Deliver What Good Looks Like for Less

Every content distribution business wants to reduce delivery costs, but until now the nuances of delivering great content have been like a black box. Content goes in and content comes out, but little is known about what exactly works for the viewer and how to ensure the viewer experience is not compromised.

IMAX is the only company that understands the viewer experience and provides the most accurate ViewerScore™ that provides clarity on how content should be processed. Some of the most common decisions that execs need to make include:

• Which source will deliver good viewer experience to process further?
• How to encode it?
• What is the most optimized profile ladder for the service content and subscribers?

Instead of guessing whether the viewer experience is good or bad, broadcasters, OTTs, and D2Cs now have an objective metric to guide critical business decisions. IMAX’s Emmy Award winning ViewerScore, is a linear measurement on a 0–100 scale that works for both live and on-demand content so customers can find the perfect balance between the viewer experience and costs.

Dollars and Sense

IMAX’s software probes are like “virtual eyes” that inspect content at any point in the delivery chain or workflow. These probes evaluate the quality based on how an actual human being would see it. IMAX does not alter the content, but simply measures the impact of content processing, compression, and playback on the viewer experience. For example, IMAX can run tests on content after encoding and tell you the difference in the IMAX ViewerScore between a 5,000 Kbps or 3,000 Kbps file. Is the difference between the two big enough in terms of the viewer experience to warrant the higher bitrate? Why serve an 8,000 Kbps file when 6,500 Kbps would work? The result is that many companies are serving video files with data rates that far exceed their needs.

Often when content is processed, there isn’t enough insight offered into what makes the video acceptable or unacceptable in terms of the viewer experience. When media companies do not have visibility into video quality, they will not be able to optimize data usage and their delivery costs will be much higher than necessary. Using IMAX, both costs savings and delivery improvements can be achieved for many different distribution methods for VOD and live delivery:

• OTT services will be able to cut CDN delivery costs, deliver better end-viewer quality and pinpoint where latency occurs.
• IPTV can improve customer service responses to quality issues and have better network scalability.
• Over-the-air delivery via static multiplexer would be able to use less data per channel, resulting in more channels on existing bandwidth and or selling freed capacity to third parties.
• Satellite delivery would be able to save on transmission costs while moving towards using a multicast ABR workflow.

IMAX’s experience with different customer cases has shown that higher bitrate does not always equate to a better viewer experience; meaning that the video industry is often wasting bitrates. Multiply this by thousands of assets and millions of subscribers and this can equate to 7 figure costs.

IMAX can consistently save customers more than 20% of these delivery costs and depending on the number of video assets and subscribers, this could mean several million dollars per year.

The Complexity Myth

Until now, the complexity myth has been propagated in the video industry. The belief is that sports and action content are hard to process while drama and animation are easy. Our research has proven that this is not always the case.

IMAX’s analysis of millions of video assets proves that there is drama and sports content that is hard to process, as well as drama and sports programming that is quite easy. For example, swimming is hard to encode, while Formula 1 racing is quite easy to process… Similarly, anime though a “cartoon” can also prove difficult to process. When people divide content into these old fashioned and inaccurate binaries, the resulting output is poor quality and a bad viewer experience.

IMAX helps D2Cs, OTTs, broadcasters and MVPDs move beyond the myths and enter the new decade of streaming wars with a future proof way to reduce costs. Now is the time to make choices based on accurate content complexity, business rules and the ultimate referee — the human visual system. High value content should receive white glove treatment and long tail viewing should be affordable to deliver. IMAX helps customers identify and provide an individualized approach to different content using the IMAX ViewerScore . All content matters, but making sure you spend only what is needed to deliver the desired viewer experience will separate the winners from the losers.

While content will attract subscribers, providing the viewer experience subscribers expect will retain them.

Want to find out how to save money and perfect the viewer experience?
Contact us to see a demo today!