SSIMWAVE, a specialist in video quality solutions technology, has announced the launch of a new product that it says enables video providers to achieve multi-million dollar savings in delivery costs per year while delivering “just right” levels of video quality across entire VOD asset libraries.
The SSIMPLUS Video Quality Dial is a software application that allows video providers total control over the viewer experience of any type of VOD video content, enabling optimization of the bitrates of every encode and every title based on the most advanced video quality metric, SSIMPLUS. Compatible with all cloud-based encoding systems, the company contends the new product can enable bitrate reductions of up to 50%, while allowing providers to deliver the experience of choice to satisfy viewers.“Current content-aware approaches do optimization using the bitrate as a guideline, while keeping quality the same, even if that quality level is subpar or bad,” observes Dr. Abdul Rehman, CEO and co-founder of SSIMWAVE. “Our patented approach drives video encoding to deliver desired viewer experience at half the cost using your existing encoding infrastructure. Thus you deliver the just-right quality: no more and no less.”
By using the SSIMPLUS Video Quality Dial software, leading content providers in the North American, Latin American and Asia-Pacific markets found out they can reduce bitrates by 40-50%, which can equate to delivery cost reductions of millions of dollars per year for services with upwards of 5 million subscribers. SSIMWAVE estimates that annual savings could reach $10 million or more per year for services with even just 5 million subscribers.
As further explained by the company, "Using the Video Quality Dial, providers pre-determine a desired viewer experience level, based on the 0-100 linear SSIMPLUS scale. The Video Quality Dial acts as a smart layer around the provider’s existing cloud encoder, automatically choosing the lowest possible bitrate required to deliver the desired Viewer Score. By choosing the most optimized encode for the selected quality level, the SSIMWAVE product also addresses access network issues, driving reductions in re-buffering, start-up times, stalling and profile switching."
The new product is being unveiled during a live presentation at NAB Show New York 2020 on Oct. 20. SSIMWAVE also announced a free trial for the first 20 streaming services that sign up for the tool. In addition to the Video Quality Dial, SSIMWAVE’s NAB NY presence also showcases its industry-first No-Reference Source Validation solution, which allows automatic detection of sub-par content at the start of the video workflow, thus protecting the service downstream from subscriber frustration and churn. SSIMPLUS Banding Detection, an innovation that alerts services to banding, can be explored in SSIMWAVE’s Demo ZONE at NAB Show New York 2020.