ROSH HA'AYIN, ISRAEL - The delivery of video over unmanaged networks like the Internet is challenging due to normal fluctuations in the network's capacity.
Decreases in capacity cause a severe degradation to the video quality and may, in some occasions, cause the video to stall. Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) was designed to resolve the capacity fluctuation issue. The decision on the bit rate to use is made by the receiver. The receiver monitors, in real time, the available capacity and the stream's health to ensure that the bit rate in use is within the ability of the network to deliver. If the network's capacity degrades, the receiver may either command the encoder to lower the bit rate or will choose a lower bit rate video profile. However, unmanaged networks will always cause packets to be lost impacting the stream's health. Hence, an ABR receiver will eventually decide to choose the lowest bit rate settings. As a result, the low bit rate setting means low quality video, leading to lower user engagement hence lower revenues.
Adding VideoFlow Digital Video Protection (DVP) solution to ABR encoders and decoders will improve the ABR's performance because VideoFlow's technology is able to recover all lost packets. Now, VideoFlow has taken one step further with its new Controlled Adaptive Rate (CAR) technology that puts the intelligence into the transmitter. Like ABR, the receiver probes the network's capacity and the video stream health in real time. In contrast to ABR, the CAR receiver sends the statistics to the CAR transmitter and, unlike ABR, the decision to either decrease or increase the encoder's bit rate is made by the transmitter and not by the receiver giving a better response to the network's capacity change. CAR leverages this knowledge to dynamically set the highest bit rate to each receiver without this interfering with the video stream. CAR is encoder independent and will work with any encoder supporting changing the bit rate on-the-fly.
"Reducing the bit rate is relatively easy. The main issue in increasing the bit rate to achieve higher video quality is to reach the maximum possible bit rate without going above the network capacity because, any bit rate above it, will cause a severe degradation to the video quality. We have solved this by using our patented Prioritized Protection Flow technology to make sure the video quality remains during the process of finding higher bit rates" explained Adi Rozenberg, VideoFlow's CTO. "The fact that the intelligence is in the transmitter and not in the receiver enable operators to use CAR to dynamically optimize video bit rate profiles to the highest possible for each viewer in large scale networks to increase the overall viewer's quality of experience."
Mrs. Ronit Kalujny, VideoFlow's CEO, explained, "CAR is a game changer for the video delivery industry that looks at the problem and solves it in such a different way that we have obtained a patent on it. The industry depends on being able to deliver the best video quality all of the time to the viewers. Video stalls and artefacts means that viewers will disengage hence revenue is lost. Viewers however will tolerate an occasional drop in video quality provided that the video resumes higher quality as soon as possible. CAR is a major step forwards, delivering a new standard for video quality delivery that will increase revenue out of live video."
