Video Breakthroughs

There is also the performance element in that state-of-the-art cloud transcoding platforms can be best for live streaming where latency must be kept to a minimum. Elemental Technologies, exhibiting at NAB, has scored heavily with leading broadcasters by touting high transcoding performance based on massively parallel processing within the cloud. By using clusters of off the shelf graphical processing units, Elemental keeps costs down while being able to boast that it can transcode both SD and HD content “faster than real time”, which is not quite as magic as it sounds. It merely means that transcoding is not on the critical time path and is executed more quickly than some of the other functions involved in end to end content delivery. Transcoding then does not add to the latency budget.

In one of the first significant pre-NAB announcements, cloud encoding companyZencoder is releasing the Zencoder Live Cloud Transcoding service, an open API that offers simple and scalable encoding for live video.

Using the API, publishers upload an RTMP stream from a lightweight encoder on a laptop. Once uploaded, Zencoder creates adaptive bitrate HLS and RTMP streams for viewers.