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.
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Voices of Video
Transforming Gaming Through Hybrid Technology
What if gaming could be as accessible and universal as music on Spotify? Olivier Avaro, CEO of Blacknut, joins us to discuss his revolutionary vision for cloud gaming. Olivier shares his journey from the Commodore 64 era to leading the charge in cloud gaming, detailing how Blacknut aims to provide a seamless and affordable gaming experience to a global audience with a library surpassing 700 games. We explore how the company’s innovative hybrid cloud architecture is set to transform gaming by optimizing performance and reducing costs, all while tackling challenges like internet instability in emerging markets.
The conversation takes a technical turn as Olivier unveils Blacknut’s cutting-edge server architecture. Learn how their unique CPU, GPU, and VPU setup allows for unprecedented concurrency, enabling up to 200 players to enjoy high-quality gaming simultaneously. This innovation is crucial in maintaining affordability while ensuring minimal latency and top-notch performance, an advancement that sets Blacknut apart in the competitive landscape of cloud gaming. We also break down the role of 5G in enhancing gaming experiences in regions with previously unstable internet, providing a roadmap for how technology can leapfrog infrastructure limitations.
Finally, we explore the broader landscape of cloud gaming's potential to democratize the gaming experience. Olivier shares insights on expanding services into new regions like South Africa, highlighting the logistics and partnerships required to make this transition smooth. This episode promises a fresh perspective on the future of gaming, emphasizing the exciting possibilities that streaming technology holds for players worldwide. Whether you're a gaming enthusiast or a curious observer of technology trends, Olivier's insights offer a glimpse into the dynamic evolution of the gaming industry.
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. So we are at the top of the hour and looks like we should get started. Olivier, are you ready to talk about cloud gaming? Absolutely ready, excellent, excellent. Well, welcome to those who are joining us live. This is the May edition of Voices of Video, and, if you haven't joined us before, voices of Video and if you haven't joined us before, voices of Video is a conversation, or, some might say, a real dialogue, not a podcast, I guess, a video cast. We go live on LinkedIn and also a lot of other platforms, and we are talking each month with innovators in the video space, and so this month, I am super excited to have Olivier Avaro, who is the CEO of a company called Black Nut, and we are talking about cloud gaming. I will let Olivier tell us all about what his company does, but welcome to Voices of Video, olivier.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot, mark, for the nice introduction. So my name is Olivier Varro. I'm the CEO of BlackNerd, which, in short, is doing two games, what Spotify did for music, so we are distributing games from the cloud large, large catalog of games more than 700 games so far and this, you know, for a simple subscription fee, right? Uh, I was long time a gamer. I enjoyed it a lot, you know, when I was a teenager. I enjoyed a lot with friends, with my family, later with my kids, and I started Black Nut in 2016 with the big ambition to actually bring this joy of gaming, this good emotion, all the positive value of, you know, playing together, to the mass market. We deployed the tech for about three years, I think cloud gaming is, you know, does require a bit of technology to work efficiently. Then we started deploying it all over the world, and this is where we are today.
Speaker 1:I love it. So I have to ask the question. You know, sometimes when we're building advanced technologies we get so into the technology we don't get to do the thing that we originally set out to do, like play games. So are you still a gamer? Well, I'm you set aside time each day to play or I set aside each time to play a little bit.
Speaker 2:That's true. And I have to say that, you know I was the first game I played was, you know, on the Commodore 64 machine. It was then Bulldash, right, so the older of the audience will know about it. Now I'm still. I've been playing with my kid, you know, of course, on the Wii. You know all the Nintendo games and Mario and Super Mario Kart and Super Mario Galaxy, right, and to be truly honest, you know I'm still playing a bit with my kid, but mostly I'm touching a truly honest you know I'm still playing a bit with my kid, but mostly I'm touching a bit. You know pokemon go sometimes to still get a conversation with my wife, you know, on gaming.
Speaker 1:That's good. That's good. Well, I'm, uh, really excited for this conversation and you know I'm. I was just thinking back as as I was making some notes for what I thought we should talk about, and in 2007, I had the distinct privilege and I really do consider it to be a privilege to be a part of a company, one of the early, early innovators of what we call now OTT, and you know, at the time it was transactional VOD. The company still exists, it's called Voodoo, and we had this crazy idea to take the Blockbuster.
Speaker 1:You know, those who have been around for a little while will remember Blockbuster video stores in the US, other countries, they had the equivalent and eventually, I think, blockbuster did expand outside the US. But you'd go to the video store, you'd rent a disc, dvd and then eventually Blu-ray, and you would drive home so excited for the family to join around the TV and watch it. And I can remember how shocking it was to have built this amazing experience where every title was in stock. And those of us who remember the video store remember that that was part of the challenge On new release day, you had to rush down to the store to be the first in line so you could even get the movie because they only had so many copies. And then, of course, you had to worry about did I return it? Did I return it by the deadline or do I have to pay for a second day? There was a lot about the experience that actually wasn't so great, and yet we were shocked.
Speaker 1:Shocked, how many people said why would I want to stream over the internet like the like? Dvd is great. This is amazing. Look at the quality. No one's going to want to replace the dvd.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, 15 years later, obviously that sounds absolutely crazy, as now the entire world is streaming and we can't even imagine a world without it. But as I was thinking about cloud gaming, it feels like maybe we're a little bit further than we were in 2007, but they're still not everybody's convinced, and I'm even surprised that major publishers that I'm coming across, and it's not a foregone conclusion that the console is going to be replaced with streaming. And so let's start there. Olivier, I have to imagine that a lot of what you're spending time doing, aside from building the technology, is making the case for why, you know, internet delivery of a game experience is going to be better and is ultimately better, you know, than something that's installed on a PC, you know, downloaded, or a console. So what insights do you have to share about where we are, you know, in this transition from consoles and disks to streaming for games?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Mark, I think the analogy with, you know, with the blockbusters, I think, is very relevant and I feel that, first, in terms of market maturity for the end user, we are probably at that point where people would question why should I do that? I can download a game, why should I actually stream it? Why do we need something different? Right, and when I created Jackknife, actually, a person that I highly respect told me well, people will not use it because they can't download it.
Speaker 2:Now, if you look at where we are right now, with people now consuming all the media, like audio and video and your music, and in a streaming manner, right, it seemed that definitely having those people accessing games the same way seems to be actually the right idea or the right next step. Right, and I do think that there is a bit more of maturity of people actually willing to access games this way. Now there has been probably an inflection point in terms of technology maturity. I think the technology meaning basically the hardware you can have on the cloud, the bandwidth you have available on your home as a kind of device you have to run it, and so on is good enough to provide actually a great experience, and I do think that we are at the time here where we are passing this inflection point that probably years ago it was not sufficient and we have seen a lot of companies trying to do this but actually failing, and failing really badly, but actually learning a lot from these failures.
Speaker 2:So I think we are at a very exciting time now where we have this maturity in terms of technology. We have the maturity of the end user, because they are used to consume this kind of media with audio video, e-books and so on, so probably they are craving to get access to game and more and more people are gaming. And we have also the maturity of the content owner and the publisher. So I think we are at a very, very good time in the market.
Speaker 1:Well, I definitely agree that. You know we are much further advanced than we were, I think, of some of the things that we had to do. Voodoo in 2007 actually required a, an appliance, a device with a hard drive in it that we could download the the first, you know, 30 seconds, maybe a minute, of every single library, every single title in the library, and it at that time the library was not as big as you know what the libraries are today, but just because streaming bandwidth was, you know, was 768 kilobits, you know, maybe 1.5 megabits was like really fast. If you were really lucky, you had five megabits. My how we've grown. So you know it's definitely we're in a better position Before we get into the technology, because that's where we're going to spend the bulk of our time today.
Speaker 1:But something that I think also you're in a really good position to address is the cost side. Is is the cost side. So certainly we're at a place today with the cloud, that you can deliver anything really anywhere via the cloud. So the notion that you can do cloud gaming, ie it's possible to deliver an ultra low latency, very high quality experience from the cloud. Deliver an ultra low latency, very high quality experience from the cloud. I don't think anybody conceivably would say you know, oh, I don't believe that that's not possible. But there is a real issue of the cost, and so why don't you address where we're at in terms of just delivery cost, and I'm speaking of, like OpEx. You know where are we at. I mean, is this possible but not affordable? Or is this possible and affordable even for someone who might not be able to charge their consumer a whole lot of money? You know, not all markets are the US or Western Europe, or you know some of these regions where consumers are willing to pay, you know, $10, $15, $20 a month.
Speaker 2:That's really the key issue, mark, because, as you mentioned, I think we passed the technology inflection point where actually the service becomes to be feasible. Okay, technically feasible. The experience is good. We think it's good enough for the mass market. I am sure that some people will be unhappy with it. You know, really core gamers. They say, well. You know probably the same people that you know when the DVD came. They say, well, I still want to listen to my vinyl on my rose boot. You know platine, because this is what I'm want to listen to, my vinyl on my rosebud. You know, because this is what I'm using to listen to my music. And you will not beat that quality with digital sound, right, yeah, but for the mass market, I think we got to the point where the feasibility is here, of course, we need good bandwidth, stable, you know, very low jitter, so the variation of the latency. But we are here right Now.
Speaker 2:The issue is indeed on the unit economics and how much it costs to actually stream and deliver games in an efficient manner so that it is affordable, basically, for the mass market. And one thing here is I think the game is not done. Okay, there is some challenges, as you know. The cost of streaming depends on the number of hours per month. Let's say that you stream. We think that we got at least a maturity where it's becoming available, so that you get to a price point, which is what people expect, which is, you know, between $5 to $15, depending on the harpy of the countries. So we think this is realistic, but of course it depends on the intensity of the player, how much they play, and if you want somehow to really sustain and to have great economics, there is still some improvement to be done and I would say we have a baseline architecture that allows the service to be profitable, to make it really work, really scale. There is still some margin of improvement and we have ways actually to improve this unique economics.
Speaker 1:So you're saying right now that to the end user which means that the actual cost to deliver the service has to be, you know, less but to the end user, about $5 a month to $15 a month is a target that is possible to reach, right. Okay, so $5 a month, you know, even in more emerging markets, where maybe subscription prices cannot be what they are, say in the US, feels like that's doable. So that's actually good to hear. Tell us what is the technical. Let's talk now about what the technical infrastructure looks like and what it takes to deliver. How have you built your system? And then we will get to the broader architecture of BlackNuts and what exactly you're offering. But let's start with what is your system built on? What does it look like? What are you deploying? Is this a cloud service, you know? Is it run all on-prem?
Speaker 2:So, basically, the architecture of cloud gaming is somehow simple. Right, you take games, you put them on a server in the cloud and you are going basically to virtualize it and stream it in the form of a video stream or in some other format, you know, so that you don't have to download the game on the client side and you can play it as you are playing a video stream. When you interact with a game, you send a comment back to the server and then you interact with the game. This way, Of course, bandwidth need to be sufficient, let's say, six megabit per second. Latency need to be good. Let's say less than 80 milliseconds Of per second latency need to be good. Let's say, you know, less than 80 milliseconds.
Speaker 2:And, of course, you need to have the right infrastructure on the server that can run games. You know games mean a mixture of CPU, GPU, storage, okay, and all this needs to work well. We start deploying, you know, the service based on public cloud, because this allows us to test the different metrics how people were playing the service, how many hours, and this was actually very fast to launch and to scale. So this is what the public cloud, the hyperscaler, the WSJCP and so on provides. That's great, but they are quite expensive, right as you know.
Speaker 2:So to optimize, the economics we actually built and invented in BlackNet what we call the hybrid cloud for cloud gaming, which is a combination of both the public cloud and private cloud. So we have to install our own servers, you know, based on GPUs, cpus and so on, either directly in Black Nut or with some partners like Radiant Arc, so that we can improve the overall performances and the unit economics of the system. That, I think, allowed us to build a profitable service. I think, if you just match basically the public cloud, currently I think this is super hard to get something which is viable, but with this kind of hybrid cloud I think it's actually very doable.
Speaker 1:And these are standard x86, commercial off-the-shelf Intel AMD machines. I mean there's nothing special required, or have you gone to a purpose-built design?
Speaker 2:No, the current design is basically definitely specific for the private cloud, but it's based on standard x86. And for GPU we use AMD or NVIDIA. We have a mixture of different providers, but basically this is, I would say, reasonably standard architecture with a mix of CPU, gpu and storage.
Speaker 1:The cloud gaming use case is a primary one and that's obviously why we got introduced and you are using NetEnt, which we will get to.
Speaker 1:But kind of the key measure from a technology perspective and it maps directly back to cost for a cloud gaming installation is the number of concurrent sessions per server.
Speaker 1:Obviously, it just stands to reason that the more concurrent sessions or players that you can get on a server, well, it's going to be less expensive to operate and to run, so that's not too difficult to understand. One of the things that's really interesting is and I'd like for you to talk about this architecture where you have the GPU rendering the game but you're actually not doing the video encoding on the GPU. So what does that look like? And also talk to us about. You know the evolution, because that's not where you started and most cloud gaming platforms today are attempting to keep everything on the GPU, which has some advantages, but it has some very distinct disadvantages and trade-offs, which means that your cost per stream likely cannot meet that economic bar where you can really affordably deliver to a wider number of players. Ie, you can't drive your costs down, so you have to charge more and there's people who will say, well, that's too expensive, but talk to us about this architecture. So that's correct, mark.
Speaker 2:I think the ultimate measure is the cost per CCU right, the cost per current user that you can get on a specific bill of material right. If you have a CPU plus GPU architecture, the game is going to actually slice the GPU in different pieces in the more dynamic manner and in the more appropriate manner so that you can run different games and as much game as possible. So, typically, if you get on the standard GPU, you can run probably a big game like a large game, and you can cut the GPU in four pieces. If you run a medium game like a large game and you can cut the GPU in four pieces If you run a medium game, you can run it maybe in six or eight pieces and if you run a smaller game, then maybe you can get to I don't know 20 pieces. Right, there is some limits on how much you can slice a GPU for the GPU to be still efficient and likely. You know, for example, the NVIDIA license allows you to slice one GPU in 24 pieces, but that's it, right, and so there is some limits in this architecture because it all relies on the GPU.
Speaker 2:We are indeed investigating different architecture where, indeed, we are using a VPU right, like NetEat, is providing a video processor that will somehow offload the GPU of the task of, you know, encoding and streaming the video so that we can augment the density. Okay, and we see it, you know, has in terms of full architecture as something which will be a bit more flexible architecture as something which will be a bit more flexible, I think, in terms of number of big games, because they rely much more on the GPU. Probably you will not augment the densities that much, but we think that, overall, probably we can gain a factor of 10 on the number of games that you can, overall, run on this kind of architecture. So, passing from a max of 20, 24 games to a time 10, right, running 200 games on an architecture of this kind, yeah, that's really remarkable.
Speaker 1:And just in case somebody isn't doing the quick math here, what you're saying is is that with this CPU plus GPU plus VPU which the VPU is the ASIC based video encoder all in the same chassis, so the same server we're not talking about different servers you can get up to 200 game players simultaneously, so concurrent players, which just radically changes the economics. And in our experience working with publishers and working with platforms cloud gaming platforms nearly everybody has said literally, without that it's not even really economical to build the platform, you know. In other words, you end up having to charge your customers so much and where the experience is, it's not viable.
Speaker 2:So that's important and for certain category of games, definitely you can reach you know this level and for certain category of games, definitely you can reach this level. So actually augmenting the density by a factor of 10 means also, of course, diminishing the cost per CCU by a factor of 10. So if you pay $1, currently you will pay $0.10. And that makes a whole difference because, let's assume, basic gamers will pay 10 hours per month or 30 hours per month. If this is $1, this is $30, right, if this is $10, then you go to $1 to $3, which I think makes the math work.
Speaker 1:On the subscription, which is, between you know, 5 to 15 euros per month, One of the questions that comes up and I know you know we've had this conversation with you is how is this possible? Because anybody who understands basic server architecture you know. Basically it's not difficult to think well, wait a second, isn't there a bottleneck inside the machine? And this must require a really super hot, rotted machine, you know. So maybe the cost savings is offset by super expensive hardware, and I think it's important to note that the reason why this is possible is, first of all, the VPU is built on NVMe architecture, so it's using the exact same storage protocol as your hard drive, you know, as the SSDs that are in the machine. And what we have done, what NetEnt has done, is actually created a peer-to-peer sharing inside the DMA. So, basically, the GPU will output a frame, a rendered frame, and it's transferred literally inside memory so that then the VPU can pick that up, encode it and there's effectively zero latency, at least in terms of the latency is so low because it's happening in the memory buffer. And so if anybody's listening and raising an eyebrow, wondering, well, wait a second, you know, surely there's a bottleneck, and especially if you're talking 60 frames per second which, by the way, our benchmarks are generally always at 60 frames per second because, you know, unless it's real casual games, you need that frame rate to really deliver a great experience, even above resolution, in some cases it's better to get the frame rate up than to increase the size of the frame. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me just pause here and say that we would love to have questions, and so feel free, on whatever platform you're if you're on YouTube or LinkedIn or wherever you're watching us right now just type in and I will try and pick those up. I have looks like we already have one, so you know why don't we? I think this is actually a really good one. I'm gonna pick this up right here, but feel free to enter questions in the chat.
Speaker 1:So, Olivier, the question is I live in a country where stable internet is not always available and, by the way, I would say that you know this isn't only, you know, a country issue. Internet varies, right, and the expectation of users is more and more that. You know they don't think about the fact that I'm in a car. You know I happen to be in an area where there's great coverage, but you know, seven miles down the road that changes right. They want to keep playing and keep enjoying this great experience. So the question is I live in a country where stable internet is not always available. How will this affect the gaming experience? And you know, yeah, I mean, that's the question.
Speaker 1:So, what's your experience and how are you guys solving for this?
Speaker 2:You see, in Netflix or Spotify, right, you can actually buffer content so that, even if your bandwidth is, you know, a bit clumsy, you can actually store that content in a CDM and keep the experience, you know good enough, right, or you can download the that content in a CDN and keep the experience good enough, or you can download the video and make it work. So, definitely you have some way to solve that problem in, I would say, cold media, media that you can encode in one way, then stream later. In games, this is completely different. Yeah, you can't do that Because we have to encode, stream, deliver and then you take the iteration right away. So if your bandwidth is not enough, right. If the quality of the bandwidth is not enough, and not only in terms of the size of the bandwidth but also in terms of characteristics, the latency, how this latency is stable, and so on, then the experience will be great.
Speaker 2:So what we've been doing actually with Ericsson is to use 5G networks and to define specific characteristics of what is a slice in the 5G network, so we can tune the 5G network to make it fit for gaming and to optimize, basically, the delivery of gaming with 5G. So we think that 5G is going to get much faster in those regions where actually the internet is not so great. We've been deploying the Blacknet service in Thailand, in Singapore, in Malaysia, now in the Philippines and so on, and this has allowed us to actually reach people in regions where there is no cable or bandwidth with fiber and this kind of thing. So, look, I'm not going to solve the problem where bandwidth is not available, but maybe bandwidth will come faster with 5G and that could be the solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to make a comment there and thank you for the answer we are seeing. So it's very interesting and I'll use India as an example. So for years in video streaming, the Indian market was used as an example of where it was very difficult to deliver high quality and especially if you wanted to deliver, say, 720p and 1080p was almost assumed at a certain period of time like it's not even possible because the network capacity and the speeds were just so low. What has happened is and India is a great case study here, but it's really almost all regions of the world as these infrastructures, these wireless infrastructures, have been upgraded, they leapfrogged literally from 3G or you know in some cases even you know 2.5G and you know before and just went all the way to 5G.
Speaker 1:And so in the last five years there has been such a fundamental shift in bandwidth availability that in some cases, some of these regions of the world, not only is it definitely no longer true that they're slow, they're faster than some of the more developed countries. So I do want to make that statement there. One question, olivier, can you talk about? Is this WebRTC? What protocols you're using? There's a lot of talk right now about QUIC and I think that would be interesting for some of the listeners who might be wondering even what protocols you're using.
Speaker 2:So we use standard codecs to start with the bottom line. We have not invented codecs. We have been in the standardization industry of audio and video for quite some years and I think you have great experts here doing great technology. And this technology is actually embedded into the chipset, into the hardware, so actually you can rely on hardware encoding and decoding capabilities. So we do think standard codecs is basically a must-have, right? Of course, you need to configure them the right way, because you have to code real-time, okay, so you cannot use particular techniques. You know to wait for a couple of frames to compute more, so you have to optimize this, but basically we use standard collects.
Speaker 2:Then, on the protocols, on top of this, we have actually a large variety of protocol okay, we depend on the device on which you are streaming. So it goes from full proprietary protocol that we have invented and patented in BlackNut to standard WebRTC. So, if you look at devices like Samsung and LG, which are basically the top manufacturers, I think the service has been launched on LG we are going to announce, I think, our launch with Samsung in a very short time and these devices support WebRTC, and that's basically the only way to implement and to support the cloud gaming solution efficiently. So short answer we use a wide range of protocols, always the one that is the most appropriate and provides the best experience to the end-user. We are using that, of course new protocol, new standards, experimenting this but I would say for the main streamline new solution, we use our own solution, plus WebRTC, when this is the only standard that there the end-to-end latency targets.
Speaker 1:I think previously you made the comment about you know like 80 milliseconds, but give us some guidelines. What is obviously the answer is as low as possible, but what's the upper limit where the game experience just falls apart? You know, it's just not playable.
Speaker 2:You know that the limit for conversional video is about 150 milliseconds. For playing games this is much lower, probably half of it. So I think you know you can get a reasonably good experience at 80 milliseconds, or actually most of the games. That does not require you know this kind of fast reaction. But then if you want to go to FPS or this kind of thing that really need to nearly be reactive at the frame accuracy, which is very, of course, difficult in cloud gaming, you need to go down to the 30 milliseconds and lower.
Speaker 2:And that I think is only feasible if you have the network that allows for it, because it's not only about the encoding part, the server side, and the client side, it's also on where the packets are going through the networks, because you can have the most efficient systems in terms of encoding latency and decoding latency. But if you pocket, instead of going directly from the server to the end user, go here and there and transit in many places, your experience will be crappy. And you know, Mark, this is actually a real issue because we, for example, had a great demonstration with Ericsson in Madrid, you know, in Barcelona, right for the Mobile World Congress, and we had servers in Madrid for the Mobile World Congress, and we had servers in Madrid. But when we first made the first test, we discovered that the packet was going from Madrid to Paris and back to Barcelona, right, okay.
Speaker 2:So we needed a bit of intelligence and technology to make this connection as efficient as possible.
Speaker 1:Tell us about Black Nut. What exactly do you guys deliver?
Speaker 2:We provide basically a cloud gaming service which is let's categorize it as a game as a service. This means that for the subscription fee per month, you get access to the real stuff. You get access to 700 games. We are adding 10 to 15 new games per month, which is, I think, the fastest pace in terms of increasing games on the market, and we provide this experience on all single devices that can actually receive a video. So that's what we do and we distribute this service either B2C, so direct to the consumer.
Speaker 2:So if you go on your BlackNet webpage, you know you can subscribe, you can access to the games. But we also distributed through carriers, so telecommunication carriers, operators all over the world. We currently have about 20 signed agreements with the carriers live actually more than 40 signed and we are signing and delivering one to two new carriers per month, you know. So that basically is 40 sign and we are signing and delivering one to two new carriers per month. So that's basically the pace where we are in BACnet and the choice to use carriers here is for the reason I explained to you, that it's good to have great service.
Speaker 1:Optimization of the network right.
Speaker 2:You need to know where the packets are going. You need to make sure that there is some form of CDN for cloud gaming that is in place here that makes the experience optimal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it completely makes sense to me, especially because you mentioned the 5G optimization. And obviously, carriers. They've been investing now for years in building out their 5G networks but they're always looking for reasons to drive more value and to really extract the full potential off the 5G or out of the 5G investment. So, yeah, it really makes sense.
Speaker 2:That's the kind of thing we are doing as well with, you know, our partner, radianark, and we are putting the server at the edge of the network. So inside you know the carrier's infrastructure, so that you know the latency is really super optimized. So that's one thing that is key for the service.
Speaker 1:What is the architecture of that edge server? What's in it? What CPU, GPU, VPU, like? Describe that.
Speaker 2:We started with a standard architecture, you know, with CPU and GPU, and now, you know, with the current you know VPU architecture, we are putting actually a whole server consisting in AMD GPU, you know NetIn GPU, and basically we build the whole package so that we put this in the infrastructure of the carrier and we can deploy the BlackBerry Cloud Gaming on top of it.
Speaker 1:And are you delivering to only a handful of fixed resolutions, or like if I was on a TV, for example, do I get 4K, or do you limit to 1080p, or how do you handle that? Again, great question.
Speaker 2:We actually can handle multiple resolution, right. I think we can stream from 720p up to 4k. Uh, the technology basically has no limits for it, right? Um, and streaming you know 4k or even you know 8K is a problem that has somehow been solved already. From a technical matter. The question is again the cost and the experience. Streaming 4K on a mobile device does not really make sense. I think the screen is a bit more, so you can screen a smaller resolution and that's sufficient. On a TV, likely you need to have a bigger resolution, even if actually there is a great upscale available on most of the TV sets. We stream 720p on Samsung devices and that's super great, right, but of course, scanning up to 1080p will provide a much better experience. So, on TVs and for the game that require it, I think we are indeed streaming the service about 1080p for the game that requires it.
Speaker 1:Do you also find that frame rate is almost more important than resolution For certain?
Speaker 2:games, absolutely, but you know again, it is game dependent. It's game. Yeah, if you are on FPS, you probably. If you have the choice, okay, and you cannot stream 1080p, you would probably stream 720p at 60 FPS rather than 1080p at 30 FPS, right? Yes, yes, if you have to make some trade-off, but if you have different games where the textures, the resolution is more important, then maybe you will actually select more 1080p and 30fps resolution and the technology we build is actually fully adaptable. Ultimately, you should not forget that there is a network in between and even if, technically, you can stream 4K or 8K, the networks may not sustain it and then actually you will have less good experience streaming 4K than actually a 1080p 60fps resolution.
Speaker 1:Okay, I see, a question just came in no-transcript. You actually talked about how many publishers you have. You did talk about every month you're onboarding, you know, I think, 10 or 12 new games, but yeah, so are there geographical restrictions? How can someone access this?
Speaker 2:great, let's start's start with content. Okay, indeed, we have, you know, more than several games right now, 10 to 15 new games per month, and we actually try not to have geographical limitation on the content. Okay, so it's been. The content we have on the catalog is, from a licensing point of view, available worldwide. That's basically what we do. We do have exceptions, as usual, but basically a large part of the catalog is available worldwide.
Speaker 2:Now, deploying this catalog on different region, we are available in more than 45 countries. We definitely need to have servers that are close enough to the end user so that the streaming experience is good enough, and we think that a radius of between 750 to 1,500 kilometers probably is the maximum kilometers, you know, probably the maximum. So I think we will actually put some point of presence, you know, in those geographical areas so that, basically, the latency, limited by the speed of light right, does not, you know, harm the service. So, of course, you know, if you look at it, we have europe very much, you know, covered. We have us and canada very much covered. We have a large portion of southeast asia, korean and japan very much covered. We are now expanding in latin america, which is a bit harder. We are strong presence now as well in in the middle with partners like STC in the region and of course we have some zones that are less covered. Africa is not well covered at all. South Africa is, but basically the rest of Africa is a bit harder to reach.
Speaker 1:By the way, what is the website? Why don't you give out the?
Speaker 2:URL there wwwblacknutcom.
Speaker 1:Blacknutcom, all right.
Speaker 2:I think, try the service. We'd be very happy to support and provide feedback.
Speaker 1:It's super exciting and you know, as I, as I said in the in the beginning, for me personally, having been, you know, really, in the very early stages of of the transition from physical entertainment delivery I'm talking about movies, you know, specifically like DVDs to streaming. I'm just super excited to also now, 15 years later, be there with games. And there's a lot of work to be done and, as you pointed out, you know, the experience is absolutely not exactly mapped. We can't replace, you know, throw out the console yet. You know, throw out the console yet, uh, and but the, the opportunity to bring, you know, really, the gaming experience to, um, to a much wider audience, is really enabled, you know, with streaming. So, um, by by the way, uh. So I think there's a follow-on question here Do you have infrastructure in South Africa you mentioned? Africa is not covered as well.
Speaker 2:Yes, we do have the capacity to deploy the service in South Africa.
Speaker 1:To deploy in South Africa. Okay, great, great. Well, we're right up against time and thank you for everyone who joined us. Live Really appreciate it. And thank you, Olivier, it's amazing what you built and we're super excited to be working with Black Nut. Thank you everyone.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Mark. 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.
