Another interesting article.

Meeting demand for wide-ranging, high-quality content

Video subscribers and consumers are getting spoiled. They want to view a bigger selection of content over a wide range of devices all in HD and they are willing to pay for it. How can content providers keep up with this demand? The answer: powerful and scalable solutions that increase both the quality and quantity of digital video services.

In terms of quality, there is currently a huge gulf between the volume of HD screens and actual HD content. Taking Israel as an example, some 80% of display screens are HD while no more than 10% of content is HD. This gap may be even wider in other countries.

Whilst production companies are producing more and more content in HD, major content providers like Warner Brothers, Disney, and Fox still have hundreds of thousands of hours of SD content in their archives. That is why there is an increasing demand for SD-to-HD conversion.

Conventional SD-to-HD conversion uses a blow-up technique or an application. The results are unsatisfactory at best. To provide true HD, BetterView has come up with a scientific breakthrough that utilizes super-resolution reconstruction. This solution eliminates the need for old-fashioned SR algorithms to precisely estimate the motion of every pixel between the various frames. BetterView’s new algorithms estimate pixel motion in a stochastic way. The result is a more robust and flexible process that can handle any content.

Meeting demand for wide-ranging, high-quality content from IsraelMedia on Vimeo.

The price of this breakthrough is the massive processing required. This is done by cloud computing using an application supplied by BetterView. Cloud computing makes this solution very scalable since resources are easy to buy and processing can start immediately. A content provider can upload content to the cloud whether it is a few hours or hundreds, and it will be processed according to requirements. When processing is complete the client receives a notification and can download the content in HD in any compression needed.

One of the main benefits of this solution is that it breathes new life into archive SD material. As demand for HD material increases, the value of old SD content grows less and less. BetterView’s solution allows content providers to convert existing content into brand-new, high-resolution material and generate new revenues.

The proliferation of HD content and displays is making consumers more choosy about video quality. In addition they are demanding a wider choice of programming available to watch on multiple devices. This is creating new challenges for video service providers. How do you deliver increasing amounts of bandwidth-intensive content on existing infrastructure without sacrificing quality?

Imagine Communications is helping system operators solve this problem by enabling them to deliver more content with better quality in multiple formats using less bandwidth. The Imagine ICE Broadcast System is a powerful combination of hardware and software that takes SD, HD and H264 video signals and uses advanced pixel process capabilities to optimize the signal giving subscribers the sharpness and clarity they want.

The Imagine ICE Broadcast System also transcodes and compresses video signals for streaming over to the internet and mobile devices. All of this means that video service providers can deliver 50% more video streams using less bandwidth over existing infrastructure whilst maintaining or improving video quality.

Imagine’s solutions enable video service providers to add or expand revenue-generating services and reduce infrastructure-related costs. In addition, better video quality and service reliability help improve customer-retention rates, since quality issues account for 40% of customer churn.

BetterView and Imagine Communications will be demonstrating the quality and capabilities of their solutions at IBC 2011. Schedule a demo here, or with another related technology at IBC.