Telecine enhanced its streaming efficiency by 42% and boosted viewer QoE
Telecine, Brazil’s top movie streaming operator, needed to optimize streaming performance amidst rising data volumes and viewer expectations. Facing challenges like tracking viewer QoE, escalating delivery costs, and the need for consistent, highquality streaming, Telecine partnered with MediaMelon to deploy SmartPlay. This solution enabled dynamic optimization, reducing
bandwidth usage by 42%, improving video start times, and elevating overall viewer satisfaction.
Impact scale at a glance
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Savings in bandwidth usage
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Global streaming series
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Employees across multiple territories
Introduction
This case study describes how Brazil's leading PayTV provider, Telecine, deployed MediaMelon's award winning SmartPlay™ solution to achieve dramatic cost savings for its video streaming service whilst improving viewer quality of experience.
Telecine is a joint venture of Globo Group with Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and The Walt Disney Company, also streaming content from Sony Pictures and Warner Bros.
Challenges
Like most video streaming companies, Telecine have been facing significant
challenges as growth in streaming consumption increases at exponential
rates.
- Maintaining state-of-the-art encoding environments to produce high quality assets.
- Maximizing QoE to reduce churn, attract new customers, and grow revenue.
- Prioritising limited resources within defined budgets.
- Minimizing costs.
Unlike the broadcasting business, which remains the core of many businesses like Telecine, every single viewer session
incurs a corresponding incremental delivery cost.
By 2023, the Cisco VNI Forecast for Brazil projects that
- Average broadband and mobile data speeds will more than double to 69Mbps and 41Mbps respectively
- The number of internet and mobile users will have increased to 200m and 181m respectively
- The volume of networked devices will have increased to 755m
- 56% of flat panel TVs will be 4K ready
- 4K video consumption will grow from 11% to >50%
According to Cisco these huge uplifts in users, devices and encoding bitrates means that companies like Telecine can
expect to see data volumes growing by more than 5-fold over the next 3 years. That represents a huge cost issue for
Telecine.
The additional challenge is that consumers, brought up on a mature broadcasting model, expect the same quality of
experience with streaming services. They want the play to start instantly without delay, they don’t want re-buffering, and
they want to be watching video in consistent broadcast quality. Of course, they also want to be able to watch when they
want, where they want and on any device.
Telecine, like any organisation, does not have infinite resources. Difficult choices needed to be made.
As part of the strategy to deliver these goals, Telecine deployed a market leading server-side content-aware encoding
solution, but this solution was not able to fully address these challenges.
Solution
Telecine understood that most quality of experience problems are caused by issues which occur in the viewer environment, which are unpredictable and outside of the operator's control. These might be related to the mobile network, broadband network, home WiFi, device, or 3rd party activity taking place nearby. Investment in the core of Telecine's service could only help so much. Telecine realised they needed a solution which could dynamically optimise user experience for each and every session.
Telecine selected MediaMelon’s SmartPlay™ streaming optimisation solution based on its unique ability to address
Telecine’s challenges, and its overlay architecture which meant it would protect Telecine’s current and future investments
in encoding, packaging, CDN and player technologies.
MediaMelon’s SmartPlay™ solution works by capturing data on the quality and complexity of every scene across every
segment profile of each video asset, packaging this data into a lightweight “hint file” which is delivered to the player
along with the Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) manifest, and using the hint file to dynamically adapt profile decisions made by
ABR in the client player through MediaMelon’ player SDK. See Figure 3 below.
Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) is a 15-year-old technology used by almost all video streaming providers. But its simplistic
algorithm always requests the highest bitrate profile possible regardless of the complexity of the video scene being
viewed. This results in large amounts of data being downloaded unnecessarily.
SmartPlay™ profile switching decisions are based on the complexity and quality of each scene, the bandwidth available,
the buffer status, the device, screen size and a number of other elements developed into a sophisticated decision engine
using Machine Learning powered technology.
Telecine appreciated the key principle behind SmartPlay™ that Bitrate does not equal Quality. SmartPlay uses the
quality and complexity of each scene to optimise ABR switching decisions.
Whilst Telecine’s immediate goals focused on cost reduction, SmartPlay’s™ functionality allows it to be tailored for
additional goals at any time. For example, Telecine could opt to prioritize data savings for one type of content, device or
customer segment, and favor enhanced quality of experience for another.
Benefits
One of Telecine's primary objectives was to reduce the data and so the costs of content delivery. On average, SmartPlay™ has reduced data by 42% across all the sessions where SmartPlay™ was applied.
The chart shows the savings achieved on the top 10 titles, with Flashdance achieving a 65% data saving.
SmartPlay™ quality analysis of every scene in each video allows the SmartPlay™ dashboard to report the actual quality
enjoyed by the viewer for each and every session. SmartPlay™ sessions delivered an average iMOS score of 4.25
(between Good and Excellent on the ITU MOS rating).
SmartPlay™ also measures and reports on Quality Density. Subjective viewing studies show that viewers are highly
sensitive to changes in picture quality so that consistency of quality is key to optimising quality of expereince. Viewers
would prefer to watch a video with a consistent MOS score of 4 than watching the same video with MOS score varying
between 3 and 5. Telecine saw an improvement in Quality Density of 5.5 points on average for SmartPlay™ sessions.
“We worked with Mediamelon to deploy SmartPlay aiming to improve quality of expereince and save costs”, said
Fabio. “We had already implemented a content aware encoding solution which we thought would deliver most of
our data saving goals, but the SmartPlay results have been extraordinary! We have reduced average bitrate from
4Mbps to almost 2.8Mbps, also reducing spikes in our web traffic, and as a result of lower traffic we have reduced
rebuffering and video start time. So our QoE has gone up whilst our costs have gone down – incredible.”
High profile streaming workflows consist of complex interdependent systems and any new technology introduction can
be challenging and time consuming.
SmartPlay™ however is an overlay solution with minimal integration effort across the content processing workflow. Also,
the SmartPlay™ Content Analyzer engine can be deployed quickly as MediaMelon’s team of experts provide support and
best practices guidance thoughout the process.
As with any changes to complex interdependent systems, adding new technology can be challenging. SmartPlay™ is
an overlay solution which protects customer’s investment, but does require some basic integration with the content
processing workflow. The SmartPlay™ Content Analyzer tool is simple to set up, but where content processing services
are deployed in environments servicing multiple clients, it can become complicated.
The ability to rapidy effect changes without needing to involve other ecosystem partners highlights the benefit of the
SmartPlay™ overlay architecture.
Turning to business benefits and a look to the future Fabio added, “With the SmartPlay reduced bitrate and
improved QoE, we can manage our customer trials more efficiently, reducing trial churn and improving conversion
whilst controlling cost. Now we understand the potential of SmartPlay’s capability our next step is to work on further
improving video start time and reducing playback failures. We are going to need to manage our CDN negotiations
carefully as we look forward given this new capability, but in the current global context we are looking forward to
being a good internet citizen and using this critical global resource more efficiently.”
Conclusion
One of Telecine's primary objectives was to reduce the data and so the costs of content delivery. On average, SmartPlay™ has reduced data by 42% across all the sessions where SmartPlay™ was applied.
All OTT streaming providers face similar challenges optimising quality of experience and cost in an environment of
explosive growth and rapidly evolving technology.
SmartPlay™ streaming optimisation provides a unique solution which:
- Dynamically optimises performance for every session
- Is an overlay solution which protects your technology investment
- Makes improved switching decisions based on the complexity and quality of each scene
The partnership with MediaMelon enabled Telecine to address its key cost and quality challenges and provides a powerful and exciting capability to support future growth. The ability for SmartPlay™ to be aligned with operators’ business rules gives Telecine the ability to create bespoke service profiles for trials vs subscription content, mobile vs broadband, PC vs SmartTV for example.
MediaMelon is here to help OTT operators perfect the experience they deliver to their customers. If you operate an
Online Video Platform and would like to understand the options for optimising your streaming performance, we would
love to speak to you.
Fix issues before they impact viewers and cause churn
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