind of go on the more mathematical concepts like image processing, signal processing, they skim over the video, the entire topic of video, despite it being a super complex place. You can probably enter and exit, you can retire working on this OTT pipeline. There's enough work for the next 20, 30 years. Students aren't really aware of that when I interact with them, so that's something that we want to do as well.
Speaker 1:So what does this translate to you? And I talked about potentially doing workshops.
Speaker 2:So this is probably going to be a couple of days. Workshops. If it's in person, go down to an office. Oh sorry, that's the other thing, right, we see a lot of engineers coming into the workforce not really understanding what it's what is?
Speaker 2:OTT specifically. I would even go around saying that teams, when they test the tests are pretty simple I press play. If it doesn't play, hey, that's a bug. But can you go a little deeper? Is there a problem in the manifest? Or can you create test cases by deleting certain files but having them on the manifest so when the player tries to play it, something happens? Is the player supposed to crash? Is it supposed to fail great speed? We don't know right.
Speaker 2:So so just a general education, either in the corporate region or the educational region, it could be a couple of hours or a half a day, online posts, or they actually go in person and walk them through an entire week talking to them about end-to-end right, from content upload to playback, recommendation, search, and then get their hands dirty. It's not very difficult. End-to-end right, from content upload to playback, recommendation, search, that sort of thing, and then get their hands dirty. It's not very difficult, right? If you have like five hours on your hand, you could learn compression, how to use FFA with command line, do the HLS, set up a server and actually stream it to Videojs, and I think when somebody presses play and it actually works, that much is enough to encourage them to take the next step.
Speaker 1:It does light you up when it actually works. What are the topics that your readers are finding interesting today? Looking at your page views, what topics are most compelling?
Speaker 2:We find a healthy mix between transcoding, a healthy mix between transcoding and in transcoding. We see a lot of questions still on cbr, crf to pass. There are very good articles online. I mean, I don't say mine is the best, so there are very good explainers. There are good guides from the fflp website itself, but people still want to understand more. They ask about the fundamentals of compression, like what's an IDR frame, what's a CRA, what's an IPB? People want to understand that. Those articles are pretty popular. How to package. That seems to be trending. Then it goes on to DRM and ad insertion client-side versus DRM and ad insertion Client side versus server side ad insertion, because these are the jargon which are thrown out there in meetings.
Speaker 2:So people want to understand what's the difference, how?
Speaker 1:do they work?
Speaker 2:and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Getting some questions in One question. I guess more specifics on the publishers who are succeeding in India. Wanted to know how is Netflix doing, how is Prime doing, how is Hulu doing? Do you have any, you know, Any information to share about how successful those companies have been? I know you mentioned Prime. Seem to be doing pretty well.
Speaker 2:Prime is doing well. They have a lot of original CDs that they've produced and released. So Prime's good Netflix hasn't had that sort of penetration because they're primarily, I would say, a premium platform. Price point is also high. They were forced to reduce their price because they didn't find any traction in India, so they have a mobile only plan which is 149 rupees. Prime is still restricted, I would say, from my guess is to the metro and the English speaking pockets of the country, English-speaking pockets of the country, but it won't have many takers in the large part of India where 80% of the population lives. But Prime is big. Jio has recently tied up with HBO and Warner Brothers, so all of that can now be accessed on Jio in a couple of months. I suppose they were early on Disney Hotstar but that relationship broke and they moved over to Jio. Hollywood content is also available through Lionsgate.
Speaker 1:Lionsgate.
Speaker 2:Play. I don't know if they have an app of their own, but they are available on aggregators. They are available on Intel Extreme.
Speaker 1:A question came through about what's being used in terms of packaging. Is it more HLS or Dash? I guess it's more Dash, right.
Speaker 2:It's actually both. Funnily enough, most of the news channels in India also live stream onto their websites, and all of these are unprotected HLS. So HLS is big and Dash is also big.
Speaker 1:What about CMF? Is that making any penetration at all?
Speaker 2:Just because of the fact that a single DRM cannot be used. I don't see a lot of single file format across all DRMs. I've spoken to somebody a month ago and they said that it's still not on the radar to try a single file.
Speaker 1:That's kind of an off-the-wall question. What has been the impact of the success of Plumdog Millionaire? I guess that's a few years back, but I mean, how did that change? Is it the perception of content in India, or what changes did that kind of deliver?
Speaker 2:I don't know from the Indian context. It was just great that an Indian movie won an Oscar.
Speaker 2:But a lot of things for example the music producer, ar Rahman, who won, I think, the best music as well for Slumdog. He composed 11 songs. This is a guy who, from 1992, has probably been producing like 50 to 100 songs every year, every song different across different languages. So when Rahman won, everybody was like high time he won something. So I would say it had a massive impact because the Bollywood industry has been a thriving industry for 70 odd years. Several superstars were being popular across the world as well.
Speaker 1:How did they do it? I mean, how do you produce a movie? You know Slumdog Millionaire was one language in the US. How do you do it, for you know dozens of languages in India? What did they? What does that look like in the theater?
Speaker 2:So, honestly, it's a voiceover For most movies. It's where you have multiple dubbing artists, so I've seen two. The most common phenomenon is you shoot a movie in one language and you dub, so you have dubbing artists for every actor. So it's the right language, the right accent, all of that, or the movie is completely reshot. I've seen that as. So you have a very popular series of a super cop Dabang In one language. The storyline is the same, but it's one actor who's popular in that region and then gets shot in another language Same storyline but with a different actor. So it's either that or very expensive ways to actually have the same cast, the same background, everything. Have different people come and shoot their parts and move on Organizational nightmare.
Speaker 1:We have a question about NAB. You were at the show. What did you see? That was kind of impressive to you.
Speaker 2:Before NAB, I was talking to a few friends and we were kind of guessing what is the next big thing. We were kind of guessing what is the next big thing. From the Indian context at least, we realized that OTT content the same content is going to be on multiple platforms very soon. It's either Sony on Jio, sony on Airtel Extreme or Tata. Now, it's the same content, same time of the day. You get it on the same day. What makes you decide where to go? Is it price or is it content? Is it quality of the app or is it the quality of recommendations? So that's when we realized that probably the next thing which people are trying to crack for many years is churn reduction, personalization and reducing the amount of time you have to spend searching for something.
Speaker 2:I think that's a persistent topic in every trade show. How do you reduce the amount of time? I spent nine minutes trying to find a movie. How do you reduce that? So that kind of stood out this year in NAV, at least for me. I saw a couple of companies like Think Analytics personalizing the EPG page, which to me, struck a chord out this year in nav, at least for me. Uh, I saw a couple of companies like think analytics personalizing the epg page, which to me, struck a chord because in my house we subscribe to probably 20 channels on our table but we still have to scroll through like 600, 700 channels or memorize all the numbers. Now why can't you just personalize the epg for me? I watch those 10. Why can't you just pull them up to the top or create my own channel? Virtual channels are now becoming common. What to live?
Speaker 1:have you covered the personalization side? Because I've that's not something I've looked into. I know it's a thing but I've not ever written about it. Pretty hard to test, I guess a couple of articles.
Speaker 2:we actually have a contributed article which will come out next week. I won't mention who, but it'll be coming out in the next two weeks. It's by a popular OVB. They're talking about personalization and data collection, like where's the boundary, how much data do you collect and to personalize. So it's a very interesting take.
Speaker 1:One last question Did you see anything AI-related in the Codex space that you thought would be impactful in the next two to five years?
Speaker 2:So I've always loved the use of AI in Codex, and it doesn't have to be super complex. I've done tests myself where you can actually use a genre of Codex and you'll know what are the popular settings which work very well for them. That's itself a use of machine learning, right? The thousands of parameters which are generated every frame if you can run them through, uh, ai is a buzzword to me. So I I typically say machine learning, which is the more technical in the right way, but if you run certain algorithms on it it makes your next compression easier.
Speaker 2:So that's where I would love to see everyone kind of go towards a scene understanding, understanding the different scenes of a movie, which I believe couple of them are working towards. A movie can have multiple scenes where you have people sitting in a coffee shop. Can it dip into a repository of settings to come and compress that particular scene, versus then somebody's running behind a football and use a different set of settings over there. I would love for some machine to be able to look at every frame and say this is the ideal bitrate distribution. Go for it, do it.
Speaker 1:Interestingly, at mile high, there were a bunch of codec vendors we're not not really even codec vendors as much as encoding and you know Netflix talked about what they were doing, sky talked about what they were doing and there's a lot of. It feels like there's going to be a lot of machine learning based innovations coming out in the next two to five. I don't know. You know I don't know how it's going to hit something like FFmpeg. You know it's going to be interesting to see. I mean, you and I specialize in making technology usable to the average Joe. I don't know. You know Netflix showed some AI-based scaling technologies that you know it's great, but it's not something that you can access from MPEG unless they open source it.
Speaker 2:But I would actually suggest a different route. Perhaps something like the VMath library, where you don't have to understand what happens inside because it's pretty complex, but you can actually use it. So if somebody creates a database or let's say, 100,000 clips, and then you're able to somehow connect FFmpeg to that database that's good enough it understands, sends some statistics there. That server sends back saying here are your optimal bit rates. Go for it. That itself is good enough for 99% of the population, I'd say.
Speaker 1:I'll keep an eye on it for that. Listen, we're out of time and we're out of questions. I really appreciate you spending time with us. I know it's late at night, but it's always great to chat with you and I appreciate your taking the time today.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you so much, Jan. This has been our.
Speaker 1:This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies. If you are looking for cutting-edge video encoding solutions, check out NetInt's products at netintcom.
