MediaMelon, the smart streaming company, and Media Excel, a leading supplier of OTT multiscreen transcoding solutions, today announced product integration designed to improve streaming video quality and bandwidth efficiency.
Service providers deploying Media Excel HERO encoders with MediaMelon QBR™ streaming optimization technology can reduce bitrates by 35%, paving the way to 4K delivery. Additional benefits include consistent video quality, elimination of video artifacts and reduced storage at origin servers.
MediaMelon QBR, offered as a managed service and easily integrated into the existing video workflow via APIs, enhances today’s widely deployed adaptive bitrate (ABR) technology by pre-analyzing scene complexity. When deployed alongside the flexible Media Excel HERO family of transcoders, streaming quality is enhanced due to better segment selection while transmission bandwidth is reduced. The joint solution was demonstrated for the first time at the NAB show in Las Vegas in April.
“Media Excel is known in the industry for three aspects: video quality, service reliability and ecosystem-wide flexibility. MediaMelon QBR technology fits perfectly into this framework, as it delivers significant improvements in streaming video quality while ensuring service reliability at reduced bandwidth for both live and VoD workflows. Those are always top concerns for pay TV service providers and operators worldwide. We are seeing the ability to stream content in HD and 4K with current networks when the two products are used together, without adding any complexity in deployment or ongoing management,” said Nikos Kyriopoulos, Product Director at Media Excel.
“Media Excel is at the forefront of transcoding technology for both real-time and on-demand video streaming for Fortune 500 companies,” said Kumar Subramanian, MediaMelon CEO. “Powering their video services with MediaMelon QBR technology, streaming companies using Media Excel solutions can now seamlessly achieve better streaming quality, reduce network and storage utilization, and improve video streaming economics.”
MediaMelon QBR technology is at the heart of the MediaMelon Qubit™ family of solutions, which support QBR-optimized real-time or VOD service delivery. QBR substantially improves today’s ABR technology by means of rapid scene analysis, content characterization, perceptual quality mapping and advanced buffer management techniques. These solutions integrate seamlessly into the existing video workflow, via SDKs implemented in encoders and video players. MediaMelon solutions are compatible with all major streaming formats including HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), MPEG-DASH, HTTP Smooth Streaming (HSS) and HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS).
Media Excel’s HERO is the only multi-screen software on the market that is available on multiple platforms providing the ultimate flexibility: standard x86 servers, virtual software running on the operator’s existing servers or even on commercial cloud services. Furthermore, HERO HEVC Encoder/Decoder products provide real-time HEVC compression up to UHD/4Kp60.
