Voices of Video

From VHS Tapes to Huddle: The Evolution of Sports Video Analysis

• NETINT Technologies • Season 2 • Episode 16

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Casey Bateman, Principal Engineer at Huddle, reveals how their video platform revolutionized sports analysis by replacing the old system of coaches exchanging physical tapes with instant digital access. Founded in 2006 at the University of Nebraska, Huddle now serves 97% of US high school football programs and has expanded globally to 40+ sports.

• Huddle's first client was Nebraska football in 2007, followed by the NY Jets when their coach moved teams
• Explosive growth began when targeting high schools - from 12 schools in 2008 to 1,300 by 2010
• Currently powers video analysis for 230,000 different organizations globally across 40 different sports
• Platform optimizes for clear jersey numbers and field lines, critical details coaches need for analysis
• Uses different video delivery strategy than entertainment streaming services due to unique access patterns
• Current library contains over 100 petabytes of video hosted on AWS 
• Developing AI-powered camera technology that automatically tracks players and the ball
• Implementing HEVC codec support after Chrome announced compatibility, reaching 71-72% of their user base
• Created on-demand rendering system that cuts storage needs in half by generating lower-quality versions only when needed


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.

Casey Bateman:

Voices of Video.

Mark Donnigan:

Well, it's 8 am on Pacific time anyway, so on the West Coast, I guess. Hey, welcome to this edition, another very, very exciting edition of Voices of Video. Casey, are you ready to have an awesome conversation? Absolutely, All right, well, good, well, let me introduce you. So, as everyone knows, today I'm going to be talking with Casey Bateman, who is with Huddle, and you're going to hear all about Huddle. But we were just chatting, casey and I, about how the company was founded and I'll let him tell the full story. But they're actually one of the OGs in streaming video and I have been fortunate enough to have been a part of not Huddle but some other companies in the same vintage, and it's amazing how, on one hand, 15 years ago is 15 years ago and yet it seems like yesterday how far we've come in streaming videos. So, casey, welcome to Voices of Video. Thank you for joining me. This is going to be great. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Casey Bateman:

I'm excited to be here.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, cool, cool. Well, let's start, obviously, give a quick intro to yourself and tell the viewers what you do yourself. And you know, tell the viewers what you do and then, you know, talk to us about Huddle what Huddle's building and let's get into this.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, absolutely yes, I'm Casey Babin. I'm a principal engineer in the office of the CTO at Huddle. Specifically, what I do is I look into our video technology stack. I kind of own that area technically speaking and my job is to kind of look at new technologies, assess the landscape and try and plot out a strategy for the company around our video vision and how we're to execute on that video vision and like how we're to execute on that.

Mark Donnigan:

It's a big it's. It's a big job, uh, plotting the landscape and the vision of the future, right, but, um, tell us about huddle, because you are a remarkable company, especially. Uh, well, you're, I'm sure, a remarkable company, but in the area of streaming, and I have to believe that probably not all of our viewers even know who Huddle is. And yet I think everyone's going to be shocked when they hear you know the scale of operations that you run and you know what you do. So you know what. What does Huddle do?

Casey Bateman:

Huddle is. We are a technology company that focuses on empowering coaches, athletes and fans sports experience Right. So we build a coaching tool platform that really helps coaches and athletes, like, work their game and get better at it. Right platform, then, also for our fans who can't necessarily be at games or are at games and want to enrich their experience at those games, um, or even just follow their favorite athletes and uh and teams just watch that content right. So we're kind of like a full service, uh, sports video suite of products. So, yeah, um, and you know the company you were saying OG company yeah, company started back in 2006, got our first customer was actually in 2007. Incredible Stuff with the University of Nebraska Wow.

Mark Donnigan:

Wow, and what's the origin story? Are the founders? You know athletes that were trying to solve a problem, or you know technologists that were just looking for an application? Both, uh, neither, yeah well actually.

Casey Bateman:

So, yeah, our three founders is dave graff, john words and brian kaiser. Uh, they were attending the rake school at, uh, the university of nebraska, which is like an entrepreneur computer science program stuff that the University of Nebraska has. Dave Graff, who is our CEO, was working with the football team at that kind of time and just to kind of paint a picture of how it was back then for you these teams, when they'd exchange video I mean they were doing vcrs a lot of time they would.

Casey Bateman:

They would have their video recordings, they would cut everything and record to a vcr and then meet other coaches like drive, and meet them halfway right and exchange tapes, right literally exactly so it's I mean, this is, this is what it was like, and it is hard to think like, based on where we are now, that that's like there was a past in which that was the thing to do. So dave graff um had the idea at that point in time and, uh, john worse and brian kaiser joined in and they developed a product they called huddle. Now, it was spelled a little differently back then, like the actual what you think of when you're talking a huddle.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, spelling um, and it was kind of a smoke and mirrors product that's what we kind of call it back then, uh, that they took to uh coach bill uh callahan at that time for the University of Nebraska and really, really sold them on it. So for that, for that first year they were, they were kind of using this, this new product or huddle, at that point in time to kind of like test it out with the school. And then in 2007, in june 2007, uh, we officially signed the huskers as our first client. It took about another year, until about march of 2008, until we finally got our second client. That's, uh, if you know, the football story behind uh coach bill callahan. He wasn't, he wasn't with the huskers very long, but then immediately after went to the Jets and he brought Huddle with him.

Mark Donnigan:

So our second ever client was the New York Jets.

Casey Bateman:

Professional team Incredible, right Incredible, and so that was kind of like the idea originally is Huddle was going to be made to be targeting these like college and pro teams and stuff. So for that first two years, you know, we had a lot of interest from high school small college teams like wanting to use the product and it was kind of one of those things. Up until that point we just turned them down. But in 2008, kind of decided we needed to shift, split the product into two sets the whole pro suite and then huddle and start tackling that high school market. And from there huddle just started exploding right by incredible.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, by by the end of 2008, we got an additional 12 high school clients. In 2009, we got up to 350 total clients. Then by 2010, we were up to 1,300. Wow.

Mark Donnigan:

Wow, that's hockey stick adoption, and was it just purely like viral, or? I guess it almost makes sense. You talk about network effects, Like if two coaches were driving the meet. All it takes is one of those coaches to adopt it and you automatically get the next, get the other one Right, Because they'd be like, wait a second, you don't have to go dry. I mean, what a pain you know, like that could burn a a Saturday afternoon or whatever you know.

Casey Bateman:

Monday night you know, or whatever so yeah, these high school coaches, you know they want, they want as much time as they can, uh, doing what they love. Driving back and forth is probably not what they love.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, incredible. So, uh, one of the one of the statistics that I think we put in our poster art for this particular interview was that you have 97% of US, and I guess we should say American football, right, right, so we'll get into and we are going to get in to talk about the technology. So anybody who's listening and saying, wait a second, are you going to talk about what they built? Yes, we are. But but I, but I, I think you know, sometimes, as technologists and engineers, you know, just my observation is we're sometimes almost too quick to dive in to talk about the nuts and the bolts and the protocols and the standards and without the context of the application, how a product's being used, why something is built a certain way, you know, sometimes it can either lead you to not realize really the full breadth of the significance of what, why something was built the way it is, or you may be asking, like well, why are they using that, that, that standard, that technology? That doesn't make sense.

Mark Donnigan:

Well, when you understand the devices, for example, or you understand the kind of like oh, okay, I get it. So that's just my caveat to say bear with us here If you're looking for us to get quickly into the nuts and the bolts. We're going to do that, but you have 97% of American football teams. So that is across like high school and colleges. The high school college pro. Like what exactly is your addressable market there that you look at?

Casey Bateman:

For the American football market? Yeah, it is. 97% of the high school football teams in the US are using the huddle platforms and really the ones that the ones that aren't are. Generally, when you start getting into the six-man football team, I see Smaller schools.

Mark Donnigan:

Small schools, yeah, yeah, wow. That's incredible. And then you have schools and customers outside the US. Or are you regionally? Where are you?

Casey Bateman:

We are actually global.

Mark Donnigan:

We have a big presence kind of in the UK UK area. We have a big presence over in Sydney and I hear they also have football over there, but the ball looks a little different.

Casey Bateman:

They do, they do it's a little different and they're not carrying it as much.

Mark Donnigan:

That's right, that's right. Yeah, hands, hands, not so much Hands off right.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, that's right.

Mark Donnigan:

That's right. Hands off right yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, I guess they also use their heads, although I think I'd rather use my head to hit their ball than American football. Oh yeah, Using my head to hit another large person yeah.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, we've definitely expanded. We service over 40 different sports right now Wow, makeup, huddle and there's over 230,000 different organizations and teams and yeah, we are global.

Mark Donnigan:

Incredible, yeah, yeah, absolutely amazing. Well, you know, we have talked through the years, and you and you know I, so I've learned, I've known about huddle and worked with huddle for a little while, but uh, until that point I too was just absolutely shocked at like how is it possible? You know, being being around the industry a little while, you know you can sometimes feel like, oh, I, you know I, I, I know everybody who's built the significant platforms, and then Huddle pops up and you go, wait a second, how have you guys been hiding out? So, yeah, congratulations. Well, let's you know. Let's talk then about you. Now, you were a part you were not a part of the original founding team, right? You joined after COVID, the original, the first platform, was built.

Casey Bateman:

Okay, I joined in 2013, right at the beginning of the year there.

Mark Donnigan:

Okay, all right, but but you're telling me that you were scaling. You know 2010,. You had, I think, 1300 schools. And you know, and so clearly you know, 2013,. Well, let's face, that's 10 years ago now. So you know, you've been there through some growth. Why don't you tell us what the platform looked like? Then you know, just architecturally, how did you? How did you build it? You know, were you building on the cloud? Did you own your data centers? Did you? You know, talk to us architecturally? And then you know, maybe walk us through what it looks like today from an architectural, you know, perspective.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, absolutely. So, thinking back to kind of like that 2010 time range, huddle, we mainly targeted kind of stop and go sports. Clip-based sports is what we've kind of referred to them as, or that's kind of like the American football market. That was our bread and butter, still is kind of our bread and butter, even though we've got so many other products. So back in 2010 through 2012, huddle was clip-based, and I say clip-based because most of those sports it was, like I said, stop and go. When you're looking at a football game, it's, uh, you know, a anywhere from a five second play to maybe a 40 second play for one of those really long that's a really good point.

Mark Donnigan:

I remember you made that comment to me, um, at one time we were talking and I and I went yeah, that's right, you know, like American football in particular, I guess you care if the, you know if the running back is repositioning themselves and whatever. But let's face it, what I really care is, once the play starts, you know right, and and there's a significant amount of time where the play hasn't started, you know players on the field and whatever. But so that's what you mean, just to be clear about kind of the clip based and yeah, there's a lot, of, a lot of dead time that coaches really don't want to see.

Casey Bateman:

They want to see.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, right yeah, that's right, yeah. I mean again, you know they're busy, so they don't need to sit through all of that.

Casey Bateman:

So at that point in time our video came in individual clips. We used WMVs at that point in time. We used WMVs because it played really nice with Microsoft Silverlight if you remember the Silverlight technology, yeah, yeah, and we used Silverlight back then because it really it allowed them to build a pretty rich experience where we could actually draw directly on the player canvas. We could do more intelligent, like clipping and stitching of video files together, right, which is kind of an integral part to the coaching workflow, right, they need at certain point in times much like if you're watching an ESPN broadcast and they're breaking down the film they need to like telestrate essentially on video play and draw out where motion should be, where, where routes need to be.

Casey Bateman:

We used microsoft silverlight kind of at that point in time. With wmv files. We started shifting into mp4s like quickly after that, as mp4 kind of became the streaming standard. It was definitely the streaming standard at that point in time and, yeah, so most of our platform at that time was all online. We were actually in 2009,. We signed with AWS. We were very early adopters 2009.

Mark Donnigan:

Wow, wow, so you're an OG on AWS as well.

Casey Bateman:

That's right. That's right. All of our video files were then hosted. We host our video files on AWS and stream them down through the huddlecom website. Yeah, at that point in time, huddle definitely looked very different. It was that bright orange color that you would see almost all over the place and was really designed to be optimized for a football coach's experience optimized for a football coach's experience. Spreadsheets are almost like a spreadsheet or table looking area where they could enter in like play-by-play data, as what happened, like what were results, and then you know, then you'd have your video player Chrome.

Mark Donnigan:

And so the original experience was all in the browser and I also was a part of building some demos with Silverlight back in the day and showing some very cool interactive features. And you know now that it's interesting you bring that up I can remember I was a part of a consortium called DECE. We were doing the digital locker in the original, original days of transactional VOD. If you purchased a file on one particular platform or if you rented it, not only was it only viewable on that platform, so, like Vudu, you couldn't watch it on. Well back then, let's say, apple, but you couldn't watch it on some other competing platform, but you couldn't even watch it on a different device, on Vudu.

Mark Donnigan:

So if you originally transacted it, you know, purchased or rented, whatever that transaction was on your connected television which you know way back in the day there were like three, you know but you couldn't then watch it on your laptop and and I can remember some very, very cool demos that Microsoft did with various partners showing just some really cool you know basically how you could take like the interactive DVD or Blu-ray experience and translate that to streaming, you know, which, again, I think a lot of us forget like, even though now it's a little bit archaic and resolutions are very, very low, but you know, there were some pretty cool like Blu-ray and DVD experiences. You know where the you know interactive menus and all kinds of really cool stuff. That's an aside, though, so you were streaming into browsers. Now, today, what is the dominant playback mechanism? You must surely support and have very strong support for mobile devices.

Casey Bateman:

I'm guessing and actually playback is still kind of split between the different devices almost perfectly in half. I just looked up the numbers here.

Casey Bateman:

Oh, interesting I tried to kind of get some updates and I would say so half is still web traffic and we have various protocols. We stream over MP4, hls for varying platforms. Various protocols we stream over, you know, mp4, hls for various platforms. And then, yeah, we do also have our Android and iOS applications where a lot of our athletes utilize those to kind of watch their video and do some of their review. We also have we're getting into the fan streaming space more and more.

Mark Donnigan:

So we have a whole host of smart tv apps as well. If someone uses one of your apps, do they get some additional functionality? Or is it just convenience, not, you know, needing to use a browser and, of course, some devices maybe. A browser is not, not not the best playback mechanism I'm thinking connected television as an example but yeah, Using our apps, and it kind of depends on which app they would use.

Casey Bateman:

but, yeah, they would get some additional features and availability. For example, our iOS app we had the the idea that anybody has this phone with them at any given time can capture different moments in sports. That's a great capture mechanism for getting video into huddle. So we do have capture in our iOS and Android applications as well.

Mark Donnigan:

The only sports that I played were I was in track, I was pretty competitive in high school and ran a little bit in college, but so I can't exactly relate. You know I never played football, never played, uh, basketball, but I can imagine a coach standing on the sidelines. Now, you know, everybody has an iphone with them, right, or an android device, and you could whip that out in theory. I'm just assuming this is the function and and capture 5, 10, 15 seconds of something, and then you upload it, right, and then it's available. Yeah, that's interesting, wow, okay.

Mark Donnigan:

Well, you know a lot of streaming conversations are in the distribution context and that is the one to many or the one to a very large number of minis. You know meaning. You know, certainly for live events, you know, like a Super Bowl, if we're going to stay within the sports conversation, you know every year it's like well, how much larger was this year's audience than last year's for streaming. But it seems to me, based on what you're describing, your use case for the platform from a platform perspective is different, because I don't think I mean, do you run events where you might be streaming to like millions of people like a single event?

Casey Bateman:

I'm assuming you don't yeah not really, we don't really have those kind of, uh big events. Most of the time we're streaming to uh just directly to teams feeds.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, right to to their fans, to their, to their athletes and coaches but on a fr Friday night, for example, especially if we're talking, you know, high school sports, there must be a peak time where all of a sudden, your platform, you know, is pretty crowded, right, Because that's kind of when a lot of schools are playing and there's even a time of the day, you know, that you can look at from East Coast to West Coast, if we're just going to talk about the US.

Mark Donnigan:

So that's a different type of challenge, right, and, believe me, it's not that I'm not suggesting one is easier or necessarily harder than the other, because it is a challenge when you have a stream and it's a single stream or a small number, but it's going out to a million people. Okay, there's scale and there's challenge in that, but it's different when you might have 10,000 simultaneous streams that individually might just be going to a very small number, but yet your platform perspective, you have to power them all equally, right, and you have to provide a great service. So can you give us some insights into how your platform is built and maybe even some surprises that someone might say well, why did you make that choice? You know? And they're like oh well, because you know I don't have to deliver to a million people, but I do have to be able to run on a Friday night. You know, whatever X number of hundreds or thousands of streams reliably, you know, without question. So yeah, give us some insights of.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, absolutely yeah. So you kind of hit the nail on the head there earlier when you were talking about we are built, definitely different. We most of the time in our content is coming from teams and coaches and is targeting their athletes, their fans, right, and so we will have a recording these two hour long events that are really they may have a couple hundred views on them. So we're not talking big numbers, right, which definitely when you're talking about the distribution side, the number one thing you might immediately think is, yeah, our caching strategy is very different. A lot of these sites. They may hit for really high cash rates. I'm very happy with like a 40 to 50% cash hit rate right, right, that's, that's actually fantastic.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, in that situation, yeah, but Disney, disney streaming would be like oh no, we have a serious problem here. Exactly.

Casey Bateman:

Exactly, and so the things that we have to optimize for in that situation are going to be regional optimizations on trying to pull content down to the users, right. So we look at things like pre-caching content, bringing content either when we're talking our HLS streams, bringing fragment by fragment content down to the users. Just as they're watching the stream. We know what their next, like the next chunk of video they are likely to watch, is going to be. We try and get that pulled into these pops in the regions where they are watching these videos. So a lot of pre-filling of the cash is a big thing for us and also kind of a diversity.

Casey Bateman:

I know this is important across multiple organizations, regardless of whether or not they're getting millions of views on a single stream or not, but also the diversity of of pops available in diversity of CDNs. Right, we run a multi-CDN environment here and that's because we don't usually have isolated chunks watching the same stream across multiple areas. I mean, you might have isolated chunks of users watching our content, but then across the state someone's not watching that. Yeah, we have to target essentially our users for what is like what's going to be the best performing CDN potentially for their region, like for their exact ISP and where they're accessing from. So how we target our users. So how we target our users, what CDN we provide to them is slightly different than what I would say you might see out of like a YouTube or a Disney or something like that.

Mark Donnigan:

And almost always, when you're talking about these really large scale events, you know where it's like streaming a single stream to millions. It's about cost reduction, right. So very often the CDN decisioning gets down to you know, and it is splitting fractions of pennies, right, because it's meaningful when you're delivering the. You know millions. But I didn't hear you mention. Obviously you care about costs. I'm not suggesting you don't, but is it true that your decision is not strictly necessarily based on cost and it's performance, as you stated? Or or it's even just purely about coverage, you know like if one cdn doesn't have coverage in a market, well, you need someone who does so absolutely.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, I would say cost is always going to be important, yeah of course, yeah, I'm not, I'm not implying that it's not but yeah, yeah, but yeah, mostly it's just the availability of the network and the performance yeah, interesting kind of the more important thing if a coach can't, you know, if a coach can't access their content? Because a couple regional pops or one cdn is yeah or out, then you can be assured that our, our support team is going to have their phones.

Mark Donnigan:

Going to get a trouble ticket filed. What is the role of quality with this content? And I'm asking the question because really I don't know. You know, is this one of those shocking things where coaches care about quality even more than you know? Or is there kind of a different bar of acceptable quality therefore you can encode at maybe lower bit rates, like, are there some sports that are more perceptive to quality than others? Uh, how do you approach that?

Casey Bateman:

quality is really important in the sense that there are a few things that we have to get absolutely right in encoding our videos. That's going to be the like field details and jersey details one of the things that you don't really think when a coach is breaking down content, you'd like to think that a coach knows the names of their players.

Casey Bateman:

Obviously they know the names of their players, but when you're watching a video and you may be getting a video shot from a press box, like on a football field. Everyone's wearing a helmet. All you're seeing is jersey numbers.

Casey Bateman:

You need to be able to quickly identify who did what and where. Clarity on numbers. And one of the things we see is, with a lot of those lower bet rates, with some encoders out there on the market, some of those finer details, the jersey lines and stuff like that, also with hair, like you get people with longer hair kind of blocks jersey numbers, kind of creates these artifacts or necessarily blends together jersey numbers yeah, yeah and features just together and it it makes it more difficult uh for coaches to see.

Casey Bateman:

So yeah, we do generally have to provide a slightly higher bit rate or use an encoder that is going to going to be optimized for providing those clear lines and also bolder colors, right like one of the things that's really easy when you're talking about an outdoor game is getting that color blending. Some encoders work really well at kind of keeping your your colors bold, like not desaturating content too much. Other coders, other encoders, may not do as great yeah so you know yeah quality.

Casey Bateman:

To take this back, quality plays a big um, yeah, just a really big part of the sports video experience because, yeah, when we're watching content, we use the identifying characteristics, like jersey number, field lines, to help tell the story of what's happening on the field interesting, right? So yeah, those things have to be clear and easy to to kind of read yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Donnigan:

That's interesting that that completely makes sense. So what is the architecture you? What I hear you saying is is that um a large percentage, if not nearly all, of the source material you're actually not generating? So it's not that you're shipping. Are you putting cameras out in the schools, and or or is it on the school and the coach and the players to we started off where it was on the schools and the players.

Casey Bateman:

We have, over the past several years, been developing an in-house camera.

Mark Donnigan:

I've actually got over the past several years been developing an in-house camera. I've actually got I've actually got my development rig of it right here um hey cool, cool.

Casey Bateman:

Let's see, there you go there we go, there, we go.

Mark Donnigan:

Okay, yeah, there we go.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, that's uh cool little focus camera. Uh, basically it's a stationary camera that gets set up in gyms, gets set up on, like football fields in different areas. That will record, uses a collection of sensors, maps them all together in a 3d environment, does player tracking and other like ai to help kind of track the ball, and we create like smart tactical feeds of video that is uploaded directly to huddle that way.

Casey Bateman:

So interesting okay but overall like video can come from a coach, from their iPhone, from an expensive camera. A lot of these Texas schools they have nice expensive rigs and stuff.

Mark Donnigan:

They love their high school football in Texas, don't they? Yes, they do. By the way, I grew up in Colorado and um, and, and I grew up, uh, you know, when Nebraska and CU and we're, you know we're, we're the absolute powerhouse teams. So, uh, yeah, yeah, so, um, I, I know a little bit, even though I didn't play the sport. I'm the culture, I can relate to it. Yeah, it actually is really amazing. If someone's not been exposed to it. Just go to a high school football game in Texas or back in the day in Colorado on a Friday night, and it's quite an experience. They take it seriously.

Casey Bateman:

It's a way of life for them.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, totally Okay. So you have content coming in from a lot of different sources, many of which you don't control, meaning that it could be very high quality, very well shot, great lenses, great cameras, all that stuff and others. It's a phone, and a shaky one at best. So then, are you doing some sort of processing in the cloud? Do you transcode that? Like, what do you do with that video once it's on the platform? And you know, do you have a decision tree, Like, are you using some sort of you know, even I've got to get it in there AI to you know, to you know, to maybe do some sharpening or some processing or something you know to improve quality?

Casey Bateman:

For most video. The way that we've kind of operated for so long is we we've kind of taken the single encoding ladder approach so we didn't have like a lot of a smarter way to uh provide more bits to a certain stream. It's just historically how we've done it and some of that is around cost management. Right, when you've got all these streams, we've got 100 petabytes of video out on s3 in our video library right now. It it's a lot of video.

Casey Bateman:

It's a lot and in order to kind of keep our costs down but also provide the best possible experience, we generally ran just tests to find what is going to be the optimal bit rate in which 95% of our users have top quality for their highest renditions that we have.

Casey Bateman:

And that's kind of historically how we have done things. Now we are looking at exploring a little deeper renditions that we have and that's kind of historically how we have done things. Now we are looking at exploring a little deeper, maybe providing a different experiences and stuff where we're exploring. Obviously, some of these new codecs that are out here, like HEVC 81, do a great job at providing that better quality video off the bat at those lower yeah, lower bit rates, sure better quality video off the bat at those lower yeah, lower bit rates.

Casey Bateman:

Sure, moving forward, I think we're. We're kind of looking to optimize, possibly on a per sport level, which I mean we talked. We talked a little bit earlier. Yeah, there are some different requirements for different sports. Uh, that might just have a worse experience and thinking water polo is a big one Like most people in the video world. You've got the moving water, you know it's super challenging to encode.

Mark Donnigan:

I mean all those pixels are in motion continuously. There is no step by very definition, right With water.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, and I know one of the things that we've had to do in special situations like that is, I mean, we have to slow down the encoder significantly. We can't in those situations we gotta. You have to pay for a little additional compute time yeah on that and then you have to up the bit rate on those streams to provide a better, much better.

Mark Donnigan:

Are you standardizing on 1080p for what the coaches and the players are looking at, or do you? Is there a need to deliver 4k?

Casey Bateman:

Yep, so and that kind of depends on the sport and the level there. Okay, the NFL they still run on 720p. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. However, our coaches, most of them, they want 1080p, our football.

Mark Donnigan:

That's all.

Casey Bateman:

We are delivering 1080p.

Mark Donnigan:

I have to ask a question here and you can answer it as sufficiently general as possible to not give away any secrets or insight. But it still is shocking to me how broadcast and you mentioned the NFL, and not singling out the NFL, because it's true of major leagues, you know kind of go around that are running on. You know, sometimes there's even MPEG-2 happening. Now I'm talking more in the broadcast distribution chain, but you know, my point is is where there's literally two, three, sometimes four generation old technology that they're still using today, you know, and 720p or interlaced. You know it is shocking. People just don't know how much interlaced is still happening, even in live TV production. You know now interlaced is is, is that you know, that's. That's largely, I think, gone and you know. But but three, four, even five years ago there was still a tremendous amount of interlaced content that had to be then deinterlaced and meanwhile everything's being streamed at 720p or 1080p or 4K, all progressive, and yet the production chains are so old.

Casey Bateman:

Why do you think that is?

Mark Donnigan:

like why you know. So I'm asking just a general question like, like why is that you know? And and 720p at the NFL. Like why is it that a high school team in Texas can have better quality than the, than the professional league? You?

Casey Bateman:

you know real quick. It's funny. You do mention that over 50 of our video we get in we do have to de-interlace as well. So, yeah, it's, it's still out there for sure. Wow, amazing, I can tell you. Um, that's generally when you're talking about these, these bigger programs, or I'll speak specifically to the NFL. There's just a concern around security. Security is just more worried about.

Mark Donnigan:

So their view is the lower the resolution, the less useful the video is, is that not?

Casey Bateman:

necessarily the lower the resolution they see a lot of them. Is that not necessarily the lower the resolution they see? A lot of them they actually still record to SD cards and they have runners that will run video content from the sidelines up to the press box and stuff. They some of them are under the belief that going to 1080p they would fill up those significantly. A lot of these hardware devices they use to record SD cards only support 720 feeds Crazy.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, so it's like literal hardware limitation.

Mark Donnigan:

That could be as simple, as I have a file here, everything will play it back, except for this one device and therefore I have to, you know, reduce my experience because of this one single device in this you know, somewhat complicated distribution chain. I have to say I'm not surprised by this because, again, getting back to the interlacing issue and other you know, in my past dealings with broadcast, you know, whenever I've asked like around 4k, that's that's where, you know, I really became exposed, like why is it that 4k is so hard to adopt? You know, and everybody says, well, it's the cost. It actually isn't the distribution. Yes, there's a distribution costs associated, but it's the cost of supporting throughout the entire pipeline.

Mark Donnigan:

And it can be as simple as my graphics. You know, um, um, uh, you know, um, box I I'm blanking out, you know they have a name for it, but you know that it doesn't support 4k. And there we have to go through all kinds of gyration. You know we have to down, you know we have to basically convert it from 4k to 1080p. And then they, and then we upscale and it's like, well, now we lost it, so we just run 1080p all the way through and you're like, you mean, just because of the graphics overlay device, that hardware, the consumer is missing out on this beautiful experience. Like, yeah, that's it.

Casey Bateman:

And that was the other reason. Right, it's cost, it costs is the big thing there, especially jumping to 4K. Reason right is it? This cost, it costs is the big thing there, especially jumping to 4k. When you're talking 4k, a lot of the, a lot of these boxes that these coaches have in their office that they're watching on, they're, they're not going to support the latest. Yeah, hevc, they're going to.

Mark Donnigan:

They're going to be on adp television, yeah it's a h264 and, yeah, it's an old TV and, yeah, interesting. So you mentioned, like AV1 and HEVC and you know it's certainly of interest and we've had conversations about those codecs. Are you? You know, platforms have different strategies for adopting, should we say, next gen codecs, and you know some. You know one strategy can be, can be, we're just always going to use the latest and greatest. And then there are the more conservative platforms that are like, yeah, we're not necessarily going to be the first to adopt. Where are you in this continuum? And then tell us why? Because, again, I think the why is important. You know it's one thing to say, well, you know we're pretty conservative, but then is that because people are on devices that just simply don't support AV1, you know, as an example. So it's like, yeah, but tell us, you know where you are.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, absolutely. You're right. The simple answer is yes, we're going to be a little more on the conservative side of this. Why that generally is is when you look at our user base. I mean, you're going to have our power, users are going to be coaches and you have a big mixture of the types of at our user base where they're running on, whether or not it's personal devices or even school devices. Keep in mind, we're looking at high schools and stuff, and a lot of public school systems aren't going to have access to the latest and greatest technologies.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, yeah yeah, that's true. Generally we got to look at what are. What devices are users accessing our content for what platform they're accessing as well? Right, I think we can. When you start talking more of our fan content, we get to kind of branch out beyond the high school environment, start looking at just device share around the world. Yeah, uh, when you start once getting into our core platform, yeah, we're dealing mostly with school computers and stuff like that so yeah, interesting.

Mark Donnigan:

Generally yeah.

Casey Bateman:

Generally we are, like I said, more conservative on that. We are getting into the HEVC world, given the Chrome announcement here last year about supporting HEVC playback.

Mark Donnigan:

That was good for you.

Casey Bateman:

I'm sure that was really big for us, since the bulk of our users about 98% of our web traffic is going to be either on Chrome or on Safari, both of which will support HEVC if the hardware capabilities are there. That's right. Currently we're sitting at about I double checked it again last week we're just about 71 to 72% right in there of our users have that hardware capability to decode HEVC.

Mark Donnigan:

Amazing. Wow, wow. How do you know that?

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, so what we are doing? Uh, we ran a couple tests so, um, really fun thing you can kind of do. Uh. For anybody wanting to judge this to me, there are a couple HTML, uh five video APIs you can say for can play, uh, video codecs. So right, I have to look exactly what it is, but essentially it's trying to. By specifying your codec tag you can determine if the system can properly build the decoding chain, connect the pins, get any decoder and stuff. So that is based on whether or not Chrome or Safari tells us that they absolutely do have support or is most likely supported and stuff.

Casey Bateman:

So definitely support uh, gives us, uh, approximately about 65 and the percent and then the additional. There's about 10 to 15% there on top of that that are in the some support and we assume that about half of those actually can support actually can.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, are you. So? You mentioned that you have a custom app across certain platforms. Do you put a software decoder in there or would you contemplate that, or are you 100 dependent on just the hardware support on the device?

Casey Bateman:

we are right now. It's going to be hardware like entirely dependent on that. We have talked about um and some of these newer codecs, like we've looked at potentially like av1, for example.

Mark Donnigan:

Oh, lcevc yeah.

Casey Bateman:

And putting those in there and just for the our users and the time they're spending on our app, we just we don't see as good of a battery life.

Casey Bateman:

I mean that's going to be a big thing that you see when you're putting in a software to code around these newer products is battery life really takes a hit and stuff, and it's just it hasn't been worth it to us, especially when you're weighing at the development cost to put something like that in with the. If the majority of our users actually need this for playback, does it even make sense?

Casey Bateman:

for us to encode, to encode a quality of that to them. So generally when we're, when we are looking at new qualities, new codecs to use, it's you know, dependence on hardware support or a codec that is not going to sacrifice, like battery life, significantly in mobile devices.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to have to look at.

Mark Donnigan:

I know some of the you know, like David, for AV1 is is is really, really power performant, which is to say that it actually is amazing what it can do and how little energy consumption it needs. At the same time, there's always that trade-off, right? You know, you still have to push the user even to upgrade your app so you can build all this. And then, if you know, if an insufficient number of users actually upgrade their app on the device, then they don't even have access, you know.

Casey Bateman:

So it takes a lot of it's a lot to push upgrades even so, yeah, and I would say, even then, though, we do have really good um adoption rate of our new app versions when they come out and so we're generally looking at about people or 15, yeah, 15 day to a month to the majority of our users getting updated and the majority is like what, 90 of the base, or yeah, and the majority is like what, 90% of the base.

Mark Donnigan:

Correct, yeah, yeah, yeah, which is good.

Casey Bateman:

That's really good. Av1 has been something we've actively been looking at since Apple announced that there was AV1 support with the HLF spec.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, we didn't talk about DRM. Is DRM required for any of your content or on the platform?

Casey Bateman:

Not currently no. It's something that we haven't heard. We're kind of waiting to hear back from our coaches on whether or not that is actually required. I would say it's not likely going to be something that we will ever need.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Understand. Going to be something that we will either yeah, yeah, yeah and understand what's coming for huddle in terms of the platform, like, are there any you know neat things that you're focused on, or even you're just dreaming about building that that you can talk about?

Casey Bateman:

Absolutely. I got two big, two big things that I'm really excited about that we're working on the first as, just coming hot off our conversation here with hevc, we are looking to kind of upgrade our platform to provide hevc for our coaches amazing we're really excited that we're going to be able to deliver a visually lossless quality to them, yeah, which is really big for us.

Casey Bateman:

The other one I would say really excited about this technology is what we call our on-demand rendering system. So this is something that we are currently fully utilizing for all of our secondary qualities in the US. So all U us based access video is is currently using this in uh production, but it is the ability to encode the secondary renditions of our avr ladder, so our lower quality is on the fly. So this is something. We're able to cut down our storage footprint in half, yeah, which when you're talking about the, the sheer size and the amount of content we have.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, that's. Yeah, you kind of very meaningful, yeah, yeah that I mean when you kind of think about it. Uh, in a lot of situations I would say that the math wouldn't work out. You'd be spending significantly more. Our access patterns are that this video um, coaching video is generally going to be accessed over the first 14 days of its life. Then it will just kind of sit there and the chances of being accessed again are very small, so what is your SLA?

Mark Donnigan:

Like how long do you have to keep that video on the system? Like how long do you have to keep that video on the system?

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, so we used to say it was indefinite. However, yeah, we've, and there are still, like it's going to be based on the coach's subscription, their package. How?

Mark Donnigan:

many hours of video. We got to keep that video around as long as the coach keeps it in their account. I see, I see, okay, so is this? You know, I, I buy a bundle of hours, let's say, and then I exceed my you know I'm about to run out, and then I, as a coach, have to decide I really don't need those and I can, you know I, I, I could, you know whatever, choose for deletion or something or just delete them. I guess you know video, yeah, I got it.

Mark Donnigan:

But yeah, it's an interesting problem. And it's interesting that you're pointing out that it's now becoming possible to trade compute cycles or, I'm sorry, trade storage for compute cycles, meaning that you know it's actually more cost effective to transcode on the fly and not store those additional renditions than it is to just, you know, have them pre-recorded and stored, than it is to just, you know, have them pre-recorded and stored. And I've heard pretty consistently and, of course, obviously you know we provide methods to do that very, very cost effectively. So for a lot of our customers, you know they've done that math and it makes sense in almost every context, you know to do it that way. So, yeah, yeah, storage cost, even though storage cost is being driven, you know it's more benefited from Moore's law Storage is still cheap.

Mark Donnigan:

right, storage is cheap until you're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes, and you know when you get up to a certain scale, you know there was no longer cheap.

Mark Donnigan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah it, it becomes meaningful. So yeah, casey I I really want to thank you for the conversation. It was wonderful. One of the things that you know we work really hard to do on voices of video is to is to to have meaningful conversations just like this one. So you shared a lot of great insights and I can't wait to have you back. Maybe, after you get HEVC deployed a little more fully, we can have you come back and talk about lessons learned and give us an update.

Casey Bateman:

Yeah, and thanks for having me. It was a great conversation. 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.

People on this episode

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Mark Donnigan

Host
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Jan Ozer

Co-host
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Anita Fejter

Producer
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Casey Bateman

Guest