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In the past 30-days, YouTube TV, Apple TV and Netflix all had technical issues with a live event/stream on their platform. On May 17th, technical issues marred the final minutes of YouTube TV’s stream of the Heat-Celtics NBA playoff game on TNT with users getting a looping ad for The Little Mermaid. Clearly YouTube TV had some issues on the DAI side with insertion and playback of the ad. YouTube TV was quick to acknowledge the issue on Twitter saying, “we’re aware of it & our team is working on a fix.” [Updated May 22] Some YouTube TV users are reporting online that they have received two weeks of the service for free, after contacting YouTube TV about the outage.

On April 15th, MLS Season Pass on Apple TV+ went down, due to a problem across all of Apple’s cloud services, with some users reporting an outage of two hours. Neither MLS or Apple communicated the technical issue on their websites nor social media channels, which is 100% unacceptable. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a TERRIBLE strategy, especially when it’s a service consumers pay for. [UPDATED May 19] Apple tells me that it was up to the clubs to determine how to communicate the outage with fans, with some clubs contacting fans to say, “We apologize for the technical difficulties with your MLS Season Pass subscription this past Saturday. The issue was resolved as quickly as possible that night. We appreciate your patience and support of [xx club] and MLS.” That’s good, but it happened after the fact and the outage wasn’t acknowledged at all during the outage.

One day later, on April 16th, Netflix’s live stream of the ‘Love Is Blind’ reunion never got underway as Netflix had a technical issue. The company acknowledged the problem on Twitter, apologized, and decided to make the video available on-demand only. In Netflix’s Q1 2023 earnings call, the company addressed the outage saying:

• “We’re really sorry to have disappointed so many people. We didn’t meet the standard that we expect of ourselves to serve our members. And just to be clear, from a technical perspective, you know, we’ve got the infrastructure. We had just a bug that we introduced. Actually, when we implemented some changes to try and improve live streaming performance after the last live broadcast Chris Rock in March, we just didn’t see this bug in internal testing because it only became apparent once we put sort of multiple systems interacting with each other under the load of millions of people trying to watch Love is Blind. So, we hate it when these things happen, but we’ll learn from it and we’ll get better and we do have the fundamental infrastructure that we need.”

All of these outages and technical issues are a reality of the industry when the streaming video stack is as complex as it is. These outages and technical issues will never go away completely – ever. Anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t living in reality. Yes, all streaming platforms are doing everything they can to mitigate outages and technical issues as much as possible, but these aren’t cable TV platforms which have 100% control over the entire video stack end-to-end, including the hardware.

The media doesn’t seem to understand the core differences in the technology and infrastructure of cable TV versus delivering video over-the-top. Some of their suggestions on how to “fix” these issues show a complete lack of understanding of the basics of how streaming media technology works. All that aside, outages across OTT platforms for both live and on-demand content will never go away. Overall, OTT platforms continue to improve upon the user experience and will become more reliable, but with more users, (scale) and new business models (advertising), it brings more complexity and technical challenges- and that will only increase.

Podcast Episode 57 is live! This week we highlight the Q1 earnings news from Brightcove (will lay off 10% of company), Vimeo (CEO could get $800,000 bonus), Paramount (+ added 4.1M subs), Comcast (Peacock subs up 2M), Warner Bros. Discovery (expects DTC business to be profitable this year) and the latest cord cutting numbers with over 1M pay TV losses in Q1.

We also discuss problems we are seeing with many resumes and LinkedIn pages by those looking for new jobs in the industry. We share feedback on what you should be doing if you are looking for a new job and how you should be setting yourself up for success.

Podcast Episode 56 is live! This week we highlight some of the news from the NAB Show and detail the technologies and business models we heard talked about the most. We also discuss the trends we saw at the show, vendor messaging, specific data shared from speakers and what impressed us. We also cover some numbers you need to know on cord cutting, P&L and ARRU from earnings related to Roku, Comcast (Peacock), Amazon, Verizon, Meta, Netflix and others.

Companies and services mentioned: Roku, Netflix, Amazon, Verizon, Peacock, HBO Max, Comcast, Brightcove, Harmonic, Haivision, Amagi, IMAX, Bitmovin.

At the NAB Show, I’ll be curating a special area on the exhibit floor in the West Hall called the “OTT Demo Area“. These 5 pods will feature hardware from Amazon, Apple, Roku, Google, LG, TCL, Vizio and Samsung – all showcasing dozens of streaming services including: Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Discovery+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu+ Live TV, Sling TV, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock TV, YouTube TV, Tubi, Pluto TV, ESPN+, Freevee, AMC+, fubo, DAZN and many others.

This area is part of the CONNECT Experiential Zone, in the West Hall. Come get hands-on with OTT services, during all 4-days of the NAB Show, for free! Link to area on show floor here.

AMD has announced a new 5nm based ASIC based media acceleration solution, that’s being marketed as the Alveo MA35D, targeting video streaming applications that are highly personalized and interactive by nature, demanding low to ultra-low latency. This PCIe accelerator card is designed to enable up to 32 x 1080p60 transcode channels using the AV1 codec, while also supporting the H.264, and H.265 standards. AMD says the card can achieve a full 1080p60 ABR transcode at 1W for reduced power consumption and cooling.

The Alveo MA35D is targeting the rapid growth of what AMD calls “Second Generation” interactive media applications such as cloud gaming, live eCommerce, watch parties, sports betting, as well as ‘blended experiences’ that integrate many of these services at once. AMD says they anticipated the upcoming opportunity for these use cases several years ago and recognized the challenges in terms of infrastructure and operating costs to scale broadly. Their solution can achieve ultra-low latency transcodes—8ms at 4kp60—by offloading the video pipeline with hardware acceleration of decoding (AV1, H.26x, VP9), scaling, compositing, encoding (AV1, H.264, and HEVC), and additional pre- and post-processing functions.

With this new chip they’ve integrated AI processing enabling “Smart Streaming” to improve perceptual visual quality while simultaneously reducing bandwidth consumption per stream. During my discussions with Sean Gardner (Head of Strategy & Market Development) from AMD Video Acceleration group he stated that, “by creating an AI-enabled, intelligent video pipeline, customers will no longer be tied to the historical inefficient ‘configure for worst case scenario or Set & Forget’ approach when configuring and operating their video transcoding services. Now they will be able to adjust settings dynamically. While this new intelligent, dynamic processing will be able to demonstrate a 25% bandwidth reduction under certain conditions and content types, AI is not fool proof.”

It makes sense that this is why AMD has instantiated a VQ feedback loop. This VQ feedback loop integrates a hardened IP block that monitors in real-time, every frame coming out of the encoder, analyzing the dynamic changes being driven by the AI processing unit to ensure they are operating within the target QoE/QoS range set by the operator.  According to AMD what makes this significant is the fact that not only can they do this in real-time but at full density, providing the ability to transcode 32 channels of 1080p60 using AV1 and consuming 32W for this use case.

There is significant excitement in the industry around the development of video applications with new engagement and monetization models. AMD says it worked closely with leading providers to understand both their technical requirements and infrastructure challenges and tailored their new platform to meet the streaming density, performance, power-efficiency, and most importantly—cost-effectiveness—to scale these use cases. The 35W, HHHL PCIe card is priced at $1,595 USD MSRP, sampling to key customers today and will be in full production in Q3 of this year.

Viacom18 reported the opening weekend of the Indian Premier League (IPL) on Jio Cinema had a simultaneous stream count of 16 million viewers. While the numbers are impressive, Jio Cinema also faced criticism from viewers for streaming quality issues. Users complained on social media for two consecutive days that the English commentary lost its audio feed. There were also reports of “buffering issues, sound problems, screening problems, brightness problems, and pixelated streams”. Some users also reported that the Jio Cinema app crashed during the opening encounter between the Chennai Super Kings and the Gujarat Titans.

Viacom18 isn’t disclosing the average bitrate or percentage of users that were on mobile but the company did say that viewers spent an average of 57 minutes per match. Without more details on the average bitrate, quality of the stream and breakdown on devices used for viewing, it’s hard to compare one live streaming event to another. But just based on the simultaneous stream count alone, it would put IPL opening weekend in the top ten largest streaming events of all time. But please see the caveats above since we don’t have more details from the company to compare the stream to other previous live events.

For my latest “Executive Interview” podcast, I sit down with Eric Black, who joins me for a discussion about the sports streaming market. We discuss licensing costs, bundling and packaging of sports content, user personalization, the impact of low/ultra-low latency streaming, and discuss the focus of his new job, as CTO and GM of Media for Edgio. You can listen to the podcast here.