Broadpeak has announced S4Streaming, a technology intended to give video service providers more control over streaming quality and bandwidth usage.
Through a combination of server-side technologies, S4Streaming is designed to assess and select the appropriate quality for video streaming to reduce the latency of live streams, enable higher bitrates for on-demand content delivery, and decrease video quality changes when network conditions vary.
"Until now, ABR streaming has been exclusively relying on the players to evaluate bandwidth and perform quality selection. The problem with this approach is that it can cause uneven end-user experiences, and bandwidth evaluation may not work in the context of low-latency video streaming, further worsening viewer experiences," said Jacques Le Mancq, CEO at Broadpeak. "S4Streaming represents an inflection point in the industry, giving service providers full control over how their resources are used so that they can deliver high-quality video streams with low latency."
S4Streaming is designed to measure the bandwidth available from the server side rather than at the player level. The latter has access to limited information about network congestion compared with the latest generation of streaming servers that rely on modern network transport algorithms. The S4Streaming solution provides centralized control of quality stream selections based on server-side assessments or via operator-defined rules. Service providers can change video profiles at any time. The S4Streaming solution is intended for managing low-latency live video streaming.
S4Streaming analytics are intended to let service providers determine how network investments will translate into an improvement in video QoE, prevent events that can cause QoE degradation, anticipate streaming limits, and manage bandwidth intelligently.
The solution includes a home network orchestration feature designed to let service providers dynamically distribute bandwidth resources among different devices and monitor bandwidth at the home level. For mobile applications, a cell congestion capability offers management of backhaul and radio cell congestion during consumption peaks.
The S4Streaming solution is designed to be compatible with the existing ABR streaming ecosystem in both unicast and multicast ABR environments.
Broadpeak will demonstrate its video streaming and cloud recording solutions at the 2020 NAB Show in April Las Vegas.