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How to Add New Codecs Cost-Efficiently

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Learn more about codecs and codec deployment at Streaming Media East Connect 2021.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Colleen Kelly Henry: If you have your own data centers and your own infrastructure team, it's entirely possible that you're rolling out a codec on a smaller project, where there is no ROI necessarily because not even monetized, but then all of that engineering work can be reused later in other products. What I do I look at currently is that basically there's a support matrix of decoder capabilities, from mobile devices, Android iOS--for me--Oculus Quest 2, browsers, yada yada, yada. And from there you break down things into as granular levels of understanding as possible.

That's where, I think, people are kind of confused, because I, for example, for live, would be encoding AV1 right now. And you'd code-switch on the way up on certain devices to H.264, where you can do it. I do it all the way up on the browser. But because of that, that doesn't make AV1 a non-starter for live, because the compute complexity isn't going past those base smaller layers, but it really does improve the experience. And I think of the phrase developing nations.

So, when you're not forced to, you also don't have to encode all of your videos with AV1. You encode your top videos. It depends how peak-y, how longtail-y your content is, all that kind of stuff. But I look at it for the reason that code-switching is important. And the reason to look at the popularity of content is that it's just like any other thing, and encoding it's a cost trade-off/benefit overall, but you don't have to treat everything equally. And you shouldn't.

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