Dec. 5 event to focus on cloud-based automation, live sports benchmarking
WATERLOO, ON (Nov. 29, 2022) — Optimizing live sports video quality to give streaming services a competitive edge will headline the agenda when AWS Principal Solutions Architect Thomas Edwards joins SSIMWAVE® CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Abdul Rehman for a special webinar on Monday, December 5.
Edwards and Rehman will discuss how video quality has emerged as a critical differentiator in the high-stakes sports media arena, especially when events are delivered by more than one streaming service. The webinar will discuss the current state of streaming sports and how cloud-based automation of video quality can increase viewer engagement and enjoyment, especially for those watching on large-screen HD TVs.
SSIMWAVE introduced the concept of sports benchmarking earlier this year and has measured the video quality for more than 100 events across the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, FIFA World Cup 2022, Premier League soccer, F1 racing, golf, and tennis. SSIMWAVE monitors more than 18 million hours of live video every month across more than 6,000 live channels.
The webinar will begin at 1 p.m. ET. Registration is available here. Jason Thibeault, Executive Director of the Streaming Video Technology Alliance, will moderate.
“When it comes to viewer experiences, not all streamed sports events are created equal,” said Rehman. “As sports has become a huge economic driver for streaming, it’s even more important for providers to have real-time visibility into the performance of sports streaming workflows, including impairments that can happen at multiple points in the live delivery chain.”
The webinar will address how live monitoring of events using cloud-based automated solutions – most notably SSIMWAVE’s live sports benchmarking capabilities – can provide objective actionable data into the quality that viewers are seeing. Examples of experiences ranked using the SSIMPLUS® Viewer Score, the most accurate metric for predicting Viewer Experience will be utilized to illustrate how the results can help streaming providers decide what video technologies to deploy and how to optimize content processing and operations to improve competitive positioning.
Edwards, who previously worked on advanced technology projects for PBS, Fox, and Disney, is focused on helping customers achieve success in building applications and services on the cloud. Dr. Rehman is the key researcher and inventor of SSIMPLUS, the two-time Emmy Award-winning perceptual quality algorithm that puts the Human Visual System (HVS) in software and can virtualize the viewing experience of humans by device, viewing conditions, and content type at every stage of the streaming pipeline. He successfully led SSIMWAVE to an acquisition by IMAX.
SSIMWAVE’s Video Experience Automation Platform brings the power of the human eye to entire video delivery chains to help streaming services assess video quality at scale, minimize quality drop-offs, and reduce distribution expenses and video assurance costs. Four of the world’s top-ten streaming media companies currently partner with SSIMWAVE to optimize video, including Disney, Paramount Global, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The SSIMWAVE suite of products – Live Monitor, VOD Monitor, and Video Quality (VQ) Dial – are improving the subscriber experience for more than 150 million subscribers worldwide and also help the streaming industry address hard-to-solve problems such as banding, A/V sync issues, HDR content distribution, and low-quality sources. SSIMWAVE technology has earned multiple Emmy® Awards and NAB Product of the Year Awards.
About SSIMWAVE
SSIMWAVE, an IMAX Company, has created the Video Experience Automation category to assess video quality at scale to help video streaming services reduce distribution expenses and quality drop-offs, as well as high operational costs of traditional video assurance processes. The SSIMPLUS quality metric powers our VQ Dial and Video Intelligence Suite products providing our customers with the peace of mind that comes from the only end-to-end solution correlated to human vision. We are located in Waterloo, Canada, serving some of the world’s largest media and entertainment customers. Get in touch with us at [email protected]
