SmartPlay Streaming - Product Overview V.2.1 - © 2019 MediaMelon, Inc. All rights reserved.1

mediamelon.com Perfecting the OTT User Experience

SmartPlay Streaming™

OTT Quality of Experience EnhancementMediaMelon’s SmartPlay solution uses perceptual video quality information generated by our QBR® technology to enhance the playback performance of all types of Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming.

Features

• Enhanced streaming technology rather than encoding technology which means your content library does not need to be re-compressed, and your CDN architecture does not need to be modified

• Retrofit as a microservice overlay to existing OTT workflows, and to open-source and commercial video players

• Compatible with standard video compression schemes including H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC

• Compatible with all HTTP ABR streaming formats including MPEG-DASH; Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS); Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Microsoft Smooth Streaming (MSS)

• Recognizes device type and screen size and optimizes streaming performance accordingly

• SmartPlay SDK works with all leading commercial and open-source media players

Benefits

• Reduces Rebuffering Incidents by decreasing the overlay bandwidth required to deliver content at a given quality level

• Enhances Video Quality on complex scenes where users are most likely to notice network bandwidth limitations

• Improves the Mean Opinion Score performance of your streams

• Reduces Streaming Costs typically by around 35% while simultaneously delivering Quality of Experience improvements

• Reduces Storage Costs for VOD libraries

SmartPlay Streaming - Product Overview V.2.1 - © 2019 MediaMelon, Inc. All rights reserved.2

mediamelon.com Perfecting the OTT User Experience

SmartPlay Streaming™

Quality of Experience is Key to OTT Success

OTT Streaming is the Future of Television. Most OTT operators understand the importance of delivering an outstanding Quality of Experience to their customers, but few actually measure QoE in any comprehensive way. In order to improve something, first you need to measure it.

MediaMelon Measures Video Quality not just Video Bitrate

The first step in helping to improve the Quality of Experience you deliver to your users is to measure the actual quality of the video at the various bit rates that have been encoded. At any given bitrate the quality of the encoded video will depend upon the complexity of the video segment, with higher scene complexity resulting in lower perceived video quality and vice versa. MediaMelon’s QBR technology uses patented perceptual quality analysis techniques to measure the quality after the encoding process for each segment of each video in the content library and create an iMOS™ score. MediaMelon’s SmartSight analytics solution includes this iMOS™ information in its reporting and analysis, but SmartPlay takes things a step further and allows the information to be used to actually improve the user Quality of Experience.

Adaptive Bitrate – the highest Bit Rate does not necessarily deliver the Best Experience

Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming uses intelligence built in to the video player to determine which bitrate to download next from the OTT content delivery network. Each player in the network constantly measures the available bandwidth between itself and the headend and always retrieves the highest bitrate that can be supported by the network at any point in time based on the time required to download the last video segment. The logic within ABR forces the player to select the highest bitrate available in an attempt to deliver the highest video quality to the user. ABR is used by virtually all video delivery platforms and does a good job at adapting to changing conditions in the network in many cases, but it does have some limitations. The first limitation is that video bitrate is not the primary driver of the video playback experience – lack of video rebuffering is a more important consideration as far as most users are concerned. The second is that ABR is always constrained by the maximum bitrate that can be delivered on the user’s network. Finally, an increase in video bitrate does not always result in an increase in the perceived video quality – for any given segment of video, at some point quality will plateau, and any subsequent increase in the bitrate will not further improve the video quality. Since standard ABR video players are unaware of the perceptual video quality of the content they are streaming, they cannot take advantage of this fundamental fact.

SmartPlay Streaming - Product Overview V.2.1 - © 2019 MediaMelon, Inc. All rights reserved.3

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SmartPlay Streaming™

SmartPlay Streaming – Enhancing ABR Performance

With a traditional ABR streaming approach the player has no knowledge of the actual video quality associated with each of the bitrates available in a bit rate ladder. ABR simply selects the highest bit rate supported by the network at that point in time.

SmartPlay Streaming uses the iMOS™ perceptual video quality information generated by the QBR analysis to guide the video player to make better decisions about which bit rate to select. The iMOS™ data for each video segment is sent to each player as a metadata stream. SmartPlay then directs the player to make segment selections that are more nuanced than the simple “always use the highest bitrate” logic of standard ABR. Using higher bitrates when the scene complexity is low will often provide no improvement in the perceived video quality for the user. SmartPlay guides the player not to select higher bitrate segments if they will not improve the user experience, whereas standard ABR never takes scene complexity in to account and always uses the maximum bandwidth available.

Network Bandwidth

Standard ABR only tracks Network Bandwidth- Works to Maintain Highest Possible Bandwidth- Delivers Variable Quality- Higher probability of Rebuffering Issues- Higher Overall Bandwidth- Lower QoE due to Rebuffering and Network Bandwidth Limitations

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SmartPlay ABR can track both Network Bandwidth and Per-Title Video Complexity - Works to Maintain Uniform Quality Level- Lower probability of Rebuffering Issues as Overall Bandwidth is 35% Less- Higher QoE due to lower Rebuffering and Ability to Exceed Network Limits

Network Bandwidth

Content Complexity

Low Low LowLowReduced

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Analysis

Figure 1 - Standard ABR vs SmartPlay ABR

SmartPlay Streaming - Product Overview V.2.1 - © 2019 MediaMelon, Inc. All rights reserved.4

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SmartPlay Streaming™

Improves the Quality of Complex Scenes

With standard ABR delivery there is no correlation between the complexity of the content being played back and the bit rate of the profile selected by the player. The bit rate selected is always a function of the network bandwidth available at any point in time and scene complexity plays no part in bit rate selection for standard ABR.

With the addition of SmartPlay, the player is given visibility of the complexity of the content it is about to receive. By selecting lower bit rate segments for less complex scenes, SmartPlay can help the player prepare in advance, enabling it to use the bandwidth savings to lower the buffer capacity so that video quality can be improved during more complex scenes. The advanced buffer management of SmartPlay means that bitrates in excess of the steady-state bandwidth available on the network can be used to deliver content during these challenging scenes (see Figure 1 above). Think of an action movie. Some scenes within the movie contain a lot of action and require high bitrates, and some scenes have less action and require lower bitrates. Standard ABR treats them both the same and tries to deliver constant bit rate across the whole movie. This means that bandwidth is wasted during the low action scenes, and that the user experience is impacted during high action scenes. SmartPlay is aware of the complexity difference within the scenes and uses this information to deliver a higher and more uniform Quality of Experience to each user.

In video quality surveys, users give a greater weighting to moments of poor experience than to moments of good experience. Whatever the local bandwidth constraints, it is generally the case that users experience the poorest quality moments during scenes of highest complexity, because ABR treats all video segments the same. SmartPlay modifies ABR segment selection with a focus on selecting higher bitrate segments during scenes of high complexity to maximize improvement of user experience.

Figure 2 - Bitrate Variations for Standard ABR (in orange) and SmartPlay ABR (in blue)

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SmartPlay Streaming™

Significantly Reduces Streaming Costs – Typically by 35%

The primary objective of SmartPlay Streaming is to improve the Quality of Experience for users on an OTT platform. It achieves this by reducing the probability of rebuffering events occurring and by matching the bit rates of segments requested by the player to the complexity of the content streamed. However, an additional benefit of SmartPlay is that it will typically reduce the overall volume of data delivered over an OTT platform by approximately 35%. The greatest reductions occur in high speed broadband homes where ABR rarely down-switches from the highest bitrate profile. This reduction can result in significant savings in CDN delivery fees as well as content storage costs.

Reduces Rebuffering Ratio

By guiding the player to use lower bitrates during less complex scenes the probability of a rebuffering incident occurring is significantly reduced, particularly where bandwidth is shared between multiple users such as within mobile or local WiFi networks. Video rebuffering is the primary cause of annoyance for users of OTT platforms and the biggest driver of churn. The architecture of standard ABR tends to drive up rebuffering events because the player always pushes up towards the maximum bitrate that can be supported on the network, often when it is not required. ABR always drives streaming bitrates towards and often over the point at which the network can cope, whereas SmartPlay does not.

Figure 3 - SmartPlay Performance Metrics displayed within the SmartSight Analytics platform

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SmartPlay Streaming™

Microservice-based Enhancement to your Existing OTT Platform

SmartPlay provides an intelligent connection between your OTT headend and your media player. SmartPlay operates using a microservice architecture which typically runs in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but which can also be hosted on a private cloud at a customer facility. Running on AWS provides an extremely robust and resilient architecture that is rapid and cost effective to deploy. SmartPlay integrates at the OTT headend after the final encoding process where the QBR system analyses the perceptual video quality of the streams produced. This is a simple and lightweight integration with deployment of the QBR Video Analyzer application and selection of source and destination directories typically taking only a few hours work.

As part of the SmartPlay offering, you also have access to a SmartPlay dashboard that tells you how much each title in your library was optimized (in terms of bandwidth reduction and quality improvement). The SmartSight Analytics companion product will provide additional QoE information including the iMOS™ score of each segment viewed.

Stable and Lightweight Player SDK

SmartPlay requires a MediaMelon SDK to be added to the media players used by your OTT platform. Our SDK is quick and easy to integrate, and we have put a lot of engineering effort in to ensuring that you will not need to upgrade this SDK, even as we add more functionality to our platform. Once the initial integration is performed, it is complete. Just set and forget. In addition, the SDK we use for SmartPlay Streaming also allows you to add additional MediaMelon capabilities – SmartSight Analytics and SmartRoute Multi-CDN - without having to perform further player integration. The single MediaMelon SDK supports three important functions – all helping to perfect the OTT user experience you deliver to your customers.

SmartPlay compared with Alternative Approaches

The relationship between video complexity, bitrate, resolution and QoE is becoming better understood by the industry. Most options facing OTT operators in this area relate to the concept of per title encoding. This approach seeks to create an optimal bitrate ladder by tailoring the encoding to the complexity profile of each video title. The technology is very sophisticated, but the issues for operators are that with this approach:

• There is a reliance on measuring video quality (e.g. using VMAF) which is often a slow and computationally intensive process. SmartPlay’s QBR technology produces iMOS™ scores in faster than real time.

• Operators are required to replace their encoding infrastructure at significant cost. SmartPlay requires no change to your infrastructure.

• You need to reencode your back catalogue if you want to enjoy the full benefits. SmartPlay benefits apply across your entire catalogue.

• A per title encode cannot distinguish anything about the subscriber profile, the network conditions, the screen size or the device. SmartPlay takes all these aspects into consideration and its characteristics can be moderated on a per session basis according to the business rules you set.