Tell us about the company – when it was founded, by whom and with what objective?
VisualOn was founded in 2003 by Dr. Yang Cai and Dr. Bill Lin in Silicon Valley to bring low-cost, high-quality, multimedia experience to more consumer devices through supporting the new video compression standard H.264 in software. It has since become the leading streaming media player solution provider most trusted by the top service providers in the world.
FAST. AVOD. SVOD. MVPD. vMVPD. OTA. These services represent the options available to content owners or aggregators to deliver entertainment, sports and news content from centralized hubs to individual consumers. Their goal is simple – expose and monetize their content libraries to as many consumers as possible. However, that doesn’t mean the consumer is top of mind when it comes to facilitating their journey to their content of choice.
Linear TV isn’t dead, but the internet has changed it forever. At a time of global downturn, an increasing number of content owners are pinning their growth hopes on ad-funded live or VOD-to-live FAST channels. But drawing eyeballs and maximising ad revenues in this increasingly crowded marketplace will rely on more than just an EPG and good promos.
Video streaming is growing at a rapid pace, gaining more and more viewers from legacy broadcast. To keep up with their growing investment in content, video service providers need to find effective methods to boost content monetization, and targeted advertising is one way to do that. Enabled by ABR streaming, targeted advertising allows service providers to seamlessly deliver video ads into streamed content to create additional revenues.
Almost six months after Take 1’s acquisition by Unicorn company, Verbit, Take 1 CEO, Louise Tapia, provides an insight into how the team is collaborating with their fellow media and entertainment sector specialists at sister company, VITAC, to provide end-to-end accessibility services.
In recent years, the choice of video services has multiplied, as large media organisations add a plus symbol to their established brands and roll out new platforms. In addition, many incumbents in the VOD space are now supplementing their main subscription models with AVOD options. In some cases, these ad-funded tiers will be differentiated with new content, but at the very least they will require new versions of the original media files with markers for ad insertion. Linear TV has not been left behind, evolving its offering with more content choice, and diversifying with themed FAST channels.
ARGUS is a new product from Telestream that represents the next step in centralized video monitoring management. It was developed in response to the needs of OTT service providers who require large scale comprehensive monitoring of their entire distribution network. ARGUS enables automated surveillance of each video transition point with data aggregation from monitoring probes across the video delivery chain and provides deep dive analytics data that enables service providers to quickly identify the source of video quality issues and their root causes. Without a system like ARGUS, service providers are effectively blind when locating problems across the delivery chain.
Ateme’s 5G streaming solution can take the video experience to a new level, by leveraging the high bandwidth, low latency, Mobile-access Edge Computing and programmability of the 5G network.
Researchers in UT-Austin’s LIVE (UT-LIVE), Directed by Professor Al Bovik, have singularly pioneered the use of visual neuroscience to create picture and video quality measurement and monitoring tools that control the quality and bandwidths of a large percentage of all streaming videos, television, and social media. Their breakthrough inventions include the iconic Structural Similarity (SSIM), Multi-scale SSIM (MS-SSIM), and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) “reference” visual quality tools, which delivered dramatic leaps in performance when introduced, and are still dominant today. These tools are used today to control the quality of most streaming and social media pictures and videos in the US and beyond. Bovik and his team also disrupted the field by inventing the first accurate and practical “blind” visual quality models (BRISQUE and NIQE), using models of neuro-statistical distances, at the neural level, between distorted and distortion-free visual signals. These tools are also globally marketed and used in numerous industry applications, including inspection of streaming and social video uploads, control of cameras, and remote video transcoding in the Cloud.
Aviator is a cloud-native platform that enables broadcasters, MVPDs and digital-first providers to plan, make and monetize premium-quality, ad-supported linear and Connected TV (CTV) content from a single, unified platform. This ground-breaking platform draws on Imagine’s broad experience in ad tech, video infrastructure and playout automation to create an entirely new approach to setting up, running and monetizing channels simply, quickly and cost-effectively.