The Next Wave of Media and Entertainment Consumer Experience
June 2nd, 2016
The coming transformations in the media distribution space provide ample opportunity for both vendors and operators to work together to improve efficiencies and increase user satisfaction on the consumption experience.
DSR believes that after the failure in uptake on in-home 3D, the media & entertainment market is primed for the success of the next wave of consumer experience improvements, which we believe will be driven by high dynamic range (HDR) video, continued over-the-top streaming distribution (including 4K video resolutions) and virtual reality. Beyond the consumer experience, the backend of media operations can be substantially enhanced and prepared for these changes by embracing IMF, IP ingest & playout and virtualization of media processes.
As a software engineering provider for media & entertainment vendors for more than a decade, DSR is uniquely positioned to provide our expertise in building applications and backend services to assist companies ready to embrace these transitions.
IMF, HDR, & 4K Video
Consuming video wherever, whenever has become mainstream, and enabling those consumption habits has increased the workload on media transformation by several times in the last 5 years. IMF (a SMPTE standard for Interoperable Media Format) finally holds a promise to simplifying versioning for this wide array of consumer consumption channels.
IMF can simply your media workflows by using a single package to hold an original version video, along with all possible substitutions and exclusions referenced by composition play lists (CPL). Since additional CPL are just XML documents and substitutions and exclusions are much smaller than creating new additional versions for each distribution point, IMF not only promises simplicity in distribution, but also a possible reduction in media storage.
Within IMF, it is also possible to handle 4K video and coming soon, high dynamic range (HDR) content, along with downmix instructions, so that a single file package can hold the true master content, as well as the recipes for creating premium and lower cost versions.
DSR has already built tools for customers based upon IMF parsing, packaging and file playout, and we can bring that expertise to your project as well.
Virtual Reality
Consumer appetites for new and exciting video experiences appear to be increasing, and virtual reality experiences are poised to fulfill those desires. Several challenges exist in preparing content, however, including:
- Camera rig creation and assembly
- Video splicing/stitching for seamless visual experience during user pans
- Spatial distortion correction
DSR’s wide array of experience in handling video for ingest and playout puts us in a position to help advise and create applications within the virtual reality space, particularly when dealing with video and audio layouts.
Backend Media Process Virtualization
In the last several years, DSR has helped many of our clients migrate and manage their applications from on-premise deployments to virtualized deployments, both on the cloud and in local datacenters. Our knowledge of multiple hypervisor technologies allows us to be agnostic in helping our clients migrate applications.
DSR has a wide range of expertise in refactoring applications, removing tight couplings between user interactions and data processing to enable the addition of web services. Our database expertise and API knowledge also helps speed the transition of applications from those dependent on single machine processing to those that can scale between multiple virtual machines.
Whether your organization is facing the challenges of:
- application refactoring for virtual deployments,
- handling multiple versions of media with IMF or HDR, or
- needs to bring a virtual reality application online quickly,
DSR stands ready to help. We have over 10 years of experience in media & entertainment applications, working with enterprise application vendors and start-ups, with a stable team of engineers that understands video, audio, captions and containers (and English). Let us bring our engineering team to help in your next project.
Contact us at contact@dsr-company.com