How Globo, Starz, and Paramount Sustain Streaming Experiences Across Legacy Devices
Like other premium streaming platforms, Starz maintains a “let’s let everybody play” philosophy when it comes to delivering high-quality streaming experiences to all viewers on their platforms, but when it comes to supporting the broad morass of legacy devices and formats dating back to streaming’s early days, challenges abound, especially in streaming’s critical middle mile. Starz Executive Director of Software Development Rob Collins, Globo Head of Streaming and CDN Platform Marcos Petry, Paramount Director, Live Video Nishant Sirohi, and SVTA’s Bhavesh Upadhyaha discuss strategies for meeting those challenges and where they draw the line when it comes to the most outmoded devices in this clip from Streaming Media Connect in December.
Mitigating Outmoded Hardware Heartache at Globo
Upadhyaya kicks off the conversation with a candid omission: "You can't QA everything. You're going to see issues that pop up on a device, but you have to support it." Turning to Globo's Petry, he continues, "I know you guys have done something different in this scenario. Let's talk a little bit about the heartache of old devices and what you guys have done to manage or mitigate that."
"We have several things that we do," Petry says. "On the product side, we have an application for old devices so we can navigate in the content and the live [events] more easily. But on the platform side, we employ two key approaches to QoE. One is we create a bit rate policy by device family. So for our live events, we enforce a maximum bit rate policy based on device family. This is a safeguard to ensure [that we can] deliver lower resolutions and manageable bit rates to devices that have lower capacity."
He goes on to say that "another product that we have is a microservice built in-house that orchestrates and delivers a highly tailored video experience based on specific capabilities of the client side. For example, I can deliver 30 frame per second on [an older device] and 60 frame per second to a high-end iOS or HTML player."
Another benefit of this flexible approach, he says, is that Globo "can enable or disable low latency according to the family of device, or enable DRM and other specific parameters. So this would help us to address the long list of devices and some poor devices that we need to deliver [our content to]."
"So with your middle model," Upadhyaya asks, "you actually create divergent outputs for your light app as well as your main app. And you're measuring the qualities."
Petry nods in the affirmative.
Seeing STARZ on Legacy Devices
"Rob, how about you?" Upadhyaya asks, turning to Starz's Collins. "How do you manage? Because you have a legacy of legacies."
"We do. It's just part of the way Starz came up fairly early to streaming," Collins says. "So there's been an ethos, a business decision of saying 'If somebody has a device and they want to play Starz, let's not block them out. Some of the later folks don't need to support some of the older platforms, but we've made the decision to do so. It definitely changes the amount of ABR tiers, the encoding, even some of the protocols. We just recently stopped supporting Smooth Streaming—Bhavesh, you've got some fantastic stories about that. But in 2026, I don't want to be doing Smooth Streaming. But definitely we err on the side of 'Let's let everybody play.' So it impacts us for the platforms we support, the telemetry we get from ... If there are some old Android devices somebody bought at Walmart for $20 ten years ago, we'll try to get them going too."
Paramount: Serving Streams They Can Handle
"Nishant," Upadhyaya says, turning to Paramount's Sirohi, "you have almost an infinite number of outputs for apps that go out there and an infinite number of devices that can be available. How do you guys manage all the old devices?"
"Our approach is quite similar to what Rob and Marcos described," Sirohi says. "We also break it down to both levels. Some of these things have been controlled on the client side at the app level, and some others on the server side. On the app level, any good event that has a premium-quality stream and normal-quality stream, when we know the premium one will not work well on some platform," he explains, that premium-quality version will not be published on the legacy app. "If you have one of those devices, you will not see any entry point to that stream. That way we filter it out. We limit some of the functionality. You might not see some of the DVR functionality on lower-end devices."
Looking to the server side, he says, "the approach of filtering down based on the device's capability is also there." When Paramount delivers the same stream "across both families of devices, depending on the devices' capabilities, we are going to filter out some variant and some codecs which we know for sure are not going to be handled well. So it's a combination of both of these things, learning as you go and evolving the system. In the end, we want to handle more of it on the server side so our client site work stays light. We don't have to do a lot of handling on these low-power devices where the device itself, or the app itself is making decisions. We want to serve them a [stream] they can handle."
"I love the fact that one of the biggest complaints we have is that these devices lie," Upadhyaya replies. "They don't tell you that, the user bought a 4K stick, but then they stuck it into a 1080p TV and now they're complaining, 'Hey, why is my quality not coming in at the full high level?' Or the other way around, which is they bought a 4K TV and they still have their $20 device and they're saying, "Hey, why does it look like crap? I paid for 4K and you're not giving it to me.' I wish we actually had a true matrix that showed you from the player or the server side what is the entire path to delivery, so you could adjust the stream that way as well."
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