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How to Encode High-Motion High-Quality Livestreamed Esports

Learn more about esports streaming and encoding at Streaming Media East 2022.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Corey Smith: One of the things with esports that's interesting--and some traditional sports are like this as well--t's really the encoding quality from a high-motion perspective. Esports is much different to try to capture and put out a high-quality stream than it is a news broadcast or a TV drama, or some other kind of content that's not really particle effects blasting up all over the screens, and all this high motion of players fighting in this game battle.

It took us us about a year and a half or so really working with like AWS Elemental to really figure out a lot of our encod\ing profiles, really nailing how we capture this game stream from the players in a quality way that didn't look like Minecraft at some point, but under high motion, and we allowed the encoders to kind of catch up.

So even with live video, like when you have a concert happening on stage and all of a sudden they blast confetti over the stage. The encoder is gonna have a hard time keeping up, depending on what your bit rate is, depending on the encode quality that you have running on the hardware encoders and whatnot on the ground. At the same time, esports is no different. We have the same particle effect issues that we have in live music and entertainment.

So it takes a lot of craft to do this. And I think over time we we've retrained the audience with 4K in the home to really expect a certain quality bar to be maintained. And if they don't see it from the live service provider, because I'm paying for a service that I'm not gonna be a subscriber any longer. So that's really the linchpin of this whole thing--once you start paying for content and expect this quality, because I'm actually throwing money at it, that we need to step out as broadcasters to provide that bar to hit.

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