bitmovin has launched the official product website www.dash-player.com for the MPEG-DASH player bitdash. The bitdash players enable MPEG-DASH playback on any web browser using either HTML5 as well as Flash, depending on the browser and version, and even on mobile platforms using HTML5. That happens within bitmovin’s player SDK, so that the people using the players do not have to care about that, it simply works everywhere and can be controlled via an unified API. Another key differentiation factor from other DASH-players is that bitdash pays high attention to stability and performance, meaning that bitdash is the player to be the one with the fastest startup delay, best adaption algorithms and thus quality, and of course stability. The bitdash players can be downloaded for free on www.dash-player.com for evaluation purposes.

MPEG-DASH: THE future of online video streaming, enabling best quality towards UHD/4K

As video consumption is moving away from traditional linear TV towards ubiquitous video consumption of live and on-demand content on any type of device, Internet video traffic is exploding and will be 79 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2018, up from 66 percent in 2013 according to Cisco. Media streaming can be technically complex and for content/service providers it is often difficult to deliver a satisfactory end-customer Quality of Experience (QoE) with low startup delays, no buffering or stalling, and highest media quality. These challenges are the result of complexities introduced due to the large variety of content formats, protocols, transmission options, and device-specific factors as well as continued innovations including HEVC and 4K/UHD. Therefore the MPEG-DASH standard was recently established to create the convergence and interoperability required for further large-scale market growth. All previously existing adaptive streaming standards, such as Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS and Adobe HDS – which share the same principles as DASH – will be replaced by the vendor independent MPEG-DASH standard, especially as this company’s also participated within the standardisation. So, this standard can be seen as the future of online streaming, as major services like Netflix or Youtube already deploy it, and which is also a source of their today’s and also future competitive advantages. This streaming approach works surprisingly well without any particular support from the underlying network due to the use of efficient video compression, cost-efficient HTTP content delivery networks (CDNs), existing HTTP caches in the ISP networks and adaptive video players, resulting in significantly better video streaming experience to the end user.
“Today, content providers are expanding the distribution of their On-Demand and Live offerings to the Web and across multiple devices including and beyond TV. Due to the increasing customer expectations, the success of them depends on the offered video quality”, said Stefan Lederer, CEO of bitmovin. “bitmovin provides end-to-end adaptive bitrate transcoding services and high-performance players for any platform, enabling our customers to offer the highest quality of service, while minimising distribution costs through the efficient use of video encoding, HTTP-based delivery and caching infrastructure”.

bitdashTM MPEG-DASH Players: Features & Capability

At IBC, bitmovin took the opportunity and released a preview version to selected industry partners as well as customers, and gained extremely positive feedback as well as new feature requests. Since then, the company integrated most of them into the product, making it compatible to even more DASH content from various encoders and streaming servers.
bitdash’s features include, but are not limited to:
•    Platform independence: Any browser using HTML5 (MSE) or Flash, mobile platforms using HTML5 (MSE)
•    Live as well as OnDemand streaming
•    Full MPEG-DASH support: SegmentList, SegmentTemplate and SegmentTimeline
•    Advanced stream quality adaptation, up to 100 % higher streaming quality!
•    Advanced reporting and analytics
•    Closed captions/subtitles
•    Rich stream configuration using multiple audio languages, qualities, subtitles, etc.
•    Support of various streaming servers such as Wowza Streaming Engine, NGINX, etc.
•    Individual branding and skinning
•    and much more …
But that’s not all, bitmovin is constantly expanding the feature set of its players.

Pricing:

bitmovin’s bitdash is priced using a very simple and straight-forward model. First, if someone is interested in bitdash s/he can try out a free evaluation version. The free version can even be used for any non-commercial use cases.

Professional services/customers can go for bitdash’s professional license, which comes along with custom branding possibilities, advanced streaming adaptation and optimization, advanced metrics, and much more. This license is bound to one domain and does not restrict the use cases, number of views, etc. running on it. Further help in setting up or integrating the players to services/platforms is offered via additional support tickets.

Larger services and projects which need an even more advanced feature set including highest streaming quality, custom reporting, individual support, etc. should go for the enterprise version, where bitmovin can assemble a custom project tailored to the customer’s needs.

Figure 3: bitdash Pricing Model including a free version for evaluations and non-commercial use cases

For further information please visit the bitdash website: www.dash-player.com or www.bitmovin.net

About bitmovin

bitmovin provides high performance transcoding and media streaming solutions that enable delivering a superior quality of experience to end users. The company is specialised in adaptive streaming solutions based on MPEG-DASH and Apple HLS, which can be used to offer live as well as on demand content in highest quality (HD, UHD/4K) without stalls and startup delays. Therefore, bitmovin offers its cloud-based transcoding and streaming platform bitcodinTM to generate the content for adaptive streaming via the Internet as well as its bitdashTM MPEG-DASH players to consume this content in the best quality (up to 100 per cent higher media throughput as other solutions). Using bitmovin’ products it’s possible to have one technology and solution for multiple platforms (Web, TV, Smartphone, etc.) and to use cost-effective HTTP delivery infrastructure, which both helps to reduce costs. bitmovin actively participates in standardization bodies, including ISO/IEC MPEG, DASH Industry Forum, IETF and IEEE.

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