Voices of Video

The Lag Ends Here: Dolby's Battle Against Streaming Delay

• NETINT Technologies • Season 4 • Episode 8

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The streaming revolution has arrived, and Dolby is at its cutting edge. In this enlightening conversation, Paul Boustead, VP of Product and Business Strategy for Dolby's Cloud Solutions Business Group, reveals how Dolby is transforming the sports viewing experience through unprecedented low latency streaming technology.

Imagine sports content delivered with less than 500 milliseconds of delay - faster than traditional broadcast in some cases. Paul explains why consistency of this low latency across all viewers is even more critical than the raw speed itself. This consistency enables truly interactive experiences where viewers aren't spoiled by social media alerts before seeing the action unfold on their screens.

The conversation dives deep into Dolby's streaming platform, built through strategic acquisitions like Theo Player and Millicast, and how they're integrating Dolby Vision to create stunning visual experiences without sacrificing speed. Paul articulates a fascinating philosophy around quality: "We want better pixels, not more pixels." This approach respects content creators' intent while delivering optimized experiences across diverse viewing devices.

For broadcasters and content providers facing infrastructure challenges, Paul shares how VPU integration is helping solve density and cooling issues for customers managing hundreds of concurrent channels. He also unpacks Dolby's innovative approach to monetization through server-guided ad insertion that maintains the viewing experience while creating new revenue opportunities.

Whether you're a sports broadcaster, streaming technologist, or content creator, you'll want to visit Dolby at NAB booth W2849 to witness these technologies firsthand, including their groundbreaking Dolby Vision integration demos. The future of streaming isn't just about speed or quality in isolation - it's about creating cohesive experiences that engage viewers in entirely new ways.

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.

Mark Donnigan:

Voices of Video. Voices of Video, Voices of Video, Voices of Video. And we are back. Yes, we are back with another, yet another special edition of Voices of Video. Back with another, yet another special edition of Voices of Video. And if you've been following us, you know that we're building up to NAB. Nab 2025 is set to be huge a lot of excitement, there's going to be some great announcements and we certainly hope that we're going to see you there.

Mark Donnigan:

But on this edition of Voices of Video, I am joined by Paul Baustad from Dolby, and so first of all, I want to welcome you, Paul. Thank you for coming on the show. Hi, Mark, it's great to be on the show. Yeah, exactly so you know Voices of Video those regular listeners know that. You know we typically have a little bit longer format. We're not afraid to go deep and talk, you know, at length, about interesting things that people are building, companies are building in the industry. But I'm really excited to talk to you because it's actually the first time that we've had Dolby on Voices of Video, so it's great to have you here. Why don't you launch and just tell the listeners who you are, what you do at Dolby, and then let's talk about NAB and what our two companies are doing together and see where this leads.

Paul Boustead:

I'm excited to be on the Voices of Video podcast and I'm also excited about NAB coming up. We've got lots of good things to show and we've got lots of meetings and it's great to meet probably a lot of people that are listening to this podcast, I'm sure yes, so I'm the VP of Product and business strategy for Dolby's cloud solutions business group and I've been at Dolby for 17 plus years and our focus at the moment is on ultra low and low delay streaming for sports experiences, and at NAB, we've got lots of cool things to show, including integration of Dolby Vision into our products, etc. So it'd be really great to see people at our booths.

Mark Donnigan:

Low latency Dolby Vision. That sounds pretty cool.

Mark Donnigan:

Oh, that's right, that's going to be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really Well, you know, paul, we are really excited. There was a little bit of a, of a. It wasn't exactly closed doors, it was out in the open. But at IBC, dolby showcased an integration with NetEnt VPUs and you were doing something pretty cool there that not everybody saw. So maybe you can give a quick sneak peek about that and then bring us up to date as to just what you're excited about, what you're building, the opportunities you're going after.

Paul Boustead:

Yeah, why don't we?

Mark Donnigan:

start there.

Paul Boustead:

So what I'm excited about with VPUs is we have lots of customers that have their own on-prem encoding equipment that connect to our service, and some of those customers have hundreds of channels operating concurrently and they're new to this space and they're building out their on-prem infrastructure and they're running into cooling, they're running into density as well as all the sorts of things which data centres are running into all the issues data centres are running into.

Paul Boustead:

So we're excited to be starting to build a product where we can include VPUs in these on-prem encoder installations. It also really helps with some of the strategic work which we're going to show at NAB, which is including, as I said before, dolby Vision into our service. And once we include Dolby Vision into the service, we need to use HEVC. The codec complexities rise and so it becomes more of a problem. So VPUs are really important to our strategy going forward.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, it's interesting, and so these use cases are live sports primarily, or even exclusively, or what type of content?

Paul Boustead:

Well, we operate in multiple market segments. Live sports is really our focus. Well, we operate in multiple market segments. Live sports is really our focus. It's a focus because we believe we can create great interactive and immersive experiences as Dolby within the sports space, and we think in sports, that's increasingly important as younger generations are coming in and they don't want to spend the whole game watching the one game. They want to be able to interact with the experience, they want to be able to switch between multiple games and also they want to be able to see things when it happens not, you know, hear about it on social media, then see it on their over the top stream.

Mark Donnigan:

yeah, yeah yeah, read about it on X.

Paul Boustead:

Yes, that's right.

Mark Donnigan:

Before. Yeah, that's the proverbial use case you know out there, but it's very real. I thought it was interesting. You know, the Super Bowl was one of the most recent live events, at least at a real mass scale, where there seemed to be a real concerted effort from a lot of folks working in the industry, some of our friends maybe you were taking part in this too that were actually benchmarking the delay behind or even ahead of broadcast. It was quite remarkable that on certain devices I think it was the iPad, I may have the device wrong, but the stream was actually a little bit ahead of broadcast, which you know. When has that happened?

Paul Boustead:

This is awesome. So I love these surveys looking at the delay, the comparative delay to broadcast, and some of the studies also show something which is important, which is the variation of that delay. And it's kind of interesting. The whole streaming industry is low-delay. Streaming industry is trying to get to a consistently low-delay-like broadcast, but we're not quite there yet because you can see those delays in those studies. Some get to broadcast delay or below, but if you look at the delay variation, that's quite wide. So with broadcast, everyone's watching at the same time. But with even with these low delay streaming services, some people are, you know, five seconds, ten seconds behind broadcast, even if on average it's a broadcast delay. So they're not watching together and that's one of the problems. We're really looking at solving in Dolby.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, it's really good. Now I actually want to back up a little bit, because it strikes me that there's probably some of our listeners that are not even totally aware that Dolby even has a streaming platform, so maybe we should start there. Can you give an overview of what Dolby operates, what platforms, what products, what solutions that you operate that are available?

Paul Boustead:

So what we provide is more than streaming, more than low delay streaming. So we have a cross-platform player and the cross-platform player came from Theo, so Theo Player, which we recently acquired.

Paul Boustead:

That's right, yeah, so we've managed to get ourselves the leading player in the industry and this enables our customers to easily deploy their streaming services over a wide variety of platforms, from web to mobile to a huge range of smart TV and connected TVs.

Paul Boustead:

So we manage that complexity for our customers and provide a simple API that they can just write their business logic once and deploy over many platforms.

Paul Boustead:

That's crucial to our strategy to also provide experiences on top of that, and the experiences we provide on top of that is one is the streaming product, and we've got a streaming product that can use multiple underlying technologies to provide delays consistently below a second, even below 500 milliseconds. This uses technologies like WebRTC, which is essentially RTP and UDP being distributed over like an overlay multicast network, just packet forwarding nodes. But we also have a streaming technology that distributes over CDNs, where we can get massive scale, and we have a protocol called HESP at massive scale and we have a protocol called HESP. What we do with HESP is focus on both low delay, so we can get delays below five seconds, but then we enable our customers to get consistent low delay, so a customer can choose to select a target of two seconds and we'll keep that target of two seconds for all those viewers. So it's that low delay plus, more importantly, consistently low delay. So it's similar to broadcast.

Paul Boustead:

Yeah, in addition to that, we have an ad product and that's about enabling our customers to create, to be able to monetize their streams. We're tackling a number of problems here. One is we're tackling the problem of providing scalable ads at low delay. That is actually a difficult problem.

Paul Boustead:

So we're working with a number of sports organizations and also Google Ad Manager Interesting. We're also helping them monetize their content more, so we have additional ad experiences. So our product is a server-guided ad insertion product which enables you to do sort of double box ads L bars, et cetera. So there's a lot of detail in that ad product. We're solving sports problems in particular, so I'd be really encouraged to talk to people who are doing ads and streaming, particularly low delay streaming so.

Mark Donnigan:

So any listeners who are working in sports broadcasting, sports streaming, low delay applications if you're at nab, you need to come see Paul is what I'm hearing. Yeah, that's right. I'm really keen to talk to them. Okay, yeah, yeah, now you mentioned that you acquired Theo, didn't you also acquire? Was it Millicast? A number of years ago now? Is that where the initial low-delay technology came from, or maybe you can explain some of the history there?

Paul Boustead:

So we purchased Millicast a number of years ago and then we purchased Theo and Theo has given us both a leading player. Technology plus. It's also bolstered our streaming product. Technology plus it's also bolstered our streaming product so it gives us a streaming technology that is similar to technologies like low latency hls, which so it uses a cdn to distribute. But we really focus on that consistent delay, yeah, which means managing that playback buffer so that we can keep that delay down and adjust that delay as we go forward.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. Well, it's definitely. You know, low latency combined with the sports application is super hot, super hot topic. A lot of growth is super hot, super hot topic, a lot of growth. You know. There's just a lot of of content that needs to be delivered and services are trying to figure out how to do it. You know more more reliably.

Mark Donnigan:

I would love to talk about where you see, you know as so.

Mark Donnigan:

It's one thing to run sort of the the base level of technologies.

Mark Donnigan:

You know, just for sake of discussion, webrtc with H.264, maybe VP8, vp9, you know, and those are generally again, emphasis on, generally generally supported in a lot of browser ecosystems and, you know, sort of ubiquitous on certain computing devices. But the minute you want to add Dolby Vision, as you already referenced, the minute that you say, hey, we need to increase resolution, therefore, you know, I really care about my bit rate and my quality, and so there's added codec complexity and you know, we add a few more things All of a sudden. This gets hard really fast, you know, and especially it complicates the encoding piece. So I'm just curious if you can share, you know, some insights in the way that Dolby is thinking about how to manage that, you know, and of course one way is to adopt a solution like VPU. But you know, maybe you can tell a little bit of the, you know of the journey or the technology progression you know, to deliver higher resolution, higher quality, lower bit rates and then still keep the latencies low.

Paul Boustead:

So traditionally with services like Millicast and also TheaLive, we've been focusing on H.264 ABC and the reason we've been doing that is because the devices out there for the services that we're running we want to be able to support decoding without putting too much, without taxing the playback devices too much.

Mark Donnigan:

So, in other words, use a native hardware encoder instead of software yeah it helps with CPU load on the device.

Paul Boustead:

It helps keep the battery from draining too quickly, and we've seen with some services where we get analytics on the service, we're really looking at the performance on those low-end devices. But what we're seeing now is devices are more increasingly providing hardware coding support for HEVC, and HEVC is important for us as well for Dolby Vision. So we're looking at HEVC in the future and so that's where VPUs become more important to us. Also, the nice thing about more efficient codecs with higher compression it's going to help us in the long run with delay as well, because once you compress the video more, you're going to have lower bit rates. Lower bit rates mean that you're going to run into congestion issues less. You're going to have less retransmissions. You're going to be switching layers less, which is going to help keep the delay down as well. So retransmissions are one of the big causes of that variation in delay that we see with over-the-top streaming services at the moment.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, that's absolutely correct and you know you said it a couple minutes ago but you know it's a theme again is that it's one thing to be low latency and you know that's kind of the initial target right, but it's very important the variance of that latency, that it's either very, very minimal or even no variance at all. And you know I can think of, you know the sports betting use case is only one, you know, but that's one obvious, where you know if that latency is fluctuating, you know it's varying, yeah, you know that's not good if I'm relying on that extra, you know, half a second to be able to react to what I think is going to happen or whatever the case is.

Paul Boustead:

So yeah, any interactive experience. Yeah, that's right, any interactive experience. That variation delay ruins the experience for some people and we see it in stats of streaming. We see it in those stats you talked about Super Bowl quite a large variation in delay, even for the low delay services.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right, wow, wow, very, very interesting. Now, what regions of the world are you primarily operating your platform in? You know, do you have a global footprint? Are you focused mostly on North America?

Paul Boustead:

We certainly have a global footprint for our streaming services. It's really important for the use cases we're going after for streaming, for sports streaming in particular. People want to be able to watch from wherever they are, and it's up to our customers to determine if they want to restrict access from particular regions and with sports, it's actually really important that you have a good implementation of geo-restrictions, which we haven't at that point.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. How does Dolby think about quality? You know, when I think of the Dolby name, and certainly Dolby Vision, I mean it's. You know Dolby equals quality and I think in most people who work in the industry probably have the same. You know the same impression and certainly you set a standard. So how do you think about quality At Dolby?

Paul Boustead:

we look at quality from multiple levels, look at quality from multiple levels. So obviously video quality is something that we are we're very passionate about. So, and with video quality, we look at resolution as part of it. But actually you want better pixels, not more pixels, so we want to make each of the pixels look good. So with technologies like Dolby Vision, what we do is we're able to take the creator's intent and map that onto the display that consumers see, so that we get the brightness, we get the colors as the content creator intended, colors as the content creator intended, and we do that through working with the ecosystem. So we actually work with the TV manufacturers on the panel itself, so we understand the panel capabilities of the devices we're playing back with Dolby Vision. So there's that level of quality which is important to us.

Paul Boustead:

But we're also an experience company and with sports, the quality of experience is more than just the quality of the picture. You want to be able to engage with the experience, and that's what we're focusing on with our streaming technologies, streaming player and ad technologies. You want to be able to have a good experience over the top of high quality video. So that's why we're looking at consistently low delay. But also we're working with our customers on how to monetize better as well. So our ad product, which we talked about before, we're working with customers to be able to monetize while also having a good experience. We're working with customers to be able to monetize while also having a good experience, and because we've gone down the path of server-guided ad insertion, which essentially renders the ad on the player side, we can do very innovative ad experiences that fit with the stream, fit with the sports experience, for example.

Mark Donnigan:

I like that perspective. The sports experience, for example, I like that perspective. You know, as the industry and you know, we obviously at NetEnt are, you know, really exclusively focused in video encoding, right, and I would argue, rightfully so, that that is a pretty essential step to delivering quality, you know, meaning the faithful rendition of whatever that source is. You know, preserving it as much as possible, you know, so that you know it looks good, right, but your point is very well taken and I think this is, you know, this is where the trade-offs come into play and where, you know, everybody has their own calculus for how they balance. You know, what you might say broadly is the consumer experience. You know, do I do. I believe that resolution is an important contributor. You know what? If I don't have a lot of bits available, am I willing to trade off resolution? You know, for higher quality representation of those pixels. You know I love that.

Mark Donnigan:

I spent quite some time years ago working in Hollywood, working in the post-production facilities and you know, and boy, when you get in there and you see the painstaking detail, you know that those filmmakers, the cinematographers, everyone who's involved in putting that image up on the screen, you know they, they, they scrutinize everything, you know. So, but it's a trade-off, right, yeah, you know. And then late and latency comes into that as well, because there are certain experiences where, as we've been talking, into that as well, because there are certain experiences where, as we've been talking, you know if you're lagging too far, even just behind broadcast, you know that can be a bad experience. And so, yeah, so it's a very interesting trade-off. Well, paul, you know we're really excited about the work that NetEnt is doing with Dolby, and here we have a major showcase coming up.

Mark Donnigan:

Nab is just now, three and a half weeks away, hard to believe. A lot of preparation, a lot of work still yet to do. I'm sure on your side, I know we're scrambling, but when someone comes to visit you at NAB, comes to your booth, what are they going to see? You know what are you there to talk about. You know what are you excited to showcase. Give them a preview.

Paul Boustead:

Okay. So we're going to be at booth W28498. And we're really keen to talk to people there. Talk to people about streaming, talk to people who've got player needs as well as ads. So at the booth we're going to be showcasing each of these products, but we're also going to be showcasing some of the quality experiences which are coming Like. We've got a demo of Dolby Vision integrated in with our streaming product and we're really excited about this. So, as we move into the sports space, we are really able to show fantastic experiences by bringing in technology from the wider Dolby into the products that we've built. So I'm really excited to show that story of our streaming player and ads products with all of the Dolby technology added to create a fantastic experience.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, that'll be amazing. Well, say that booth number again, just so in case the listeners didn't catch it the first time.

Paul Boustead:

It's W28498.

Mark Donnigan:

So I'm really happy to meet people there, awesome, awesome, well, good, well, paul, thank you for joining us on Voices of Video. We'll have to have you back. Maybe we'll do a follow-up after the show and we can dive into some of the key takeaways, what you heard, what the themes were of the discussions. We're very excited about our work supporting your platform and I certainly encourage everyone to go check out what Dolby is doing. All right, thanks for listening and hopefully we'll see you at NAB.

Paul Boustead:

Yeah, see you at NAB. Thanks Mark. Yes, see you at NAB. Thanks Mark.

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Jan Ozer

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Mark Donnigan

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Pierre Le Fevre

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Anita Fejter

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Paul Boustead

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