AWS, SSIMWAVE tackle sports streaming quality in webinar
November 29, 2022
Optimising live sports video quality to give streaming services a competitive edge will headline the agenda when AWS Principal Solutions Architect Thomas Edwards joins SSIMWAVE CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Abdul Rehman for a special webinar on December 5th.
Edwards and Rehman will discuss how video quality has emerged as a critical differentiator in the high-stakes sports media arena, especially when events are delivered by more than one streaming service. The webinar will discuss the current state of streaming sports and how cloud-based automation of video quality can increase viewer engagement and enjoyment, especially for those watching on large-screen HD TVs.
SSIMWAVE introduced the concept of sports benchmarking earlier this year and has measured the video quality for more than 100 events across the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, FIFA World Cup 2022, Premier League soccer, F1 racing, golf, and tennis. SSIMWAVE monitors more than 18 million hours of live video every month across more than 6,000 live channels.
Jason Thibeault, Executive Director of the Streaming Video Technology Alliance, will moderate the webinar.
“When it comes to viewer experiences, not all streamed sports events are created equal,” said Rehman. “As sports has become a huge economic driver for streaming, it’s even more important for providers to have real-time visibility into the performance of sports streaming workflows, including impairments that can happen at multiple points in the live delivery chain.”
The webinar will address how live monitoring of events using cloud-based automated solutions – most notably SSIMWAVE’s live sports benchmarking capabilities – can provide objective actionable data into the quality that viewers are seeing. Examples of experiences ranked using the SSIMPLUS Viewer Score, the most accurate metric for predicting Viewer Experience will be utilized to illustrate how the results can help streaming providers decide what video technologies to deploy and how to optimize content processing and operations to improve competitive positioning.
Edwards, who previously worked on advanced technology projects for PBS, Fox, and Disney, is focused on helping customers achieve success in building applications and services on the cloud. Dr. Rehman is the key researcher and inventor of SSIMPLUS, the two-time Emmy Award-winning perceptual quality algorithm that puts the Human Visual System (HVS) in software and can virtualize the viewing experience of humans by device, viewing conditions, and content type at every stage of the streaming pipeline. He successfully led SSIMWAVE to an acquisition by IMAX.