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Nettlecombe, Dorset: Logging is typically a job for a machine, but French Comtois are highly manoeuvrable and have just the right amount of horsepowerA heave and a grunt and a sudden rush as the felled tree trunk starts to move, dragged on a chain behind Etty’s stocky chestnut hindquarters.Etty is a 12-year-old mare who works with Toby Hoad of Dorset Horse Logging. Their partnership requires mutual understanding and constant communication, as he explains: “You’ve really got to build up a relationship; you’ve got to build up trust. I can drop the reins, and she will pull out the log out for me if it’s in a tight spot.” Continue reading...

Voters rejected rule from the centre – but could end up with another centrist governmentWe could be at the end of the road for the Danish method of democracy. Our style of parliamentary politics has been celebrated and admired internationally for many years, but last week’s general election has left it in crisis. The result was a vote of no confidence in a centrist government led by the Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen. Her administration was, in the Danish context, an unusual political construction. Frederiksen had broken the old pattern of politics in 2022 by forming a governing alliance between the centre-left and centre-right.Yet the most likely outcome of the election is that Denmark will get another centrist government. This is a kind of democratic boomerang. For reasons of perverse parliamentary logic, what the voters reject, they get right back in the face.Rune Lykkeberg is editor-in-chief of the Danish newspaper Information Continue reading...

From balloon arches at parties to mass balloon releases at funerals, these bits of floating rubber and plastic can have disastrous effects on wildlife. As some retailers are refusing to sell them, here are some alternatives I remember, as a child, hanging on to one specific party balloon for what seemed like years. I don’t remember how or where I acquired it, but it had initially floated high, bobbing against the ceiling, and, over time, lost its buoyancy, coming to rest on the carpet. Yet, when a family friend asked if they should pop the now sad-looking balloon, I assumed they were joking – like when an adult asks, teasingly, if they should eat your last slice of birthday cake – and was distraught when they followed through. I didn’t care that it had become grubby and partly deflated – I’d had that balloon for what felt like for ever.This, it turns out, is the problem with many balloons. Not that clingy young children might become over-attached to them, but that they are often a single-use plastic – and even biodegradable alternatives such as latex balloons do not decompose quickly, meaning they can pose a significant risk to wildlife and the environment. In 2019, scientists found that balloons eaten by seabirds are more likely to kill them than other kinds of plastic – yet they do not seem to have been earmarked in the same way as, for example, plastic straws. If anything, balloon-based decor has become more popular in recent years, with balloon arches or tunnels deployed not just at birthdays but at events ranging from baby showers to shop openings. Balloon drops are used at New Year’s Eve celebrations and graduation parties, and balloon releases have also endured – particularly at funerals, where the unleashing of helium-filled balloons signifies the letting-go of a loved one. Continue reading...

Deep divisions on Israel mean the union has failed to act over Lebanon, Gaza, or settler violence in the West BankThe human costs of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon were plain to see when the Irish MEP Barry Andrews visited Beirut last month. He met people who had fled Israeli airstrikes and complied with evacuation orders in southern Lebanon.At makeshift shelters – converted schools – conditions were even worse than during Israel’s last incursion in 2024, he was told. “There are dirty mattresses, dirty blankets, [people] are getting infections, they are getting rashes,” he said recalling a picture of misery compounded by swingeing aid budget cuts. Continue reading...

The 55-year-old is one of the most successful hedge fund managers of his generationWhen Chris Rokos decided to donate a record £190m to the University of Cambridge to set up a “school of government” this week, it became the latest mega project carried out in the hedge fund billionaire’s name.The publicity-shy tycoon has spent much of the last decade presiding over one of England’s most expensive home renovations ever, of the 200-room Tottenham House mansion near Marlborough in Wiltshire, adding a tennis pavilion and private cinema in the £175m revamp. Continue reading...

Saunas and cold plunge pools are popping up everywhere in the UK, bringing fiery heat and icy cold to a beach, city farm or park near you. Their users will be ready with all the reasons why it’s good for both the mind and the body. But what’s the evidence for the benefits of sauna and cold plunge? Madeleine Finlay hears from Ian Sample and from Dr Heather Massey, associate professor at the University of Portsmouth’s extreme environments laboratory.‘It all feels very natural’: Britain’s sauna boom heats up as people seek warmth of human connectionSupport the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod Continue reading...

Endo Kazutoshi spent decades climbing to the top of the culinary world, only for a devastating fire to threaten it all. I joined him in the aftermath as he travelled around his homeland, visiting the people that helped make himEndo Kazutoshi was on the train to Paris when he heard about the fire. A few hours earlier, at 2am, he had left his restaurant – the tiny, Michelin-starred sushi counter, Endo at the Rotunda, in west London – and headed home, where he got changed and packed his bags for the 6am Eurostar, upon which he planned to sleep. As he boarded the train that morning, 6 September 2025, he was unaware that just after 3am, the fire brigade had been called to a blaze at the Helios building, where his restaurant was located on the eighth floor. The fire had started on a terrace and a few hours later had reached the restaurant’s dining room – built mostly from 200-year-old hinoki wood – the prep kitchen, everything.Shortly after departure from St Pancras, the news began to reach Endo through early-rising friends; they reassured him and would keep him updated, though details were still unclear. The trip to Paris was intended as a moment of respite after a busy summer’s service. Instead, Endo cleared his schedule and booked the first train home. But there was one appointment he couldn’t bring himself to cancel. Continue reading...

In the holiday hotspots of the Costa del Sol, the risks are rarely mentioned. But in neighbouring Cádiz, the country’s first tsunami-ready town is leading by exampleEven on a wet, wintry day in Málaga, the Mediterranean looks benign. But only 25 miles (40km) south-west of its port, where half a million tourists disembark from cruise ships into the Costa del Sol each year, lies a system of tectonic plates and faults that fracture the seabed between Spain and north Africa.Earthquakes are routine here. They are mostly too small to notice but sometimes strong enough to rattle glasses in cafes on the seafront. In December, a tremor with a magnitude of 4.9 off the coast of Fuengirola triggered more than 40 calls to Andalucía’s 112 emergency line. Continue reading...

Datafeeds from platforms being used to create algorithms that determine multimillion-dollar trades on global marketEnergy traders say online betting platforms are directly driving the global oil market as they increasingly rely on anonymous prediction markets to determine multimillion-dollar trades.Market experts have said that datafeeds from prediction platforms such as Polymarket are being used to create the algorithms that influence trading in the global Brent crude futures market. Continue reading...

SLC Bitrate Explorer gives encoding engineers and QA teams a complete picture of their video files in one place. Load any file encoded with H.264, HEVC, VP9, or AV1 and instantly see codec parameters, bitrate behavior, frame structure, and quality metrics — everything you need to verify a test encode before it goes to production. Available for Windows and Mac. Trial note — Full access is free for 14 days, then a free tier which includes the File Intelligence, File Compare, Bitrate Charts, and Frame Viewer (Still Image only; no video playback). Buy Full License – Click Here. Feature List: File Intelligence Tab MediaInfo goes deep on container and codec details. SLC Bitrate Explorer goes further — detecting the encoding preset, GOP structure, scene cut settings, B-frames, reference frames, and rate control parameters. For x264 and x265 files encoded with FFmpeg, it identifies exactly what the encoder did and shows only the parameters that differ from defaults. File Compare Tab Identifying differences between encodes normally means opening multiple MediaInfo windows and scanning back and forth. File Compare puts all files side by side in a single view. Check Show Deltas Only and every parameter that matches disappears — leaving only what actually changed. Drag in up to eight files, export the comparison to CSV. Bitrate Chart The original Bitrate Viewer is abandoned and H.264-only. SLC Bitrate Explorer supports every FFmpeg-compatible codec — H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, and more. Load multiple files and overlay their bitrate curves on the same chart. Switch between per-second, GOP, and per-frame views. Hover for instantaneous bitrate at the cursor. Average bitrate reference lines keep the comparison honest. Load as many files as you need — check and uncheck to control what’s displayed. Frame Type Tab See exactly what your encoder did at the frame level. Frame Type visualizes I, P, and B-frame distribution across the entire file, with average bitrate and VMAF overlaid on the same chart. Verify your GOP structure is correct, confirm scene cut I-frames are landing where expected, and see how bitrate and quality track together frame by frame. Load multiple files and compare frame structure side by side — each file gets its own chart with synchronized scrolling. Metrics Tab Objective quality measurement without the workflow friction. Load a reference file, drag in your encodes, and run VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM simultaneously across all files in one pass. Results display as per-frame curves with average reference lines — switch between metrics instantly without re-running. Export to human-readable markdown for reporting or CSV for further analysis. Save stills or a comparison movie at any frame. Results verified to within 0.01% of MSU VQMT. BD-Rate Tab Bjøntegaard Delta Rate is the definitive measure of codec efficiency — how much bitrate does one codec need to deliver the same quality as another across a full encode ladder. Building it manually in Excel is tedious enough that most practitioners skip it. SLC Bitrate Explorer automates the entire workflow. Load your reference, drag in your encode ladder, and the tool groups files by codec automatically. Press Calculate and get Rate Distortion curves and a BD-Rate matrix in minutes. Export to Excel for further analysis or markdown for reporting. Results verified against the standard Excel plugin implementation. Breakeven Tab BD-Rate tells you a codec is 11% more efficient. But is it worth the higher encoding cost? Breakeven answers that question in dollars. Enter your CDN cost per GB, your encoding cost per minute, and your projected viewing hours. Breakeven calculates how many viewing hours it takes for the bandwidth savings to pay back the extra encoding cost — and what the net savings look like at your scale. The business case for a codec migration, built directly from your BD-Rate results. Frame Viewer No metric tells the complete story. Frame Viewer lets you see your encodes directly — navigate to any frame, zoom in on detail areas, and switch between files instantly using keyboard shortcuts or the dropdown. Hit play and switch between encodes during live playback. The mini chart below shows bitrate, frame type, or quality metrics in sync with the current position, so you always know what you’re looking at and why it looks that way. Set in and out points to loop a specific section while switching between files. The visual check no metric replaces. Versions Available – Download/Installation Instructions SYSTEM_REQUIREMENTS.txt (2 downloads ) Windows x64 – Download SLCBitrateExplorer-beta-win-x64.zip (2 downloads ) MacOS Intel – Download SLCBitrateExplorer-beta-osx-x64.zip (2 downloads ) MacOS Apple Silicon – Download SLCBitrateExplorer-beta-osx-arm64.zip (2 downloads ) System Requirements All platforms: – ffprobe + ffmpeg must be on PATH (not bundled) – ~130 MB disk space for the app itself Windows x64 (win-x64) – Windows 10 or later, 64-bit – .NET runtime bundled (self-contained) – LibVLC bundled via NuGet — no separate VLC install needed macOS Intel (osx-x64) – macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or later, Intel – .NET runtime bundled (self-contained) – VLC 3.x must be installed (app loads from VLC.app at runtime — the NuGet x64 dylib is stripped in the build) macOS Apple Silicon (osx-arm64) – macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later, Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) – .NET runtime bundled (self-contained) – VLC 3.x must be installed (same reason as Intel Mac) The post SLC Bitrate Explorer: Encode Verification for Professionals first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

US president’s apparent decision to leave highly enriched uranium in hands of regime creates a more risky scenario than before the war began, experts sayMiddle East crisis – live updatesDonald Trump has said he does not care about Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium (HEU), arguing it was deep underground and could be monitored by satellite, raising questions about one of the key US justifications for the war.Experts said that if the US-Israeli offensive against Iran concluded with the Tehran government still in control of its 440kg HEU stockpile, it would be significantly closer to the capability of making nuclear warheads than if the US had pursued a potential negotiated settlement that was on the table at the time the US and Israel launched the war on 28 February. Continue reading...

President says ‘little journey’ to Iran close to achieving US aims but offers few details on plan to wind down conflictMiddle East crisis – live updatesDonald Trump used a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.In remarks from the White House, Trump argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”. Continue reading...

Ukrainian president says ceasefire could show diplomacy works, while Russia dismisses statement as ‘PR stunt’. What we know on day 1,499Volodymyr Zelenskyy has criticised Russia for responding to an offer of an Easter truce with airstrikes. The Ukrainian president said on Wednesday he had spoken to US negotiators about an Easter ceasefire but Russian forces had fired more than 700 drones – many of them Iranian-designed Shaheds – targeting parts of western and central Ukraine in a rare daytime attack. Zelenskyy said: “Russia is responding [to the Easter ceasefire offer] with Shahed drones and continues its terrorist operations against our energy sector, against our infrastructure,” adding that he had discussed ways of advancing diplomacy with US negotiators. “A silence over Easter could be exactly the signal that tells everyone that diplomacy can be successful.” Russia’s foreign ministry rejected Zelenskyy’s proposal as a “PR stunt”.The Ukraine president said talks with US mediators aimed at resolving the four-year conflict were “positive”. The talks were held remotely on Wednesday with the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and the US senator Lindsey Graham, with Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, also joining the call amid the alliance’s continuing tensions with Washington. Zelenskyy thanked the US for its efforts to bring about peace and said the Ukrainian and US teams had agreed to strengthen a document outlining US security guarantees for any future peace deal. “This is precisely what could pave the way for a reliable end to the war.” In recent weeks Zelenskyy said the US had been pressuring Ukraine to make concessions to bring a quick end to the conflict after the US and Israel launched the war on Iran in late February. Talks with Russia are deadlocked over the question of land, with Ukraine refusing to cede to Moscow’s demands that it relinquish the eastern region of Donbas.Russia claimed to have full control of Ukraine’s Luhansk region on Wednesday, which Kyiv denied. Russia’s defence ministry claimed its forces had taken control of the entire Luhansk region – part of the Donbas – but a Ukrainian military official said small areas were still held by Ukrainian forces. Russia has previously made false claims of advances. The Russian defence ministry said in a statement: “Units have completed the liberation of the Luhansk people’s republic.” But Viktor Tregubov, a spokesperson for Ukrainian forces, said there were no changes to report in that region. “Unfortunately, we only hold small patches [in Luhansk], but those positions have been held by 3rd brigade for a long time,” Trehubov told the Associated Press. Russian claims of progress have in the past proved to be inaccurate. The Moscow-appointed head of Luhansk announced its full capture last June. Ukrainian officials have said that Moscow makes false claims of advances to persuade US negotiators a Russian victory in Ukraine is inevitable.Russia fired hundreds of drones at Ukraine, killing at least five people and destroying a postal terminal, Ukrainian officials have said. Ukraine’s Nova Poshta mailing company published an image on Wednesday of a warehouse in the western city of Lutsk in flames, with thick smoke pouring from its roof. As well firing 339 drones at Ukraine overnight, Russia launched more than 360 drones during the day, the Ukrainian air force said. One drone killed four people in the central Cherkasy region, while an earlier drone strike on a car in Ukraine’s frontline Kherson region killed a woman and badly wounded two other people, regional authorities said. Continue reading...

Agreement comes after Wellington halted millions in aid to its former colony after Cook Islands formed strategic partnership with Beijing New Zealand and the Cook Islands have signed a defence and security declaration, ending a year-long diplomatic row that erupted after the Cook Islands struck strategic agreements with China.The Cook Islands was a dependent New Zealand colony from 1901-65 but has since operated as a self-governing nation in “free association” with New Zealand. Its roughly 17,000 citizens hold New Zealand citizenship. There are obligations between the two nations to regularly consult on matters of defence and security. Continue reading...

Lawyers for accused had argued names of family members should be suppressed due to fears for their mental and physical safetyFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThe alleged Bondi attacker has been denied a suppression order over his family member’s names and home and work addresses after a collective of media organisations won a challenge against the bid.In the Downing Centre local court on Thursday, judge Hugh Donnelly decided to deny the request for a 40-year suppression order, ending an interim suppression order that was granted for Naveed Akram’s mother, brother and sister in early March which banned the publication of their names and addresses. Continue reading...

Quake with epicentre west-north-west of Ternate island shakes cities and prompts regional tsunami warningOne person has been killed after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck off Indonesia’s Ternate island, damaging buildings and triggering small tsunami waves.The quake, which had a depth of 35km, occurred on Thursday at 6.48am local time, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Its epicentre was 127km (79 miles) west-northwest of Ternate, an island in Indonesia’s North Maluku province. Continue reading...

Mass of spectators cheers dazzling Florida launch as astronauts head to moon for first time in almost 54 yearsNasa’s moon rocket Artemis II launched on Wednesday evening, carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in almost 54 years.The rocket is now orbiting Earth and will continue to do so until Thursday, when the translunar injection burn will take place and send it on the rest of its 240,000-mile journey to the moon. Inside the Orion capsule, the four astronauts onboard immediately began tasks to assess how the spacecraft handled the 17,500mph ascent to orbit. Continue reading...

National theatre, LondonA queenly Lesley Manville steals the show in this dark, rageful tale of seduction as contact sportPierre Choderlos de Laclos was serving as an artillery officer while writing his epistolary novel about a cold game of seduction in the salons of 18th-century France which backfires on its conniving architects. It shows: love is a fight for power and control in his story, every bit as strategic as a military campaign.Popularly known through the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons, starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich (and also the teen version of it, 1999’s Cruel Intentions), this production is directed by Marianne Elliott and uses an adaptation by Christopher Hampton – whose play of the novel, first staged in 1985, was also the basis for the film starring Close. Continue reading...

Royal Exchange theatre, ManchesterSparring lovers play a capricious game in Blanche McIntyre’s revival – but the cut and thrust is kept witty, rather than curdling into dangerIn director Blanche McIntyre’s take on Private Lives, love is a dizzying thing. Staged in-the-round, Noël Coward’s vicious comedy of desire and spite is spun around like the records its sparring lovers play on the gramophone. From the moment that acrimonious exes Amanda and Elyot collide on their honeymoons, the revolve starts to turn, gradually accelerating to the point of nausea.This queasy effect is apt for Coward’s play, which slowly peels back the ugliness of its central couple’s destructive bond. Opening in the luxurious surroundings of a French holiday resort – rendered in sleek, monochrome minimalism by designer Dick Bird – the first act is all pre-dinner cocktails and witty dialogue. The reunited Amanda and Elyot quickly ditch their respective new spouses, pompous Victor and vapid Sibyl, and escape to Paris. But in Amanda’s cluttered apartment, surrounded by booze and half-eaten plates of food, the rekindled romance starts to sour. Continue reading...

Charity calls for a levy on the very richest and the closing of tax loopholes in its report on offshore wealthThe global super-rich may have as much as $3.55tn hidden away from tax authorities, according to estimates by Oxfam.The charity renewed its call for a wealth levy and urged governments to close tax loopholes as it published its latest analysis of the scale of offshore holdings. Continue reading...

Ofcom research shows people also concerned old posts could affect personal or professional lifeSocial media users in the UK are becoming less active on tech platforms due to the rise of video apps and fears that posts could come back to haunt them, according to the communications watchdog.Ofcom said just under half of adult social media users (49%) now post, share or comment compared with 61% in 2024. The proportion exploring new websites has also fallen, from 70% to 56%. Continue reading...

Resident doctors on the picket line outside St Thomas' Hospital in London, on the first day of a five-day walkout over pay and jobs, which could see up to half of the medical workforce in England could stop work. Picture date: Wednesday December 17, 2025. PA Photo. Photo credit should read: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire

For the first time in over 50 years, astronauts will see Earth from distant space. Let’s hope the images they send back of our fragile home bring some much-needed unityMore than 50 years ago, the Apollo astronauts’ photographs of Earth seen from the moon had a jolting effect on a society distracted by division and conflict. Then, as now, they came in “an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance”, as President John F Kennedy had put it. But what he hadn’t predicted was that on the way to the moon, we would discover the Earth.Here was our home planet, suddenly seen as a finite ball of rock, shrouded in an apple peel-thin layer of life-sustaining air. This view jarred with people’s everyday experience of living on the surface of an apparently infinite world of limitless resources. The creation of a special Earth Day soon followed, along with the founding of the campaigning environmental charity Friends of the Earth and the passing of a slew of environmental protection laws. Continue reading...

The last heistmeister of ‘the largest burglary in English history’ oozes charisma as he tells his wild tale. Even his contempt for his accomplices is impressiveIt is a truth I feel should be universally acknowledged – that a headline-grabbing crime, which still has one of its charismatic perpetrators alive and willing to talk about it now on camera, must have a documentary dedicated to it.The last one was the three-part miniseries The Diamond Heist, from Guy Ritchie’s production company, about the Millenium Dome Robbery (although the best line came not from the villains but from one of the laconic police officers responsible for trying to track down members of the gang as they put their plan together. They got a lead on one when he went back to the venue without his daughter. “No one goes to the Millenium Dome twice.” This is what I pay my taxes for.)Hatton Garden: The Great Diamond Heist is on Channel 4. Continue reading...

US understood not to be invited directly to talks that will explore ways of reopening critical waterwayMiddle East crisis – live updatesThe UK will convene 35 countries – excluding the US – to explore ways to reopen the strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route for oil and gas that has been blocked by Iran.Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said the next phase of discussions in the joint British and French efforts to secure the waterway would be held on Thursday, with Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, alongside international leaders. Continue reading...

Woods focusing on his health and wellbeing after crashFlorida judge grants his request to leave the USTiger Woods has turned down the opportunity to captain the United States at the 2027 Ryder Cup, the PGA of America has announced.The former world No 1’s decision comes after he announced he would step away from golf for a period to focus on his health and wellbeing. Woods was charged with driving under the influence after being involved in a car accident last week. Continue reading...

Advertising‑funded streaming is gaining significant momentum across Europe, with a new industry report highlighting the growing strategic relevance of FAST Channels. The State of TV & Video 2026 FAST Special, published by FUNKE Channels, a subsidiary of German media company FUNKE Mediengruppe, and digital consultancy valantic, examines how viewing behaviour, business models and competitive dynamics are shifting across German-speaking countries (DACH) and internationally. The study draws on market research, international best‑practice examples and insights from industry stakeholders. It outlines how the structural transition towards digital, IP‑based distribution is reshaping the entire value chain – from content acquisition and channel curation to advertising sales and platform partnerships. The report confirms that linear television remains the most‑used video format in the DACH region. However, its share is steadily declining as video‑on‑demand, subscription streaming and social video continue to grow, particularly among younger audiences. The authors note that cable and DTH satellite distribution are increasingly being replaced by IP‑based delivery, accelerating the shift towards platform‑driven digital models. The authors also highlight that the VOD market is entering a maturity phase in which growth is driven less by new users and more by monetisation. This shift places greater emphasis on pricing strategies, advertising models and content efficiency FAST has now established itself as a stable and fast‑growing segment of the streaming market. Built on curated, linear channels funded by advertising and primarily accessed via smart TV platforms, FAST appeals strongly to price‑sensitive audiences. The market continues to expand, but competition is intensifying as channel supply grows faster than demand and advertising budgets move from traditional TV to digital, programmatic environments. New developments such as single‑IP channels, live content and AI‑driven localisation are driving international scale. The report concludes that FAST is evolving into a strategically relevant component of the wider video market, offering new reach and monetisation opportunities for media companies. The report is aimed at content providers, advertisers, platform operators, telcos and media groups seeking to sharpen their strategic positioning in a rapidly evolving market. It can be downloaded here.

Sonia Bompastor blasted refereeing in the Champions League as “not good enough” after she was shown two yellow cards and emotions boiled over following Katie McCabe’s hair pull on Alyssa Thompson in a frantic end to their two-legged quarter-final defeat by Arsenal.The holders, Arsenal, progress despite the controversy, and will play the winner of Thursday night’s quarter-final between Lyon and Wolfsburg, with the German side taking a 1-0 lead into the second leg. Continue reading...

From Algeria to Uzbekistan, our writers and contributors from around the world assess the state of the 48 nations to qualify for the World Cup“There’s more talent and potential than in 2022,” Kylian Mbappé said ominously this week after France had beaten Brazil 2-1 despite having Dayot Upamecano sent off after 55 minutes. He may well be right. For the second game of this window, against Colombia, Didier Deschamps changed the entire starting XI but was still able to field an attack of Marcus Thuram, Désiré Doué, Rayan Cherki and Maghnes Akliouche. Doué scored two in a comfortable 3-1 victory. “I’m well aware that there are some very good players that I won’t be bringing because, in my opinion, there are even better ones,” Deschamps said. Marcus Christenson Continue reading...

File - In this June 27, 1979 file photo, accused murderer Ted Bundy stares out at the photographer during the second day of jury selection in his murder trial in Miami, Fla. Authorities say DNA testing helped them confirm notorious serial killer Ted Bundy also murdered a northern Utah teen. KSL-TV reports Bountiful Police Sgt. Shane Alexander announced Monday, March 11, 2019, that investigators retrieved a human kneecap in 2015 that authorities had given to the family of Debra Kent. Alexander says DNA testing on the bone confirmed it belonged to Kent. (AP Photo/File)

Unlucky in love? Maybe ditch the apps. This new twist on Victorian-era ‘flirtation cards’ could spark your next meet-cuteHow do romance novelists celebrate love?Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better thingsTired of swiping, singles are attending flirting parties and even dating-oriented run clubs in hopes of meeting their future partner in real life.But even those lack the romanticism of a true meet-cute. The Brooklyn-based stationery brand No Particular Order is offering a more serendipitous option: its new acquaintance cards that encourage more spontaneous connections. Continue reading...

British Medical Association leaders say PM’s threat to cut 1,000 new roles makes next week’s strike action more likelyResident doctors have accused Keir Starmer of damaging the prospects of a deal to end their pay and jobs dispute by threatening to cut 1,000 new jobs for medics in the NHS.The claim from the British Medical Association leaders came just before the Thursday deadline given by the prime minister for the union to accept the government’s final offer. Continue reading...

War shows little sign of easing despite Donald Trump claiming Iranian leadership ‘just asked’ for ceasefireMiddle East crisis – live updatesIsrael unleashed two waves of attacks on Tehran and said it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander on Wednesday with little sign of the war easing up despite Donald Trump repeating a claim that Iran’s leadership was seeking a ceasefire.The US president, writing on social media, said that Iran’s president had “just asked” for a ceasefire and that American troops would be “out of Iran pretty quickly” as he sought to extricate the US from the war. He indicated that he was not concerned about leaving Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) – often cited as a justification for the war - in its presumed underground hiding place, arguing it could be monitored by satellite. Continue reading...

As the world’s attention is drawn to the Middle East, Donald Trump’s assault on Iran has had damaging knock-on consequences for KyivAfter meeting European Union foreign ministers this week, Volodymyr Zelenskyy voiced exasperation over the continued blocking of a €90bn EU loan to Kyiv by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. US financial support for Ukraine has dried up under Donald Trump, so the money is desperately required. But as Mr Zelenskyy bitterly observed, it is being delayed “because one person in Europe is standing against all of Europe simply to please Moscow”.Trailing in the polls ahead of an election on 12 April, Mr Orbán is doubling down on attempts to mobilise his nationalist base by fuelling anti-Ukraine and anti-EU sentiment. Allegations also continue to emerge, dismissed by Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, that he has in effect colluded with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to undermine European decision-making during the war.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

AI is interpreting journalism without regard for truth. The BBC must build the capacity to ensure its reporting is understood on its own termsAppointing Matt Brittin, a former Google executive, as BBC director general is smarter than critics admit. Although he was on the board of the Guardian’s publisher, Mr Brittin was no journalist. He does understand platforms, scale and digital audiences.Director generals come under scrutiny when crises hit, like this week’s sacking of Scott Mills over his “personal conduct”. It then emerged that police previously questioned the Radio 2 DJ over separate allegations, of serious sexual offences, closing the case due to lack of evidence. But the role’s underlying challenge is facing future threats to the corporation’s audience.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Discussion on how to ease impact from Iran war coincides with Food and Drink Federation almost tripling forecastFood inflation could hit 9% in the UK this year even if the strait of Hormuz opens within the next few weeks, figures suggest, as the Iran war pushes up energy prices.The Food and Drink Federation (FDF), which represents 12,000 food and drink manufacturers, has predicted prices will rise by “at least” 9% by the end of 2026, almost tripling a forecast of 3.2% that was made before the Middle East conflict. Continue reading...

Midfielder failed to impress against Uruguay and Japan‘He was excellent in camp but struggles on the pitch’Thomas Tuchel says Phil Foden is not assured of a place in his England squad for the World Cup finals in the summer after watching him struggle in the Wembley friendlies against Uruguay and Japan.Tuchel has appeared unconvinced by Foden since taking charge at the beginning of last year but the head coach gave him a big opportunity in the starting lineup in each of the games during this past international window. Tuchel played him in the No 10 role in the 1-1 draw against Uruguay and as one of the No 10s alongside Cole Palmer in an experimental 4-2-4 in the 1-0 defeat by Japan. In both matches, Foden could get little going. Continue reading...

Brutal past experience has taught us that a cost of living crisis doesn’t affect us all the same, because we don’t all go into it with the same income or wealthPerhaps the most celebrated writer on oil markets is Daniel Yergin. His work has won a Pulitzer and his advice sought by every president from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. Let’s start by looking at an example.Fifteen years ago, before the US and Israel started their war on Iran, killing thousands of civilians in the process, before the strait of Hormuz became as infamous as the Bermuda Triangle, and before experts declared “the greatest global energy security threat in history”, Yergin published The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. After hearing Trump announce a “very soon” end to the conflict for the second – or was it the third? – time, I dug out my copy. Just as I remembered, it devotes a chapter to the Persian Gulf.Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

The rapper was hospitalized in New York City after feeling unwell during her Moulin Rouge performance on BroadwayMegan Thee Stallion was taken to the hospital on Tuesday in New York City after feeling unwell during a performance of Moulin Rouge! The Musical on Broadway.A representative for the rapper said in a statement to the Guardian on Wednesday that “on Tuesday evening, Megan was transported to a local hospital to undergo a medical evaluation after experiencing concerning symptoms.” Continue reading...

Crown Prosecution Service confirms support on inquiries after arrests on suspicion of misconduct in public officePolice are receiving advice from prosecutors as part of their inquiries into Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein.The former duke of York and the former UK ambassador to the US were both arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office over their connections with the late financier. They have since been released under investigation. Continue reading...

Elon Musk’s rocket company could go public as early as June, Bloomberg reportsSign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inboxSpaceX has confidentially filed for an initial public offering on the US stock market, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. The IPO is set to be one of the most closely watched and highly valued listings in market history.Elon Musk’s company, which has become a dominant power in both space travel and satellite communications, could potentially seek a valuation upwards of $1.75tn. The confidential filing will give regulators a period to review and discuss the company’s financial disclosures before investors and the public are able to view them. Continue reading...

Speaking publicly for first time, Radio 2 breakfast show host said he ‘fully cooperated’ with police at the timeScott Mills was sacked after “new information” came to light relating to his conduct, the BBC said on Wednesday.The corporation confirmed in a statement that it was first made aware of a police investigation into historical allegations of sexual abuse in 2017, but terminated the radio presenter’s contract on Friday in accordance with its “culture and values”. Continue reading...

Two of the points were measures on energy bills from the autumn budget, another restated the existing energy strategy‘We have a five-point plan for the immediate crisis,” declared the prime minister during his remarks from Downing Street on Wednesday. Really? Two of his five points were measures on energy bills that pre-date the Iran war. One was a description of support for a sub-set of consumers but dodged the key question of who else could get help.Another stated the government’s longstanding energy strategy in unchanged terms. The last was a diplomatic policy, presumably shoehorned into the cost-of-living passage because a five-point plan sounds better than a four-point one. Continue reading...

Michael O’Leary says UK’s reliance on Kuwait for jet fuel supply amid Iran war exposes it to possible shortagesThe UK is the most vulnerable country in Europe to potential jet fuel shortages as the Iran war throttles supplies from the Gulf, the boss of Ryanair has said.Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of the budget airline, said Britain would be the most exposed to jet fuel shortages because it relies on Kuwait for about 25% of its supply. Continue reading...

Drummer with Pentangle, the folk-rock group who found fame in the 1960s with their fusion of jazz, blues and traditional songsOn 27 May 1967, a bravely original band called Pentangle made their first major appearance, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. They were not a typical folk group, although they included the folk scene’s acoustic guitar heroes Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, along with the singer Jacqui McShee.But they were not a typical jazz band either, despite playing lengthy improvisations and including the jazz and blues exponents Danny Thompson on bass and Terry Cox on drums. Instead, they presented a subtle and often complex fusion of jazz, traditional styles, new songs and blues. Continue reading...

Readers respond to an article about people whose lives were wrecked by delusional thinking after they used AI toolsYour coverage of AI-associated delusions exposes a gap that training-level guardrails cannot close (Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion, 26 March). As someone who has worked in health systems across fragile and low-income contexts, I find it striking that AI companies have failed to adopt a safeguard that even the most underresourced clinic in the world already uses: screening patients before exposing them to risk.The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for depression and the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale are administered daily in settings with no electricity, limited staff, and patients who may never have seen a doctor. These tools take minutes. They are validated across dozens of languages and cultural contexts. They create a human checkpoint between vulnerability and harm. Continue reading...

Anthony Lawton and Dr Felicity Mellor on the importance of humans who design systems and execute decisions taking responsibility for themYour article on the Iran school bombing rightly challenges the reflex to blame artificial intelligence (AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying, 26 March). However, the deeper problem lies not in the technology but in the language now forming around it. To say that there was an “AI error” quietly removes the human subject from the sentence. Where once civilians were “dehoused” or “collateral damage”, responsibility is now displaced altogether: from people to systems.This matters because moral accountability depends on clarity about who acts. However complex the chain of analysis and command, it remains human beings who design, authorise and execute these decisions. To obscure that fact is not a technical error but a civic one. Continue reading...

The creatures should not be kept or treated as pets, however tame or familiar they may appear, says Tiggywinkles Wildlife HospitalAs a specialist wildlife hospital, we would like to gently remind readers that hedgehogs are wild animals and should not be kept or treated as pets, however tame or familiar they may appear (The pet I’ll never forget: Harriet, the hedgehog in my airing cupboard, 23 March).Healthy hedgehogs are best left in the wild, where they can behave naturally and remain independent. If you find a hedgehog that is clearly injured, unwell, orphaned, or active during the day and appearing to be in difficulty, it is important to contact a wildlife hospital for advice as soon as possible. Continue reading...

Dr Mussaddaq Iqbal responds to the news that the prime minister has warned medics to call off their strike or lose a training offerWhile I totally disapprove, as I did last time, of the doctors’ strike but completely support their demands and grievances, it is the prime minister’s response which has made me write this letter (Keir Starmer gives resident doctors 48 hours to call off strike or lose training offer, 31 March). His threat of not creating extra training posts is shocking, inappropriate and impulsive. Though on the face of it it sounds like an innocuous response showing irritation, it is probably the most convincing evidence so far of his unfitness to govern among the litany of his other missteps.It has laid bare his government’s lack of strategy and lack of sincerity. Does he understand that, by not creating training posts, he is not only going to harm doctors’ careers, spoil thousands of young doctors’ lives and deter others from adopting this noble and vital profession, but also harm the NHS, and thus patient care? The NHS is desperately understaffed. This shows that he never had any plan to increase the number of posts and it was agreed under pressure. He is clearly not a statesman, and if he is only capable of responding in this childlike manner, he could have threatened to freeze their pay or any such lowly response, but not one that is harmful. Continue reading...

Cannabis policy still divisive two years in, with SPD hailing it while CDU minister says it is risk to young people’s healthIt was a landmark piece of legislation passed by Germany’s previous, centre-left-led government: a measure that legalised the personal recreational use of cannabis for over-18s despite warnings from critics it would cause a steep rise in the drug’s use, including by teenagers, and boost criminal gangs.Two years on, controversy over the move has still not been stubbed out, with critics and proponents at odds over its impact on consumption, youth welfare and organised crime. Continue reading...

Roberto Baggio proposed an overhaul of talent pathway in 2011 but it was never acted on and the national team’s approach now is just not workingThe decline of Italy’s footballing expectations can be read in the headlines that greeted their third consecutive failure to qualify for a men’s World Cup. When the Azzurri lost their playoff against Sweden in November 2017, La Gazzetta dello Sport defined it as “The End” and an “Apocalypse”. After defeat by North Macedonia in 2022, Il Corriere dello Sport saw a country sinking “Into Hell”.On Wednesday both newspapers led coverage of elimination by Bosnia and Herzegovina with a simpler, perhaps sadder, “Tutti A Casa” – Everybody Go Home. What else is there left to say? Italians understood long ago that 2018 was not some aberration but the continuation of a trend, their team having failed to reach the tournament’s knockout stage in 2010 or 2014. Continue reading...

Six teenage girls arrested after hundreds of young people gather in Clapham in ‘swarming the streets’ trendPolice have urged parents to “take responsibility” after scenes of widespread disorder in Clapham, south-west London, on Saturday and Tuesday. Officers said the incidents were caused by a TikTok trend for swarming the streets.Six teenage girls have been arrested so far, and the Metropolitan police said there would be more arrests in the coming days as officers reviewed CCTV and body worn camera footage of the disorder. It urged parents not to allow their children to take part in similar events over the Easter weekend. Continue reading...

First fatal incident this year occurred hours after £16.2m ‘stop the boats’ deal agreed between Britain and FranceEurope live – latest updatesUK politics live – latest updatesTwo people have died and another is missing after trying to cross the Channel from France to the UK on Wednesday morning. It is the first fatal incident in the Channel this year.The deaths occurred just hours after an interim £16.2m “stop the boats” deal was agreed between the UK and France which will be in place until May. Negotiations will continue for a longer-term deal to replace the previous three-year deal, which expired on Tuesday. According to reports, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is trying to secure a “payment by results” agreement to reduce small boat crossings. Continue reading...

Ye, who has called himself a Nazi, released a song called Heil Hitler and sold T-shirts bearing swastikas, is confirmed to play three nights at the London festivalThe Jewish Leadership Council has condemned Wireless festival for booking Kanye West, also known as Ye, to headline all three nights of the forthcoming north London event in the wake of heightened attacks on the UK Jewish community, calling the organisers “deeply irresponsible”.In a press statement on Wednesday 1 April, a spokesperson for London mayor Sadiq Khan said: “We are clear that the past comments and actions of this artist are offensive and wrong, and are simply not reflective of London’s values. This was a decision taken by the festival organizers and not one that City Hall is involved in.” Continue reading...

Meteorologists issue yellow weather warning, with gusts of up to 90mph expected in some areasThe northern half of the UK is expected to face gale-force winds over the Easter weekend, with forecasters warning of possible travel disruption and power cuts, stemming from a “significant cold plunge from Canada into the North Atlantic”.The Met Office issued a yellow weather warning for very strong winds in Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of north Wales and northern England from 6pm on Saturday until midday on Sunday. Continue reading...

McCartney and her husband faced objections including fears of threat to local otters and ‘hideous’ designThe fashion designer Stella McCartney has been granted permission to build a £5m home on a spectacular Highland peninsula after a three-year planning battle over the threat to local otters and the “hideous” modernist design.McCartney and her husband, Alasdhair Willis, a creative director at Adidas, want to build the split-level property with a turf roof and natural stone walls on the rocky outcrop overlooking Loch Ailort, west of Fort William, 30 metres above sea level. Continue reading...

At 17, Cooper Lutkenhaus is the youngest world champion in track and field history – and potentially USA’s poster boy for LA28Fire on the boards. Slack jaws off it. Last week, I was fortunate enough to be yards away from the 17-year-old American high school student Cooper Lutkenhaus when he powered away from a strong 800m field in Torun to become the youngest world champion in track and field history. But no sooner had the applause died down than the search for superlatives began.“He’s like David Rudisha,” said Eliott Crestan, the Belgian who took world indoor championship silver behind Lutkenhaus. “In 10 or 20 years’ time, I’ll be able to say that I ran against him.” Continue reading...

Ministers accused of being too fearful of offending Emirates to help Britons detained for sharing images of warMiddle East crisis live – latest updatesThe families of UK citizens held in the United Arab Emirates over allegations that they shared images of the conflict with Iran have voiced frustration at the British government’s failure to help.Several British citizens are among more than 100 foreign nationals who have been detained under draconian Emirate rules that outlaw publishing or sharing material that could “disturb public security”. Continue reading...

Doctors warn viral off-label use lacks evidence, with unknown long-term risks and possible systemic absorptionVaginal estrogen cream is prescribed to ease genital dryness, irritation and discomfort that results from the loss of estrogen during menopause.The name tells you exactly where to put it. Yet a new trend has been making the rounds on social media. People are calling vaginal estrogen cream the new “filler” for the face and other body parts, claiming it can smooth wrinkles, reduce dryness and sagginess and plump up the skin. Continue reading...

Sam Browne’s blend of brutal honesty and droll observation has made him a viral sensation. He talks about growing up in Southend, mental health and the healing power of poetryOn a cold night in east London, 21-year-old performance poet Sam Browne is telling a packed room of strangers about his second bout of psychosis. “I was in Morocco at 18, completely alone, and I started to feel that things weren’t real,” he says. “It got so bad that one day I turned to a random person and told him I was thinking of killing myself. He just said back to me: ‘Don’t do that – you’ll miss the sunset.’”The room falls quiet and Browne breaks the tension by launching into a poem inspired by his Moroccan breakdown, You’ll Miss the Sunset. “The world is so beautiful, the least you could do is stick around to watch it,” he says with the hint of a smirk. “But it’s all shit, all of it, isn’t it?” Continue reading...

Joyce gave birth in November and returned to pitch in MarchBristol flanker hopes to be role model for next generationAlisha Joyce returned to the rugby pitch in March just 123 days after giving birth and a week later was named in Wales’s squad for the Women’s Six Nations. The 28‑year‑old says she was “shocked” to get the call-up after welcoming her son, Ralphie, in November but adds it’s “cool” to be a role model for the next generation of players.Joyce was the first Wales player to use the governing body’s new performance maternity programme. The back-row, who shares Ralphie with her wife and teammate Jasmine Joyce, has played only 30 minutes of rugby since returning last month in a game for Brython Thunder where she came off the bench. Continue reading...

Prince tells privacy summit of ‘harrowing stories’ of how use of tech giants’ platforms led to ‘grave and irreversible harm’The Duke of Sussex has welcomed two landmark lawsuits against major tech companies, declaring: “Finally, some truth and accountability has arrived.”In a speech in Washington DC to the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) global summit on privacy, AI governance and cybersecurity law, Prince Harry said he had done a “deep dive into the tech-fuelled world in which my children – all our children – are growing up”. Continue reading...

Could AI write an entire sitcom series? That’s the plot of the new season of comedy drama The Comeback. Its co-creator explains why it’s ‘very possible’ – and why the world needs to catch up with AJLTTV veteran Michael Patrick King has had a long, lively career, writing, directing and producing on shows including Murphy Brown, Will & Grace and 2 Broke Girls. He’s best known, though, for his work on the Sex and the City franchise, serving as its showrunner for the bulk of its run, writing and directing its two films, and masterminding its controversial 2020s revival And Just Like That. But this month sees the return of one of his most loved, and perhaps most underwatched, shows: The Comeback.Co-created and co-written with Lisa Kudrow, The Comeback first aired in 2005, telling the story of a gormless sitcom star named Valerie Cherish, played by Kudrow, trying to return to stardom through the then-new format of reality TV. The show had an awkward, blackly hilarious tone that was a hit with critics and the Emmys, but failed to find much of an audience. Nine years later, in 2014, it returned for a masterly second season in which Valerie – now playing herself in a gritty HBO dramatisation of the events of season one, and filming the whole thing as an audition tape for The Real Housewives – confronts her failing marriage and relationships. Continue reading...

After covering changes for matchgoing fans, Gavin Willacy assesses how coverage has transformed for fans at homeBy No Helmets RequiredSuper League celebrated its 30th birthday in style at the weekend. The main party was at Headingley, where Leeds hosted Warrington in a repeat of one of the league’s original fixtures. As Sky Sports anchor Brian Carney welcomed guest after illustrious guest to reminisce about their past heroics, we were shown clips from three of the opening round of games from 1996. That’s because only three were televised. And that was one more than Sky normally showed, despite having spent £87m on the new competition. All seven Super League games were shown live last weekend.We now consume the game on our phones rather than through hourly radio bulletins. Unless you had a satellite dish on your house in the mid-1990s, you couldn’t watch Super League’s launch. For the opening weekend, Sky sent the media circus to Paris, Oldham and Leeds. By all accounts, members of the press pack were well oiled. In 2026, Super League on Sky is just a well-oiled machine. Continue reading...

How much do you know about the history of one of the most powerful computing companies on the planet?In the 50 years since it was founded, Apple has long been seen as one of the most significant technology companies globally. The design and manufacturing decisions taken in Cupertino, California have affected product design across the world, helping usher in an era of ubiquitous touchscreen computing while insisting on exacting user experience design principles. How much do you know about the history of one of the most powerful computing companies on the planet? Test yourself with these 12 questions.The Guardian’s Apple at 50 quiz Continue reading...

In a world of data theft and online scams, there is something thrillingly analogue about these audacious robberiesNow, let me begin by saying: stealing is bad. I don’t think you should steal things. It is a good way to get yourself sent to prison and it is morally wrong to take things that don’t belong to you. Cargo theft? Bad. Stealing priceless artworks from museums where they could be enjoyed by everyone? Bad.And yet. And yet. Continue reading...

Joani Reid MP reportedly swapped flirtatious messages with senior officer in charge of nuclear-armed submarineA Royal Navy captain in charge of one of Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines stepped back from his duties over his relationship with the MP Joani Reid, whose husband faces allegations of spying for China.The married senior officer was investigated by the navy last year over his contact with Reid after the messages, described as inappropriate, prompted an assessment of a potential blackmail risk, the Financial Times first reported. Continue reading...

The argument for transitioning to renewables seems stronger than ever – and yet, attacks mount on the carbon price scheme that underpins the EU’s success at cutting pollution• Don’t get This Is Europe delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereOn the one hand, experts say, Europe is better prepared for this energy crisis than the last. On the other, it is still waging a culture war against the most obvious path out.Fuel prices have soared to ruinous levels since the Iran war left ships of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) stranded in the Gulf. The pain is most acute in Asia, but high energy prices are already causing panic in Europe. Shortages could hit the continent this month, oil company Shell warned last week. Donald Trump’s “go get your own oil” comments on Tuesday sent prices to their highest level since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran. They briefly dipped below $100-a-barrel on Wednesday amid hopes that the war may soon end. Continue reading...

TV 2 and Amedia have combined on a joint rights offer for Norwegian football covering the period between 2026 to 2034, in a new partnership aimed at strengthening the sport’s position across the country. The two Norwegian media groups said they plan to use a shared streaming platform to build the value of football rights, linking TV 2’s national reach with Amedia’s local presence through its network of newspapers and Direktesport service. Olav T. Sandnes, editor-in-chief and CEO of TV 2, and Anders Opdahl, CEO of Amedia, said in a joint statement: “The fact that TV 2 and Amedia have joined forces on this offer represents a unique partnership in the Norwegian media landscape. We are uniting our complementary strengths to further develop the experience of Norwegian football. All based on the good cooperation we have had in recent years.” Amedia said Norwegian football plays a central role in national life, from grassroots to elite competition, and argued that the partnership would help reinforce that position at a time of growing fragmentation in the media market. Sandnes highlighted TV 2 Play’s scale as a key part of the proposal, saying the streaming platform was already present in 2.1 million of Norway’s 2.7 million households and had been the country’s largest streaming service by daily viewing time over the past two years. He said: “TV 2 Play has already become a common property. 2.1 out of 2.7 million households in Norway now have access to our streaming service, and in terms of daily viewing time, we have been the largest in Norway for the past two years. The combination of TV 2’s position as a public broadcaster, this unique distribution and high daily usage, makes the platform the ideal destination for Norwegian football.” The two companies said they would provide further details once discussions and negotiations with the rights holders have progressed.

Once a corporate trademark, the half-zip sweater is now fashion’s hottest look. Want to avoid cosplaying Rishi Sunak when you wear one? Our menswear expert reveals all• Men’s spring wardrobe updates for under £100You’ve probably noticed more quarter-zips around. This time, it’s not the City boys to blame. Rather, it’s that the fashion industry’s attitude has shifted. Once dismissed (not least by GQ, who named it “a joyless jumper for the joyless grind”), the style has been reclaimed by the very people who deemed it uncool – I even wore a Vivienne Westwood design to attend London fashion week. In menswear circles, the rise has been slow and steady. IYKYK labels such as Mfpen and Amiri introduced them into their autumn/winter 2025 collections, before luxury houses Dior and Louis Vuitton followed suit for spring/summer 26. A few A-list celebs have been spotted wearing them (including People magazine’s sexiest man alive for 2025, Jonathan Bailey). The popularity is measurable, too – in the latest Lyst Index (a quarterly report of the world’s most coveted items in fashion), Polo Ralph Lauren’s cable-knit quarter-zip was named the top menswear buy. Continue reading...

We are paying more for a PlayStation so that idiots can use ChatGPT to mislead people on dating apps – something is rotten in the state of gaming• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereWhen the PlayStation 5 launched almost five and a half years ago, it was listed at £449 in the UK. If you were to buy one at the recommended retail price today, it would be £569.99, or £789.99 for the updated Pro model. Sony has just raised the price of its console by another £90, the latest in a series of hikes. This is unprecedented: consoles have always decreased in price over time (until they become retro collectibles – the other day, I saw someone asking £200 for a SNES on Vinted). So, what’s going on?Unfortunately, this is another case of artificial intelligence ruining things for everyone. AI data centres need lots and lots and lots of computing power to be able to present you with lies whenever you Google anything, and this has pushed up demand and pricing for RAM and storage. This isn’t the only reason prices are rising – the wars in Ukraine and Iran have caused global economic disruption, and rampant inflation has eaten into many companies’ bottom line. But AI is the cause that’s easiest to get angry about, because it doesn’t need to be this way. Continue reading...

‘I was on a scrubby bit of land with Wu-Tang Clan when Method Man said, “Let me show you a trick.” And he put his cap strap over his eye, pulled it back and made the face’I got into photography when I was about 15. My mate’s grandad died and he left behind a Praktica camera that we played with. I quickly caught the bug. In 1994, during my second year of university, I was a huge fan of Wu-Tang Clan and one day, I heard that they were going to their record label office in Putney, London. So I went along, too. I saw a coach outside and I could soon hear them, arguing and being rabble-rousers. As soon as I came around the corner, I started photographing them on the street. They were giving me such energy but what really made it come together was the fact that Popa Wu was travelling with them. He was older and something of a mentor to them. It was one of those moments when I realised that if you don’t dare, you don’t win – so I asked him if I could get on the coach and travel with them and shoot them. And he let me.This was Wu-Tang Clan’s first time out of the US. They were these wild, urban kids from New York who had a genius talent for storytelling. On the coach, they were listening to some really deep soul music – Stax Records stuff. It was the only mixtape they could all agree on. It was way beyond the sort of soul I knew. That music has always stayed with me. Continue reading...

The Lebanese singer’s patriotic song has returned repeatedly since 1976 to inspire hope amid catastrophe. But as it resurges during the US-Israeli war, some Lebanese are chafing against its optimism and nostalgiaWhen Leila Milki first heard Fairuz’s Bahebak Ya Lebnan, she experienced it as the song of Lebanese unity and resilience. Milki, a Lebanese-American singer-songwriter and pianist based in Los Angeles, has partly built her career on covering the catalogue of Fairuz, the 91-year-old Lebanese singer who has become a rare generation-uniting public figure in the small Mediterranean country. “I knew that, in terms of my parents’ generation and even my grandparents’ generation, the song was sort of this really cathartic, hopeful message of unity,” says Milki.The old adage is that Lebanon and its people remain resilient in the face of tragedy, able to rebuild and be born again into a stronger, more stable nation. That was the message Fairuz conveyed with Bahebak Ya Lebnan, a song released 50 years ago that has since become the country’s de facto national anthem. “I love you Lebanon, my homeland, I love you / Your north, your south, your plains / I absolutely adore,” Fairuz sings in Arabic in the opening lines. When she released the song in 1976, it came against the backdrop of the early stages of a 15-year civil war, which resulted in the deaths of roughly 150,000 people, the mass exodus of nearly 1 million people and foreign occupation by Syria and Israel. Continue reading...

Bespectacled young batter shone on England duty in Australia and is primed to make a splash in Division OneThe daffodils were in suitable bloom in Cardiff, swathes of them, creeping from under the trees in Bute Park, yolky heads bobbing in the spring sunshine. A few hundred metres up the road, Glamorgan’s players were gathering at Sophia Gardens before their biggest season in years, back in Division One of the County Championship for the first time since 2005.Their campaign last year was a slow burner but blossomed, a close-knit side playing confidently. Alongside a thousand runs each from Colin Ingram and Kiran Carlson were eye-catching performances from two talented then 21-year-olds, Ben Kellaway and Asa Tribe, who went on to be picked for the Lions tours in the winter. In their shellacking by Australia A in the unofficial Test, Tribe hit an unbeaten 129, which was enough to get him a namecheck from the England managing director, Rob Key, in pre-season media musings – the only non-capped player to be mentioned. Continue reading...

Kemi Badenoch claims increased UK oil and gas production would cut bills by £200, but critics say plan won’t workOil prices hit $100 a barrel soon after the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran, and though prices have wobbled since, ongoing supply issues from the partial closure of the strait of Hormuz mean they could leap higher, to $150 a barrel or more, by some estimates.The impacts could be severe – not just increases in the price of petrol, and oil for home heating, but also in the cost of gas, with knock-on inflationary pressures on food, consumer goods and industrial components. Continue reading...

AgileTV has entered the DACH market through a new deployment with Austrian operator LIWEST, which has launched its next generation IPTV platform. The new service combines traditional linear television with streaming and app-based entertainment, giving LIWEST customers access to a more personalised and flexible viewing experience through a single interface. AgileTV said the platform includes super-aggregation capabilities, an open content system for third-party integrations and regionalisation tools that allow content offers to be tailored to local market requirements. Koldo Unanue, CEO of AgileTV, said: “We are strengthening our presence in the DACH market with the ‘next’ IPTV platform launch alongside with our partner LIWEST. It proofs the competitiveness and scalability of the AgileTV operating model and allows us to continue to grow and bring high-quality TV experiences to new audiences around the globe.” LIWEST added the launch represents a further step in the development of its television infrastructure, alongside its broadband and telephony services. Dr Stefan Gintenreiter, managing director of LIWEST, said: “The collaboration with AgileTV marks an important step in the ongoing development of our television infrastructure. With ‘next’, we are reinforcing our commitment to excellence in television together with AgileTV, and alongside our internet and telephony services.” The TV-as-a-service platform is being made available immediately to new customers, while migration of LIWEST’s existing TV base is scheduled to begin in February 2027. AgileTV said the platform is supported by a secure and highly available infrastructure aligned with data protection standards and powered by certified green energy. The service also supports multi-device access across iOS and Android mobile devices, as well as Android TV, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick and Samsung Smart TVs based on Tizen. The launch marks a further international expansion step for AgileTV as it looks to strengthen its position as a TV technology and services provider for telecom operators.

John Lanchester, Patmeena Sabit and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the commentsI find it hard to read contemporary fiction while I’m in the middle of writing a novel, so I use the time after finishing as an opportunity to catch up. I hugely enjoyed two British novels, Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, about friendship and business, and The New Life by Tom Crewe, about gay life in the 1890s. European fiction: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is a funny novel about going on a road trip with a deranged parent; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is about the horrible life of digital nomads; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk is an unclassifiable, riveting sort-of mystery. Continue reading...

The German composer, born 341 years ago, dominates the classical charts and concert platforms, especially at this time of year. Here’s to his life-giving zombie music!The musical world’s present for Easter is Bach, Bach and more Bach. These next two days alone, there are performances of his St Matthew Passion in every musical city you care to name, from London to Leipzig, Rome to Rotterdam. In the classical charts, from the “official” one to the, er, other official one, and Apple Music’s, one composer dominates more than any other, from Yunchan Lim’s Goldberg Variations to Raphaël Pichon’s St John Passion. Why?Two descriptions of his music have particularly struck me this past week. Bach the zombie and Bach the meat-grinder. The phrases belong to the violinist James Ehnes and the Guardian’s Clive Paget, reviewing Pichon’s new recording. Meat-grinding is how Paget describes the St John Passion’s opening chorus; a fantastic expression of the viscera of human feeling that Bach exposes especially in Pichon’s drama-filled recording. Bach’s composition in this chorus is made of obsessive repetitions in the churning figuration of the strings; there are the wailing agonies of the dissonances in the woodwind lines before the voices of the chorus make their first shocking appearance, not so much singing as screaming their demands to Christ to witness his passion in its “glory” and its “humiliation”. The opening chorus, all eight minutes of it, makes a gigantic cross shape in musical time: the surging, relentless rhythms are the horizontal planes, the harmonies that sear through them are implacable verticalities. And that’s just the opening chorus. This is the darkness of the Passion story. Continue reading...

Live streaming has transformed how we consume content, from corporate communications to sports broadcasting. With 82–85% of sports fans using streaming services, the demand for accessible, multilingual content is higher than ever. However, traditional approaches to live captioning and translation are prohibitively expensive, requiring significant human resources and technical infrastructure. This cost barrier often forces organizations to limit their language offerings, excluding millions of potential viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, non-native speakers, or international audiences. AWS Media Services makes it possible to automatically generate high-quality captions and translations in multiple languages at scale, dramatically reducing costs while expanding global reach. This blog post provides a comprehensive overview of current streaming technology for localization and accessibility. It helps you evaluate live streaming localization technology and choose cost-effective, proven, integrated, deployable, and production-ready solutions. Target audience This post is designed for professionals involved in business decisions, technical evaluation, and implementation of live streaming localization and accessibility projects where multiple language captions, subtitles, and live dubbing are required. If you’re interested in learning about current industry developments in accessible live streaming, this serves as an excellent reference resource. Business benefits If you own content rights or create content, reaching global audiences is increasingly important. Offering multi-language subtitles and dubbed audio significantly expands market reach and unlocks new revenue opportunities. Content creators that provide multilingual options see measurable impact: broader international viewership, increased engagement across diverse demographics, and enhanced brand reputation. By removing language barriers, businesses can monetize content in previously untapped markets and maximize return on content investment. Cost considerations and market expansion Traditional audio transcription, translation, and dubbing services have restricted accessible content because of high costs, leaving many creators unable to reach global audiences. This guide demonstrates how you can use cloud-based services and generative AI to dramatically reduce these barriers to entry. The significantly lower costs enable organizations of all sizes—from independent content creators to large enterprises—to make their live streams accessible across languages and abilities. This transformation in localization technology helps create new opportunities for content producers while improving capital efficiency and delighting viewers worldwide. Architecture overview and prerequisites Before implementing this solution, you should have a basic understanding of live streaming architectures. Build a resilient cross-region live streaming architecture on AWS provides the foundational knowledge you’ll need. For high-value live streaming events, a resilient and redundant architecture is crucial. While the reference architecture demonstrates a comprehensive cross-AWS Region solution with full redundancy, you can adapt it to match your specific needs and budget: Scale down to a single Region Use a single pipeline instead of standard pipelines This guide focuses on adding localization capabilities—including captioning, subtitles, and audio dubbing—as modular components to your streaming architecture. We reference industry standards like CEA-608/708 (the North American closed captioning standard), DVB Subtitle, DVB Teletext, and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocols, providing context for these technical elements throughout the guide. Design considerations To choose the right localization technologies, consider these key aspects: Start with your current live streaming architecture workflow Determine language requirements Assess whether languages are supported by the 608 protocol Evaluate live dubbing needs Define latency requirements Determine if the streaming is for live events or 24×7 broadcast channels These answers help determine the best architecture and services and how to integrate the technology with your current live streaming workflow. The caption, subtitle, and dubbing processes rely heavily on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies, machine learning, and generative AI technologies to transcribe, translate, and generate audio dubbing. These technologies sit at the forefront of innovation, rapidly evolving and continuously improving. An architecture that allows customers to choose the right technology for the right job is important and helps protect your investment. How to choose an architecture to implement localization Choose the right integration point to reduce complexity when integrating localization features into your live streaming workflow. A typical live streaming workflow includes video transportation using AWS Elemental MediaConnect, video transcoding using AWS Elemental MediaLive, video origin service using AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and final distribution to users through a content distribution network (CDN) such as Amazon CloudFront. Following the video processing pipeline, the workflow has the following integration points (shown in Figure 1): Figure 1: Integrations points in the media processing pipeline Integration point 1: Video is sent from the video source to MediaConnect. This step is optional, and you can use an alternative protocol such as RTMP to send video from the source directly into MediaLive. MediaConnect provides secure transport with optional video encryption using the SRT protocol. Integration point 2: This integration point is positioned immediately before video ingestion into MediaLive. MediaLive can convert embedded 608 captions into WebVTT for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). This option is commonly used when the targeted languages are supported by 608, such as English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Italian. MediaLive can also process embedded captions such as DVB Subtitle and DVB Teletext if present. Integration point 3: This phase of integration includes points 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3. At these points, the video has been transcoded and processed, and a main manifest playlist and multiple bitrate video segments are produced, ready for distribution. At this point, you can augment the playlist with additional subtitle and audio dubbing tracks, align the timing with the original video, and insert them into the main manifest or produce an alternative manifest to include the subtitles and audio dubbing tracks. Integration point 4: This is the last integration point, on the client side. This method requires client-side development such as iFrame embedding for browser-based players or application development to integrate SDKs or APIs to retrieve subtitles or audio dubbing tracks from an endpoint other than the original video. Let’s examine each integration point for a detailed analysis of pros and cons. Integration point analysis Integration point 1: Choose this integration point when you already have a caption solution. The live stream starts from an on-premises video camera or a live production feed, goes through the captioning solution before being sent to the cloud for transcoding and distribution. You must provide your own captioning solution when choosing this option. Integration point 2: At this point, the live stream is already in the cloud and needs captions added. The common solution is to embed 608 captions into the live stream before MediaLive transcoding. The captioning service ingests your live stream, transcribes and translates captions, generates audio dubbing, and embeds the captions and dubbed audio into the live stream, then forwards it to MediaLive for processing. The available options are CEA-608 embedding, DVB Subtitle, and DVB Teletext. 608 embedded captions are limited to Latin-based languages such as English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Italian. The total number of caption tracks is limited to CC1, CC2, CC3, and CC4. Embedded DVB subtitles and DVB teletext aren’t readily available, often come with limited language support, and the downstream encoder might also have limited support for DVB subtitle and DVB teletext depending on the use case. The advantage of using embedding is low latency, least interruption to the video processing and distribution pipeline, and can use software as a service (SaaS) based captioning services, or solutions deployed into your virtual private cloud (VPC). Integration point 3: A major integration task here is to append additional subtitle and audio dubbing tracks into the existing main manifest and perform time alignment with the main video. When properly done, the main video playlist has caption or subtitle tracks and audio dubbing tracks natively integrated with the original video and audio. This method avoids downstream changes and provides seamless integration with the origin server, CDN, and client player. The advantage of integration point 3 is that there are no limitations on language support. This solution can use SaaS captioning services and uses HLS WebVTT to integrate subtitles with no limitation on the total number of languages. The disadvantage is the processing latency added by the SaaS service to transcribe, translate, and audio dub, and to align the subtitle and audio dubbing tracks with the original video. Integration point 4: This integration point occurs on the client side. The main video and subtitle and audio dubbing are delivered through separate paths and origins. The timing synchronization occurs at the client side. The advantage is that there are no changes to the original video pipeline. The disadvantage is that it requires changing the video player to include additional code to process subtitles and audio dubbing at the client side. Integration comparison Integration Point 1 2 3 4 Cost High* Low Low Low Use SaaS No Yes Yes Yes Low latency Yes Yes No Depends* Client agnostic Yes Yes Yes No Any language No No Yes Yes High*: On-premises caption solutions require a captioning hardware encoder and are optionally paired with a SaaS solution to provide captioning embedding. They most likely cost more than SaaS-based solutions. Depends*: The latency depends on two factors. First, the transcription and translation processing delay. Different languages have different delay characteristics, so not all languages are delivered the same. For example, for an English-speaking live stream, English captions only need transcription service, but Japanese subtitles will need translation from English to Japanese with additional delay. Secondly, it depends on whether the customer needs to deliver a synchronized multi-language video experience or not. For example, if the customer chooses to deliver each language independently, the delay could vary for each language delivery. Integration architecture recommendation Integration points 2 and 3 are recommended because they allow ease of integration, ease of deployment with minimum integration touch points, and a converged video delivery path for caption, subtitle, and audio dubbing along with the main video. For low latency needs where 608 embedding technology works for your targeted languages, use integration point 2. For situations where DVB Subtitle and DVB Teletext work for your workflow and the transcoder can support your desired workflow, use integration point 2. For multiple language subtitle support where embedded 608 isn’t an option, use integration point 3. Integration point 4 provides a solution when you can’t modify your main video distribution pipeline. This applies when you can’t change your video processing pipeline or lack the development resources to make changes to your application. Integration point 1 depends on the customer’s choice. If you already have an existing captioning solution but need additional subtitle languages not supported by embedded captions, or want to expand caption or subtitle solutions to additional services, we recommend using a SaaS service where the cost is significantly lower compared to hardware-based solutions. Implementation case studies Let’s examine a live captioning and dubbing service from SyncWords to see how it helps integrate localization features into live streaming using AWS Media Services. SyncWords specializes in building the integration pipeline and removes the heavy lifting to enable localization, so you can choose the most suitable services for specific tasks. For example, you can choose cloned voice to provide rich emotion, voice separation, and tone-matching dubbed audio, or Amazon Nova or other generative AI services for subtitle translation. Low latency secure 608 embedding workflow The first option uses 608 embedding to deliver up to four language captions simultaneously while taking advantage of the CC1, CC2, CC3, and CC4 caption channels. This option offers low latency caption insertion. MediaLive converts the embedded captions into WebVTT for HLS live streaming. Figure 2: SyncWords – SRT-based workflow The SRT-based workflow has the following limitations: Limited character set: SRT supports only the basic Latin character set, plus a few extended characters and special symbols Restricted language options: Because of character constraints, SRT supports only English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Dutch Supports up to four simultaneous languages The SRT-based workflow benefits from widespread support in current broadcast and live streaming systems. 608 is widely supported, and the embedded captions can use the SRT protocol for secure transport, enabling flexible transport of live streaming production, contribution, and distribution. DVB Subtitle and DVB Teletext support in SRT workflow SyncWords extended their output subtitle support with DVB Subtitle, DVB Teletext, and DVB TTML options. With DVB Subtitle and DVB Teletext, customers can use MediaLive to process DVB Subtitle for pass-through or burn-in applications, and use DVB Teletext to convert to WebVTT for OTT streaming. Late binding localization workflow As demand grows for localized live streaming in more languages, another option for integrating subtitles is to add subtitle tracks after transcoding. For example, in HTTP live streaming, the encoder continuously writes the manifest file and media segments. The top manifest file updates only after at least 2–3 segments to ensure smooth playback and buffering on the client side. Here you can augment the playlist with multiple language subtitle tracks. Binding subtitles with transcoded media assets produces an integrated HLS streaming media asset. Compared to the SRT-based workflow, this is a late binding” mechanism to combine subtitles and transcoded media assets after transcoding. The late binding workflow provides these benefits: Supports many languages with no real limitation on the total number of subtitle languages The combined media assets can be ingested by any standard origin service, such as MediaPackage Makes the distribution CDN-agnostic and player-safe Requires no changes on CDN and player to support multiple language subtitles Figure 3: Late binding caption insertion workflow We discussed two different implementation methods to enable live streaming localization and accessibility; these are production-ready, deployable solutions that many AWS customers deploy today. As the industry and technology evolve, there will be improvements to further simplify and streamline this workflow. Conclusion In this guide, we’ve presented comprehensive insights into how you can implement live streaming localization and accessibility using AWS Media Services and partner services. You learned about multiple integration approaches, with Integration Points 2 and 3 emerging as the recommended solutions for most use cases. And the importance of SaaS-based solutions and currently deployable solutions using current caption and subtitle standards such as CEA-608, DVB Subtitle, DVB Teletext, and WebVTT. While current solutions face some limitations, particularly with 608 protocol language support, emerging technologies and AI advancements promise to simplify implementation and expand language support capabilities. Use this guide as a resource for organizations seeking to expand their global reach through localized streaming content for syndication, free-to-air, direct publishing, and multilingual live OTT streaming.

Experts say brutal March heat has left critical snowpack at record-low levels – and key basins in uncharted territorySnow surveys taking place across the American west this week are offering a grim prognosis, after a historically warm winter and searing March temperatures left the critical snowpack at record-low levels across the region.Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will probably be too little too late. Continue reading...

Nevermind the trends, want to know how to dress for actual spring weather? Then read onIt all came to a head, as matters of getting dressed so often do, over black tights. I had wanted to wear my silver skirt, you see. It was a rare blue-sky day and the sunshine was making me crave reflective surfaces to maximise the light. Anyway, you know how it is when you just get a yen to wear something. So I pulled out said silver skirt and then realised I didn’t want to wear the black opaque tights I wear with it in winter, but it wasn’t anywhere near warm enough to wear it with bare legs as I do in summer. I was completely stumped. And it made me realise: I need a refresher course in what to wear at this time of year. Spring has sprung, but I have forgotten how to hop to it.So here we have it: your pocket primer on how to dress for spring. I’m talking about the spring that happens every year, an actual real-world meteorological phenomenon, not about the fashion trends of this particular moment. The lengthening days, daylight commuting, the juicy greens and yellows of the landscape, the maverick unpredictability of rain. Whether zebra stripes are the new leopard does not concern us today. We don’t need fashion to provide the newness when newness is in abundance in the world. So we can flick back through the pages to remind ourselves of spring’s fashion classics. Continue reading...

This report illustrates and compares the royalty calculations of two patent licensing programs, Access Advance’s Video Distribution Patent (VDP) Pool and Avanci Video, using eight streaming service templates modeled after well-known platforms. The purpose is to help streaming services understand how the two programs calculate royalties and compare potential royalty costs side by side. I believe that the best way to accomplish this is to use real-life examples of different types and sizes of streaming companies to illustrate royalty calculations using the metrics specified by the two programs. The study was sponsored by Access Advance. After agreeing on the companies to include, I (Jan Ozer) independently researched all inputs used in the computations and performed all calculations myself. Assumptions and procedures were selected to reflect typical commercial usage, not to favor either program. These illustrative calculations are for informational purposes only. They should not be relied on by anyone to determine their royalty costs under each program. Contact each program directly to verify current terms. Price is a critical input in any licensing decision, but it is not the only one. Other factors merit consideration, including the patents held by each program and the scope of protection a license provides. What the Numbers Show I computed and presented royalties two ways for each program: with current adjustments and discounts applied, and as a full royalty without promotional incentives, to reflect both present and potential future exposure. With adjustments and discounts applied, Avanci’s royalties range from 1.9× higher than Access Advance (Paramount+) to 30.3× higher (Meta). In the full royalty computation, the range runs from 6.5× (Paramount+) to 31.9× (Meta). The table below shows the results across all eight service templates. Figure 1. Royalty summary. Click to view at full resolution. As is detailed in the report, Avanci’s higher royalties are attributable to multiple factors: Avanci’s royalty base includes advertising, which Access Advance excludes. Avanci’s list rates are higher than Access Advance’s effective rates Avanci’s revenue‑based rates are flat; Access Advance’s are tiered. In our modeling, at the highest Access Advance revenue tier, the modeled effective rate is under 0.17%, while Avanci’s lowest published rate is 1.6%, roughly 9.5x higher. As of March 2026, Avanci had not announced a fee cap for its video program. How I Computed the Royalties Each template uses three categories of inputs: universal inputs (subscribers, users, subscription revenue), Access Advance-specific parameters, and Avanci-specific parameters. The full report contains enough detail for readers to independently verify every royalty figure. Note that there is substantial overlap in patent ownership between the two programs, which this report did not explore or attempt to quantify. All information reflects program terms as of March 2026. These illustrative calculations are for informational purposes only. They should not be relied on by anyone to determine their royalty costs under each program. Contact each program directly to verify current terms. Download the full report: Access-Advance-Royalty-Report_Final_1.1.pdf (24 downloads ) Questions about the royalty calculations: jan.ozer@streaminglearningcenter.com (from the report: I won’t take questions about the service inputs and estimates; they are estimates to serve as examples. If you have questions about the royalty calculations themselves, I’ll respond if you share a Google Sheet with a reasonable model of how you computed royalties and how your numbers differ. I don’t open Excel or other files from sources I don’t know.) The post Access Advance vs. Avanci Video: How the Streaming Programs Calculate Royalties first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

This hearty, slow-cooked soup is a celebration of all things Welsh, and its versatility makes it a year-round favouriteCawl is Wales’ gift to the world of thrifty, slow-cooked broths and, like all great peasant dishes, it’s seasonal, versatile and immensely practical. A few years ago, Food & Drink Wales invited me to create two food sustainability toolkits, one for hospitality and one for the public, with both celebrating Welsh produce and recipes. This led me to explore Wales’ national dishes and discover cawl (or lobscows, the northern Welsh name for the dish) properly for the first time. Inspired by Welsh culinary legends Dudley Newbery and Tomos Parry’s recipes, it’s the perfect way to turn lamb leftovers, or even just a bone, into a hearty meal. Continue reading...

The more than 100 bat species living in the Mozambican reserve’s labyrinth of caves play a key role in maintaining a fragile ecosysytem that benefits wildlife and people• Words and photographs by Kang-Chun ChengAfter wriggling gingerly into a damp, cool cave, Raúl da Silva Armando Chomela waits for his eyes to adjust. Donning latex gloves, a helmet fitted with a headlamp, and a mask to protect his lungs from fine particles and bacteria, the molecular biologist from the Mozambican port city of Beira gazes into the shadowy recesses for signs of bats.He has spent two years in these claustrophobic spaces studying the winged mammals and their excrement. “Guano is far more than just bat droppings,” he says. “If I had to describe it in one word, I’d say ‘ecosystem’.” Continue reading...

While informative, the book struggles to identify what strategies can change racist systems held hostage by the political right and centre• Don’t get The Long Wave delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereIt’s not straightforward, trying to assess a book written by someone whose stature and reputation loom large over the text. I have not read any books by the American academic and anti-racist writer Ibram X Kendi before, but I had absorbed his ideas and interventions into American racial discourse over the years, as well as the controversies. And so I was curious about his latest – and his first since the “anti-woke” backlash.I tried reading it as a stand-alone text, rather than another chapter in Kendi’s history. Every book deserves to be judged on its own terms. And Chain of Ideas is a huge piece of research that clearly builds on the many years Kendi has spent writing on racism and his experience as a public figure. But does it rise to the occasion? I attempt to answer this below. Continue reading...

Only half of the 26 places appear nailed-on and some players benefited from missing the Uruguay and Japan gamesJordan Pickford remains the undisputed No 1. Harry Kane is irreplaceable up front. Declan Rice and Elliot Anderson look certain to start in midfield, nobody has emerged as a realistic challenger to Bukayo Saka on the right and Jude Bellingham’s hopes of grabbing the No 10 spot were done a world of good by other challengers failing to impress against Japan and Uruguay. Continue reading...

Group cuts costs as shares plunge while it grapples with impact of Iran war on property market Business live – latest updatesOne of Britain’s biggest housebuilders has said it will stop buying new land and hiring new staff, as it grapples with the impact of the Iran war on the property market.The London-focused housebuilder Berkeley said it would cut costs as it warned that “geopolitical volatility” and reduced potential for interest rate cuts could weigh on the business. Continue reading...

YouTube is now used weekly by nearly one in two people in France, according to new data from Arcom, underlining its growing role in the French media landscape. The regulator’s Audio-Video Trends 2026 study found that 48% of the population access YouTube at least once a week, rising to 69% among 15–24-year-olds and 64% among 25–34s. This makes YouTube the second most visited platform in France, behind Facebook but ahead of Instagram. Arcom said the platform’s rise reflects a broader shift in viewing habits, with increasing convergence between online video and traditional television. Juliette Théry, Arcom board member, said: “There is a form of convergence in users’ perceptions between YouTube and television channels, even though the economic and legal models are completely different.” Smartphones remain the dominant access point, used by 89% of viewers, but television sets are gaining importance, with two-thirds of users now watching YouTube on the big screen. Around 27% of users said they automatically open YouTube when switching on their TV, rising to 36% among younger audiences. This shift is also changing viewing patterns. While short-form content remains near universal, longer formats are growing strongly, with 77% of users watching content over 30 minutes, increasing to 85% when viewed on television screens. Despite growing competition, Arcom said traditional broadcasters retain a strong position. Free-to-air television remains the most widely consumed video service, particularly for news and sport, while subscription video-on-demand services continue to dominate fiction. At the same time, boundaries between platforms are increasingly blurred. Around half of users watch television-originated content on YouTube, while creators and TV personalities are appearing across both environments. The study also highlights the growing importance of distribution platforms and interfaces. Operator set-top boxes remain the main gateway to television, but smart TVs are gaining ground, increasingly directing viewers towards streaming platforms. Arcom warned that this shift raises questions around regulation and prominence, particularly as global technology and device manufacturers play a greater role in controlling access to content. In audio, the report found radio remains a mass medium, reaching nearly 38 million daily listeners, but is undergoing a digital transition as listening shifts towards smartphones and online platforms. Overall, Arcom said the market is undergoing a gradual “recomposition” rather than a sudden disruption, with traditional media continuing to play a central role alongside rapidly growing digital platforms.

The Iran war will hit food prices, fuel costs and interest rates. But with a few smart moves, we could could turn this crisis to our advantageEnergy shocks don’t just raise our energy bills – they can be turning points in how our economy runs. The UK responded to the energy crises of the 1970s by reshaping its energy system and doubling down on extracting its own fossil fuels from the North Sea. Investment poured in and the UK became a net energy exporter. When energy security is on the line, serious countries act at scale. Today, as the war in Iran continues, scraping the North Sea barrel for the last of its planet-heating fuel is no longer a solution. If the UK is to weather the shocks to come, we need to build a clean energy system for the next generation.A supply deficit of 10m oil barrels a day and a fifth of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade is already having significant effects around the world. The UK is painfully exposed to international gas prices. The public expect inflation to soar, the market is forecasting a rise in interest rates over the next year, and costs on some government borrowing have risen to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. This is what a fossil-fuel shock looks like for an import-dependent country, and it will not stop at energy. UK food inflation is already high, reaching 3.3% in February, and we are likely to see much higher food prices in as little as three months.Chaitanya Kumar is head of economic and environmental policy at the New Economics Foundation Continue reading...

Meg O’Neill’s memo comes as company tries to rebuild strategy amid oil shock of Iran war and after failed green pivotBusiness live – latest updatesThe new boss of BP has told staff that the oil company is operating in a world of “significant complexity” as it attempts to rebuild its strategy under a fresh leadership team.In her first message to staff as BP’s chief executive, Meg O’Neill promised a “clear direction and consistency” after a tumultuous period for the 117-year-old fossil fuel company, in which it has pivoted away from a failing green strategy. Continue reading...

We would like to hear about your experiences of caring for elderly parents and how this has affected your lifeIn a recent Guardian opinion piece, Lucinda Holdforth described her experience of caring for her late mother, and her complicated feelings after she died.It is a common human theme that good parents can never really rest for worrying about their children. But it seems to me that a reciprocal burden exists for good children. We are never entirely free from the psychic weight of our parents’ needs, love and ambitions for us in our youth, and increasingly we now find ourselves taking on guardian-style responsibilities for them during their prolonged old age.I finally understood the accumulated heaviness of the burden I had carried about a year after my mother died. At 59, I was at last an orphan, which meant I could turn off my phone each night. I woke up one day with the most complete feeling of creative liberty and personhood I’d ever experienced. That feeling has not left me since. Continue reading...

UKTV has expanded the remit of Jonathan Newman, who has formally taken on the role of chief commercial officer, alongside his wider responsibilities within BBC Studios. Newman, previously general manager, commercial at UKTV and BBC Studios UK/Ireland, will now oversee the full scope of UKTV’s commercial activity, including advertising, distribution, content funding and UKTV Ventures. He will also continue to play a role across BBC Studios portfolios, including BBC SER distribution in Ireland, and lead UK routes-to-market strategy in partnership with BBC Studios and BBC Public Service. The move comes as UKTV strengthens its commercial structure, following Newman’s involvement in securing a recent agreement with Channel 4 to distribute UKTV’s U service on Channel 4 Streaming. As part of the changes, UKTV has appointed David Swetman to the newly created role of director of content partnerships and sales for the UK and Ireland. Swetman will join on April 7, reporting to Newman, and will lead a newly structured Content Partnerships & Sales team. He joins from All3Media International, where he has served as SVP of content and commercial strategy, overseeing scripted pipeline development and negotiations with production companies. In his new role, Swetman will be responsible for UKTV’s content funding strategy and for aligning commercial and editorial priorities across UKTV and BBC Studios. He will also lead key negotiations, shape content investment decisions and develop strategic partnerships across the market. Jonathan Newman said: “I’m delighted to step into the role of Chief Commercial Officer at a time when UKTV and BBC Studios are deepening their commercial collaboration and sharpening their focus on growth. David’s appointment is a key part of that ambition. His expertise across content investment, funding and distribution will be invaluable as we expand our partnerships and unlock new commercial opportunities.” David Swetman added: “I’m thrilled to be joining UKTV and BBC Studios at such a pivotal time. The strength of the portfolio, combined with the opportunity to bring together content investment, partnerships and routes to market, creates a compelling platform for growth. I’m looking forward to working with Jonathan and the team to build on this momentum.” Sam Tewungwa, CEO of UKTV, said: “Jonathan’s appointment as Chief Commercial Officer reflects both his strong track record and the critical role commercial strategy will play in UKTV’s next phase of growth. We’re equally pleased to welcome David, whose deep expertise in content strategy and partnerships will further strengthen our capabilities as we continue to invest in content and expand our reach.” The appointments come as UKTV and BBC Studios look to accelerate commercial growth and deepen collaboration in an increasingly competitive UK content market.

The NEM Dubrovnik TV market has announced its first lineup of keynote speakers and panellists ahead of its 2026 event, which will take place from June 8-11 in Croatia. The annual gathering, widely regarded as the leading TV market for Central and Eastern Europe, is expected to be its largest to date, with organisers forecasting participation from more than 300 companies across broadcasting, streaming, production and distribution. Among the confirmed speakers are Sam Barnett, Maria Rua Aguete, Avi Armoza and Stella Litou, alongside executives from Hearst Networks, Viaplay Group and the European Audiovisual Observatory. Organisers said the event will once again serve as a key meeting point for decision-makers across the region, combining deal-making with a programme of panels, keynotes and presentations focused on industry trends and business strategy. Sam Barnett, CEO of Central European Media Enterprises, said: “The pressures on media businesses in Central and Eastern Europe are real: costs are rising, audiences have more choices than ever, and the global platforms aren’t standing still. But the opportunities are real too… I’m glad to be part of NEM, a place where the people who actually run the industry come together, and that makes it one of the most useful conversations of the year.” Organisers said this year’s event will be around 50% larger than the 2025 edition, reinforcing its role as a key B2B marketplace for the CEE television industry.

Canal+ has appointed Anne-Laure Tingry as chief data and AI officer, as the group steps up its focus on artificial intelligence across its international operations. Tingry will report to Maxime Saada, chairman of the management board and CEO of Canal+, and will join the company’s executive committee. She will be responsible for leading the group’s data and AI strategy across all markets and overseeing the rollout of related projects. Canal+ said the appointment reflects its growing emphasis on artificial intelligence as part of its broader media and entertainment strategy. Tingry brings 25 years of experience spanning digital, data, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, marketing and strategy in both B2C and B2B markets. A graduate of HEC Paris and Paris-Dauphine, she began her career at France Télécom/Orange in 2002, where she held a series of marketing and sales roles before becoming managing director of Orange Store. She later joined the executive committee of Orange France, serving as digital and omnichannel director and director of the data and AI transformation programme. Since July 2024, she has been executive director of the Smart Mobility Services business line at Orange Business. Tingry has also served as an independent member of the supervisory board of Elis since 2017.

Company chaired by Trump ally Larry Ellison seeks to reassure investors that bet on AI infrastructure will pay offOracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave. Continue reading...

Roku has expanded its low-cost ad-free streaming service Howdy with the launch of a dedicated mobile app in the United States for iOS and Android devices. The app gives subscribers on-the-go access to Howdy’s catalogue of films and TV programming, extending the service beyond the Roku platform as the company looks to broaden its subscription business. Roku said Howdy is priced at $2.99 (€2.76) per month, which it described as the lowest price point for an ad-free streaming service in the market. The service offers more than 10,000 hours of programming, including titles from FilmRise, Lionsgate, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Discovery, as well as selected Roku Originals. Among the titles highlighted for April are Edge of Tomorrow, Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family and When Harry Met Sally. Gil Fuchsberg, President of Subscriptions, Partnerships and Corporate Development at Roku, said: “At a time when most things are getting more expensive, Howdy is designed to make premium, ad-free streaming more affordable and accessible for all viewers. Launching the Howdy mobile app on iOS and Android enables us to continue growing the service beyond the Roku platform, bringing Howdy’s unique value and quality entertainment to even more viewers.” The mobile launch follows Howdy’s recent expansion onto Prime Video in the United States, where it is offered as an add-on subscription. Roku said the move forms part of its wider strategy to grow platform revenues and scale both first-party and third-party subscription services. Howdy was launched in August 2025. Alongside the service, Roku also operates The Roku Channel and Frndly TV as part of its broader streaming portfolio.

France 24 has launched a new application for BMW Group vehicles in Europe and the United States, extending the news channel’s distribution into connected cars through the TiVo infotainment platform from Xperi. Developed by Dotscreen, the app is now available in most BMW Group vehicles, including BMW and Mini models fitted with the platform. The move forms part of France 24’s wider innovation strategy, aimed at increasing its presence on connected devices and reaching audiences on the move. The application has been designed specifically for in-car use, with a touchscreen interface giving users access to the France 24 live stream, latest video bulletins and on-demand news content. The service is available in the channel’s four broadcast languages – French, English, Arabic and Spanish – with full support for Arabic right-to-left display. The home screen offers a live window feed, recent bulletins and a simplified menu structure covering Home, Most Watched and Settings. France 24 said the interface had been adapted for a safe and intuitive automotive environment. The partnership with Dotscreen and Xperi underlines the growing convergence between media services and connected mobility, as broadcasters seek new distribution opportunities beyond the home. Serge Schick, Director of International Development and Own Resources and member of the executive committee of France Médias Monde, said: “With this launch, France 24 continues its international public service mission: to inform everywhere, at all times. Integrating our channel into the BMW/Mini ecosystem via Xperi technology strengthens our presence in connected mobility.” Stanislas Leridon, president of Dotscreen, added: “We are proud to support France 24 in this innovation that combines mobility, performance, and a tailored user interface. This application perfectly illustrates our expertise in creating multiscreen experiences adapted to each environment — particularly mobility — and foreshadows new forms of audiovisual consumption inside the autonomous vehicle.”

Within the lunar dirt is a type of helium so rare on Earth that a palm-sized container is estimated to be worth millionsIn the silent vacuum of space, five autonomous robots churn through the lunar surface, digging up a loose layer of rock and dust and leaving rows of uniform tracks in their wake.Stopping only to recharge at a central solar power station, the car-sized machines process the lunar dirt internally to extract a type of helium so rare on Earth that a palm-sized container is estimated to be worth millions. Once processed, the precious resource is loaded into a launcher and ejected back to Earth. Continue reading...

From an interactive session of Sex With Friends to improvised Robot Karaoke, the Friday Live celebration of play and performance amid the museum’s venerable halls was a reminder of gaming’s cultural cloutIn the grand entrance of the Victoria & Albert Museum, beneath a looming dome with ancient statues visible through nearby arches, a programmer/DJ is busy live-coding a glitchy electronic music set. Either side of her, large LED displays show streams of code and strobing pixellated images as the bass pounds. She’s part of a group named London Live Coding, an experimental collective that makes music by writing and manipulating audio programs. It is loud, disorientating and brilliant, and I can’t help wondering what Queen Victoria and her husband would have made of it.The set is part of the museum’s long-running Friday Late evening series, a collaboration with the London Games Festival. It showcased a range of independent video games and immersive interactive experiences, focusing on the link between play and performance. Visitors were given a map and left to wander the halls, corridors and galleries looking for installations. You could play the Bafta-winning comedy game Thank Goodness You’re Here! on a giant screen beneath a 13th-century spiral staircase. You could wander down the darkened Prince Consort’s gallery and find groups of giggling pals playing the hilarious erotic physics puzzler Sex With Friends, in which ragdoll-like characters have to be guided into (consensual) sexual encounters – much to the amusement of spectators. Continue reading...

Diamonds might not be forever in a film centred around a massive, ticking bomb on a building site, which is equal parts violent and sillyThere are some lively if borderline ridiculous shenanigans in this London heist thriller from screenwriter Ben Hopkins and director David Mackenzie, brazening out its innate silliness with chutzpah, heavily researched police and army lingo and athletic plot contortions. It’s a violent affair of double-cross and triple-cross that ups its narrative game in the final act for the massive reveal: a head-spinning story of diamonds, some fake … yet also … some real. And it also deploys the classic thriller moment, popularised by TV’s The Night Manager: the three-second bank transfer of millions of illicit dollars, which you can tensely monitor on your smartphone in real time. Oh my God, will the money go through OK? (You’ll need solid wifi or 5G.)Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Major Will Tranter, a bomb disposal officer called in when what looks like a gigantic unexploded second world war device is discovered in a London building site, making a worrying ticking noise. The police are under the direction of the Met’s chief superintendent; this is a dull role with none of the juiciness of the guys’ parts, played deadpan by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. She shuts off the electricity in the whole area for fear of the bomb igniting power cables, then evacuates and cordons off the entire zone – not realising a crew of bank robbers is in there, led by Theo James and Sam Worthington, who are now able to work without fear of being discovered by some pesky member of the public as they tunnel through a wall into a safe-deposit vault from a neighbouring basement. Continue reading...

Almost 30 years after scientists mapped the nerves in the penis, they’ve done the same for the clitoris. At least men have stopped denying it exists There’s no excuse for being icliterate any more. It was a long time coming, but, almost 30 years after the web of nerves inside the penis was charted, we’ve finally got a similar 3D map of the nerves within the glans of the clitoris. You can’t see all of the nerve branches of the clitoris via dissection or clinical imaging methods, which is why this sort of visualisation is so important.Ju Young Lee, one of the researchers behind the scan, has said she’s amazed it has taken so long for a project like this to materialise. But the clitoris has long been understudied and misunderstood. The Malleus Maleficarum, a 1486 guide to identifying witches, even described it as the “devil’s teat” and noted that if you found one, it would prove a woman was a witch. (The good news: not many men could find one. The bad news: you may just have discovered you’re a witch.)The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live Continue reading...

One of the fastest-growing fitness trends is also one of the most divisive. To its fans, it promises a stronger, healthier body; to its critics, it’s another way to make women feel insecure. Time to sort fact from fictionI have noticed something new in my London neighbourhood. Amid the sea of nail salons, vape shops and purveyors of fried chicken, sleek, opaque-fronted premises are popping up everywhere. There are several within 15 minutes of my home.At weekends, you can spot clusters of devotees heading to these mysterious, vaguely aspirational temples of self-care, AKA reformer pilates studios. Many of these devotees conform to an aesthetic popularised on TikTok via hashtags such as #pilatesprincess. There is definitely a uniform: pink athleisure, Rhode phone cases and oversized pastel-coloured Stanley tumblers, jokingly referenced on Instagram as “emotional support” bottles. It is a trend that prompted New York magazine to run an article under the headline “Why Pilates Keeps Pissing People Off”: the workout has become inseparable from a very strict idea of womanhood. Continue reading...

From action thrillers to sci-fi flicks, a deluge of recent releases are riddled with self-satisfied smarmThe new Hulu movie Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice has been marketed as a genre-mashing wild ride, with plenty of South by Southwest festival reactions and even genuine full reviews delighting in its supposed mixture of sci-fi, action, romance and buddy comedy. That’s a hell of a lot of genres. While watching it, I found myself wondering if the number of elements in play is supposed to distract from how its comedy has three deadening and similar modes. One involves characters being unexpectedly familiar with seemingly incongruous elements of pop culture: it opens with a scientist tinkering with his time-travel machine while singing along to Why Should I Worry?, a niche Billy Joel song from the old Disney cartoon Oliver & Company; later, there’s a long conversation about a bunch of criminal types’ deep familiarity with the TV show Gilmore Girls.If that doesn’t sound funny enough, writer-director BenDavid Grabinski finds the flip side equally hilarious: people not knowing things. Gags include a guy who hasn’t heard of Winnie-the-Pooh, a guy who doesn’t know the proper name of chloroform, and a guy who doesn’t know what the word “comeuppance” means. These are all different guys. The third, even less sophisticated strain of comedy in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, are characters who fuckin’ swear. Talk about fuckin’ comedy! Sometimes their names even swear: one guy is nicknamed, get this, Dumbass Tony! In every detail of the movie, you can feel the heavy hand of the screenwriter, straining for irreverence, desperate to show that he’s made something that’s not like the other, regular screenplays out there. Continue reading...

The former PM has no valid response when progressives raise a voice over war crimes, so he seeks to mute them. But we’ll take no moral lectures from himThe left, claims Tony Blair, has forged an “alliance with Islamists”. He goes further: this is simply the latest mutation of antisemitism. Extraordinary accusations require extraordinary evidence. Yet unlike with his illegal war on Iraq, our former prime minister has not even troubled himself to assemble a dodgy dossier.This latest tirade was published by the Free Press, a woke-bashing, pro-Israel publication founded by journalist Bari Weiss, now accused of pro-Trump censorship in her new role as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The substance of Blair’s charge is what he calls “opposition to Israel”. This has become an increasingly familiar allegation. As the popularity of the Green party of England and Wales surges, its opposition to Israel’s genocide is recast as sectarianism.Owen Jones is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Armani revamps a favourite, Clarins adds a tint to its serum and a new base from Carisa Janes will suit anyone who hates powdersThree very big hitters have new foundations: one risky reformulation of a cult classic; one addition to a wildly popular skincare franchise; and one to launch a new brand from a beauty legend.Let’s start with Armani’s Luminous Silk (£49 for 30ml), loved by many for its buildable, versatile coverage, and perhaps the most worn bridal foundation of all time. While I’m not against a reformulation in principle (technology, regulations and ingredients move on, and that’s all for the better), Armani does seem to have reformulated here for little discernible reason beyond Google Analytics. Continue reading...

From council tax to water, broadband to stamps, the annual round of price rises starts on 1 April … and that’s before any fallout from Iran warUK savers told to act now before Easter Sunday cash Isa deadlineBritons will typically see more than £200 added to their household bills this year as “awful April” price increases kick in.The annual rises are particularly unwelcome as the financial turmoil caused by the Middle East conflict has pushed up mortgage rates, fuel prices and energy bills for rural households. Continue reading...

This debut about female friendship and environmental fragility set after the 2004 tsunami in Thailand is strong on grief, but the storytelling remains unevenThe underlying themes of this debut novel could hardly be more relevant. Marissa is working as a travel writer without leaving her desk, coining gleaming descriptions of untouched beaches for tourists. But as she does so, her mind runs on darker paths. She is living in New York while it braces for Hurricane Sandy, and as the wind rises she remembers being caught up in the horrors of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. She grieves for the beauty of the ocean that she knew then, and the fate of her beloved friend Arielle.Loss, love, environmental fragility, female friendship: I was ready to plunge into the waves of this novel, to swim with its currents of grief and longing. But while I found myself at times drawn in to the narrative, at others I was distanced by Menon’s style, which is deliberately fragmented but also disappointingly uneven. Continue reading...

This isn’t just a retelling of the infamous drug lord’s life. His son shares a traumatic coming-of-age story plagued by chaos and violence – and it is like being in The SopranosYou’d be forgiven for thinking that we didn’t need another TV series about the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s life, and that it’s been milked for all its worth in popular culture. Escobar’s murderous Medellín cartel was most ruthless in the 1980s and 90s – but this century alone, the Colombian druglord and politician’s biography has inspired numerous books, Hollywood films, the Netflix series Narcos, and even the title of Kanye West’s 2016 album Life of Pablo. The new Spanish language series Dear Killer Nannies, however, manages to find a new and unexpected way into the life of an archetypal villain, which focuses very little on the bloodshed that has made his life so ripe for movies and television. In terms of genre, the show – co-created by Escobar’s son Juan Pablo Escobar – is far more coming-of-age than action.Instead of following the usual beats that mark Escobar’s rise, fall and eventual death (during a shootout with Colombian special forces), our way into the story is seven-year-old Juan Pablo, also known as “Juampi”. Juampi is sweet, sensitive and soft around the edges in the way most boys are before being exposed to the ravages of patriarchy. We meet Juampi as his head bobs above the surface of a lake, beaming and soaking up the sun, when a speedboat zooms into frame, headed straight for him, causing him to panic. The boat swerves at the last minute, narrowly avoiding him. Enter: Juampi’s “nannies”. These are associates of his father, who double as childcare while he’s out of the country attending to cartel business. What could possibly go wrong in such an arrangement? Continue reading...

Calls for tougher laws as network stretching from Caribbean to Georgia generates riches for offshore tycoons by appearing to prey on the vulnerableImmaculately groomed and beaming from ear to ear, Andres Markou looks every inch the golden boy of the gambling sector. The youthful boss of MyStake, a fast-growing digital casino, has been pictured shaking hands with the Brazilian football legend Ronaldinho over a lucrative branding partnership.Elsewhere, he can be seen collecting industry awards, or offering “visionary” insights to interviewers. There is only one hurdle blocking Markou’s ascent to the very top of his trade: he does not exist. Continue reading...

Rightwing parties are using parliamentary queries, legal traps and policing to target NGOs and stifle dissent Revealed: Five EU governments found to ‘consistently’ dismantle rule of lawPauline Voss, the deputy editor of Nius, a fast-growing rightwing media outlet whose ambition is to be Germany’s Fox News, believes progressive civil society groups in Germany are engaged in a coordinated campaign to “act against their own population”.That may be why, according to research this year by the progressive pressure group Campact, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) filed 295 parliamentary queries targeting left-leaning NGOs last year – more than twice as many as in 2024. Continue reading...

A new biography puts Baldwin’s sexuality – and the men he loved – front and centreToday, James Baldwin’s legacy seems assured, but this wasn’t always the case. His critical reputation, already on the wane in his lifetime, declined after his death in 1987. On the publication of the Library of America’s Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories a decade later, Michael Anderson, writing in the New York Times, complained of his “intellectual flaccidity”. He also dismissed The Fire Next Time – Baldwin’s searing 1963 essay diptych on the US’s legacy of racial injustice – as an overly emotional “period piece”. If such a verdict was out of touch then, six years after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, it seems, now, pitifully shortsighted.An inflection point in the Baldwin revival arrived in the form of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which juxtaposes footage of modern-day protest and racist police violence with clips of Baldwin’s civil rights-era speech­making. It’s an effective technique, capturing Baldwin’s prescience as well as reasserting his rightful place as a key witness to that bloody era (“witness” was Baldwin’s preferred name for the writer-spokesperson-celebrity mantle he had assumed by the mid-60s; a title that captures something of its moral obligation and frustrating passivity). Continue reading...

With its never-ending street theatre and labyrinthine medina, this timeless city swallows you whole – and reveals new secrets with each visitThe rising sun sets fire to the snow-covered caps of the Atlas mountains. Within moments, the shadowy gorges are gleaming with warm terracotta hues. I turn my back on north Africa’s highest peaks and look north where Marrakech – nicknamed the Red City – rests like a jagged ruby amid the jade swathes of palms and the silvery sheen of olive groves.Swinging 800 metres (2,625ft) above the stony desert in a giant wicker basket, I try to imagine what this scene would have looked like when camel trains trooped this way, loaded with salt, spices and enslaved humans bound for Marrakech’s souks. Continue reading...

Only way to avoid missing a flight because of EES rules: squeeze everything into a cabin bag and skip luggage check-inTravellers to the EU risk missing their flights because bag drop-off times don’t allow for the long queues to get through a new security system.My family of four missed our easyJet flight home from Málaga because, although we followed advice from the airport and arrived three hours before departure, the bag drop-off didn’t open until two hours before. Continue reading...

I had grown up dreading introductions, with the inevitable mangling of my name. Suddenly, in India, we were both getting the respect we deservedI had five names on the day of my Hindu naming ceremony, but my given name was Priti, a name that came to shape me.Like most children with “unconventional” names, I dreaded the first day of each school year. I would squirm in my chair as my new teacher worked their way through the class register, and my stomach would drop as they attempted to say my full name: Priti Ubhayakar. I would be sitting there thinking: “If the first name doesn’t get you, the last name will.” Continue reading...

South Korea will delay the shutdown of coal-fired plants, while the Philippines also plans to boost the output of its coal-burning plantsGovernments across Asia are ramping up their use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, as they try to cover huge energy shortfalls triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran.The move has triggered warnings from climate experts who point to coal’s devastating environmental impact, and say the energy crisis should be a wake up call for governments to invest in renewables, which can offer a more stable supply that is not exposed to price shocks. Continue reading...

A moist bake with a deep carrot and cinnamon flavour, plus a showstopper of crisp meringue, strawberry and chocolate fudge sauceCarrot cake is heaven at any time of year, but especially around Easter. Thanks to a generous glug of olive oil and heaps of finely shredded carrots, this single-layer version stays moist for days. A supple crumb, deep carrot flavour, a halo of cinnamon: it’s as close to divinity as I’ll ever get. For something more unexpected, meanwhile, I love this Neapolitan-inspired pavlova: a crisp, strawberry meringue piled with bittersweet fudge sauce, tangy vanilla cream cheese whip and bright strawberry compote. It’s impressive yet simple, and a raucous pleasure to devour communally with spoons. Continue reading...

The philosophy was embraced by film noir, the French New Wave and modern hitmen questioning life’s purpose. Now dust off your turtlenecks, for Sirāt and a new version of Albert Camus’ The Stranger look set to make ennui on-trend again“For it all to be consummated, to feel less alone, I had only to wish for a big crowd on the day of my execution, and for them to greet me with cries of hate.” The lacerating signoff of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger isn’t a collection of words you’ll see appearing as life advice in some influencer’s Instagram caption any time soon. In the age of vapid social media self-help, François Ozon’s new film adaptation of the existentialist masterpiece rears up like a great monolith. Eighty-four years after the novel was published, that’s rather unexpected; as far as IP goes, L’Étranger (The Stranger) was probably some way behind Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on the film industry’s revival list. Does this mean that existentialism is suddenly back in vogue? Or is the film just a farewell tour for every angsty student’s favourite source of tattoo quotes?It should be said that Ozon’s version is a big improvement on Luchino Visconti’s ill-conceived 1967 stab at Camus’s novel, Lo Straniero (the only other direct adaptation). Filmed in serenely aloof silvery monochrome, the new film is a tasteful but pointed interpretation. Newcomer Benjamin Voisin is superb in the lead as antihero Meursault, who is famously unmoved by his mother’s death and says the sun’s glare is what makes him shoot an Arab. This Meursault is hard-edged in his nonconformism, coming across at times like a sociopathic, colonial-era Patrick Bateman, next to the book’s sleepily acquiescent figure. And Ozon is on politically strident form, recentring the story on colonial power relations from the prologue onwards – which features a chirpy newsreel-style propaganda film about Algiers’ “smooth blend of Occident and Orient”. Continue reading...

From medieval church wall paintings to Liam Gallagher’s viral X post, charity has catalogued more than 6,600 piecesSome of the UK’s smallest public murals are on bollards in Shrewsbury while one of the biggest is on a 1960s 16-storey block of flats in Gosport.Perhaps the funniest though is in Cardiff. Ahead of last summer’s Oasis concerts it was a straightforward copy of Liam Gallagher’s viral post on X declaring: “Because Cardiff is the bollox.” Continue reading...

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: These early spring bloomers are a favourite of mine, a model of nature’s generosity, yet so often ignoredThe drier days of March are always marked by the hum of dutiful grass-cutting on our urban Midlands housing estate, and so I know I will have to look to the gutters and pavements to spot my favourite spring flower. Sure enough, the first one I see is blooming in a crack beside a crumbling wall on the busy main road. I can’t help but let out a joyful shout, leaning down to cradle its fierce lion head in my fingers. Hello, dandelion, how I’ve missed you!Perhaps it’s being a wheelchair user, closer to the ground than most, that has given me a special place in my heart for them, or perhaps it’s because I’ve always felt like a weed myself, inconvenient and growing in the wrong place. Either way, I have long been kindred spirits with keen-eyed toddlers who love to carry them in their fists. I’ve often joked that my bridal bouquet will be dandelions, please. I can honestly think of no finer flower. Why? Because there is no better example of nature’s generosity than a dandelion. Continue reading...

Content creators love the built-in camera; sceptics call them ‘pervert glasses’. Do we really need any more hi-tech wearables, even with a voice assistant that sounds like Judi Dench?Lately, I’ve been hearing Judi Dench’s voice in my head. She tells me tomorrow’s forecast, when to turn right, that there’s been another message in my group chat. Day or night, Dame Judi is eager to assist. When I ask the eight-time Academy Award nominee what I’m looking at, she answers: a residential area, a person in a pub, daffodils. “They are a bright yellow colour and are often associated with spring.”This isn’t a delusion. This is, apparently, progress. I am test-driving Meta’s smartglasses and Dench voices its integrated AI assistant: “Here to chat, answer questions, create images and provide advice and inspiration,” said “Judi” when I selected her over the actors John Cena and Kristen Bell. “Shall we begin?” Continue reading...

The great Shakespearean shares his passion project, there’s a sneak peek of Sam Ryder’s Jesus Christ Superstar and Back to the Future: The Musical hits reverseWhen stages went dark during the Covid crisis, all sorts of impromptu performances popped up online. Patrick Stewart’s pandemic hobby was to recite one Shakespeare sonnet each day on social media – a project inspired by him reading one to his wife over dinner. Now, all 154 from the 1609 quarto are collected on Audible – including Stewart’s favourite, Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds). Almost four hours long, the recording includes his personal commentaries. Available from 7 April. Continue reading...

Recent reporting from an independent third party found that using an IP address as the signal to target in a household-based environment like CTV is only 13-16% accurate. In other words, for every $1 of media investment aimed at a specific audience, about 85 cents is wasted right out of the gate? so is it really worth the premium?

Harold Pinter theatre, LondonYoung stars perfectly encapsulate the uncompromising nature of first love in Robert Icke’s productionHas the conveyor belt from screen-to-stage celebrity turned full circle when a star from a hit TV series steps on to the West End stage in a production that runs contemporaneously with an adaptation of that same TV series? Sadie Sink, better known to Stranger Things fans as Max Mayfield, performed her West End debut while a prequel to the Duffer Brothers’ series played up the road, at the Phoenix theatre.It may seem like the Netflixification of the West End, but Sink began life as a theatre actor – and earned a Tony nomination in the US for John Proctor is the Villain, currently at the Royal Court for its London run. Continue reading...

London ColiseumSuperbly cast, the dancer brings stratospheric levels of charisma to a rather pedestrian show driven by Cyndi Lauper’s songsJohannes Radebe (AKA Jojo from Strictly) is a born performer. He is utterly magnetic on stage, and when he’s dancing you can’t take your eyes off him. The role of the drag queen Lola in Kinky Boots could have been written for Radebe, whose entrances alone are a thing to behold – rising from a trapdoor, say, draped in a floor-length crimson gown and wearing a curly blond wig, part Diana Ross, part Whitney Houston. The musical is based on the 2005 film inspired by the real-life story of a troubled Northampton shoe factory that switches to making thigh-high boots for drag queens. It’s a riot of feathers and sparkle, with designers Robert Jones and Tom Rogers going all out on the costumes.The foil to Lola’s otherworldly glamour is the everyman character Charlie Price (usually played by 2010 X Factor winner Matt Cardle, but due to illness, by understudy Liam Doyle on the night I watch). Charlie is likable, directionless, pulled back home from London by the death of his father to reluctantly take over the ailing family business. A chance encounter with Lola and her friends leads to a mad scheme to save the factory, and a bit of culture clash comedy. Kinky Boots approaches gender and sexuality in a warm, good-humoured way, and lightly explores themes of fathers and sons, expectations and acceptance. Continue reading...

Geely Technology Europe has partnered with 3 Screen Solutions (3SS) to launch a new in‑car entertainment hub for Zeekr vehicles across Europe, introducing a next‑generation media platform built on Android Automotive OS and powered by the 3Ready Automotive solution. The rollout marks a significant step in Zeekr’s transition toward software‑defined vehicles, combining Geely Tech EU’s intelligent software capabilities with 3SS’s entertainment technology expertise. The platform is being deployed across multiple Zeekr models in European markets. The entertainment hub provides access to premium video streaming, live TV, news and other content from more than 15 global providers, integrated directly into the vehicle’s screens. The system is designed for use during charging stops or waiting periods, offering a fast, familiar and seamless media experience for passengers. Running on Android Automotive OS, the platform gives Zeekr full control over interface design, content delivery and performance, while meeting automotive‑grade safety and reliability standards. Through 3SS’s experience management system, Zeekr can also push branded content, service information and product updates directly to vehicles without requiring an over‑the‑air software update. A dedicated Zeekr channel within the entertainment hub enables direct communication with users, providing personalised updates, service insights and responses to customer feedback. The feature is positioned as an extension of Zeekr’s customer‑centric approach, bringing the feedback loop into the vehicle itself and strengthening the brand relationship. The platform also supports context‑aware experiences that adapt to driving scenarios. Built‑in analytics allow the system to learn from usage patterns, personalise recommendations and evolve throughout the vehicle lifecycle. According to Christian Hering, Head of Intelligent Software at Geely Tech EU, the goal was to integrate the vehicle into users’ digital lives. “Together with 3SS, we were able to bring entertainment hub to life efficiently and with the flexibility we need to shape the passenger experience,” he said. “The dedicated Zeekr channel takes this further, allowing us to close the feedback loop visually and directly with our customers.” Felix Walter, Chief Growth Officer, Automotive at 3SS, said the collaboration demonstrates how OEM strategy and entertainment expertise can combine to create a robust, evolving platform: “Geely Tech and Zeekr approached this project with a clear ambition: to make digital entertainment an integrated part of the vehicle experience rather than an add‑on.”

I’ve been tracking CMSD-MQA for a while now. Briefly, Common Media Server Data for Media Quality Assessment (CMSD-MQA) is a draft SVTA standard that defines how video quality scores like VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM, generated at the encoder, can be carried downstream through the delivery chain as standardized metadata, giving packagers, origin shields, and monitoring systems actionable quality information without requiring them to decode or re-analyze the content. A December 2025 online workshop hosted by Alexander Leschinsky of G&L Systemhaus, featuring Will Law of Akamai, Adrian Roe of Norsk/id3as, and Brenton Ough of Touchstream, provided valuable insight into the emerging spec. Leschinsky organized the presentation around a three-part framework: See It, Score It, Switch It. See It means surfacing quality information that already exists at the encoder rather than letting it disappear downstream. Score It means attaching standardized names and numeric values to those quality dimensions. Switch It means carrying those metrics downstream and, eventually, letting upstream components make switching decisions based on them. This article is a summary of those discussions. Introduction By way of background, for years, live streaming operations teams have monitored bitrate as their primary indicator of signal health. It is a convenient proxy, but as Will Law, Chief Architect, Cloud Technology Group at Akamai Technologies, framed the problem, it is often the wrong one. “We constantly use bitrate as a proxy for the visual quality received by the end user,” Law said, “but many times this is wrong.” Figure 1. Factors that contribute to perceived quality. The Problem: Quality Dies at the Encoder As Law explained, perceived visual quality depends on the codec in use, keyframe interval, encoding constraints such as CRF versus QP, the rendered size of the content on the display, and the viewer’s distance from the screen. Bitrate captures none of this. Established full-reference metrics such as PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio), SSIM (Structural Similarity Index), and VMAF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion) capture it, but they require a copy of the source from which the content was encoded. So the only component capable of generating accurate quality scores is the encoder. Figure 2. Workflow diagram from camera through contribution encoders, cloud transcoder, packager, origin, CDN, and player. VMAF/SSIM/PSNR labels appear only at the encoders and cloud transcoder; bitrate is the only metric visible at every other node “The encoder already knows a lot about quality,” Leschinsky explained. “Quality of the actual video content often needs to be rediscovered later down the signal chain, and this is extra decoding and tooling, which is generating costs and time and effort and can go wrong.” Without that information, he noted, operations teams making decisions about switching or quality ratings fall back on whatever metrics are available: network connectivity between the packager and the encoder, ping latency, or simply bitrate. “That does not necessarily tell you something about the quality of the actual signal.” The Standard: org.svta.mqa in CMSD Headers Then Will Law explained the genesis of the spec. The Streaming Video Technology Alliance’s QoE Working Group began work on the Transmission of Media Quality Assessment (MQA) data project in January 2025, building on a patent submitted by Dr. Urvashi Pal at Akamai in October 2023 and granted in December 2025 as U.S. Patent No. 12,499,527. Use of the patent is royalty-free for the media industry. MQA covers both video and audio. The project defines a standardized method for transmitting quality scores using Common Media Server Data (CMSD) response headers, as well as via SEI messages embedded in H.264 and H.265 streams, eRTMP, and DASH Live Ingest. The spec supports three source of metrics, VMAF in standard, mobile, HD, and UHD profiles; PSNR; SSIM; IMAX proprietary scores; Synamedia’s pVMAF; and AWS Elemental’s Media Quality Confidence Score. It also defines two generic fields, MQA-VIDEO and MQA-AUDIO, for vendors using proprietary quality measures who still want downstream components to act on a standardized score. For contribution workflows where CMSD headers are unavailable, quality data can be embedded directly in the H.264 or H.265 bitstream as SEI messages, with keys indicating whether the data applies at the frame level or is aggregated across a GOP. For live ingest where segments are POSTed rather than fetched, the spec uses CMCD (Common Media Client Data) request headers instead, with nearly identical syntax. The same CMCD approach applies when a player reports quality data back to an analytics service. In low-latency configurations, response headers are sent before a segment has finished encoding, so per-GOP quality scores aren’t yet known. “To solve that, we invented a scheme where the data for Segment N can actually be communicated in Segment N plus one,” Law explained. “When you receive segment N plus one, it’ll carry the data for the prior segment.” Encoder and Packager Implementation Next up was Norsk’s Adrian Roe, who discussed Encoder and Packager implementations. Using Norsk Studio, Roe ran a single-source signal through two independent encoders in separate regions, each tagging quality metrics at the frame level via SEI messages, aggregating them at the packager into per-segment CMSD headers, delivering them to a quality-aware origin, and flowing them through a CDN to an end-user player. According to Roe, the architecture reflects standard industry practice: running redundant parallel pipelines so that if any component in one path fails, the other is already running and can take over instantly. That availability story has been well solved for years. Figure 3. The demo topology: a single source fed into two independent encoder/packager chains, with a quality-aware origin selecting between them on every segment. What CMSD-MQA adds is a second dimension: the origin can now compare quality scores arriving from both paths and switch to the better one even when both are technically healthy. Roe described a scenario rain degraded one of the signals. As he explained, without MQA scores, the origin has no way to distinguish between them. With them, it sees the quality score on path A drop and automatically serves from path B instead. Roe’s framing for why the approach matters centered on availability versus quality: “For quite some time, there has been a good story around high availability in a live context by using redundant signals. What CMSD-MQA brings to the table is a similar conversation about how you do that based on quality as well as availability.” Fidelity Is Not Quality The most counterintuitive point in Roe’s presentation was that PSNR and VMAF scores can actively mislead in exactly the scenario where quality monitoring matters most: rain fade on a satellite contribution link. “What you observe with rain fade is that you get pixelated content,” Roe said. “If you simply look at the VMAF scores and the PSNR scores of that content, it’s counterintuitive, but actually you get higher scores, because pixelated content has less information in it. I’ve got the same amount of bandwidth to encode that less information, and so I get a higher fidelity score.” His vocabulary adjustment: PSNR, VMAF, and SSIM are “fidelity scores and not necessarily quality scores.” The solution is filters. Alongside standard reference metrics, Norsk augments each stream with metadata from the transport stream layer (sequence continuity errors), the decoder step (dropped frames, invented or duplicated data), and audio-level analysis (loudness, clipping). Roe demonstrated a segment where MQA-VIDEO scored 54 despite a PSNR of 47 and an SSIM of 100, because the TS error count of 8 pulled the composite score down. “You get both a well-defined standardized decision metric, and you get the granular detail behind it too.” Avoiding Metric Explosion Because a fully instrumented dual-path workflow can easily surface 50 or more individual metrics per segment, the spec mandates the two composite fields: MQA-VIDEO and MQA-AUDIO, both on a 0 to 100 scale, where larger is better and linear aggregation is used. These give a packager or origin from a different vendor a single, interoperable number to act on, regardless of which underlying metrics an encoder vendor chose to compute. “A packager from a different vendor than the encoder will see MQA scores at a frame level; they know exactly how to produce overall quality scores,” Roe said. “They know exactly how to do quality-based decisioning.” Figure 4. Browser network panel showing a live CMSD-Static response header. Callout boxes identify MQA-VIDEO: 54, PSNR: 47, SSIM: 100, and errors: 8 as the constituent values behind the composite score. Consistent Segmentation Quality-based switching introduces a requirement that pure availability-based switching does not: the two redundant streams must be segmented identically. If a switch is made mid-GOP, or if the incoming and outgoing streams are not aligned to the same frames, the viewer will experience either a repeated sequence or a skip, either of which is more disruptive than the brief quality degradation the switch was meant to avoid. Norsk addresses this by injecting SEI timecodes at the source and propagating them through both encoder chains, giving each packager a common reference for where to start segments and I-frames. In Roe’s 24-hour test, a frame-by-frame comparison of the two encoder outputs showed a scene transition occurring at exactly the same frame in both chains. Monitoring and Switching Touchstream’s Brenton Ough demonstrated how CMSD-MQA data surfaces in a monitoring environment. The CMSD-Static header carrying the quality scores is visible in browser developer tools and parseable by any HTTP-aware monitoring agent. Touchstream’s product, which it calls eVQA, decodes the structured header field into human-readable form and collects it from multiple points along the delivery chain simultaneously: both packagers in a redundant A/B configuration, the quality-aware origin, and the CDN. Figure 5. Touchstream time-series dashboard showing MQA-VIDEO, PSNR, SSIM, and error count plotted over a rolling window. A sharp quality drop with a coincident error spike is clearly visible, followed by recovery The live dashboard displays each node in the workflow as a tile with its current MQA-VIDEO, PSNR, SSIM, and error counts. A time-series view plots all four metrics over a rolling window. When a packager’s MQA-VIDEO score drops below a configurable threshold, the tile turns red and an alert is sent to Slack or email, showing which node triggered and the scores at that moment. In the demo, Ough introduced 2% packet loss into the Encoder A path to simulate rain fade. The quality-aware origin evaluates MQA-VIDEO scores on every incoming segment and switches delivery to the Encoder B path as soon as B outscores A. “It doesn’t take much to give a significant impact,” Ough noted. The Touchstream dashboard showed Packager A in red with an MQA-VIDEO score of 22 and 24 errors while the origin and CDN continued serving clean content from the B path. After the packet loss was removed, the system waited five segments before switching back to the primary, deliberately avoiding thrashing if quality fluctuates briefly around the threshold. “You can see the score dropped below 60, down to 42, when the errors went up to 14,” Ough said. “We can track it, we can see exactly what time it happened, we can see if it’s repeated.” Use Cases Beyond Fault Detection Next, Law outlined five primary applications for MQA data, each addressing a different point in the delivery chain where quality decisions are currently made blindly. At the cloud encoder or packager, MQA enables intelligent selection between two contribution sources that may be running at identical bitrates but delivering very different quality. This is exactly the rain fade scenario the demo illustrated. Without quality scores, the packager has no basis for choosing between them. With them, it can switch automatically to the cleaner signal. At the packager, MQA provides the data needed to embed quality-based switching signals directly into HLS or DASH manifests, giving downstream components a standardized basis for routing decisions without having to independently assess the content. At the origin shield, or the caching layer that sits between the cloud origin and the CDN, MQA enables the same kind of intelligent selection between redundant origin sources. If two origins serve the same content at the same bitrate but one has a lower quality score due to an upstream issue, the origin shield can route around it. At the player, the use case shifts from switching to auditing. This is where MQA becomes a tool for accountability. A subscriber paying for an HD tier should be receiving HD-quality content. When ads are inserted from third-party servers midstream, there is currently no standardized way to verify that the inserted ad matches the visual quality of the surrounding content, a mismatch that viewers may notice. MQA gives the player a per-segment quality record across the entire session, including ad breaks, so operators can verify what was actually rendered rather than just what bitrate was requested. At the analytics provider level, that same per-segment quality record can be aggregated across millions of sessions, giving operators a genuine quality-of-experience picture rather than a bitrate distribution. The difference matters: a session that downloaded consistently at 4 Mbps but suffered rain fade on the contribution side may have looked terrible despite other numbers looking fine. Roe added a longer-term angle: quality scores could eventually enable smarter ABR ladder management. With codecs like AV1 on efficient content, the perceptual difference between adjacent rungs on the bitrate ladder can be negligible. “If you’ve got relatively simple content, the quality difference between your eight-megabit stream and your one-megabit stream is negligible,” he said. “In which case, why send them all?” The implication is that quality-aware routing could allow operators to collapse redundant ladder rungs on the fly, reducing CDN egress costs without degrading viewer experience. Adoption Status At the time of the workshop, the SVTA technical publication had not yet been formally released. Norsk/id3as and AWS Elemental MediaLive/MediaPackage v2 were the identified early adopters. Akamai supports constructing arbitrary CMSD headers at the edge but does not automatically add MQA headers. Unified Streaming supports CMSD at the origin level. Law was direct about the adoption question: “Ask it six months to 12 months after the spec has been published, and then we can try to judge the adoption rate.” His recommendation for operators evaluating vendors in the interim was straightforward: “Ask your encoding vendor when they are going to support it, and you can put that in RFPs as well.” Leschinsky echoed the point: the standard is still early enough that requiring CMSD-MQA as a mandatory RFP criterion may be premature, but including it as a weighted evaluation factor is reasonable. “It’s definitely something that you want to know about and that you can attach a weight to in answering the quality of a certain RFP quote.” He also noted a broader problem with how quality is specified in tenders: “We often see CDN tenders where it says the quality has to be high all the time. You have to define what is high. Having just something like ‘high quality’ is not helpful. Looking into what you really need and defining that in objective terms that you can already measure is helpful.” The SVTA technical publication and working group information are available at svta.org. The post CMSD-MQA: Carrying Quality Scores Through the Live Streaming Chain first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

King’s Head theatre, LondonThe media tycoon comes up against union boss Brenda Dean in Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s docudrama about the 80s Wapping disputeA teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys says that “there is no period so remote as the recent past”, suggesting that such events are caught between the fallible memories of those involved and the ignorance of those not yet taught about them at school.That problem was visible at In the Print, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s docudrama about the 1986-87 stand-off between Rupert Murdoch, aiming to reform newspaper production, and Brenda Dean, general secretary of the print union Sogat (the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades). Theatregoers ranged from Lord Kinnock – Labour party leader at the time depicted – to viewers barely born when Murdoch’s News of the World ceased publication in 2011. Continue reading...

For some, it’s a meat thermometer or a knife, for others a roasting tin, a reliable peeler or, yes, a teapot (gravy, anyone?). Let the cooking perfection beginCrispy roast potatoes, golden yorkshire puddings and perfectly cooked meat (or a vegetarian centrepiece) – there’s nothing like a good roast dinner. But making a roast can be quite a balancing act in the kitchen. There’s a fine art to juggling all the elements: you want to make sure nothing is over- or under-cooked, and that everything is still warm when you come to serve it.To refine your techniques and help you feel like a pro in the kitchen, we asked top chefs from around the UK about the cooking equipment they rely on to make the perfect roast. Featuring life-changing peelers, roasting tins that make the crispiest potatoes and a temperature probe to help you cook to perfection, these are their recommendations. Continue reading...

Claims of benefits have been amplified by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. How does the evidence actually stack up?Read more in the Antiviral seriesInfluencers are telling their audiences that injectable peptides are the “glow up potion” they need for everything from clearing up hormonal acne, thickening hair, relieving back pain and even treating chronic UTIs.These peptides, intended for research purposes (as some influencers do point out) and not approved for human use, are being increasingly sold through unregulated online channels. Continue reading...

“I came to you because of the name. Streaming Made Easy. But streaming isn't easy.”Tom Chmielewski, VP EMEA, TestlioHe has a point. The name of this newsletter is aspirational. What it actually takes to deliver a working streaming service, across dozens of countries, hundreds of device combinations and payment methods, is anything but. That is exactly what Tom and I got into this week. Testlio runs a managed crowd testing service which covers devices, operating systems, languages and payment methods at a scale no in-house QA lab can replicate. SkyShowtime used over 1,500 devices and OS combinations across 22 countries and 18 languages for a single launch. NBC Universal’s global streaming technology team (the same team that runs Peacock, Sky, Showtime, Now TV and more) relies on them across 80 countries.The insight that stuck with me was what Roku’s localisation lead Nicole Kittle described as the difference between a service that appears “made for their market, not just translated for it.” That is a different bar entirely and most operators are not meeting it yet. What Tom kept coming back to is a pattern I often see in this industry: operators invest heavily in content and distribution and then lose the consumer in the last meter. The payment method does not work, the interface feels wrong or the app behaves differently on a device that has been on the market for four years and will stay on that wall for four more. We discuss that and much more in this interview. Watch our full conversation above 👆🏻Join us on April 14th at 4.20pm during StreamTV Europe (code: PORTUGAL gets you 20% off). We’re bringing Sylviane Lecomte (Bedrock Streaming) and Antonio Vieira (Sky Portugal) to understand how they make sure their platforms make streaming easy. That’s it for today but before you go:🗳️ Poll timeComments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

Do you agree with the guidance? Have you been limiting screen time for your child? How is that going? Children under five should spend no more than an hour a day on screens and under-twos should not be watching screens alone, according to UK government advice.The guidance was developed by a panel led by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, and the children’s health expert Prof Russell Viner. Continue reading...

The guitarist made their name on dazzlingly knotty musicianship and collaboration with the likes of Bill Orcutt. So their new album is their most surprising: a startlingly beautiful reflection of love and self-acceptanceIt’s 30 December 2023. Wendy Eisenberg is walking and cannot stop. At an all-night rave in Bushwick featuring Detroit house legend Theo Parrish the previous night, they became paralysed by anxiety, returned home, “threw up a lot” and then set off with no destination in mind. “I walked for that entire day,” Eisenberg says by video call from their Brooklyn home. “I couldn’t stop moving my legs. I felt like I needed to reauthor myself, and this was how I was going to do it.”While out on their fevered walk, Eisenberg ran into an old friend. “She told me: ‘You seem like you’re having a kind of exorcism.’ Then she added: ‘Maybe just play some guitar?’” Thus diagnosed, Eisenberg went home immediately and began writing the music that became their sublime new self-titled album. “I remember reading how Cat Power wrote Moon Pix in 10 hours, in a dream state,” says Eisenberg. Many of these songs were written in a similar state, across three or four months after that “strange, mystical moment”. Continue reading...

For sports leagues, esports organizations, casino streamers, and content creators, the most powerful moments in a broadcast are also the hardest to capture at scale. Highlights drive social engagement, grow audiences, and fuel marketing campaigns, but identifying, clipping, and publishing them has historically required manual effort, expert editors, and hours of post-production time. AI-powered highlight generation changes that equation entirely. By analyzing live or recorded video in real time, AI can automatically identify the moments that matter, a massive bonus win, a clutch buzzer-beater, a record-breaking unboxing, and transform them into polished, platform-ready clips ready for immediate distribution across social media, streaming platforms, and digital channels. The result is a fully automated pipeline from raw content to published highlight, with no manual review required. Clips are cropped for vertical formats, captioned, scored for viral potential, and delivered in the precise dimensions and aspect ratios each platform demands, whether that’s Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or broadcast distribution. For marketing teams, this unlocks capabilities that were previously out of reach: Always-on content generation: highlights are produced and published 24/7, without shift management or editor availability constraints Moment-level precision: AI identifies not just action, but context: ROI thresholds, audience reactions, vocal excitement, and momentum shifts that correlate with engagement Platform-native output: every clip is automatically formatted for the target surface, eliminating manual reformatting and export workflows Faster time-to-publish: from event to social post in minutes, not hours, enabling real-time audience engagement while interest is at its peak Scalable volume: process a single stream or hundreds simultaneously, with consistent quality and zero incremental labor cost Data-driven virality: scoring models trained on engagement signals surface the clips most likely to perform, not just the longest or loudest moments Beyond efficiency, AI highlights preserve the emotional truth of the content. Speaker recognition, tone matching, and contextual scoring ensure that clips don’t just show what happened, they capture why it mattered. For marketing teams managing content across multiple channels, time zones, and formats, the business case is clear: lower production costs, higher publishing frequency, and a continuous stream of high-quality content that keeps audiences engaged between live events. AI highlights transforms content production from a bottleneck into a growth engine, turning every broadcast into an always-replenishing library of social-ready stories. Explore related insights Reaching More Communities Our Solutions for Sports & Live Events L’article Turning Every Moment Into a Story est apparu en premier sur Ateme.

Our specialists weigh in on the sauce’s best uses, suggesting dressings, dips and moreMy wife adores roast lamb with mint sauce. However, after an online purchasing blunder, my larder now contains six jars. How can I make use of them apart from serving roast lamb every Sunday from now until the crack of doom?John, by emailAs is so often the case, it all starts with a shift in mindset. “When you see a jar of sauce, there’s a real tendency to think, ‘I must use this as a sauce,’” says Kate Young, author of Dinner at Mine? Start treating that surplus mint sauce as an ingredient instead, however, and your life will be a whole lot easier. “If John is planning on using chopped fresh mint with, say, meat, cheese or veg, then consider how you might use mint sauce in its place,” Young adds. Case in point: pea and mint soup, says Sally Abé of the recently opened Teal by Sally Abé in east London. “Stir in the mint sauce at the end of the cooking, then blitz with the peas.”Obvious, maybe, but it’s also worth pointing out that mint sauce has a decent shelf life, so John can be nice and relaxed in how he chooses to use the fruits of his shopping blunder. That said, sausage rolls are always a good idea, especially if you’re feeding a gang over Easter. Young says: “Put some finely chopped onion through lamb mince, then add big spoonfuls of the sauce.” Fry a bit of the mix before nestling it in pastry, mind: “You want to be sure the mint is really coming through.” (Likewise, any lamb meatball will be greatly improved by the addition of the green stuff.)Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com Continue reading...

Whitechapel Galery, LondonThe Turner prize-winner has spent her career exploring organic forms, with often beautiful results – but the most recent work obscures it with what looks remarkably like rubbishSometimes the seed of an idea can grow into something monumental. In Veronica Ryan’s case, kernels and pods have grown into a whole career filled with organic forms bursting to life with stories and symbolism.It’s an approach that has served her well, winning her the Turner prize in 2022. And now the Montserrat-born British artist is being given the full retrospective treatment, with a show taking viewers from her early experiments in lead to more recent sculptures made of twine, bandages and plastic. Continue reading...

It’s a quintessentially Welsh experience of castles, cockles and cawl when you explore the south-west of the country by train, bus and a new footpath opening this weekSit on the left when you catch the train from Swansea to Carmarthen, and you can watch huge sandy estuaries unspool outside the window. There’s a curlew standing by the water, an egret-haunted pool in the wetlands, and a boardwalk along the foreshore, part of the 870-mile Wales Coast Path. It has been a six-hour, four-train journey to get here from Essex, but I’ll soon be on foot.Carmarthenshire has picturesque railways, a network of buses, and some epic long-distance paths, so it makes for an ideal car-free break. The 13-mile Tywi Valley Path (officially opening in time for Easter) will link Abergwili near Carmarthen and Ffairfach near Llandeilo, helping walkers and cyclists access some lovely scenery. I’m visiting just before Saint David’s Day, and there are daffodils everywhere. Carmarthenshire offers a quintessentially Welsh experience, packed with castles, cockles and cawl (stew). Continue reading...

Snappy performance, high-quality screen, best-in-class keyboard and trackpad show cheaper can still be greatApple’s brand new entry-level laptop is powered by the chip from an iPhone and offers more than just the essential MacBook experience for a great price, putting the PC industry on notice.The MacBook Neo is the first of its kind from Apple. A 13in laptop that runs on an A18 Pro chip and brings the starting price for a brand new MacBook down to £599 (€699/$599/A$899) – £500 or the equivalent less than the MacBook Air. Continue reading...

This Easter feast is steeped in the flavours and traditions of the Middle EastWhenever I’m asked about my favourite dish to serve to friends and family, in most cases I’d say slow-cooked lamb at the centre of the table. After a long, slow cook, the meat becomes tender and rich, and the spices melt into every bite. Served with flatbreads, tahini, fresh herbs and sharp pickles, it invites everyone to build their own perfect mouthful. Across the Middle East and Mediterranean, lamb symbolises generosity and celebration, especially at Easter, when roasting it remains an adored tradition. Continue reading...

He went from a Glasgow council estate to Hollywood fame. Now, in his directorial debut, the X-Men star is challenging stereotypes about his homeland via the remarkable tale of a real-life hip-hop hoaxIt’s the final night of the Glasgow film festival and James McAvoy is a wee bit out of breath. His directorial debut, California Schemin’, is playing across all three screens at the Glasgow Film Theatre in the city centre, taking the festival’s prestige closing slot.Usually, a big name would say a few words of introduction in the main cinema then bask in the glory. Not McAvoy. Getting in among it still comes naturally 25 years after he left this city to pursue a career that has blazed from his award-winning Cyrano de Bergerac in the West End of London to playing Professor X, the founder of the X-Men, in the blockbuster Hollywood franchise. Continue reading...

Linear broadcast still represents a significant source of revenue for many major media organizations. It can't simply be replaced. The challenge is to support both the real-time digital and scheduled linear TV models at once - delivering fast, platform-specific content for streaming and social platforms while continuing to serve traditional broadcast audiences.

Even as the buzz builds around vertical microdrama and more and more content, innovation, and creativity flow into this new storytelling mode, how to make it profitable remains an open question. Celestine Pictures founder and executive producer Grace Gao discusses its origins in China, its transition to America, persisting quality/quantity disparities, the emergence of a few successful brands, the monetization and distribution models that will sustain and grow the industry as a whole, and how the interest of major platforms like Netflix will impact vertical content creators in discussion with Chris Pfaff in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026.

New data from NETINT’s state of video encoding survey shows H.264/AVC sits at 84% production deployment, making the standard effectively universal and plateaued. HEVC is at 65% in production with another 20% planning deployment, putting it on a path toward H.264-level ubiquity. But the breakout number belongs to AV1. At 17% current production deployment, AV1 might not look like much on its own. But 40% of respondents plan to deploy AV1 in 2026, giving it a combined reach of 57% by year-end. That is not early-adopter experimentation. That is mainstream planning. The barriers to AV1 adoption are worth noting because they are not primarily about the codec itself. Hardware decode support leads at 54%, followed by toolchain limitations at 43% and encoding compute costs at 37%. The licensing story is essentially a non-issue for AV1, with less than 1% cited it as a barrier. This stands in sharp contrast to VVC, where 44% flagged licensing and royalties as a concern. That licensing gap alone may determine which next-gen codec is deployed first. One additional data point I found interesting: organizations running three or more codecs in production today are 57 times more likely to have AV1 in their stack compared to single-codec operators. Current codec stack complexity is the strongest predictor of future adoption velocity. That pattern makes intuitive sense. Teams with multi-codec experience already have the tooling, testing workflows, and operational maturity to add another format without starting from scratch. VP9 offers a cautionary data point here. The data shows it sits at 15% production deployment with respondents, with only 15% planning further adoption, and 70% reporting no plans at all. VVC generates interest in evaluation, with 29% planning to adopt it, yet the successor to HEVC remains at just 4% in production deployment. It’s clear that VVC is facing both licensing headwinds and toolchain immaturity, unlike AV1. The report describes a clear codec progression ladder: organizations tend to climb from H.264 through HEVC and VP9 to AV1, meaning the current stack is a better predictor of next-gen adoption than company size or industry vertical. GPUs Dominate, But the Hardware Picture Is More Complicated Than It Appears GPUs hold 72% of the hardware acceleration market share, driven primarily by NVIDIA’s NVENC ecosystem. That number is not surprising. What is more revealing is what is happening underneath it. Among organizations using hardware acceleration, 41% deploy multiple hardware types simultaneously—GPU plus VPU, GPU plus on-premises appliance, or broader combinations. This is not a one-size-fits-all market. Organizations are matching different hardware to different workload profiles, and the data suggests this trend is accelerating rather than consolidating. GPU-specific pain points explain the hardware diversification. Power consumption leads at 39%, followed by codec/feature gaps at 37% and insufficient stream density at 35%. For live and high-density workloads, these are meaningful operational constraints. The report notes that VPU evaluation intent stands at 49%, nearly matching the 51% who plan to evaluate GPUs. Live and broadcast operators are 2.2 times more likely to adopt VPUs, driven by density economics and latency requirements that GPUs can struggle to meet at scale. The primary encoding method split also tells a story of transition. Software/CPU-based encoding remains the single largest encoding architecture at 37%, while hardware-accelerated (30%) and hybrid approaches (32%) collectively account for 62% of the market. The era of pure software encoding is winding down for anyone operating at a meaningful scale. AI in Encoding Has Crossed the Mainstream Threshold 60% of respondents currently deploy AI/ML in at least one encoding workflow, and 70% plan to expand those capabilities in 2026. That is no longer experimental. The more interesting story is where AI is heading versus where it started. Current deployments concentrate on what I would call adjacent applications: transcription and captioning at 46%, scene classification at 37%, and super-resolution at 26%. These sit next to the encoding pipeline but do not fundamentally change how encoding decisions are made. The highest-growth applications tell a different story. Content-aware ladder generation shows the highest planned growth at 77%, followed by QoE prediction at 50%. These are core encoding intelligence functions—they sit inside the pipeline and directly influence bitrate allocation, resolution selection, and quality optimization. This migration from auxiliary to core defines the AI trend in encoding for 2026. It also explains why AI expansion correlates with operational scale rather than company size. Organizations processing high VOD volumes are 2.3 times more likely to plan AI expansion regardless of employee count. GPU users are 2.4 times more likely, since GPU infrastructure provides the compute foundation for AI workloads. The implication for hardware vendors is clear: offering AI-ready compute alongside encoding capability could become a baseline expectation. The Quality Measurement Gap Nobody Is Talking About VMAF has crossed the 50% adoption threshold at 52%, establishing itself as the de facto objective quality metric for the encoding industry. PSNR remains at 32%, mostly due to legacy pipeline inertia rather than active preference. But here is the number I found interesting: 30% of respondents operate without any formal QA metrics. These organizations are making encoding decisions such as codec selection, bitrate allocation, and hardware investment without systematic quality measurement. The report finds they are 2.7 times more likely to report frequent quality issues and 1.9 times more likely to cite viewer complaints as a business problem. That gap correlates strongly with team size: organizations with one to two-person video teams are 3.1 times more likely to lack formal QA than those with 10+ person teams. This connects to a broader theme in the data. Content Adaptive Encoding (CAE) has nearly identical adoption across live (25%) and VOD (28%) workflows, which the report identifies as the clearest indicator of encoding sophistication, regardless of use case. Organizations using CAE for live workflows are 2.4 times more likely to also use AI/ML in their encoding pipeline. CAE adoption appears to serve as a gateway to broader encoding intelligence. For the 30% without formal QA, they are not just behind on measurement; they are likely missing the optimization wave reshaping streaming economics. The Biggest Roadmap Blockers Are Not Technical One of the more revealing sections of the report examines what is actually preventing organizations from executing their 2026 encoding roadmaps. The top constraints are capital and budget limitations (39%) and limited team capacity (38%). Device and technology support comes in at 30%, cost-per-channel pressure at 30%, and integration/API gaps at just 10%. In other words, 77% of respondents cite at least one organizational barrier, compared to just 19% citing a purely technical one. This shows the bottleneck is not the technology. It is the budget to buy it and the team capacity to implement it. This matters because the data elsewhere in the report shows that 49% of all respondents have video engineering teams of 1 to 5 people. Even among companies with 5,000+ employees, small video teams are not uncommon. When the report says lean teams are the norm across all company size brackets, it has real implications for how vendors should think about integration complexity, time to value, and operational overhead. Edge Encoding: High Interest, Low Conviction 42% of respondents expressed interest in deploying encoding at the edge, while 30% remain uncertain. This represents the largest undecided cohort on any topic in the survey. Only 29% said they are not interested at all. Among those interested, the top use cases are localized ladder generation (56%) and dynamic ad insertion (48%). Edge interest follows a U-shaped curve by company size. Small companies (46%) and large enterprises (43%) show the highest interest, while mid-market firms lag at 26–28%. Interest also correlates with operational scale: 50% of organizations running 250+ live channels are interested, compared with 35% at smaller scales. The data suggests edge economics become more compelling as encoding volume increases, regardless of overall company size. But the 30% uncertainty band represents the biggest market education opportunity in the survey. These organizations see the potential but lack the information or confidence to commit. Live event operators show the strongest interest in edge, at 44%, driven by latency requirements for real-time delivery. This aligns with what I have been hearing from operators at industry events—edge latency is becoming a competitive differentiator for sports and live entertainment. The report suggests that vendors who can reduce ambiguity through reference architectures, concrete use cases, and trial programs will convert undecided prospects faster than those who lead with product specs. Who Responded and Why It Matters Before drawing too many conclusions from any survey, it is worth understanding who completed it. Live events and sports broadcasting represent the single largest vertical at 35%, followed by subscription VOD at 18%, AVOD/FAST at 7%, and enterprise communications at 6%. Combined streaming verticals: live sports, SVOD, AVOD, and UGC represent 65% of the sample. EMEA leads geographically at 44%, followed by North America at 40%. The report is transparent about its limitations. Survey distribution through industry channels and NETINT’s network may overweight organizations already evaluating hardware encoding solutions. APAC (19%) and LATAM (16%) are underrepresented relative to their share of global streaming growth. These are fair caveats and worth keeping in mind when interpreting the data. The combination of executive-level respondents with real budget authority and hands-on engineers with operational experience makes this one of the more credible encoding industry surveys I have reviewed. The fact that nearly half the respondents are VP-level or above means the stated priorities and investment plans are not aspirational wish lists from mid-level managers—they reflect where actual dollars are going. The report runs more than 50 pages and covers codec adoption, hardware acceleration, AI/ML integration, quality measurement, cost structures, and organizational archetypes. The full report is available from NETINT here. It includes detailed archetype analysis of four distinct organizational segments, build-versus-buy economics, executive priority rankings, and projections. For a vendor-sponsored survey, NETINT deserves credit for producing something with analytical depth.

Spring has officially sprung, but your March favourites tell us you’ve still got one cosily socked foot in bed• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereMarch claims to be spring – and some of it even reckons it’s British summertime – but even the sunniest days are “summer in the sunshine, winter in the shade”. Judging by the products you loved most, you haven’t decided whether to emerge from hibernation yet, either.Pillows and bed socks accounted for a quarter of all your favourite things this month, and your fashion must-have was a snuggly hoodie. But your enthusiasm for a glow-up eye cream and a legendary hot brush suggests you’re harbouring an itch to get out. Continue reading...

Radicalised by the inventiveness of groups such as the Harlem Renaissance, the LA-based musician is determined to reclaim the radical possibilities of culture in an age of institutional and algorithmic exploitation‘For many years, I’ve called myself a surrealist blues poet,” says Aja Monet in her warm, deep voice. Sitting in a London cafe, the Los Angeles-based artist looks striking, with her blue braids woven up in an intricate style. She was up late uploading the final master recordings for her new album, The Color of Rain, which she says was heavily influenced by her reading around how “surrealism was a real intentional device that artists used in response to the rise of fascism throughout history”.High-minded and yet invested in the cut-and-thrust of our lives today, it’s a typical comment from Monet. With themes around love, resistance and the absurdity of our current times, her performance, poetry and music offers a balm for the suffering and abuse meted out by establishment power. Already in 2026, her second poetry book Florida Water was nominated for an award by the foundational US civil rights organisation the NAACP, and she performed alongside Stevie Wonder at Time magazine’s event celebrating Martin Luther King Day. Continue reading...

‘Zombie filler’, or using cadaver tissue that’s been sterilized and branded as Alloclae, is the latest cosmetic surgery rage. Is it safe? The residential block at 655 Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is so storied it has its own Wikipedia entry. It has housed luminaries from bestselling romance author Danielle Steel to esteemed yachtsmen and the 20th-century heir William Kissam Vanderbilt II. A more recent resident, on the ground floor, is Alpha Male Plastic Surgery, a clinic offering a broad menu of elective procedures catering to the needs of the modern man.On a coffee table in the waiting room, fanned-out brochures tout facelifts, non-surgical penile implants, and Tesamorelin – an FDA-approved peptide injection targeting stubborn visceral belly fat. Flatscreen monitors mounted behind the front desk shuffle through ads for a “Full Male Model Makeover”, proprietary procedures like BodyBanking® and the 360 TorsoTuck®, and for the gym rat who habitually skips leg day, even “Amazing New Calves”. Continue reading...

Beyond the Belgian capital’s more obvious sights lies a thriving district known for its classic Belgian cuisine, alternative art scene and gigantic flea marketThe Brusseleir dialect that’s still spoken in much of the Marolles dates back to the middle ages, a symbol of the independence of this proudly working-class neighbourhood in central Brussels. Located between the Palace of Justice and Halle Gate, it’s always been an inclusive refuge for immigrants from Europe and north Africa. The must-see Brussels tourist attractions of the Grand-Place central square and Mannekin-Pis statue are within walking distance, but the Marolles offers a very different experience: fashion, antiques and bric-a-brac shopping; alternative creative centres and provocative graffiti; characteristic estaminets (hybrid pub, cafe, bistros) specialising in hearty local dishes; and artisan breweries. Continue reading...

When Merlin came to live with me, his only job was to clear the weeds from my fields. But his calm, affectionate nature has made him a vital part of my therapy practiceMerlin the sheep came to me by chance four years ago. A friend of mine had a lamb she was bottle-feeding, but she couldn’t look after it any more so she asked me if I could take care of it. I live in Moortown, Leeds, and rent about three hectares (seven acres) of land in Eccup, a small village nearby, where I’ve kept horses for about 13 years. I needed some help clearing the weeds that the horses wouldn’t eat and sheep seemed like the best solution because they’ll eat anything – so I said yes.The lamb was called Bambi and when I came to collect her, my friend offered me another lamb, Merlin. Shortly after, Bambi died and it was just Merlin left. It wasn’t long until he started to show his special powers. Continue reading...

M Gessen explores the wild truth about their cousin, who keeps kidnapping his own child. Plus: will the world of porn really be Screwed By AI?“Anyone’s first cousin could be plotting murder …” New York Times columnist M Gessen is the reporter and host of this leftfield five-parter released under the NYT/Serial Productions banner, with shades of its previous series such as We Were Three and S-Town. A braggart with a problematic habit of kidnapping his own son, M’s “idiot” cousin Allen is charged with ordering a hit on his ex-wife, Priscilla. Hannah J DaviesWidely available, episodes weekly Continue reading...

The singers and sisters on growing up in west London, finding fame in the 90s and relaunching their music as a duoBorn in Canada, Natalie and Nicole Appleton are singers best known as members of the group All Saints. Raised between Ontario, London and New York, the sisters joined the band in 1996 alongside Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt. After the success of their self-titled 1997 debut and a string of hits including the chart-topping singles Never Ever and Pure Shores, All Saints split in 2001. The sisters released music together as Appleton in 2002, and have since reunited with All Saints for three albums. Appleton’s new single, Falling Into You, is out now. Continue reading...

Emigrating to be with your partner sounds wildly romantic, but what happens when the person is right and the place very much isn’t?I met my wife in Queensland in 2001. She’s from Bern, but was in Australia to study marine science. She needed help collecting fish for her project, and had heard that I was handy with a spear gun. We hit it off straight away, and began our romance on semi‑deserted islands near the Great Barrier Reef.We went on to make a life together. My wife liked Australia and eventually got citizenship, but after we had our first son she wanted to be near her family. Continue reading...

Sandra and Roy are adapting to sex as new parents, from postpartum pain to acting fast when they have a private moment• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymouslySex was a reminder that I’m still me. That this identity still exists, which is really important because you do lose it a bit, especially in the early weeks of becoming a mother Continue reading...

On March 24, 2026, Dolby sued Snap Inc. (Snapchat) for AV1 and HEVC patent infringement in the United States and Brazil. The suits are the first AV1 assertion against a streaming platform by an Access Advance licensor, and Dolby is seeking injunctive relief in both countries. The reason this matters beyond Snap is a single legal fact: Dolby is asserting that it has made no FRAND or royalty‑free commitments for AV1, so the royalties the court sets for the asserted AV1 patents are not constrained by any Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory obligations. To explain, when a company’s patents are essential to a standard it helped develop, it typically makes a FRAND commitment to the standard-setting organization, a binding promise to license on Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory terms. Courts can enforce that commitment to cap what a patent holder can demand. That pressure valve doesn’t exist here. As an article in IP Fray explains, “As Dolby did not participate in the development of the AV1 standard, it did not make any promises with respect to licensing AV1 implementations. Dolby is not even bound by any FRAND pledge because any of its FRAND pledges for video patents relate to standards in the development of which it was involved. As a result, there is no contractual FRAND (much less royalty-free) defense to Dolby’s pursuit of injunctive relief.” Focusing on the US suit, what are the practical implications of the lack of FRAND status? There are two. 1. A Heightened Threat of Injunctive Relief In standard-essential patent (SEP) litigation, a FRAND commitment typically acts as a checkbook defense for implementers. When a patent holder promises to license technology on fair and reasonable terms, U.S. courts generally view monetary damages as an adequate remedy, making a permanent injunction, which requires proving irreparable harm that money cannot fix, extremely difficult to obtain. The Federal Circuit has noted that a FRAND commitment “strongly suggests that money damages are adequate,” making an injunction “unlikely” because the patent holder has already expressed a willingness to trade their right to exclude for a royalty. Without a FRAND commitment, that contractual pressure valve is removed. For this reason, it’s not surprising that Dolby’s complaint asked for the injunction like this: “While Dolby contributed its inventions to the HEVC standard and licenses those HEVC-essential patent claims through established patent pools on RAND terms, Dolby did not contribute its inventions to be incorporated into the AV1 specification or agree to any of AOM’s policies. Accordingly, Dolby has made no contractual RAND commitment with respect to AV1. Dolby seeks injunctive relief against Snap’s infringing decoding of AV1-compliant videos and encoding videos into AV1-compliant formats.” 2. The Removal of the Damage Ceiling The second implication of a lack of FRAND status is the calculation of damages. In a FRAND environment, the Fair and Reasonable promise creates a natural cap on what a patentee can demand. Removing that status shifts the analysis from a contract-based fair rate to a standard patent infringement framework, where the goal is to fully compensate the owner for the unauthorized use of their property. But that doesn’t mean that the court will rubber-stamp any amount that Dolby claims. As Patent Progress explains, without a FRAND commitment, courts fall back on standard reasonable royalty tools, primarily a framework called Georgia-Pacific that asks what a willing licensor and willing licensee would have agreed to at the time infringement began. It’s not a blank check, but it’s a much wider range than FRAND allows. The clearest illustration of how this plays out in court comes from Optis v. Huawei, where a non-FRAND H.264 video patent coexisted with four FRAND-committed patents in the same trial. The jury awarded $7.7 million on the single patent without a FRAND commitment, nearly three times the combined $2.8 million awarded for the four FRAND-encumbered patents. As Akin Gump’s subsequent case summary confirms, the court entered final judgment of $10,553,565 and then enhanced that by 25 percent for willful infringement, with Huawei also on the hook for PanOptis’s attorneys’ fees after the court found a “widespread pattern of litigation abuse.” The jury instructions made the structural difference explicit: for the FRAND patents, a reasonable royalty cannot exceed “the amount permitted under PanOptis’ FRAND obligations.” For the non-FRAND patent, no such ceiling applied, and that difference appeared to show up clearly in the jury’s award. I say “appeared to” because the differential in the award could also have arisen from the perceived value of the respective patents, though the jury instructions still tell the tale. Limiting Damages to the Actual Value Contributed Even without FRAND, courts won’t let Dolby charge for the market power that comes from AV1’s adoption. It can only charge for the actual commercial value its technology contributes to Snap. This is clear from the jury instructions in the PanOptis’ trial: “the FRAND royalty rate must be based on the incremental value that the patented technology adds to the product, not any value added by the standardization of that technology.” In other words, Dolby has to justify its royalty demand based on what its technology actually contributes, not on the leverage that comes from AV1’s widespread deployment. Comparable licenses also work as a practical anchor. The existing Access Advance Video Distribution Patent pool, the Avanci Video program, and rates from prior HEVC disputes all become reference points a court will use to test whether Dolby’s ask is reasonable. And as the W&L Law Review analysis points out, when acceptable non-infringing substitutes exist, they effectively cap what a willing licensee would rationally pay. Snap can encode and deliver video using AVC, HEVC, or VP9. That optionality isn’t a complete defense, but it’s a real constraint on the upper end of any damages award. The bottom line for U.S. proceedings: Dolby has meaningfully more leverage than a FRAND-bound patentee, both for seeking an injunction and increased damages. The Optis v. Huawei numbers suggest that the gap can be substantial. But courts will still push Dolby to justify its royalty based on the incremental value of its technology, comparable licenses, and what a rational implementer would have paid knowing it had alternatives. In addition, note that Dolby is also requesting enhanced damages under 35 U.S.C. § 284. To support this, the complaint asserts that, because Snap was a licensee of the Access Advance HEVC pool, it had knowledge of the patents and infringement. Given such knowledge, Snap’s failure to secure a license for its HEVC and AV1-compliant video processing constitutes a “willful and deliberate” violation that justifies the court increasing the final damages award by up to three times. What Happens Next? Where Snap goes from here is pivotal to the industry. Between the threat of a permanent injunction, damages not limited by a FRAND commitment, and the potential for a triple-damage multiplier, Snap faces a level of risk that few in the streaming space have had to navigate. Dolby appears to be positioning this as a test case for its video patent portfolio, and the recent Roku settlement in January 2026 suggests there is a clear, if expensive, off-ramp for those unwilling to risk a Delaware or Brazilian jury. On the other hand, Snap is an Alliance for Open Media (AOM) Promoter, and if the consortium’s much-ballyhooed, now-disappeared patent defense program was ever going to be deployed, this is the moment. For years, like a proverbial drug dealer, AOM marketed AV1 as a “royalty-free” alternative to the traditional patent pool model, and much of the press and publisher community bought it hook, line, and sinker. At some point, AOMedia either needs to back its members in a high-stakes legal fight or abandon the “royalty-free” pretense. If a top-tier insider like Snap agrees to pay a toll, it confirms that for high-volume platforms, the “free” codec has become a commercial myth. Author’s Note: IP Fray asserts that the ITU’s FRAND pledge governing HEVC covers decoding only, not encoding, which would further limit Snap’s FRAND protections on the HEVC side of the suit. The complaint doesn’t appear to make this distinction explicitly. It’s worth knowing this argument is out there, but since the FRAND gap on AV1 is both clearly alleged and well-documented, that’s where this article focuses. The post When There’s No FRAND: What Dolby’s Suit Against Snap Means for the Industry first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

With an egg-cellent roster on offer, which chocolate treats are the most moreish and which aren’t worth shelling out on?• The best novelty hot cross bunsAt the age of 45, my Easter egg hunt is about seeking out quality, transparency and flavour, rather than just finding the most eggs. Then again, I haven’t been on one for about 35 years, and my tastes have since changed, as has the market. Beyond those foil-wrapped novelties of yesteryear, there’s now a genuinely impressive selection of thoughtfully made, handcrafted chocolate eggs aimed at those with a more mature palate.As with all chocolate, certifications matter: Fairtrade guarantees a minimum price, fairer working rights and investment in climate resilience, while the Rainforest Alliance focuses on environmental standards and farm sustainability. The quality and processing of the chocolate is also important. Most eggs contain the likes of invert sugar syrup, soya lecithin and E471, so rather than highlight every additive, I’ve instead flagged products with minimal processing, as well as those that use palm oil. I haven’t marked down for high sugar content – it is Easter, after all – but I have included the percentage of sugar. Continue reading...

Join the Famous Five in Dorset, relive Springwatch in the Peak District … our selection of Easter treats will keep all the family entertainedSpring has arrived at Wicken Fen, one of Europe’s most important wetlands, and with it the first summer migrants. Chiffchaffs are usually the earliest, with their rhythmic song ringing out across the fens. Then, if the weather is mild, blackcaps and willow warblers might join them. Listen closely, especially early morning or at dusk, for the foghorn-like calls of the booming bittern across the reedbeds. There’s a pushchair- and wheelchair-friendly boardwalk around Sedge Fen, and wheelchair-accessible wildlife hides. Look out for the electric blue flash of a kingfisher, and male marsh harriers performing their dramatic sky-dancing flights as the breeding season gets under way, before the cuckoos arrive in late April. From £10 adults, £5 children (under-5s free), nationaltrust.org.uk Continue reading...

Prepare for bouclé jackets, quilted chain-link bags galore and an outfit formula that is proving to be consumer catnipJust six months after Matthieu Blazy unveiled his debut collection for Chanel, and a week after it landed in stores, excitement over the new designer has reached fever pitch. There have been queues outside shops, grapples at the tills and dozens of social media posts bragging about purchases. Now, Blazy’s Chanel effect is coming for the high street. Prepare for bouclé jackets and quilted chain-link bags galore.“It is a good sign that it has become immediately a reference point for the high street,” says Mario Ortelli, a managing partner at the luxury advisory firm Ortelli & Co. “When a new product and new creative direction is successful it is copied by the high street. If not, it means it is not relevant or is only relevant for a niche set of consumers.” Continue reading...

“The ritual’s probably the biggest word I would say around determining success for creators on YouTube. Are you part of someone’s ritual every week, every day?”Jordan Schwarzenberger, Co-founder, Arcade MediaThis week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I sit down with Jordan Schwarzenberger, CEO & Founder of Arcade, management company behind The Sidemen, a creator collective with 244 million followers and a business that now runs 55 people deep. Getting him on the pod took me the better part of a year and within the first few minutes you understand why I chased Jordan so bad. He’s a knowledge machine. We spent an hour listening in awe. Jordan has a way of making things the industry has been arguing about for years suddenly feel very simple and very urgent. He gets into the Netflix deal, the YouTube algorithm, what broadcasters consistently misread when they show up on the platform and a commercial model he just launched that puts Arcade in territory previously occupied only by Sky, ITV and Channel 4. He also makes the case, grounded in a decade of building actual businesses, for why the metric everyone obsesses over is probably the wrong one.By the end of the conversation you will have a different word in your head when you think about what actually builds a media business that lasts.LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.That’s it for today but before you go:🗳️ Poll timeComments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻Enjoy your week and see you on Tuesday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

With Signiant, Option Media moves high volumes of media quickly and consistently, reducing transfer failures and eliminating the need to restart interrupted uploads. Signiant's alignment with TPN Gold Shield assessments and advanced access controls help Option Media meet studio-grade security requirements without slowing production. Branded, client-friendly portals make it easy for non-technical users to send and receive content, improving client experience

Retail sims aren’t my thing, but the tactile, nostalgic pleasures of hit indie title Retro Rewind have me yearning for the era of physical media, smoking indoors and uncomplicated geopolitics It’s early doors, but 2026 may be the biggest bin fire of a year in my lifetime. Wars starting, then ending, then starting again in the course of a week. People running their cars on hopes and dreams because a tank of petrol costs more than the vehicle. Manospheric morons making millions. Several depressing celebrity deaths before I’ve so much as eaten my first Creme Egg of the year.I had no idea that the antidote to my anxiety and rage would be a cheap little title, made by two French blokes, in what I usually regard as the most turgid gaming genre. Retro Rewind is the moment’s indie darling, selling more than 100,000 copies on Steam in a week. In it, you run a video rental shop in the 90s. You need to buy videos. Display them well. Drop flyers. Serve your customers. Buy more stuff. It’s no different from any other retail sim out there, and I normally shun them because I play video games to escape the boring world of work and into an exciting one of dragons, aliens, and being brilliant at sports. Continue reading...

Show draws almost entirely from collection of Lancashire schoolteacher Peter Smithson, a fan since he was 10Peter Smithson’s wife, Belise, has never minded when he receives a corset from Japan or a pair of fur-trimmed knickers and they are not for her.“No, she’s never seen it as strange,” said Smithson, a chemistry teacher and Vivienne Westwood supercollector. “She has never judged it. She gets it. She knows it is part and parcel of who I am.” Continue reading...

Integrated purchasing opportunities and creator content are becoming increasingly prominent elements of the CTV experience. How are they converging on major CTV platforms like LG and webOS? Chester Goodson, LG Electronics' senior manager of business development, discusses the rise of creator programming and monetization opportunities available through LG's Shop Time ecommerce app and where the two intersect in this conversation with moderator Chris Pfaff at Streaming Media Connect 2026.

In CTV, where exposure is often view-through, and actions happen on other screens, "last-click" measurement distortion can turn "good ROAS" into a mirage. That's why incrementality is becoming a necessary baseline. In practice, it means fewer arguments about attribution models and more routine experimentation baked into media plans.

What strategic and technological innovations are in the pipeline to facilitate more seamless shoppable CTV experiences? Fuse Media's Karl Meyer, Disney's Lexi Swift, Spaceback's Joe Hall, and LG's Chester Goodson address future prospects for enhanced shoppability in this discussion with moderator Chris Pfaff from Streaming Media Connect 2026.

Brands have poured millions in media spend into making commercials "shoppable" by placing QR codes on screen. The logic seems simple: put your code in front of millions of viewers and they will scan it. But many publishers have told me that widespread scanning just hasn't materialized, with some even reporting that CTR hovers around 0.03%. Why so low? Because scanning a QR code takes viewers away from the content they love.

For years, many streaming companies have perceived piracy as?a disease that needs to be treated only after it strikes.?A show is released, pirates copy it, and the platform responds with takedown notices, legal complaints, or occasional enforcement actions. That approach may have worked in the early days of online video. Today, it does not.

Digital rights management is the invisible backbone of?streaming security, and the license service sits at its core. Every play request, entitlement check, and encrypted segment relies on a clean exchange of?keys between clients, proxies, and license servers. Replacing that infrastructure under deadline pressure requires not only technical execution but strategic planning.

How are streaming content companies doing? Publishers, creators, and aggregators have traditionally made the majority of their revenue on subscriptions, so why does everyone want to talk about advertising? Ad-supported content is more affordable. Because most streaming consumers have maxed out their subscriptions, leaving the SVOD market saturated, advertising is more likely to be the dominant incremental revenue driver for streaming over the next several years, based on how media companies are talking about themselves and guiding investors.

As with all streaming workflows, AI has steadily crept into the live streaming technology stack. In some cases, the impact is incremental, in others, profound. From production to monetization, here's a quick overview of where AI has become relevant for live event producers and engineers, and some areas where, surprisingly, it hasn't.

The global media conversation has a favourite word: fragmentation.Audiences are splitting across platforms, attention spans are shrinking and long-form content is being carved into clips for feeds that reward speed over substance. Ask anyone in the industry and they will tell you this is the defining condition of the business. That is true everywhere. But it is not the whole truth.Viewers know the landscape has changed. They just do not think it has changed for the better. The Living Room Study shows that 73.6% of Europeans say social media has lost its capacity to create real social connections, the highest of any region in the study. The US is close behind at 72.2%. The platforms built to bring people together did the opposite. And yet, in one room in the house, people still sit side by side, watch the same thing at the same time, and talk to each other when the ads come on. The living room did not need an algorithm to do what social media promised and failed to deliver.For five years, the Living Room Study has tracked how Europeans watch video content. Every edition has returned the same core finding: the living room is not losing ground in Europe. It is gaining relevance. 83% of respondents watch video in their living room, compared with 58% in the United States. These are not the habits of a market in decline. They are the habits of a market that values something the rest of the industry is struggling to recreate: deliberate, present, shared attention.Attention is the word our industry uses most and understands least. We measure it as an individual metric, one person, one screen, one impression. But European viewing does not follow that model. Here, attention is collective. It compounds. That changes what an impression is worth, what a brand encounter produces, and what kind of creative actually lands.What Europe has built around its main screen has no equivalent anywhere else in the world. There is a reason Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and YouTube are seeking partnerships with European broadcasters. This environment, the trust, the consistency, and the audiences who show up and stay, is not something a platform can manufacture through pure scale or spend. It was built over decades of local broadcasting, free-to-air access, and cultural proximity. It is not a legacy position. It is an asset worth protecting, and the reason these partnerships exist. Broadcasters who are smart about it leverage those partnerships to solve their own challenges too: reaching audiences who expect trusted content to be available everywhere, on demand, without friction.Stephane Coruble, CEO of RTL AdAlliance, writes about collaboration as Europe’s competitive edge. He is right. But collaboration works because there is something worth collaborating around. That something is an audience that still pays attention, together, on purpose. The rest of the world is trying to solve the problem of fragmentation. The pages that follow show why Europe never fully bought into it.The replay of the Living room Club and the 5th edition of the Living Room report are out now. Hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed making them for you. WATCH REPLAY: DOWNLOAD REPORT: https://rtl-adalliance.com/article/living-room-studyWanna brush off on past reports beforehand? Dig in: Living Room 2025; Living Room 2024; Living Room 2023; Living Room 2022. That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻Enjoy your week and see you this weekend for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

As physical media makes an unlikely comebac​k​ among younger gamers, the humble VHS emerges as an unexpected archive of gaming’s messy, magical evolution​ that I saw first time around• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereAs I am nostalgic and of a certain age, I recently bought a VHS video recorder, just for the retrospective thrill of it; then I won a 32-inch CRT television at an auction in Shepton Mallet. Partly, this was to play a few old videos I had found in my loft, including one of me appearing in a 1990s youth TV show talking about sexism and Tomb Raider. (I was against the sexism, to be clear). But it was also because I wanted a new way of spending my money on fragile video-game nostalgia.The rise of the games industry in the 1980s and 90s coincided with the explosion of the home-video business, and the two crossed paths in lots of interesting ways. There are the obvious treasures I want to get hold of: VHS copies of Street Fighter: The Movie and the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, naturally, as well as early games-inspired hits such as The Last Starfighter, The Wizard and WarGames. I rented most of these from my local video shop in the 80s – which, like many others, also sold computer games by the budget publisher Mastertronic, another interesting (at least to me) crossover between these two entertainment formats. Continue reading...

Smart TV manufacturers in Europe have a revenue problem they did not create and cannot easily solve on their own. The devices they build carry more intelligence than ever, the advertising market around those devices is growing and yet most of the household-level advertising data that American platforms have been selling to media buyers for a decade simply does not exist in European markets at any useful scale. Not because no one wants it and not because the technology is fundamentally out of reach but because the infrastructure built to generate it was designed for one specific (and huge) market (the US) with specific economics and those economics have never translated to Europe.SyncMint, founded a year ago by Mehmet Eroglu and Pieter Oonk, is trying to close that gap with a technical approach that works at European scale and a privacy by design architecture. I sat down with them to get to the bottom of this. The problem with the American blueprintThe dominant model for TV advertising data in the US was pioneered around 2010 and built around a very specific set of market conditions. A module on the device captures a sample of what is on screen every few seconds, sends that sample to a central server and matches it against a database of known content covering hundreds of channels, thousands of hours of programming, and every ad creative in active rotation. The match tells you what a household was watching and which ads they were exposed to and that data flows to broadcasters, advertisers and device manufacturers as commercially actionable intelligence.The problem is that this infrastructure is expensive to run, requiring server capacity and content databases that cost millions to maintain and those costs are only justifiable when you have tens of millions of devices contributing data simultaneously. When your addressable footprint is 400K TVs in the Netherlands or 200K in Belgium, the math falls apart entirely. The vendors who built the US system have shown little interest in adapting their operating model for smaller markets, because there is no version of that model that works at European scale without a fundamental rethink of the architecture.Why TV manufacturers need this more than everTo understand why this matters commercially, it helps to understand just how thin the economics of Smart TV manufacturing actually are. The bill of (hardware) materials on a mid-range set is substantial and after accounting for manufacturing, logistics, retail and OS licensing, the margin available to the device maker is narrow enough that the business has always depended on supplementary income streams to stay viable.For a period, those supplementary streams came from the operating system arrangements that defined the last decade of CTV. When Google was actively building Android TV’s device footprint, it paid bounty fees to manufacturers like Sony and TCL, a fixed payment for every set sold with the OS installed, because it needed their distribution reach. Smaller OS providers without the same financial firepower structured similar arrangements around revenue share, promising manufacturers a cut of the monetisation generated on their hardware. Now layer in a supply chain disruption that has nothing to do with streaming or software with AI companies purchasing available memory at scale and the downstream effect on consumer electronics manufacturers is genuinely severe. "A customer told us that their cost was around 1$ for a certain memory type and it's now at $44. That's the immense difference they're facing right now. If you don't have the means to subsidise your brand with other income streams, you’re in for a struggle." Mehmet Eroglu, co-founderFor a manufacturer without the balance sheet depth of a Samsung or LG, that kind of shock does not get absorbed into the P&L. It threatens the entire unit economics of the business and pushes the question of supplementary revenue from consideration to necessity. Data revenue shared directly with the device manufacturer, generated from advertising intelligence that already exists on the hardware they produce, offers a way to address that pressure without requiring them to build a platform, acquire content rights or compete with the OS providers already running on their devices.How the detection actually worksSyncMint’s technical approach starts with a deliberate constraint that turns out to be a significant advantage. Rather than trying to identify everything on screen, the module embedded in the device’s chipset is trained to detect one specific type of content: advertising. Not sport, not news, not drama, just the ads.This is not an arbitrary limitation. Advertising content is structurally distinct from everything else on television precisely because it is designed to be: every piece of ad creative is built to stand out, to be immediately recognisable and to not sound or look like the programming it interrupts. That distinctiveness makes advertising far easier to detect than content. Football matches are notoriously difficult to distinguish from each other because the first five seconds of almost every game feature a whistle and crowd noise. Identifying ad creative A versus ad creative B is a far simpler problem and a far lighter one to run on a small portion of a chip’s processing power.The local (as in ‘on device’) fingerprinting architecture compounds this efficiency. Rather than sending samples to an external server for matching against a vast catalog, the algorithm runs on the device itself, checking incoming audio against a library it already holds locally. On top of the audio detection layer sits a contextual classification engine powered by machine learning, which adds a second dimension to the data. This engine does not identify specific content, it classifies it. It recognises that what is on screen is football rather than tennis, that a Rolex ad is airing during a sports broadcast with Sinner visible and a sponsor logo on court, that the viewing context is premium sport rather than late-night infomercial. It builds meaningful context around each advertising exposure without attempting to build any kind of profile of the person watching. For most planning purposes, that classification is exactly what advertisers need: confirmation that their message reached a household in a specific viewing context and a record of how many times that week it already had.Privacy as architecture, not complianceSystems operating in the US can combine a household’s IP address, device identifiers, screen size and detailed viewing history into a behavioral profile that tells you the address, the hardware specification and what that household was watching at eleven on a Friday night. That is one-to-one profiling of personal behaviour, it has already attracted legal scrutiny in the US including an ongoing case in Texas and it reflects a data philosophy that sits awkwardly with how Europeans think about the relationship between their devices and their private lives.SyncMint’s architecture makes those profiles structurally impossible to build rather than merely difficult to access. The module detects advertising exposure and nothing else. It does not log what content a household watches, how long a viewing session lasts or any behavioural signal outside of which ads have appeared on screen and in what context. There is no viewing diary being assembled anywhere in the system, no content fingerprint being transmitted to a server and no persistent household identifier linking sessions together into a longitudinal profile. The data that flows out of the device is limited, by design, to what is commercially useful for advertising measurement and excludes everything that would make it useful for surveillance.“The data harvesting that legacy competitors do always felt uncomfortable, especially coming from a European perspective. So we took the approach of: what if we look at advertising exposure only? No one particularly minds that they drive past a billboard and see it. The advertising is there to support.” Pieter Oonk, co-founder SyncMintOonk’s billboard comparison captures the underlying logic cleanly. Nobody objects to driving past a billboard and being counted as part of the audience measurement for that location. They did not choose to see the ad but they understand the implicit exchange between free content and commercial exposure. The data SyncMint collects is the television equivalent: a record of advertising exposure, measured in aggregate, without any of the behavioural inference that has made US Smart TV data practices a target for regulators.What advertisers do with the dataThe most immediate commercial use case is frequency management and the planning gap it addresses is more significant in Europe than most media buyers will acknowledge.Every major advertiser has a view on optimal frequency for a given campaign. According to Oonk, for a major retailer, historical data pointed to an optimal frequency of seven impressions per week, roughly one per day, and hitting that target consistently across both linear and streaming was something their current media buy could not verify.​​​​​​​Staying within that range matters both for efficiency and for how the brand is perceived by the audience. What advertisers have consistently lacked is a reliable way to measure whether they are hitting that target, because linear and CTV are planned and bought through separate systems that do not share household-level data with each other. The linear buy gets optimised against panel reach data. The CTV buy gets optimised against digital impression metrics. Nobody reconciles the two at the household level, because until now there was no data that made that reconciliation possible.The practical result plays out in every major European market: a household ends up seeing the same supermarket ad ten times in three days because the linear team and the streaming team each optimised their buy in isolation, while a competitor’s message reaches that same household zero times because no one had the visibility to identify and fill the gap. SyncMint provides a single view of advertising exposure across both environments, which closes the loop and makes it possible to plan against reality rather than against assumptions.The CPM uplift this kind of data enables is well evidenced in the US market. Oonk points to Vizio as the clearest example: household-level targeting and incremental reach measurement delivered three to four times higher CPMs compared to standard run-of-network rates, a difference that reflects the premium buyers will pay when they can verify they are reaching genuinely unduplicated audiences. On the buy side, a planner managing a major consumer brand campaign can use the data to set different bid prices for households already at frequency saturation versus those that are hard to reach because they are predominantly streaming-only viewers and that kind of bid optimisation creates real efficiency at a scale that European CTV has been promising for years without having the underlying data to support it.Linear inventory, notably, tends to be the underserved channel in these analyses. The industry narrative around CTV targeting has pulled planning attention and budget toward streaming, but most European households remain cord-shavers rather than cord-cutters, spending a meaningful share of their viewing time on linear while also using streaming services. Those two environments live in separate planning silos and the data that would connect them across a single household view has simply been absent. That absence is what SyncMint is building against.We’ll discuss that in more details during Streaming Made Easy Live as part of Stream TV Europe. That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy.

Abel Ortiz was brought from Mexico to LA when he was just two months old and has been​ living undocumented​ ever since. Now 38, he has a full life​ cutting hair, building a community, loving​ a city that has never fully loved him back.​ ​In a time of escalating ICE raids and the ache of uncertainty, Abel has made a radical decision: he’s leaving – not because he has to, but to escape perpetual limbo and be free to see the world Continue reading...

A live Champions League final. Hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers streaming simultaneously. And running alongside them, thousands of sessions acquiring the stream from a single stolen account. Same bandwidth overhead, zero revenue. Your CDN delivery costs make no distinction between a paying subscriber and a freeloader. Both cost exactly the same. This is CDN leeching. And for operators delivering premium video streams, it’s one of the quietest margin problems in the industry. The Double Hit The economics of leeching are twofold; A hacker buys a single legitimate subscription, extracts the streaming URLs, and redistributes access, often to hundreds or thousands of people paying a fraction of the legitimate price. The hacker bears almost none of the operational cost – storage, packaging, CDN, content licensing: all stays with you. The financial damage runs is twofold. First, there’s the lost subscriber revenue: every viewer paying a hacker is a subscriber you’ve lost. Second, and this is the part operators tend to underestimate, you still have to deliver every byte of traffic those illegal sessions generate. Bandwidth is bandwidth, regardless of who’s watching. At scale, during a live sports event where piracy spikes at exactly the moment your infrastructure is under maximum load, that adds up fast. Why Visibility Is the Problem The obvious response is to detect and block. But detection requires data: granular, real-time visibility into traffic patterns across your delivery infrastructure. That’s precisely what third-party CDN models don’t give you. When your content flows through a public CDN, the logs are in someone else’s system, formatted on their terms, accessible through their tooling. Illegal sessions look like normal sessions from the outside. By the time you’ve identified a pattern, raised a support ticket, and waited for a response, the match is over. The pirated stream has already run its course. Without control over your delivery infrastructure, you don’t have the visibility to act on what’s being delivered through it. Taking Back Control with NEA CDN Ateme’s private, on-net NEA CDN solution combined with PILOT Analytics brings delivery infrastructure inside your network, and with it, full visibility into everything running on it. Every session, every request, every anomaly is your data, accessible in real time, actionable immediately. Ateme has spent over two decades working alongside broadcasters and network operators to solve the specific challenges of high-scale video delivery. That experience shapes how NEA CDN approaches security: not as a set of standalone features, but as an integrated capability that reflects how operators actually encounter and respond to threats in production environments. The latest release of NEA CDN builds on that close collaboration with a range of new and enhanced security capabilities aimed to address the leeching problem across the entire attack chain. Enhanced Token Protection for Live and Start over Content Closes off a common attack vector: parameter tampering. Malicious users can modify start and end time parameters to access content outside their authorised window, or to overload backend systems with invalid requests. Token validation at the NEA CDN layer rejects mismatched requests before they reach your origin, shifting control to the server side. Multi-vendor Watermarking Integration Every stream delivered by the NEA CDN carries a session-specific fingerprint, invisible to viewers but recoverable when illegal content surfaces on piracy sites. When a leak appears, a watermarking platform identifies the account it originated from, closing the loop between the redistributed stream and its source. Nagra Gatekeeper Stream Disruption Once a rogue session is identified, integration with Nagra Gatekeeper gives you options: block it outright, degrade quality to make the service commercially unviable for the pirate’s customers, or redirect to alternative content. Disruption is configurable per session and enforced in real time. Enhanced Operation Logging Operators gain full visibility into the type and scale of illegal requests being dropped by the NEA CDN Balancer, including the original requested URLs and the operations that caught them. That data informs your security strategy over time and provides the audit trail that compliance teams increasingly require. The Real Cost of Leeching Is the Cost You Can’t See Leeching is a revenue integrity problem with a technical solution. But it’s also a moving target. As operators close one exploit, attackers adapt. The approaches that work today will need to evolve, and the operators who navigate this best will be those with a technology partner invested in staying ahead of the threat alongside them. Ateme’s security roadmap for NEA CDN is shaped directly by the operators who deploy it. If you’re looking for a partner to help you protect the margins that premium content is supposed to generate, the conversation starts with owning the infrastructure that delivers it. Explore related insights Data Sovereignty for Video Delivery NEA CDN & Video Delivery Ateme OTT Streaming Solutions About the Author Mark Haines CDN Product Manager & OTT Streaming Solutions Manager at Ateme Mark brings 18+ years of experience in OTT streaming & Content Delivery Networks. With a background spanning product management, solution architecture, and business development, he helps content owners, telcos & network operators navigate modern streaming infrastructure, from CDN strategy and live video delivery to cloud-native OTT platform design. At Ateme, Mark leads product direction for the NEA CDN portfolio and drives OTT & streaming solution strategy for major telcos and network operators worldwide, having previously spent 5 years as a Global Solution Architect.  Prior to Ateme, he held solution architecture and business development roles at Velocix, part of Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Video division. L’article Who’s Paying for Your Streaming Piracy Problem? est apparu en premier sur Ateme.

🎙️ TF1+ comes for your commuteTF1+ just added a dedicated podcast category to its streaming platform, bringing together 21 brands, 453 episodes and over 220 hours of content spanning true crime, politics, culture, sport and more, all free and accessible from the homepage. The lineup leans on familiar TF1 faces: Jacques Pradel on criminal cases, Audrey Crespo-Mara on long-form celebrity interviews, François Lenglet on economic conversations and Pablo Mira on celebrity daily routines.The format is video-first podcast (vodcast), designed to work whether you watch or just listen, which turns a streaming app into a companion app, one that follows users beyond the couch and into the commute, the kitchen and the gym. Extending reach beyond the living room has real value for a free ad-supported platform trying to maximise daily touch points.Two years into its rebirth as TF1+, the broadcaster’s streaming platform is turning more and more into a multi-vertical entertainment destination that happens to be powered by a broadcaster. Throughout 2025, it garnered 38M monthly active users, with a peak at 42M in October, and it’s looking to give more and more reasons to users to come back and stay. 🇪🇸 Movistar Plus+ finds its grooveMovistar Plus+ added 278,000 subscribers in 2025, a 7.9% year-on-year jump that took its total base to 3.8 million across IPTV and OTT. For context, in 2024 the net gain was just 94,000. Their formula? Premium local originals, stacked sports rights and enough international series to round out the library. On the content side, Movistar Plus+ originals picked up 13 Goya Awards including Best Film and Best Director for Los Domingos. Sirat earned two Oscar nominations. On sports, Champions League renewed until 2031, LALIGA secured through 2031/32, the 2026 FIFA World Cup added through a DAZN deal and a new FIBA basketball agreement on top.What makes Movistar Plus+ interesting is what it represents structurally. This is a telco-owned platform competing credibly against global streamers in a major European market by doing exactly what the textbook says: invest in local, lock up sports and grow distribution. In a continent where everyone talks about scale, Movistar Plus+ is proof that depth in a single market still works.📊 Europe is not America (and we’ve got the data to prove it)Four years of data, 17 countries, 15,000+ respondents. The RTL AdAlliance Living Room report is the largest ongoing study of European viewing behaviour The 5th edition, which Streaming Made Easy is co-producing with RTL AdAlliance, goes even wider: three continents, and for the first time, data on how Europeans feel about AI-generated video content, long-form content chopped into shorts and more. We are unpacking it live on March 25th. Tune in live at 10am CET. You’ll get a QR code to download the full report afterwards.Register🇺🇸 What US audiences actually wantTubi’s annual audience study The Stream (produced with The Harris Poll) is out and it’s one of the few reports that tells you what US audiences actually do, not what the industry assumes they do. One stat that stood out: 77% of respondents prefer on-demand over scheduled linear streaming. Three to one. Another: three quarters of viewers say streaming together is now household quality time. Co-viewing is back, well it never really left. and I got an advanced copy and broke it down on this week’s Media Odyssey Podcast. We also dug into the Paramount investor deck making the rounds and let’s just say there’s a lot of money talk and very little strategy in those slides.The Stream is free. Go download it. The podcast is wherever you listen to podcasts: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE.🐾 PAW Patrol runs Netflix KidsPAW Patrol claimed the number one spot in Netflix Kids by hours viewed in H2 2025, powered by its US debut on the platform. That’s the headline from the fifth edition of ’s Netflix Kids Content Performance Report and it’s packed with signals worth tracking. The preschool category is now the most competitive space in Netflix Kids. Gabby’s Dollhouse still dominates across the full year with over 600 million hours viewed. Ms. Rachel jumped from number six to number four within her first year on the platform. CoComelon’s decline is now a multi-year trend that new seasons can’t reverse. And Sesame Street’s much-hyped Netflix arrival? Landed on the lower end of performance benchmarks.Two patterns stand out. First, creator-led content is no longer a curiosity. Ms. Rachel, CrunchLabs (Mark Rober), Little Angel: YouTube-native brands are building real scale on Netflix. Second, legacy IP refuses to get out of style. SpongeBob pulled 143 million hours viewed, 40% ahead of its nearest comedy competitor, without even being on Netflix in the US. That catalogue power matters enormously as the Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery merger speculation continues. Where those franchises end up will reshape the kids streaming map for years.Emily Horgan’s report is the closest thing this space has to an industry standard. If you work in kids content, licensing or distribution, you gotta grab it here.📣 SME Live Amsterdam is back!Our programming for SME Live Lisbon during Stream TV Europe is a wrap (we start at 9am sharp on April 13th!) so it’s time to get started on SME Live Amsterdam now.Last September, 118 executives from Netflix, YouTube, BBC, Sky, Canal+, Paramount and 90+ other companies flew into Amsterdam a day before IBC for a half day of talks and networking. They rated the experience 4.7 out of 5. On September 10th 2026, SME Live returns at a new location, Rode Hoed, expanding to a full day and ready to welcome 200+ executives around the theme of The Long Game. Five years of reactive mode, quarterly pressure and short-term pivots have left the industry good at firefighting and less good at building. This edition is designed to create space for the conversations that don't fit in a 45-minute panel: where European content investment actually goes from here, what the talent equation looks like when AI is in the room, which distribution models are built to last and who owns the audience relationship when the platform wars settle. Talks, case studies and structured networking in a single-track room where Media meets Tech as equals. No overlapping sessions, no FOMO.The waitlist is now open, priority access and early bird pricing go to waitlist subscribers first before tickets go on sale April 19th. Last year, the event sold out and 63 people were left on the outside looking in.Join the waitlist🗳️ Poll timeThat’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.

We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closingAcross the UK, many small charities face increasing financial pressures, forcing some to shut their doors. When this happens, it can leave the people who relied on those services without support - and volunteers and communities trying to step in and keep things going.We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closing. Have you or others tried to continue the work informally and what were the challenges of doing that? Did you try to keep it going - and what difficulties did you face? What happened to the people who depended on the service? Continue reading...

“It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s your playlist.”Evan Shapiro, co-host, The Media Odyssey PodcastThis week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I dig into two reports that together paint a sharp picture of where the streaming industry stands right now. One is full of insights to build a strategy while the other makes you question whether there is one.First: Tubi‘s The Stream (in partnership with The Harris Poll), their annual study on audience behaviour in the US. They gave us an advanced copy and we found real gems. If you work in streaming, this report should be required reading. It’s packed with data and some of the findings will challenge a few assumptions the industry has been holding onto for a while.The Stream is out now. Go download the report for free here. Then Evan Shapīro got his hands on the Paramount investor deck making the rounds. We looked into the numbers, ran the analysis and found a whole lot of money talk and very little strategy.Here's what jumped out:→ Combined revenues went from $71B to $66B between 2023 and 2025 but the deck projects a climb to $84B by 2030.→ EBITDA has been flat or down for three years and somehow growth magically kicks in this year.→ $8B in tech cuts, $6B in business services cuts, $4B in real estate sales, all while promising "no massive layoffs."→ Bank of America apparently agrees with us, downgrading Paramount stock from a buy at $13 to a sell at $11.And that's just the US side of things. We also looked at Europe where the added complexity lives. Grab our slides and LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.That’s it for today but before you go:🗳️ Poll timeComments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻Enjoy your week and see you on Sunday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

We’d like to hear from people who are in a throuple or who used to be in one, and what their relationship was likeThe Guardian’s Saturday magazine is looking for throuples to talk honestly about the experience of love and commitment.We’re particularly interested in talking to throuples living together under one roof, as well as throuples who are raising children as a unit of three parents. Is it easier to manage the chore rota and childcare when there are more adults in the room? Or more difficult? Continue reading...

Hi everyone, We’re going live on March 18th (5pm CET / 11am EST) right here on Substack. No need for Riverside this time. You can click the link below to join or simply open your Substack app on the day and you’ll see me live at the top of your homepage. Read more

I recently interviewed Damien Sterkers, VP of Products and Solutions Marketing at Broadpeak, to discuss the company’s new multiview solution for live streaming. Briefly, Broadpeak has developed an innovative server-side approach that delivers the best of both worlds: the universal device compatibility of server-side multiview without the massive encoding costs that approach typically requires. You can watch the video on YouTube here; in this article, I summarize our conversation. About Broadpeak Figure 1. Broadpeak’s products and solutions. Multiview fits right in. Click to see at full resolution. We started by describing Broadpeak, which is a France-based streaming technology company founded in 2010, with roughly 300 employees and offices around the globe. As shown in Figure 1, the company offers end-to-end video streaming solutions spanning video processing, content personalization, anti-piracy and security, delivery, analytics, and app intelligence. Sterkers noted that Broadpeak is perhaps best known for delivery, and in particular for its multicast capability — “the ability to deliver live events in multicast, meaning only one stream for everyone. It’s very helpful when we have massive audiences.” The company has also built a strong reputation in dynamic ad insertion and origin packaging, serving major operators including Deutsche Telekom and Charter. More broadly, he said, “We’re known for being very present with our customers. We really follow them through their journey until they get their services delivered to the end users.” Multiview is a natural extension of Broadpeak’s existing video processing work. “We’ve been deploying origin packagers and cloud DVR for quite a bit of time now, probably over ten years,” Sterkers said, “and now we’re proposing this multiview solution, which is an extension of what we’re proposing on the origin packaging process.” It also draws on the manifest-manipulation know-how built over years of content personalization and ad insertion work. The solution is available as licensed software, as a SaaS offering on Broadpeak’s proprietary platform, or as a fully managed service with 24/7 operator support. About Multiview Figure 2. Multiview is most commonly used for sports. With the company background established, the conversation turned to multiview itself. The concept is straightforward: multiple programs displayed simultaneously on a single screen, as shown in Figure 2. But Sterkers was quick to distinguish it from an older, superficially similar idea. “Sometimes the first remark that I’m getting is, ‘Oh, I know this, back in the time, maybe 20 years ago, it was called a mosaic.'” The difference, he explained, is control. “The mosaic was very static. The operator was deciding on maybe four or five pages of mosaic. With multiview, the end user gets to choose what content they want to put on the screen and also the overlay, how they want that to be presented.” The most obvious use case is sports. “If you have a championship where different games are going on at the same time, that’s really one main example of how people would use it,” Sterkers said. Beyond that, viewers might want multiple camera angles on the same game, or simply keep an eye on the news or another game while watching something else. “Maybe the game is getting a bit boring,” he offered, “you want to watch something else at the same time, but still see whenever there’s a goal or anything going on.” The market dynamics behind Multiview are compelling. The second-screen experience, driven by sports betting, fantasy leagues, and simple generational habit, has become enormous. Publishers who can’t capture that attention on the main screen risk losing it to a phone, along with the revenue that goes with it. Multiview brings that activity back into the primary viewing experience, where publishers can monetize it. Traditional Client-Side and Server-Side Multiview Figure 3. Traditional client-side and server-side multiview. As shown in Figure 3, there are two established ways to implement multiview, each with significant drawbacks. The server-side approach, called multi-encode, is what YouTube and Comcast have deployed. “The principle is to prepare combinations in advance in the system,” Sterkers explained. “When a user requests a combination, it will be a specific combination that is prepared as a different channel or a different video.” The key advantage is universal device compatibility: it looks like any standard stream to any player. The problem is cost. Every unique combination requires its own encoder. With 20 input channels and five layouts, you can quickly reach tens of thousands of combinations, each needing dedicated encoding capacity. Most publishers sensibly limit their options, but as Staerkers noted, the relationship between inputs and outputs is factorial, not linear. “You can add a little bit at the input, and it makes a big difference at the output.” The client-side approach, called multi-player, flips the problem. No extra encoding is needed since the existing streams are reused, and users get full flexibility to build their own layouts. But all the heavy lifting moves to the device. “There are only very few players that are able to deal with that,” Sterkers said. FuboTV launched client-side multiview on Apple TV in 2021 and didn’t expand to other platforms for four years, a telling sign of how limiting device constraints can be. The multitude of lower-powered smart TVs in living rooms simply can’t handle receiving and compositing multiple simultaneous streams. In short, client-side is cheap on the transcoding side but reaches few devices; server-side reaches all devices but gets expensive fast. Broadpeak’s Multi-Package Multiview Figure 4. Broadpeak’s multi-package approach avoids transcoding, but requires that all source videos be HEVC. Broadpeak’s solution takes a third path. “Instead of doing it at the encoding level, which is quite expensive in terms of processing, we’re doing it at the packaging level,” Sterkers explained. Each input channel is encoded just once. From there, the system assembles combinations on the fly at the packaging level, no additional encoding required. As I summarized during our conversation: “So, you’re manipulating metadata; you’re not re-transcoding.” Sterkers confirmed this, adding that while repackaging does require some processing, it’s “in the range of 100 to 1,000 times less CPU usage than if you were using an encoder.” HEVC Inputs and Outputs Required Significantly, this approach only works with HEVC source streams, as specific tools in the HEVC specification enable the tile-based encoding and repackaging that makes multi-package work. “For that client, it’s just a normal HEVC channel,” Sterkers said, and he estimated that roughly 90% of devices currently support HEVC, with nearly 100% of new devices shipping with HEVC capability. In practice, the limitation is minimal. Multiview is primarily a big-screen experience, and any large TV purchased since 2015 almost certainly supports HEVC, making 90% a conservative estimate. The fringe cases are browsers and older devices, where multiview is unlikely to be a priority anyway. The scale advantage over multi-encode is significant. “Where we had the capacity that was limited, let’s say, to 100 combinations with multi-encode, now it would be more in the range of 10,000 or 100,000,” Sterkers said. “If you put enough servers, you can consider that you will never reach that limit.” H.264 Inputs and Legacy Devices At this point, I asked about legacy support for H.264, both for input streams entering the system and for output streams to legacy devices. On the input side, the answer is straightforward. Broadpeak can transcode H.264 sources to HEVC, and since each input is only encoded once, the cost is minimal, so ten input channels means ten encoders, full stop. Output is a different story. Delivering H.264 to legacy devices means re-encoding every combination, which puts you right back into multi-encode/server-side territory. It’s technically possible, but as Sterkers put it, “most operators prefer to abandon the very old devices and pay for a system that is much less expensive and much more lightweight.” Advantages of Multi-Package The multi-package approach combines the best of both traditional methods. Like server-side/multi-encode, it delivers a single stream that any standard player can handle, with wide device support. Like client-side/multi-player, it doesn’t require encoding every combination. “You encode just the inputs,” Sterkers noted, and in many cases, that encoding is already part of the existing delivery system. The result is dramatically more flexibility at a fraction of the cost. “You can propose to your customers hundreds of times more combinations than you would with server-side/multi-encode,” Sterkers said. The solution also layers on top of existing infrastructure, so operators don’t need to rip and replace their current origin packager to add multiview. Dynamic Ad Insertion on Multi-Package Multiview Figure 5. The Broadpeak solution enables dynamic ad insertion over the entire screen. Ad insertion in a multiview environment raises an obvious question: if one tile breaks to an ad while the others keep playing, does anyone actually watch it? Sterkers acknowledged the concern and said that Broadpeak’s preferred approach is full-screen ads. Since each multiview combination is treated as its own channel, it can be handed off to the dynamic ad insertion system like any other. “We just announce to the ad server that we have more inventory available, and it can decide to insert ads specifically on this multiview application.” This level of ad integration is still a work in progress; Sterkers noted it isn’t part of any current deployment phase. But he sees no fundamental blocking point, and suggested multiview could actually open up new ad formats. A standard L-shaped banner, for example, typically zooms out the video and fills the surrounding space with a still image. With multiview, that space could carry a live video instead. Sterkers also noted that interactive elements, like banners, buttons, and zoom overlays, work just as they would on a standard stream. Multiview API and Demo Figure 7. Broadpeak has a web demo they can make available to prospective customers. Sterkers then switched to a web demo. He explained that the multiview combination is driven entirely through URL query parameters, one parameter per tile specifying the content, plus a layout parameter to define how they’re arranged. The system builds the combination on the fly and returns a single stream. Switching channels or changing layouts is as simple as updating the URL. One bonus of working at the packaging level rather than the encoding level: no added latency. “Here at the packaging level, switching multiviews avoids any transcoding latency,” Sterkers said. The player itself needs no special capabilities; any standard player capable of decoding HEVC will handle it. The intelligence lives in the app, which needs to handle tasks such as tile selection and layout switching. During the demo, Sterkers showed how this logic extends to the audio track, noting that the sound automatically follows the primary tile. “The sound will be on the big one,” he explained, “and if I click on another tile, the audio will follow.” Broadpeak has built a demo app that shows how straightforward that logic can be and is compatible with Shaka Player, THEOplayer, Safari, and others. It’s available on request. Availability and Deployment Options Broadpeak announced the product last month, with undisclosed projects already underway. Sterkers shared that interest is strongest in the US, though discussions with European operators and in Latin America are also in progress. In terms of how quickly the technology can be deployed, Sterkers stated that deployment is faster than either traditional approach because so much less hardware is involved. A large configuration supporting 10,000-20,000 combinations can run on a single server plus a redundant backup. On-prem, cloud, or fully managed service are all options, and operators can start with managed service to get up quickly, then transition on-prem later if preferred. Summary Broadpeak’s newly launched multi-package multiview solution is already generating worldwide interest. With NAB just around the corner, it’s a safe bet the technology will be a centerpiece of their presence at the show. Operators interested in learning more can reach out to Broadpeak directly or stop by their booth in Las Vegas. Click here for more on meeting with Broadpeak at NAB. The post Broadpeak Debuts “Best of Both Worlds” Multi-Package Multiview first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

The subscription economy is entering a new phase. For years, the playbook was simple: build a service, launch it direct-to-consumer, compete on content and/or price. That era is ending. What is replacing it is a market that divides into two camps: companies that bundle (and own the customer relationship, the billing, the interface) and companies that get bundled into someone else’s package (and lose control of all three).New research from Bango, surveying 4,000 consumers across the US and UK in January 2026, puts hard numbers behind this shift. 61% of Brits now expect streaming services to be included within their internet, TV or phone package, not as a bonus but as a baseline expectation. 31% of Americans say they are done with standalone subscriptions entirely, a figure that rises to 48% among Gen Z. And 71% of British consumers say they are more loyal to telcos that help them save money on subscriptions.The consumer verdict is in: whoever simplifies the subscription mess wins. The open question is who that “whoever” turns out to be because the candidates are not limited to the usual suspects. Retailers, neobanks, publishers and even creator-led brands are all making moves. Today at a glance:The squeezeThose who bundleThose who get bundledThe new wildcardsDownload the reportThe squeezeThe pressure to bundle is hitting every part of the European media and telecom ecosystem at once. On the streaming side, fragmentation has reached its natural limit. European households juggle an average of 3.2 subscriptions (vs 4.5 in the US and 3.5 in LATAM) and after years of price hikes, consumers are consolidating rather than adding blindly. Smaller SVOD services have already become add-on channels inside aggregators. For streamers who lack the scale of a Netflix or Disney+, the question is no longer “how do I grow directly” but “which bundle do I need to be inside to grow the most.”On the telecom side, Europe is consolidating toward three operators per country. According to Analysys Mason, 56% of Europeans live in a three-MNO market by end of 2025, up from 46% a decade earlier. When connectivity commoditises, differentiation moves upstream to whoever controls the bundle, the billing and the discovery layer.European broadcasters feel it too. Partnerships with former rivals (Netflix with TF1, France Televisions with Amazon, Disney+ with ITV, Atresmedia and ZDF, RTL with Sky) are multiplying because doing it alone is no longer viable. These deals are bundling strategies in disguise: exclusivity traded for distribution reach.And here is the demand signal that should worry everyone: Bango’s earlier European research found that 19% of subscribers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy use pirate streaming as their only way to get content in one place. Those who bundleThe companies winning this race share one trait: they control the interface (and underneath the billing relationship) between the consumer and the content.Sky’s February 2026 move is the clearest example. Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and Hayu packaged into a single TV subscription from 24 pounds a month, with genuine Sky OS integration: unified recommendations, cross-app Continue Watching and voice search that spans every service. Canal+ runs a similar play in France with Apple TV and Paramount+ included for all subscribers. Deutsche Telekom is scaling operator-led Disney+ bundles across its European footprint starting with Hungary.CTV platforms are playing the same game from a slightly different angle. Samsung, LG and others control the home screen (but often lag behind on the payment layer), which in a bundle economy is arguably the most valuable real estate in streaming. These platforms now operate their own FAST channels, ad sales and subscription storefronts. For any streamer without Netflix-level scale, home screen visibility is an existential question.Those who get bundledPaul Larbey, CEO of Bango, puts it bluntly: “if telcos do not move quickly to become the orchestrators of subscription access, they risk being reduced to a product inside someone else’s experience.”That warning extends beyond telcos. For content providers, getting included in a Sky or Deutsche Telekom bundle delivers scaled distribution and lower acquisition costs. But someone else owns the customer relationship and in some cases the product fades in the background leaving only content as the driver (often without the appropriate service brand attribution). Bango’s research found that 30% of US SVOD subscriptions were sold through indirect channels. The services that optimise for indirect distribution will reach more subscribers. Those that insist on owning every customer relationship directly will watch their addressable market shrink.The new wildcardsWhat makes this moment different is the range of players entering from outside media and telecom.Neobanks like Revolut, which launched a mobile network in the UK in January 2026 offering unlimited 5G for 12.50 pounds a month, could bundle subscriptions next. Retailers have been testing similar plays. In France, Carrefour piloted a bundle in early 2024 offering customers Netflix Standard with Ads alongside a 10% discount on own-brand products for 5.99 euros a month in Bordeaux and Rouen (but no national roll out ensued). In the US, Walmart+ includes Paramount+ and Peacock and Kroger Boost offers Disney+ Basic. Publishers are testing the logic too. In France, Le Monde and Telerama launched a bundle with WBD’s HBO Max in April 2025, folding streaming inside a journalism subscription. The logic works because it serves the same consumer need: consolidate, simplify, reduce.Then prominent creators like MrBeast, with 471 million followers, who is planning to launch Beast Mobile and acquired fintech app Step, positioning himself as the GenZ bundler. The direction is clear: any company with a recurring billing relationship and/or a large customer base or following can position itself as a bundler. The boundaries are dissolving and the only question that matters is who the customer trusts the most to be their default subscription hub.That’s it for today. During Streaming Made Easy Live - Lisbon, Giles Tongue, Bango’s Chief Marketing Officer, will join our panel ‘The Living Room in 2030: Super Aggregation or Super Fragmentation?’ where we will discuss what happens by 2030? Will one player own the living room or will we still be switching between apps, juggling subscriptions and forgetting passwords? Join us at StreamTV Europe. Use my code (SME10) to get 10% off here. We just released our programming here. A lot of great content is coming your way.🗳️ Poll timeThat’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

Content is only as powerful as its ability to connect with every audience it reaches. For broadcasters and streaming platforms, expanding into new regions is no longer just about distribution—it’s about delivering localized, accessible experiences at scale, across both broadcast and OTT environments. Ateme’s TITAN solution enables this through a fully integrated, AI-driven workflow that supports both SRT-based broadcast contribution and CMAF-based streaming delivery. Whether ingesting live content via SRT or preparing streams for OTT distribution using CMAF, the same unified pipeline enables real-time transcription, translation, dubbing, and AI-powered signing. This end-to-end approach ensures that accessibility is built directly into the content workflow. Subtitles, multi-language audio, and sign language services for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences can be generated and delivered seamlessly, helping content providers meet increasingly stringent global accessibility and regulatory requirements. Operating 24/7 without human intervention, the solution removes the complexity of manual workflows, shift management, and resource constraints, enabling consistent, scalable delivery of localized content at any time. Beyond translation, Ateme preserves the integrity of the viewing experience through contextual translation, speaker recognition, and emotion and tone matching. Audiences don’t just understand the content—they experience it as intended, regardless of language or format. From a business perspective, this unified solution delivers clear value: Expanded reach into new regions and underserved communities Regulatory compliance with global accessibility mandates Lower OPEX through fully automated, always-on operations Faster time-to-market for multi-language and accessible content New monetization opportunities through localized advertising, sponsorship, and subscriptions With support for over 120 languages and a field-proven, fully integrated architecture, Ateme transforms accessibility and localization from a compliance requirement into a scalable growth strategy. Explore related insights Webinar: Live Stream in 120 Languages, with emotion! Preparing Live Infrastructures for Immersive and Personalized Experiences TITAN for Video Processing & Compression About the Author Jean-Louis Lods VP Media and Monetization at Ateme Jean-Louis offers over 25 years of media, entertainment, and broadcast industry knowledge. Focusing on the customer experience, he brings a consultative approach to solutions delivery, focusing on everything from business transformation through cloud strategy and SaaS to a manage-by-exception media supply chain principle plus contribution and primary distribution and monetization with DAI to VoD-to-Live. Prior to joining Ateme, Jean-Louis managed a major service provider in Amsterdam offering video-on-demand and linear playout services for international blue-chip media companies. L’article Reaching More Communities est apparu en premier sur Ateme.

Audio at Scale: Preparing Contribution for the Next Generation of Live Experiences For years, contribution infrastructures have evolved primarily around one objective: delivering video with the highest possible quality, reliability, and efficiency. Improvements in compression, latency reduction, and network resilience have driven most technological innovation across the broadcast chain. But as live services evolve, another factor is increasingly shaping how audiences perceive content: the experience itself. And within that experience, audio is becoming a decisive element. Languages, stadium atmospheres, accessibility tracks, alternative commentaries and immersive sound environments are no longer secondary features. They are becoming essential components of modern live services, influencing how audiences engage with content and ultimately how platforms retain subscribers. The shift toward personalized viewing experiences is transforming the role of audio in live production. What was once a single accompanying stream is now evolving into a complex ecosystem of audio elements designed to serve different audiences simultaneously. At the same time, contribution infrastructures designed around fixed hardware capacities struggle to adapt to these new requirements. Increasing the number of audio components should not require replacing platforms or sacrificing video performance. This is why the industry is increasingly moving toward architectures designed for scalability by design. From a Single Audio Track to Dozens of Experiences Live content today reaches audiences that are far more diverse than in the past. A single event may need to address multiple geographic markets, each with its own language and cultural expectations. At the same time, viewers increasingly expect immersive sound environments that bring them closer to the venue itself. Accessibility is also becoming an essential part of modern media services, introducing additional audio components such as descriptive tracks or dialogue enhancement. Streaming platforms are experimenting with alternative commentary formats, while rights holders explore ways to offer differentiated audio feeds tailored to specific audiences. All of these developments naturally translate into a growing number of audio tracks associated with a single program. Where a contribution workflow once handled only a few channels, it must now support dozens of audio components while maintaining operational simplicity and preserving the integrity of the video workflow. Scaling audio must therefore become a natural capability of contribution infrastructures rather than a disruptive change. Contribution as the Foundation of Immersive Distribution Contribution has traditionally been viewed as a transport mechanism, an efficient way to deliver a high-quality program feed from production to distribution. In a world of immersive and personalized media services, however, its role becomes far more strategic. Immersive distribution formats and personalized audio experiences rely on the availability of underlying audio components. If these elements are not captured, preserved and transported during contribution, they cannot be recreated later in the distribution chain. Contribution therefore, becomes the foundation of immersive distribution, determining whether downstream systems can construct richer experiences from the original media elements. Looking ahead, emerging technologies across the ecosystem (from scalable IP transport environments to memory-based media exchange frameworks and new immersive audio interchange standards) are all converging toward the same objective: enabling contribution infrastructures capable of supporting richer audio structures, larger channel counts and dynamic metadata workflows. Scalable Contribution for Immersive Experiences Why Traditional Architectures Struggle to Scale Traditional broadcast architectures were designed around predictable and relatively limited audio requirements. They remain extremely reliable but were not built with large-scale audio flexibility in mind. As the number of audio components increases, rigid workflows can quickly become complex. Expanding capacity may involve adding hardware resources, restructuring signal paths or introducing new operational layers. The challenge is not related to audio quality itself, which has long met broadcast standards. The challenge lies in scalability. Increasing the richness of audio should not come at the expense of encoding density, video quality or infrastructure simplicity. Modern contribution systems must therefore evolve toward architectures that allow audio capacity to grow without forcing fundamental infrastructure changes. IP Architectures Unlock Audio Flexibility The transition toward IP-based infrastructures, particularly environments built around SMPTE ST 2110, introduces a structural change in how media components are transported. By separating audio and video into independent flows, IP systems remove the rigid constraints associated with embedded transport models. Audio becomes an independent resource that can expand according to production needs without affecting video processing. This architectural approach makes configurations involving 32 or even 64 audio tracks operationally feasible in large-scale environments. These figures do not represent limits imposed by standards; they simply reflect the growing maturity of IP ecosystems capable of handling increasingly complex audio workflows. With such architectures, adding new languages, ambiences or accessibility feeds becomes a natural extension of the workflow rather than a structural redesign. Scalable Audio Contribution Workflow The Importance of Software-Driven Scalability Supporting a large number of audio channels today is only part of the challenge. Equally important is ensuring that systems can evolve tomorrow without requiring hardware replacement. Software-driven contribution architectures provide this flexibility. When media processing, routing and service configuration are defined in software rather than fixed hardware structures, infrastructures gain the ability to adapt as workflows evolve. Increasing the number of audio tracks should not reduce video encoding capacity, compromise video quality or require additional hardware platforms. Instead, systems should be able to expand logically, allowing operators to introduce new audio groups, languages or services while maintaining the same video performance. True scalability therefore comes from software evolution rather than hardware expansion. Preparing for Future Audio Ecosystems While IP transport already enables significant flexibility, the broader media ecosystem continues to evolve in ways that will further expand the role of audio. Architectures such as Media eXchange Layer (MXL) aim to simplify internal media processing by enabling efficient memory-based exchanges between processing components. By reducing dependency on rigid interface chains, these approaches help remove internal bottlenecks and make it easier to handle increasingly complex media structures. At the same time, contribution technologies continue to evolve across different latency and efficiency trade-offs. Codecs such as JPEG-XS enable visually lossless transport with extremely low latency, while intra-frame approaches such as AVC-I or HEVC-I offer a middle ground between latency and compression efficiency. Short-GOP AVC and HEVC contribution codecs remain widely used where higher compression efficiency is required while maintaining contribution-grade latencies in the range of a few hundred milliseconds. The audio ecosystem itself is also evolving toward richer interchange frameworks. Emerging specifications such as Immersive Interchange Format Pro (IIF-Pro) are designed to support complex channel structures together with dynamic audio metadata. In these workflows, immersive audio elements and their associated metadata can travel together throughout production, contribution and distribution. Such approaches allow large channel counts and dynamic rendering instructions to coexist within a single transport structure, enabling more flexible immersive audio ecosystems across the media chain. Audio as the First Step Toward Personalized Live Experiences In a media landscape where audiences expect increasingly personalized experiences, contribution infrastructures must be designed to evolve. Transport technologies such as IP networks and OTT contribution models provide the scalability needed to deliver content across global audiences. But the immersive experience itself is built on personalization, and audio plays a central role in enabling that personalization. By supporting multiple languages, premium audio groups and audience-specific feeds, contribution infrastructures move closer to the end user and enable the diverse listening experiences that modern viewers expect. From stadium microphones capturing the atmosphere of a live event, to scalable contribution platforms processing dozens of audio components, every stage of the workflow must now be designed with audio scalability in mind. In that sense, the future of scalable contribution does not begin with video.It begins with audio. Explore related insights How Premium Stadiums Are Rethinking UHD Contribution at the Edge Enhancing Broadcast Audio: Ateme’s KYRION DR5000 now Supports MPEG-H Audio Ateme Contribution & Distribution Solution The Glossary of OTT Contribution About the Author Julien Mandel Solution Marketing Senior Director at Ateme Julien joined Ateme in 2001, starting in the Hardware Department before moving into Product Management, where he led the launch and evolution of the Kyrion product line. In 2017, he co-founded the BISS-CA standard with the EBU, reshaping the secure distribution of international live events. He is currently Solution Marketing Director for Contribution and Distribution, driving partner and customer engagement around the Kyrion and TITAN product lines. L’article Scalable Contribution Starts with Audio est apparu en premier sur Ateme.

Sony Pictures Network India (SPNI) runs Sony LIV, which is one of the leading popular over-the-top (OTT) video-streaming platform in India. The content offering includes original and acquired TV shows and films, alongside live sporting events. SPNI secured the media rights for the Asia Cricket Council (ACC) from 2025 to 2031, making the Asia Cup Cricket 2025 their first major tournament and a high-stakes debut. During this inaugural tournament, Sony LIV delivered personalized advertisements at scale to a peak of over 10 million concurrent viewers, serving billions of ads across 19 matches. Delivering personalized ad experiences during large-scale live sports streaming requires a highly resilient, latency optimized server-side ad insertion (SSAI) architecture and SPNI achieved it by leveraging AWS Elemental MediaTailor integrated with Google Ad Manager (GAM) as the Ad Decision Server (ADS) in a multi-CDN environment including Amazon CloudFront, maintaining viewer experience and ad delivery at scale throughout the tournament. The AWS Unified Operations for Media team supported SPNI throughout this journey, working alongside the media specialist team in India. The team worked as an extension of SPNI’s technical team, providing strategic architectural guidance, conducting workflow reviews, coordinating cross-team integrations with partners such as Akamai and GAM, and delivering real-time support during live streaming. This partnership ensured SPNI handled the unprecedented scale and complexity of live cricket streaming with personalized advertising. Objective Live sports broadcasts present one of the most complex streaming environments like high concurrency, unpredictable viewership spikes, and the need for flawless ad transitions. For this cricket tournament, SPNI wanted to Deliver personalized ads in real time for every viewer based on device types, languages and other Ad campaign criteria. Maintain broadcast-grade reliability and minimal-latency during live play. Seamlessly integrate with their existing Google Ad Manager (GAM) for ad decisioning and impression reporting. Handle multi-CDN distribution across India efficiently to ensure resilient global delivery. Deliver personalized ads across Android, iOS, and Connected TV (CTV) devices “Granular playback session level capabilities, combined with ad break type management and MediaTailor’s pre-fetch driven traffic shaping, enable just-in-time strategies that maximize concurrent personalized ad insertion at high scale during live Asia Cup matches, while aligning with Ad Decision Server (ADS) throughput and performance characteristics.” – Mukund Acharya, Chief Technology Officer, Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI). Architectural Overview The live OTT workflow was architected as a multi-CDN, AWS Elemental media services based SSAI streaming pipeline, designed for scale, personalization, and resiliency: Live Ingest & Encoding with AWS Elemental MediaLive Multiple live inputs were ingested and encoded using MediaLive into adaptive bitrate (ABR) HLS renditions. The encoded outputs were pushed to 3rd party Origin endpoints and AWS Elemental MediaPackage, which handled content origination. Personalized Ad Insertion with AWS Elemental MediaTailor: MediaTailor acted as the SSAI layer, dynamically generating per-session manifests with ad insertions based on user attributes. Integration with Google Ad Manager provided real-time ad decisions via VAST responses. MediaTailor’s PING feature enabled asynchronous ad tracking, ensuring accurate impression reporting without affecting playback or performance. Client SDK on the player side ensured consistent playback and client-side ad beaconing for some specified scenarios. Content Delivery with CloudFront and multiple 3rd Party CDNs Final HLS manifests and segments were distributed across multiple CDNs to handle regional traffic spikes and provide low-latency delivery. MediaTailor’s session-based manifest generation ensured that personalization persisted across CDN edges without cache contamination. Key AWS Elemental MediaTailor Features That Enabled Scale Pre-Fetch Optimization: MediaTailor’s pre-fetch capability was critical in reducing request timeouts and throttling issue at the Ad Decision Server (ADS) during high viewership periods. By resolving ad decisions in advance and keeping those available in MediaTailor before start of each ad-break, SPNI achieved improved fill-rate. The configuration flexibility enabled SPNI to define multiple ad-break types (like, end of over, fall of wicket, drinks break) with distinct pre-fetch strategies for each one, including customizable pre-fetch start points, duration windows, and consumption periods. This distributed ad requests evenly over a defined time duration while aligning with ADS RPS limits and completing ad creative transcoding before the start of ad-break. This approach prevented runtime bottlenecks at ad-break start points by protecting ADS from being overwhelmed by sudden concurrent request spikes. the distributed load model maintained healthy Ad Decision Server performance while delivering improved fill rates and handling millions of personalized ad requests at scale. PING-Based Ad Beaconing for Accurate Impression Tracking: MediaTailor’s Player Impression Notification Gateway (PING) delivered enterprise-grade ad impression tracking at scale throughout the tournament. Integrated natively within AWS Elemental MediaTailor, the PING framework provided SPNI with the architectural flexibility to deploy a hybrid reporting strategy that intelligently balanced client-side and server-side tracking based on specific operational and measurement needs. Through asynchronous player-generated pings, PING guaranteed dependable ad impression reporting even in challenging network environments while simultaneously minimizing throttling pressure on advertising decision servers. The decoupled architecture ensured tracking calls operated independently from the playback pipeline, eliminating any potential interference with stream continuity and safeguarding the viewer experience. This asynchronous approach also significantly reduced client-side computational overhead compared to conventional synchronous tracking methods. Operating at tournament scale, this architecture successfully and reliably processed billions of tracking beacons to ensure expected ad monetization revenue for SPNI. VisualOn Client SDK Integration: The integration of the VisualOn Client SDK with AWS Elemental MediaTailor session manifests and tracking endpoints played a key role in ensuring seamless SSAI-based playback across platforms. The SDK enabled robust client-side beaconing and ad tracking while maintaining stream continuity during ad insertions, which is critical in server-side ad insertion scenarios. In addition, the SDK reported detailed client-side playback metrics, allowing the platform to correlate ad impression data with player Quality of Experience (QoE) indicators. This end-to-end visibility strengthened both monetization analytics and playback performance monitoring at scale. Multi-CDN Delivery Architecture Traffic was balanced across multiple CDN providers including CloudFront as one of the prime CDN provider for redundancy and performance optimization. MediaTailor’s stateless, manifest-based personalization model allowed each CDN to serve cached segments while MediaTailor dynamically generated personalized manifests per user session. This approach enabled horizontal scaling of edge delivery without impacting personalization fidelity or increasing origin load. AWS Elemental MediaTailor integrated directly with Google Ad Manager (GAM) over VAST to request and assemble personalized ad pods for each viewer session. This integration combined MediaTailor’s intelligent pre-fetch capabilities with GAM’s ad targeting engine, enabling precise, user-level ad selection based on device type and behavioral segments. During live events, the workflow supported dynamic creative insertion, allowing campaigns to adapt in real time to audience targeting parameters. Additionally, the integration provided real-time visibility into fill-rate performance and campaign pacing, ensuring optimal inventory utilization while maintaining monetization efficiency at scale. By pre-transcoding ad creatives to align with the primary content’s encoding specifications, SPNI achieved seamless transitions between live main content and ads, eliminating playback glitches and minimising buffering incidents to deliver a consistently smooth viewing experience at scale for millions of subscribers. AWS Unified Operations for Media: The Strategic Partner Behind the Scenes “AWS Unified Operations for Media along with Solution Architects team worked as a true extension of our team during the Asia Cup. Their designated media streaming experts reviewed our end-to-end workflow and made recommendations to optimize our media pipeline from encoding, ad insertion to delivery. The proactive monitoring, real-time guidance during live matches, and seamless coordination across our partners gave us confidence to deliver flawless experiences to over 10 million concurrent viewers while protecting our advertising revenue. This strategic partnership was instrumental in achieving the scale.” – Mukund Acharya, Chief Technology Office, SPNI, Sony Pictures Networks India The AWS Unified Operations for Media team provided architectural guidance and live operational support to successfully deliver high viewer concurrency cricket streaming event: Enhance Streaming Quality with Designated Media Experts: A designated team of media specialists—including Delivery Manager, Media, Monetization, CloudFront, and Live Event Engineers—worked in tandem with SPNI’s team reviewing control plane, media plane, and data plane architecture, delivering context-aware guidance and real-time support throughout the engagement. The team made recommendations to enhance video quality, improve latency performance and resiliency across all Media Services and CloudFront configurations, ensuring broadcast-grade viewer experiences. Optimized Ad Performance: The Unified Operations for Media team worked very closely with MediaTailor team to validate the performance of the service at scale and collaborated with external partners — Akamai and Google Ad Manager— to optimize workflow for latency, ad fill rate, and ad impression success rate for the high-stake live events. Operational Excellence Delivered: The Unified Operations for Media team developed joint runbooks with SPNI’s operations team and through load testing, proactive monitoring, and live event support, it ensured SPNI achieved operational readiness—delivering flawless streaming experiences throughout the 19 days of the tournament. Benefits/ Outcome: For SPNI, the result was a smooth, monetizable live-streaming distribution at scale. The workflow maintained broadcast-grade latency with seamless mid-roll transitions and stable ad stitching under high concurrency conditions. This deployment redefined what’s possible in live OTT advertising, setting a new benchmark for SPNI’s streaming capabilities. Increased Ad Revenue: Through real-time personalization and better fill rates. Reduce Ad Revenue Risk: MediaTailor PING feature allows beacon retries for up to an hour to protect ad revenue allowing recovery time for a downstream ADS Improved Viewer Experience: Smooth ad transitions, zero buffering. Scalable Global Delivery: Multi-CDN architecture with MediaTailor handled regional peaks effortlessly. Operational Simplicity: A managed, serverless architecture reduced complexity and cost. Lessons Learned Based on operational experience of live SSAI workloads for high-concurrency Asia cup event, the following insights were observed: Pre-Fetching ad decisions significantly reduces latency at scale; without it, live SSAI can easily bottleneck under ad server’s RPS limitations. PING beacons are more reliable than synchronous client tracking for maintaining accurate metrics during high concurrency live sports events which causes network congestion at ADS. A multi-CDN setup provides both redundancy and geo-optimization benefits without compromising personalization. Close coordination between the player SDK, MediaTailor configuration, and ad server logic is essential for large-scale SSAI success. “AWS is proud to partner with SPNI in transforming how live sports streaming drives business value. Elemental MediaServices which includes MediaTailor in SPNI’s Asia Cup deployment achieved exceptional monetization at scale—maximizing ad fill rates while maintaining premium viewing experiences. AWS Elemental MediaTailor – fully managed, serverless approach along with pre-fetch feature, fundamentally changes the economics of large-scale live sports advertising that aligns with the unpredictable nature of live events”. – Abhijeet Pandey, Head of Core Services, AWS India Conclusion This deployment demonstrates how AWS Elemental MediaTailor, combined with AWS Elemental MediaLive, 3rd Party Origin server, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and multi-CDN delivery, can support live streaming of large live sporting events with real-time ad personalization. By leveraging Pre-Fetch, PING tracking, and client-side SDK integration, the customer achieved broadcast-quality ad delivery at unprecedented scale for concurrent users with precision and reliability. Ready to Scale Your Streaming Workload on AWS? Contact AWS today to learn how MediaTailor and Unified Operations for Media can help you deliver personalized ad experiences that engage viewers and drive revenue growth. Learn more about AWS Elemental MediaTailor and how it enables personalized streaming experiences at scale. Learn more about Unified Operations for Media and how it supports seamless content delivery at any scale.

🇵🇹Who owns the first click? Find out in LisbonOn April 13th, I am running a half-day workshop at StreamTV Europe titled “Who Owns the First Click in the Living Room?” Three hours, five sessions, no filler.The morning opens with data. Côme Fradetal from RTL AdAlliance and I will present the findings from the largest annual study of European viewing behaviour, this year co-produced with Streaming Made Easy. Then Tom Smith from FX Digital opens up their project files to show which product features actually moved the metrics on apps built for Discovery+, BritBox and Dyn Media. After the break, three panels. One on monetising the big screen without invasive tracking, with Canal+ Brand Solutions, Sharp and SyncMint. One on who is actually winning the sports fan’s living room, with Orange Spain, YouTube and MainStreaming. And a closing debate on whether 2030 looks like super aggregation or super fragmentation, with TF1, Samsung TV Plus, Telenet and Bango on stage.→ Full programme and registration at StreamTV Europe here, use my code SME10 for a 10% discount. 🤖 Great idea, inconvenient timingCANAL+ is bringing OpenAI to 42.3M subscribers. I wanted to cheer then I remembered the Gracenote lawsuit. Starting this June, the CANAL+ App will let subscribers search for content in plain language. Type “something comforting and romantic” and OpenAI’s frontier models return tailored suggestions based on your mood, preferences and context. It could be a real UX leap for content discovery but here is the context the press release did not mention.Axios reported this week that Nielsen’s Gracenote is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The allegation: OpenAI scraped Gracenote’s proprietary media metadata without permission. That includes the structured content data (titles, genres, cast, descriptions) that powers content discovery at scale. Gracenote argues this threatens its core business, as content media distributors could use that data to build competing metadata products and platforms.That is the irony here. CANAL+ is deploying OpenAI to power content discovery, at the exact moment OpenAI is being accused of appropriating the metadata infrastructure that content discovery runs on. None of this makes the CANAL+ partnership a bad idea (unless OpenAI is found guilty). But zoom out for a second. If OpenAI can power content discovery at scale directly inside a platform like CANAL+, companies whose entire business is built on structured media metadata, like Gracenote, but also the broader ecosystem of EPG providers, recommendation engines and content intelligence platforms, are looking at a direct threat to their core value proposition. Why license a metadata layer when a frontier model does the job inside the app? This also shows how the industry needs to start asking harder questions about what these models were trained on and whether data rights were properly cleared before signing. Worth watching closely. → More here about the Gracenote OpenAI lawsuit here. 🇨🇭 Switzerland backs public mediaOn March 8, Swiss voters rejected the “200 Francs Is Enough!” initiative by a clear 60% majority. The proposal would have slashed the annual household licence fee from 335 CHF to 200 CHF and scrapped the fee for businesses entirely. Swiss citizens said no. SRG SSR, the public broadcaster serving German, French, Italian and Romansh-speaking regions, keeps its funding model intact.This matters beyond Switzerland. Public broadcasters across Europe are fighting the same battle on different fronts: defunding proposals, political pressure, platform competition. Switzerland just gave them a rare win but the Swiss broadcaster will still need to operate on a reduced budget by 2029, as decided by The Federal Council. → Read the full EBU statement here.🎯 What Premium actually buys you on CTVThat’s exactly what we’re getting into on our next Off The Record session with Richard Brant, Senior Director Advanced TV at Vevo.Vevo partnered with Amplified to run one of the most rigorous attention studies ever done on YouTube CTV: 150 households, 19,000+ ad views, 5,000+ YouTube channels and 240+ brands measured. The findings will make you rethink how you value premium inventory on the biggest screen in the home.Vevo mastered YouTube then went big on CTV so bring your questions to benefit from their experience.We’re going live on March 18th (5pm CET / 11am EST) right here on Substack. No need for Riverside this time. You can click the link below to join or simply open your Substack app on the day and you’ll see me live at the top of your homepage.→ If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, consider upgrading to attend and decide if we are a keeper. Subscribe now📕 5th edition out on March 25thFour years of data, 17 countries, 15,000+ respondents. The RTL AdAlliance Living Room report is the largest ongoing study of European viewing behaviour and last week I went through every edition since 2022 to pull out what has actually shifted and what the industry keeps getting wrong.The 5th edition, which Streaming Made Easy is co-producing with RTL AdAlliance, goes wider still: three continents, and for the first time, data on how Europeans feel about AI-generated video content, long-form content chopped into shorts and more. We are unpacking it live on March 25th. Don’t miss it. Register to attend🇪🇸 Spain’s free streaming map: who’s winningSpain is running one of Europe’s most active free streaming experiments and most markets are not paying attention. In this week’s Deep Dive, I mapped the full competitive landscape using GECA’s FAST Barometer (three waves, 1,000 Spanish users per wave) and Omdia data to show who is leading, who is growing and what the numbers actually mean for platforms fighting for the home screen.→ If you want the full picture, including the ad tolerance data, the SVOD cannibalisation signal and what Prime Video’s move means for the rest of the field, this one is worth upgrading for. 📊 Earnings season, no PR spin👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here or catch the replay here (we start at the 2’49” mark!).🇸🇪 Sweden kicks Meta out of the clubSweden did what no one else had the nerve to do. On March 11, IAB Sweden formally expelled Meta, citing insufficient action against deceptive advertising. The decision came after Bonnier News and Schibsted, two of the biggest Nordic publishers, initiated the case. A first vote on March 10 was thrown out on procedural grounds. The board reconvened the next day and finished the job.The numbers behind the decision are not in dispute. Reuters reported that Meta internally projected earning $16 billion in 2024 from ads for scams and banned goods, roughly 10% of its annual revenue. Meta has since filed lawsuits against fraudulent advertisers in Brazil, China and Vietnam, removed 134 million scam ads and deployed facial recognition to catch impersonation fraud. IAB Sweden concluded it was not enough. Meta has until April 15 to appeal. IAB UK responded the same week by confirming Meta remains a member in good standing. Worse, Meta received the IAB Gold Standard certification in 2025, while all of this was already known. The Swedish publishers pushed hard and got results. Their counterparts elsewhere, so far, have not. Go Swedes 🙌🏻Thanks to Justin Lebbon for putting this on my radar.🗳️ Poll timeThat’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium. Photo: Mattias de Frumerie / TT Nyhetsbyrån (Montage)

“If there was a real strategy here, you’d spin Bravo out with this and make it kind of the main hook of their new streaming business.”Evan Shapiro, co-host, The Media Odyssey PodcastEarnings season is, among other things, a lie detector test. You can dress up a press release but the numbers tell you what the business actually is, where it is heading and most usefully what the people running it are not saying out loud.This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, and I went live to run four of those tests at once. Four companies, all in the middle of some kind of structural shift, whether through a spinout, an acquisition in progress or a full reinvention of their revenue model. One American, three European. All of them revealing, for different reasons.Plus a quick 2’ lesson to improve Evan’s French skills (or lack thereof) 😁LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.That’s it for today but before you go:🗳️ Poll time

In a sport where every stroke, statistic, and storyline unfolds in real time across hundreds of players and thousands of fans, the PGA TOUR is rewriting the rules of sports content. In this blog post, we’ll describe how PGA TOUR uses Amazon Bedrock to address the fundamental challenges facing modern sports organizations in delivering timely, accurate, high-quality and engaging content across multiple platforms simultaneously to millions of fans worldwide. Unlike traditional content creation workflows that rely heavily on manual processes, this solution employs a distributed network of specialized AI agents that collaborate autonomously to research, create, validate, and publish content with minimal human intervention. In collaboration with CapTech, an AWS Partner that specializes in AI for Sports, the PGA TOUR recently developed a solution to generate content. The “Automated Content System” solution, uses a revolutionary approach to sports content creation, generating around 1200+  pieces of content every week, spending less than 25 cents for each piece of content generated, and achieving 95% cost reduction. This solution enables content generation and near instant publication typically within minutes of live sports, scaling from manual processes to automated creation of content such as round recaps, tournament recaps, and betting profiles for all of the 150+ players in a field per tournament. The system delivers the content with unprecedented speed, adaptability, consistency, for multiple platforms cost efficiently while maintaining strict brand standards and data accuracy. The business challenge Before implementing this solution, the PGA TOUR faced several critical limitations: Missed engagement – Manual processes created significant delays between events and content availability. Delays meant missing peak fan interest windows. Limited coverage – Content creation focused only on prominent players and major events. Manual processes couldn’t handle comprehensive tournament coverage, leaving smaller storylines and emerging players with minimal exposure. Cost inefficiencies – External vendor dependency created unpredictable cost structures and delays with increased content demands. These limitations particularly affected major tournaments, where hundreds of players generate thousands of noteworthy moments requiring individual coverage that modern sports fans expect. Solution overview Comprehensive solution architecture Figure 1: Content generation – agent orchestration The heart of the content generation engine lies in its sophisticated multi-agent orchestration system with deterministic workflow guardrails, ensuring predictable and reliable content generation outcomes. The orchestration system intelligently manages agent specialization, assigning specific roles and responsibilities to different agents based on their optimal capabilities and cost-effectiveness. Research agents focus exclusively on data gathering and fact verification, while writer agents specialize in content creation across various formats and styles. Validation agents provide quality assurance and brand compliance checking, while editor agents refine content for specific publication channels and audience segments. Figure 2: Content generation – agent interactions PGA TOUR selects the best available model for each agent based on capability. Amazon Bedrock empowers their team with the flexibility to choose the right model for the job. Figure 3: Content generation – technical architecture Intelligent research agent capabilities Research agents form the foundation of accurate and engaging content creation by providing comprehensive data gathering capabilities that rival and often exceed human researchers in both speed and thoroughness. These agents integrate directly with the PGA TOUR API through custom Python functions that retrieve data such as real-time player statistics, tournament information, leaderboard data, historical performance records, and detailed shot-by-shot tracking information. The research agent architecture supports both dynamic and programmatic operation modes, providing flexibility to handle diverse content creation scenarios. In dynamic mode, agents respond intelligently to natural language prompts, automatically selecting and executing appropriate tools based on context and requirements. This capability enables a writer agent to request specific types of content using conversational language, with agents translating these requests into precise API calls and data retrieval operations. Programmatic mode enables standardized content workflows where research agents follow predetermined sequences of data gathering operations optimized for specific content types. Tournament recap generation, for example, triggers a standard sequence of leaderboard retrieval, key moment identification, statistical analysis, and historical context gathering that ensures comprehensive coverage while maintaining consistency across all tournament summaries. The extensible tools architecture allows seamless integration of additional data sources as they become available and as content requirements evolve. Media guides, external statistical databases, and weather information services can be incorporated into the research agent toolkit without requiring fundamental system changes. This flexibility ensures that the content generation system can continually adapt to new information sources and evolving content strategies. Advanced content validation systems Content validation represents one of the most critical aspects of automated content generation, ensuring that published material meets both factual accuracy standards and brand consistency requirements. The validation system employs a multi-layered approach that combines automated fact-checking with brand voice compliance and visual asset evaluation. Data correctness validation operates through collaborative interaction between validation agents and research agents, creating a comprehensive fact-checking workflow that rivals traditional editorial processes. Validation agents analyze content drafts to extract specific factual claims, organizing these claims into structured fact tables that can be systematically verified against authoritative data sources. When discrepancies are identified, the system automatically generates correction recommendations and initiates content revision workflows with the writer agents to generate a revised draft. The fact extraction process utilizes advanced natural language processing capabilities to identify not only explicit statistical claims but also implied assertions about player performance, tournament conditions, and historical comparisons. This comprehensive approach ensures that subtle factual errors that might escape casual review are identified and corrected before publication. Brand voice validation ensures that all generated content maintains consistency with established organizational voice and style guidelines. Editor agents review content against detailed style guides, checking for appropriate tone, terminology usage, and adherence to communication standards. The system maintains databases of preferred terminology, prohibited language, and context-specific style requirements that inform validation decisions. Multimedia agents extend validation capabilities to visual assets, evaluating player images, graphics, and other visual elements against brand guidelines for consistency, quality, and appropriateness. This capability ensures that automated content generation maintains visual brand standards across all publication channels and content types. Scalability and cost optimization Agent specialization contributes to cost optimization by ensuring that computational resources are allocated efficiently across different types of content generation tasks. Simple operations like basic fact checking and tool selection utilize cost-effective models, while complex creative tasks leverage more sophisticated and expensive foundation models only when necessary. The modular architecture enables selective scaling of specific agent types based on workload characteristics. During periods of high research demand, additional research agents can be deployed without unnecessarily scaling writing or validation capabilities. This granular scaling approach optimizes both performance and cost efficiency across varying operational scenarios. Use of generative AI for content generation tasks resulted in immediate cost reductions while providing greater control over content quality and publication timing. Integration, security, and monitoring The system’s tools leverage REST API’s for seamless connection. API design follows industry best practices for security, performance, and reliability, incorporating comprehensive authentication, authorization, and rate limiting mechanisms. Monitoring and logging capabilities provide detailed observability into system performance, usage patterns, and potential issues before they impact content generation workflows. Amazon CloudWatch integration enables real-time performance monitoring and automated alerting when system metrics exceed predefined thresholds. Solution Impacts The PGA TOUR realized the following benefits by implementing this solution: First to market: Content can be generated and published across various platforms (official websites, social media) within minutes of the event taking place, such as round and tournament recaps, shot commentaries, etc. Scale: The AI systems achieve a level of scale previously impossible, unlocking new content types such as event recaps for all 150+ players in a field and shot commentaries for every shot (amounting to 30K+) of a golf tournament. Efficiency: Multimedia agents evaluate visual assets much faster than humans to ensure adherence to brand standards. Flexibility and adaptability: The agents handle a diverse array of content including tournament and player previews, betting profiles, recaps of player and field performance by round and by tournament, and articles for short form/social media platforms. Expansion of usage: Golf content is parameterized so that separate sets of content can be generated based on the preferences assigned by various golf associations. This has allowed the PGA TOUR to collaborate with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to generate tailored content for them. Cost: Regular content needs such as player betting profiles for every golf tournament were previously generated weekly by third-party vendors. They are now generated in-house by the AI content generation system.  Figure 4: Articles generated by AWS generative AI Future expansion and adaptability Content format flexibility enables the system to adapt to new publication channels and content formats as they emerge. The same underlying content generation capabilities can produce short-form social media posts, long-form articles, multimedia presentations, and interactive content formats through appropriate agent configuration and output formatting. Integration capabilities support connection with emerging data sources and third-party services as they become available or as organizational requirements evolve. The extensible tool architecture ensures that new capabilities can be incorporated without disrupting existing operations or requiring system downtime. Implementation recommendations The Automated Content System demonstrates the transformative potential of combining Amazon Bedrock’s foundation models with sophisticated multi-agent orchestration systems to address real-world content generation challenges at enterprise scale. The PGA TOUR implementation validates the approach’s effectiveness in delivering rapid, accurate, and brand-consistent content across multiple publication channels while achieving substantial cost reductions and operational efficiency improvements. Organizations considering similar implementations should begin with pilot projects focused on specific content types or use cases to validate the approach within their unique operational contexts. Gradual expansion allows teams to develop expertise with the system while minimizing risks associated with large-scale changes to established workflows. Success factors include comprehensive planning for data integration requirements, clear definition of brand guidelines and style standards that can be codified into validation rules, and establishment of performance metrics that align with organizational content strategy objectives. Organizations should also plan for change management processes that help content teams adapt to new workflows and capabilities enabled by automated content generation. The modular architecture and extensible design principles ensure that initial implementations can evolve and expand to address growing requirements and new use cases as organizations gain experience and confidence with AI-driven content generation capabilities.

Premium CTV costs more but Vevo has the data to prove whether it delivers for advertisers. That's exactly what we're getting into on our next Off The Record session. I'm bringing Richard Brant, Senior Director Advanced TV at Vevo, to discuss "What Premium actually buys you on CTV." Vevo partnered with Amplified to run one of the most rigorous attention … Read more

When people talk about European Free Streaming, the conversation often defaults to the UK and Germany. Bigger ad markets, more established infrastructure, more familiar to US-headquartered platforms deciding where to expand next. Spain rarely gets top billing which is a mistake. Spain has built one of the most active free streaming cultures on the continent, with adoption rates that leave its Western European neighbours behind. The UK and Germany have scale but Spain has momentum and right now momentum is the more interesting story for us here at Streaming Made Easy.Today at a glance:Why Spain matters right nowThe Free Streaming mapHow Spaniards feel about adsThe SVOD cannibalisation signalThe latest entrant: Prime Video goes free in SpainWhat this means for the platforms that own the home screenNot a premium subscriber yet? This is a good one to upgrade for.Subscribe nowWhy Spain matters right nowHard data on European markets is still surprisingly scarce. Spain could become the exception thanks to recent Omdia findings and GECA’s FAST Barometer, now in its third wave in under a year. According to Omdia, monthly FAST usage in Spain sits at 35% of adults and FAST revenues are forecasted to reach $32 million in 2025 and nearly double to $65 million by 2030. “That Spain leads Europe in FAST consumption is no coincidence. According to Omdia’s data and our own analysis at GECA, the Spanish market possesses a uniquely favourable architecture for this model: high penetration of free platforms, a robust presence of national broadcasters and a highly active connected TV ecosystem. These elements have converged to create an environment where free, ad-supported content is no longer just a supplement to subscription streaming, but a structural pillar of the broader audiovisual landscape.” Rafael Herrera, Barometer OTT & FAST Director, GECA.GECA goes further tracking penetration across 20+ individual platforms. Their FAST Barometer consists of quarterly surveys of 1,000 Spanish free platform users (aged 18+) to understand how they consume free video content and on which platforms. The Free Streaming mapThe competitive landscape splits into four segments, each operating on a different logic.The local broadcasters:→ RTVE Play (the public broadcaster) sits at 52.2% penetration and has held the number two position across all three waves, confirming that Spain’s public broadcaster has successfully extended its brand and catalogue into the streaming era. → Atresplayer (33.8%) remains a significant force with 17 million registered users and 20 million hours of video consumed monthly, even as its penetration has drifted slightly downward since Wave 1. → Mediaset Infinity (16.8%) had the most interesting Wave 2 story, jumping 3.8% from October to December in 2025. The start to 2026 was more challenging for the platform as it dropped 1.1%, but that is still a net +2.7%, higher than any other platform.The international pure players: → YouTube dominates the Free Streaming market although YouTube’s performance fluctuates on a quarterly basis. From October to December of 2025, YouTube dropped 2.3% to 68.8%. But by February of 2026, YouTube was back up at 71.2%. It’s too soon to tell if YouTube hit a ceiling or growth is slowing down.→ Pluto TV has become the third-largest free platform in Spain at 37.8%, gaining 2.3% in Wave 3 and now sits firmly above Atresplayer in the rankings. With 22.7% of respondents watching DAZN, it stands leaps and bounds above other sports-exclusive platforms LaLiga Sports and FIFA+. It is impressive because sports and sport content still perform well on linear television, making grabbing attention for sports content all the more competitive. DAZN had a rough December to February period, however, dropping -4.2% from its 26.9% penetration in December. Rakuten TV (19.8%) and Twitch (16.6%) round out a second tier of international platforms. The CTV and device manufacturers: Samsung TV Plus recorded the largest point gain of any platform in Wave 3, jumping 5.2% to 22.4%, making it the biggest mover in the entire field over that period. But because the previous period was slower (leaving Samsung at only 17.2% penetration), Samsung only saw a net +1.3%. LG Channels grabs the 11th spot, Xiaomi TV+ 14th, TCL Channel 16th and Whale TV+ 18th. One segment sits outside the GECA data but deserves a mention. Read more

There is a lazy habit in our industry. Something shifts in the US market and within weeks it becomes a European strategy talking point. AVOD is booming, ad tiers are the future, Linear TV is dead. The data tells a different story and it has been telling it for four years, but most people were not reading the right study.For the past four years, RTL AdAlliance’s The New Life of the Living Room report has tracked how Europeans actually watch, pay for and feel about video content. The 2022 edition started with 8,500+ respondents across 10 countries. By 2025, that had grown to 12,500+ respondents, 15 European markets, with the US added as a benchmark (back in 2024). The study earned its authority over time.I went through all four editions to identify a few key trends (but do grab the reports for more) ahead of the release of the Th edition, which Streaming Made Easy is co-producing with RTL AdAlliance. It goes further than any previous iteration: 15,000+ respondents, 17 countries in 3 continents. Before we get there, here is what four years of data already tell us.Today at a glance:→ The US comparison trap→ Broadcast still owns the first click→ The ad-tier migration is speeding up→ Trust is moving in one direction → What’s in store for 2026?The US comparison trapThe 2024 edition introduced the US as a benchmark for the first time. Smart move and not because the markets are similar but because the data proved they are not.Start with advertising: In the US, 22% of viewers said they actively pay attention to ads. In Europe, that number was 8%. Americans were almost three times more receptive. US viewers also showed far greater tolerance across every platform: ad annoyance on YouTube sat at 38% in the US versus 57% in Europe. On AVOD, 30% versus 41%.The gap goes beyond attitudes toward ads. It showed up in which platforms people actually use. In the 2025 study, 38% of US respondents watched FAST content on their TV set daily. In Europe, that figure is 10%. YouTube on the TV set hit 53% daily usage in the US versus 30% in Europe. Churn tells the same story. 53% of US respondents admitted to churning SVOD subscriptions (subscribing for a show, then cancelling). In Europe, that dropped to 37%. Americans treat subscriptions like rentals while Europeans treat them more like utilities. The 2023 edition showed what happens when Europeans do face budget pressure: 48% preferred dropping a subscription entirely rather than switching to a cheaper ad-supported plan (28%). They cancel, they do not downgrade. That is a fundamentally different churn dynamic than the US subscribe-watch-cancel cycle and it has been consistent across multiple editions.Content preferences diverge too. In 2024, the most-watched genre on European linear TV was news (30% of viewing). In the US, it is sport (22%). This shapes programming strategy, scheduling and ad placement for anyone operating across both regions.42% of US households were willing to increase their video budget during 2024. In Europe, only 17% said the same. The takeaway is simple: US trends are directionally interesting. They are operationally misleading for anyone planning a European launch, campaign or content strategy.Broadcast still owns the 1st clickThe 2025 report asked: “when you turn on your TV, where do you go first?”59% of European viewers go to broadcast content first when they turn on their TV. That is linear TV (51%) plus BVOD (8%), ahead of SVOD (29%), YouTube (10%) and FAST (2%).The same study mapped genre preferences by platform. Linear TV led for news (59% of viewers watched it there), sport (44%) and entertainment (44%). SVOD dominated only one category: movies and series, at 63%. The genres that drove daily habit, the ones people build their evenings around, still belonged to broadcast (which explains partnerships like the Netflix / TF1 one or Netflix’s content investment into daily soaps like Valle Salvaje with RTVE or Tout pour la lumiere with TF1 and Newen Studios).When asked to define what counts as “watching TV”, the study shows that the lines of the definition are blurring for viewers, as their opinions differ widely. What stands out is that “watching TV” is perceived as a mix of device, platform and content type. While half of European respondents consider watching long-form content on YouTube via their TV set as “watching TV”, only 22% feel the same about user-generated content (UGC).The discovery problem that needs fixingThe 2025 study measured how long it takes European viewers to decide what to watch. The results were not flattering for on-demand platforms. 24% of SVOD users spend more than 10 minutes choosing a programme. On YouTube, that drops to 19%. On linear TV, just 15%. Flip it around: 40% of linear TV viewers decide in under a minute. On SVOD, only 22% do.The reasons matter because SVOD viewers have high expectations for their evening. They are paying for the service and they do not want to waste their time on the wrong pick, which creates a kind of paralysis that linear TV sidesteps entirely by removing the choice. You turn it on and something is already playing.YouTube has a different problem. 32% of viewers who watch YouTube on their TV admit the content hooks them but they often regret the time spent. That is not a discovery issue but a satisfaction issue: the algorithm is too good at keeping you watching and not good enough at making you feel like the time was well spent.For platforms and content owners, this is more than a UX complaint. Discovery friction drives churn and decreasing engagement. If subscribers spend 10 minutes browsing and still feel unsure, that frustration compounds over time. The next wave of competitive advantage in streaming will not come from who has the biggest library but from who helps viewers find what they want before the mood passes.The ad-tier migration In 2023, the Living Room study captured Europeans at a crossroads. 58% said they preferred to pay for ad-free viewing. 56% said they did not mind ads if it meant free or cheaper access to premium content and 52% agreed with both statements at the same time. That contradiction is the European ad-tier market in one number. Viewers want premium content without ads but they will accept ads if the price is right. The question was always which instinct would win as budgets tightened.By the 2024 edition, the compromise was gaining ground. 23% of Europeans were switching to cheaper or ad-supported services. Awareness of Netflix’s ad tier (launched late 2022) reached 62% across the five largest European markets. Disney+ trailed at 48%, partly because its ad tier launched a year later. But intent remained low: only 9% of European respondents said they would “definitely” subscribe to Netflix with ads. 56% said they were not bothered by advertising if it meant cheaper access to premium content, well below the 78% in the US.Then came 2025 where the switch rate jumped to 29%, up 6 points in a single year. That is faster than any prior shift in this study.What changed? Budget pressure, yes but also normalisation. The 2023 data showed that only 14% of Europeans were “definitely” interested in Netflix with ads. In 2025, 22% of European respondents use Netflix’s ad-supported tier, while 41% pay for the ad-free option. Intent underestimated reality. Once the option existed and the price gap became visible, viewers moved.📆 Sign up to attend the upcoming RTL AdAlliance & Streaming Made Easy webinar taking place in March 23rd, 2026, where we will unpack the 5th edition of The Living Room report.RegisterThe trust gap keeps wideningBetween 2024 and 2025, every legacy media format gained 5 to 6 trust points when Europeans were asked whether they would trust a brand they did not know after seeing or hearing an ad. Radio now leads at 67% (+6pts); Linear TV follows at 66% (+6pts); Cinema at 65% (+5pts); Magazines and newspapers at 64% (+6pts).The 2025 edition is the first to measure trust across this full spectrum, from legacy media down to individual social platforms: TikTok sits at 23%, Facebook at 31%, Instagram at 34% and YouTube at 41%.In a world where disinformation erodes audience confidence daily, where brands place their ads is becoming a brand equity decision, not just a reach calculation. Affordable impressions on low-trust platforms are not affordable if they damage how your audience perceives you. European viewers are telling us, clearly and consistently, that they trust professional content environments over social feeds. The data also reinforces something European broadcasters should shout louder about their ad environments being premium. 57% of European viewers expect ads on linear TV to be fun, 54% expect them to be moving and 67% expect them to be informative. No other platform comes close to those expectations. Viewers are not just tolerating ads on linear TV, they hold them to a higher standard because they value the environment they appear in.What’s in store for 2026?The 5th edition goes wider. China and Hungary join the study bringing the total to 17 countries and 15,000+ respondents. That matters because benchmarking European ad tolerance and media trust against markets with fundamentally different media environments, state involvement in broadcasting and social platform landscapes will sharpen arguments that currently rely on the US as the only external reference point.For the first time, the study also examines how Europeans feel about being exposed to AI-generated video content, whether watching long-form through small clips is a trend and what Europeans like to watch on YouTube. These are not abstract themes, they connect directly to how you plan distribution, allocate ad spend and position your platform in 2026 and beyond.RTL AdAlliance and Streaming Made Easy will be bringing a report for you to download, a live webinar to attend where Aurélie Brunet de Courssou and I will highlight what caught our attention the most. This is your opportunity to be in the know, don’t waste it.Sign up to attend our upcoming webinar taking place in March 23rd, 2026.RegisterWanna brush off on past reports beforehand? Dig in: Living Room 2025; Living Room 2024; Living Room 2023; Living Room 2022. 🗳️ Poll timeThat’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

Netmedias recently launched Dramaze.com, a groundbreaking freemium video-on-demand (VOD) streaming platform that brings short-form drama episodes to audiences across Asia and the Middle East. In an increasingly competitive streaming landscape where content localization and rapid scaling are critical for success, the company faced the challenge of delivering culturally relevant entertainment while maintaining operational efficiency and exceptional user experience. The technical challenge was significant. Netmedias needed to process and distribute 2,400 short-form videos at launch with plans to scale to 9,600 videos over 12 months, deliver content with subtitles in nine languages, and implement AI-driven features for automated subtitle translation and poster generation. At the same time, they needed to maintain a lean engineering team of only three developers and meet a 3-month timeline to market. By partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Netmedias built a fully serverless, AI-enhanced streaming solution that achieved remarkable results: 95% reduction in subtitle translation time (from 11 hours to 30 minutes for 70 episodes with a combined runtime of 4 hours), automated poster generation using generative AI, and successful market launch across the Philippines, with a phased release planned across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The platform now serves diverse audiences with localized content. Solution architecture The Dramaze platform’s content delivery workflow is architected around three distinct pipelines: generative AI, video transcoding, and distribution. The design allows for scaled processing of thousands of short-form videos with AI enhancement. This workflow is shown in the following diagram. Figure 1: Overall content delivery workflow for the Dramaze platform The Dramaze platform uses a fully serverless, event-driven architecture built on AWS managed services. This approach enables rapid scaling while minimizing operational overhead for the lean engineering team at Dramaze. The following outlines the sequence of events that occurs when a content moderator uploads a video: The uploaded video and original subtitles land in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, which triggers an S3 event to invoke AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda runs subtitle translation and poster cover selection using Amazon Bedrock. The Amazon Bedrock large language model (LLM) translates the subtitle text, understands the video storyline, and selects the best image frame. The translated subtitles and poster cover photos are stored in Amazon S3. AWS Lambda loads the transcoding configuration from Amazon S3 and runs video processing. AWS Elemental MediaConvert converts the movie to HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) streaming format. The transcoded video files are stored in Amazon S3. Amazon EventBridge manages the job completion event and AWS Lambda informs the status to the content moderation service (CMS). Amazon CloudFront with AWS WAF distributes video streaming to the frontend. Lambda@Edge verifies the user’s subscription to allow access. This sequence is shown in the following architecture diagram. Figure 2: End-to-end architecture for the Dramaze platform Video processing pipeline The core video workflow follows a streamlined, automated process that starts with content ingestion and transcoding. The content ingestion and transcoding phase begins when content moderators upload source videos through the CMS to Amazon S3, which triggers Lambda functions to initiate processing workflows. Amazon Bedrock then performs automated subtitle translation and poster frame selection from the video content. Subsequently, AWS Elemental MediaConvert transforms source videos into adaptive bitrate (ABR) streams at multiple resolutions with quality-defined variable bitrate (QVBR). Amazon EventBridge coordinates the entire event-driven workflow, capturing job completion events and triggering downstream processes. This decoupled architecture enables independent scaling of components and simplified error handling. Finally, the processed video streams globally with low latency through Amazon CloudFront. Amazon Bedrock powered AI enhancement Amazon Bedrock serves as the unified platform for both episode poster creation and subtitle translation, providing single API access to multiple foundation models (FMs). Through this approach, Netmedias conducted comprehensive testing across eight different LLMs for optimal language pair performance. The customer then selects the best-performing models for each specific use case without vendor lock-in. Because this evaluation is repeatable, Netmedias can establish new benchmarks as new models appear. The single API approach through Amazon Bedrock enables rapid testing and deployment of new models as they become available, continuously optimizing translation quality for the Dramaze content library. Automated poster creation The Dramaze automated poster creation system combines sophisticated frame analysis with AI-powered selection. The process begins with FFmpeg-based keyframe extraction using a two-stage approach. First, scene detection filters identify significant transitions. Next, interval-based sampling provides comprehensive timeline coverage at 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% of content duration. Each extracted frame undergoes rigorous quality assessment using content-aware thresholds for brightness, contrast calculation, and blur detection. This preprocessing improved frame selection from 1–2 frames per video to 8–12 high-quality candidates. The prequalified frames, along with comprehensive content descriptions provided by content providers during ingestion, are sent to Amazon Nova Pro for analysis. Amazon Nova evaluates visual appeal, composition, and contextual relevance based on both the frame imagery and content descriptions information, providing ranked suggestions to the Dramaze content moderation team for final selection. This flow is shown in the following diagram. Figure 3: The Dramaze AI-powered poster creation pipeline The following screenshots show a before (on the left) and after (on the right) comparison of the Dramaze AI-driven poster creation. Figure 4: Before and after screenshot comparison of the Dramaze AI-driven poster creation Subtitle translation and language-model pairing Subtitle translation quality is strongly language-pair dependent. For example, a model that excels for Chinese to English might produce less natural phrasing or weaker term consistency for Chinese to Arabic, Thai, or Bahasa. To avoid locking the platform to a single LLM provider, Netmedias evaluates multiple FMs through the unified interface of Amazon Bedrock and selects the best performer for the relevant language pair. The process starts with a short list of eight LLMs and a representative set of real subtitle assets. Each model is evaluated under the same constraints, so results are directly comparable. Translations are scored against subtitle-specific criteria: semantic accuracy, readability, name and term consistency, and formatting integrity (timestamps and indexing). The content team then conducts human review on sampled episodes and selects the best-performing model for each language pair. Based on tests, DeepSeek R1 performed best for Chinese to English translation. After the optimal model is selected for each language pair, those choices are configured in the video processing pipeline so newly ingested content is automatically translated and delivered in the required set of languages. Video transcoding and encoding optimization The extensive configuration parameters of AWS Elemental MediaConvert enable precise optimization for vertical video formats, which means Dramaze can fine-tune encoding settings specifically for portrait-oriented content that performs optimally on mobile devices. QVBR is an intelligent encoding technology that adjusts bitrate based on content complexity. AWS Elemental MediaConvert analyzes each scene and allocates bandwidth according to the visual information present. Complex scenes with rapid motion receive higher bitrates. Simpler scenes with minimal movement receive lower bitrates. This approach reduced bandwidth consumption by 30% compared to constant bitrate encoding for the short-form drama content on the Dramaze platform. Security and global distribution AWS WAF protects against common web exploits, and Lambda@Edge functions at Amazon CloudFront edge locations validate viewer entitlements in real time. This serverless verification approach enforces geographic restrictions and protects premium content without impacting performance. Amazon CloudFront distributes processed videos worldwide with low-latency delivery. The content delivery network (CDN) integrates seamlessly with transcoded ABR streams, automatically optimizing cache strategies based on viewer demand patterns. Amazon CloudWatch provides end-to-end observability with automated alerting, enabling proactive issue detection and resolution across the entire pipeline. This architecture delivers exceptional performance while maintaining operational simplicity, which frees the operations team to focus on content curation rather than infrastructure management. Outcomes By standardizing the platform with a serverless, event-driven architecture that has Amazon Bedrock and AWS Elemental MediaConvert at its core, Netmedias was able to turn Dramaze from a concept into a production-grade streaming service within a 3-month window without increasing the size of the engineering team. This also aligns infrastructure costs with content library growth and viewer adoption. This means Netmedias pays only for what they use, keeping cost low while they scale out. From the customer’s perspective, the most visible impact was how quickly the team could move from content preparation to going live in new markets. Launching in the Philippines while preparing for additional markets might previously have required a much larger operations and engineering team. With AWS managed services handling scalability, reliability, and generative AI, Netmedias could stay focused on content strategy and partnerships. “As a lean company, we needed enterprise-grade reliability to achieve multiplied results beyond our scale. AWS empowers us to focus on strategies, audiences, and markets, while its resilient infrastructure not only powers our core but scales intelligently with our growth.” — Elize Ng, Chief Operating Officer, Netmedias Future plans As the Dramaze catalog grows towards and beyond 10,000 short-form episodes and the service matures, Netmedias plans to deepen its use of AWS services to improve discovery, engagement, and personalization with the use of generative AI for episode-level summaries, intelligent multilingual search, and personalization as the catalog and markets grow. Conclusion The Dramaze platform demonstrates how AWS serverless architecture and AI services enable small teams to achieve enterprise-scale results. By using Amazon Bedrock and AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Netmedias reduced subtitle translation time by 95%, automated poster generation, and launched with only three engineers in 3 months. This architecture proves that with managed services and strategic AI integration, lean organizations can compete globally while maintaining the flexibility to adopt emerging technologies as the streaming landscape evolves. Further reading Low code workflows with AWS Elemental MediaConvert Dynamically configuring job settings with AWS Elemental MediaConvert Amazon Bedrock adds 18 fully managed open weight models Comparison of QVBR with other rate control modes

“To be the signal and not the noise is incredibly difficult."Martin Trickey, Managing Director, Zoo 55This week I got to do something rare. I listened to my own podcast as a regular subscriber. The latest episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast was recorded at MIP London last week and turns out watching someone else deal with is a completely different experience. Highly recommend it!Martin Trickey runs Zoo 55, ITV Studios’ digital distribution arm, just over a year into the job. Zoo 55 operates across three main pillars: social video on YouTube/Facebook and co, FAST channels and a games business that ranges from IP licensing to building inside Roblox and Fortnite. They run the digital operation for ITV network properties and partner with outside studios who have catalog but no digital arm to work it.Martin drops an archive data point early in the conversation that will change how you look at your back catalog. The Coronation Street numbers that follow make the case even harder to ignore. If you have content sitting on a shelf, this is the part of the episode you need to hear.Evan also brings his diagnosis of UK broadcast to the table and asks Martin to respond to it on mic, no dodging. And because Zoo 55 is not just an archive play, the same studio that built a Mentos cannon in Fortnite also put Gordon Ramsay in Roblox. Love Island was the number eight most downloaded game in the US last year. The range of what this operation is actually doing is wider than you think.LISTEN and/or WATCH in full 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here. Join us live on March 12th (at 6pm CET / 12pm EST / 9am PST) on LinkedIn and Substack for our live earnings season breakdown. On the menu: we’re off to Europe this time with ITV, Canal+, Versant but will also review Ellison’s investment deck to stress test the upsides of this deal as he pitched to the WBD board.That’s it for today but before you go:🗳️ Poll timeSubscribe now

The media industry is experiencing a fundamental shift in how content is processed, analyzed, and monetized. Recent breakthroughs in vision-based generative AI models have dramatically reduced both the cost and complexity of understanding video content at scale. By introducing these models into media supply chain workflows, organizations can reduce manual tagging and metadata generation costs while increasing accuracy and consistency. Read more about AWS solutions for video understanding in Media2Cloud on AWS Guidance, Scene and ad-break detection and contextual understanding for advertising using generative AI, and Automate video insights for contextual advertising using Amazon Bedrock Data Automation. The potential of AI in media workflows extends beyond predefined workflows. Many parts of content supply chains rarely follow linear, predictable paths and are highly nuanced. For example, preparing video metadata for different distribution channels (including social media, websites, and streaming platforms) requires varying treatments based on genre, platform requirements, regulatory considerations, and real-time audience engagement metrics. This is where AI agents come in—autonomous systems that reason and make dynamic decisions without rigid pre-programming. These agents intelligently orchestrate complex workflows, adapting to unique content requirements and business rules in real time. In this blog post, we demonstrate how to build an agentic system for media operations using Strands Agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. This system dynamically generates accurate video metadata following specific format guidelines according to the compliance requirements of different distribution channels. Solution overview The solution architecture is a comprehensive application with a UI to upload videos for analysis. Users then interact with a multi-agent backend system built using Strands Agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to refine raw metadata for different downstream use cases. Figure 1: Solution architecture Workflow, as shown in figure 1: User uploads raw video to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and sends prompts to generate asset metadata using a web interface. An AWS Lambda function is triggered based on the video object on Amazon S3. The Lambda function invokes an Amazon Bedrock Data Automation job and writes the job status to an Amazon DynamoDB table. The Bedrock Data Automation job writes video insights data to Amazon S3 upon completion. An Amazon EventBridge rule triggers an update of the job status in the DynamoDB table. The web interface redirects the user to an authentication workflow through AWS WAF and an Amazon Cognito user pool. The web interface sends the user request to Amazon API Gateway, which invokes a Lambda function to trigger the media operation agent workflow A Strands supervisor agent delegates to collaborator Strands agents based on the user query, running on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. Each collaborator agent uses tools such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Rekognition, and DynamoDB tables through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway to support individual tasks broken down by the supervisor agent. When all tasks are complete, the results are returned to the user through the web interface. Users verify the response or provide final edits before invoking the Lambda function to trigger the publishing agent on AgentCore Runtime and publish results to downstream channels This post focuses on the multi-agent portion of the architecture. You start with one agent—Sports Agent—that enriches metadata for sports videos. You will build the agent, augment tools using AgentCore Gateway for Model Context Protocol (MCP) consumption and deploy the agent to AgentCore Runtime. This is an example to explain various components of Strands and AgentCore before scaling to the entire multi-agent system. Prerequisites To follow the walkthrough presented in this post, make sure you have the following: An AWS account with requisite permissions, including access to Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and S3 vectors. Run the media-operations-agents.yaml AWS CloudFormation stack to deploy the required resources. Run the 00-prerequisites.ipynb notebook to install third-party libraries such as FFmpeg, OpenCV, and webvtt-py before executing the notebooks. The end-to-end code examples are available in the GitHub repository. Example use case Media broadcasters face a significant operational challenge: hundreds of thousands of video clips from sporting events—such as the following image—require manual analysis and tagging for downstream distribution channels. This labor-intensive process creates bottlenecks in content delivery and limits the speed at which highlights reach audiences. Figure 2: Still from a sporting event video The following figure shows the basic steps of the process, which include: Upload the video input to an S3 bucket Process it through Bedrock Data Automation Save the video metadata to an S3 bucket Figure 3: Process to analyze and tag video Consider this highlight clip from a basketball game. When analyzed through Bedrock Data Automation (BDA)—a managed service that extracts deep insights from video including celebrity detection, logo detection, and scene segmentation—the video-level summary might read: In a professional basketball arena, a high-stakes game unfolds between two teams in red and white uniforms. The action centers on a player in red (number 14) who drives to the basket and attempts a powerful dunk. The opposing team in white (number 8) tries to block the shot. The dunk attempt is contested by multiple players from both teams. The crowd cheers loudly as the play unfolds. The red team player successfully completes the dunk, increasing their lead. The scene captures the intensity and excitement of professional basketball, with players demonstrating athleticism and competitive spirit.  While this summary captures the action, it lacks critical metadata such as where the game was played, which teams are competing, and the name of player 14. Without this contextual information, the clip remains difficult to categorize, search, and distribute effectively. Gaps like this make media supply chain processes highly manual. Building sports agents using Strands Agents What if an agent could reason through the available video content and automatically retrieve the missing information? For sports content, broadcasters typically need: Complete event or game name designation Accurate venue details and location information Clearly stated participating team names Key player names prominent in the video This is where Strands Agents is useful. Strands is an open source, model-first SDK from AWS for building production-ready agent and multi-agent workflows quickly. For more information about Strands Agents, see Introducing Strands Agents, an Open Source AI Agents SDK. The most basic form of a Strands agent combines three components: tools, a model, and a prompt. The agent uses these three components to complete tasks autonomously. The following is a flow diagram of the agent: Figure 4: Flow diagram of the sports agent For this agent, we created two specialized tools: one for knowledge base search and another for database lookup. Tool 1: Knowledge base retrieval searches sports articles and match reports to identify teams, venues, dates, and game context. This tool connects to a knowledge base containing recent sports coverage, enabling the agent to match video content with published game information. Tool 2: Player database lookup retrieves detailed player information (name, position, height, and weight) using the team’s name and jersey number. After the agent identifies which teams are playing, it can precisely look up individual players visible in the footage. Here’s how these tools are defined and integrated with Strands. The reasoning model used to orchestrate the tools is Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5: agent_model_id = 'global.anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929-v1:0' The system prompt provides instructions for the model’s behavior. SYSTEM_PROMPT = """You are a sports video analysis assistant that answers user queries about the provided sports video. You have video metadata, as well as additional tools to get more information from match reports and player table. Based on the information you obtained from metadata and tools, generate a clear and accurate answer to the user query. DO NOT answer queries beyond the game you are reviewing.""" With the tools, model, and prompt defined, creating the agent is straightforward using Strands, the frames will automatically determine when to use which tool, how to chain their outputs, and how to synthesize a complete answer. Go to GitHub to review the code that puts the pieces together. For more information about the orchestration mechanism of Strands Agents, see the Agent Loop documentation. The end-to-end code is available in create-an-sports-agent.ipynb. Scaling agentic tooling using AgentCore Gateway You’ve built a local agent using Strands that can analyze sports videos and enrich them with contextual information. This works great for development and testing, but what happens when you want to scale this solution for production? What if other teams want to build agents that also need access to match information and player data? Running agents in the cloud and sharing tools across multiple agents, teams, and applications requires a different approach. This is where Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway becomes essential. AgentCore Gateway is a managed service that exposes your agent tools as secure, scalable APIs following the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open protocol that standardizes how AI agents connect to external tools, data sources, and services. It acts as a centralized hub for your agent tools, making them searchable and discoverable by authorized agents. Figure 5: Flow diagram of the solution including AgentCore Gateway As shown in the preceding diagram, the architecture involves two key setup steps: Create an AgentCore Gateway with Amazon Cognito for authentication. Amazon Cognito manages inbound authentication using OAuth2 client credentials flow. This flow validates client credentials and issues JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) that agents must present when accessing your tools. Move the tool logic into Lambda functions and register them as gateway targets. When registering a Lambda function as a gateway target, you define outbound permissions—including API keys, outbound OAuth, and execution roles for AWS resources. You also provide an API specification that defines how the tool should be called by the agent. AgentCore Gateway then automatically transforms the registered tool targets—in this case, your Lambda functions—into a centralized MCP-compatible hub that your agents can access remotely. After being set up, the AgentCore Gateway becomes an MCP server that can be connected to your agent. When invoked, you authenticate through Amazon Cognito to retrieve a temporary access token, which allows your agent to list and invoke tools from the AgentCore Gateway. See the example code snippet showing how to trigger AgentCore Gateway from your Strands agent. The same Agent class works seamlessly with gateway-hosted tools. Strands abstracts away the complexity—your agent code remains clean and focused, whether tools are local or remote. The full code is available in sports-agent-with-gateway.ipynb. Deploy Sports Agent to AgentCore Runtime You’ve now built an agent locally using Strands and scaled your tools with AgentCore Gateway. The final step is deploying the agent. This is why you need Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. AgentCore Runtime is a managed container service that runs your agents in AWS-managed infrastructure with automatic scaling and built-in monitoring—eliminating the operational overhead of managing infrastructure. See the following updated agent diagram. Figure 6: Updated flow diagram including AgentCore Runtime To deploy to AgentCore Runtime, adapt your agent code to use the BedrockAgentCoreApp framework. This framework creates an HTTP server with required endpoints (/invocations for requests and /ping for health checks) and handles authentication automatically. For more information, see Get started with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. from bedrock_agentcore.runtime import BedrockAgentCoreApp # import Bedrock AgentCore library ... # Initialize the AgentCore Runtime App app = BedrockAgentCoreApp() ... @app.entrypoint # define the entry point for the request async def invoke(payload, context=None): ... if __name__ == "__main__": app.run() # run the application What these changes do: BedrockAgentCoreApp: Creates an HTTP server with /invocations and /ping endpoints app = BedrockAgentCoreApp(): Initializes the runtime environment that manages requests and responses @app.entrypoint: Marks your function as the main request handler that receives the payload and context app.run(): Starts the HTTP server when the container launches Deploying using the AgentCore Starter Toolkit is straightforward. Configure the runtime with your entrypoint file, execution role, and authentication settings—the toolkit handles building the Docker container, pushing it to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and creating the runtime. Security is built in from the start. The authorizer_configuration validates JWT tokens on incoming requests, verifying they originate from allowed Amazon Cognito clients. This validation mechanism controls access to your agent endpoints. See the configuration code in GitHub. The agentcore_runtime.launch() method initiates the build and deployment process, which typically takes a few minutes while the container is provisioned and health checks are performed. An endpoint Amazon Resource Name (ARN) is returned for invoking the remote agent. launch_result = agentcore_runtime.launch(auto_update_on_conflict=True) To test your deployed agent, authenticate to get an access token, then invoke the agent using something like this example. The runtime validates the JWT token, forwards the request to your containerized agent, retrieves the gateway URL from AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, connects to the gateway, discovers tools, and processes the request—all automatically. Your agent is now deployed with enterprise-grade security, scalability, and observability. For detailed implementation steps, see the sports-agent-on-runtime.ipynb notebook. Scaling to multi-agent orchestration Take the concept with one agent that you just went through and scale it out to a multi-agent design using Strands and Bedrock AgentCore. The following diagram shows a fleet of agents and how they work together. Figure 7: Multi-agent architecture Instead of building monolithic agents that try to handle everything, this architecture creates specialized agents coordinated through an intelligent orchestrator (shown in the preceding diagram). This provides separation of concerns, composability, extensibility, and reusability across diverse media operations tasks. Strands Agent Description Prompts Tasks Orchestrator Agent Central coordinator that analyzes queries, routes to specialized agents, and manages multi-step workflows Prompt file url link Query type detection Intelligent routing Workflow coordination Multi-agent orchestration Sports Agent Analyzes sports videos and enriches with contextual information Prompt file url link Extracts teams, players, scores, and key moments Matches video content with game databases Retrieves player information from DynamoDB News Agent Extracts structured information from news segments Prompt file url link Identifies who, what, when, where, and why Analyzes news content and context Film Agent Recognizes and analyzes film and movie content Prompt file url link Identifies movies, actors, and scenes Retrieves cast information Analyzes production details Requirements Agent Retrieves compliance rules and formatting requirements Prompt file url link Searches compliance knowledge bases Returns character limits and formatting rules Provides JSON schemas for metadata Metadata Agent Generates compliant metadata from content analysis Prompt file url link Combines content, compliance rules, and schemas Produces structured JSON metadata Enforces regulatory compliance QC Agent Validates metadata against compliance requirements Prompt file url link Checks metadata compliance Returns Pass/Fail reports Identifies specific issues and violations The orchestrator intelligently routes requests handling a diverse set of query types. For example, you can ask basic queries like the following. These queries are picked up by the Orchestrator Agent, which passes the query to the Sport Agent to obtain the answer. Query: What teams are playing in this video? Output: The teams playing in this video are the Metropolitan Knights (in red uniforms) and the Alpine Wolves (in white uniforms). Query: Who are the key figures from this video? Output: The key figures from this video are Thompson (#14) from the Metropolitan Knights in red, who executed the powerful dunk, and Smith (#8) from the Alpine Wolves in white, who attempted to defend against the shot. The following are examples of more sophisticated queries: Query: Generate compliant social media metadata for this video This query would be sent to the Orchestrator Agent, which then passes it to the Sports Agent, Requirements Agent, Metadata Agent, and QC Agent to produce the output in JSON. Output: ```json { "description": " THROWDOWN at Avalon Center! @MetropolitanKnights forward Thompson (#14) throws down a MONSTER dunk over @AlpineWolves defense in this Eastern Division thriller! Knights cruise to 107-82 victory. Don't miss this highlight! #PBF #KnightsBasketball" } ``` Query: Evaluate if this metadata for a sports video is compliant for social media '{"description": " POSTER ALERT! @MetropolitanKnights #14 Thompson throws down a MONSTER dunk over two @AlpineWolves defenders in the PBF showdown at Avalon Center! This electrifying play sparked a 16-2 run as the Knights dominate 37-23."}' The Orchestrator Agent will pass this query to the Requirements Agent and QC Agent to produce a Pass/Fail report) Output: I'll evaluate this metadata for compliance with social media requirements for sports content. ## Validation Result: ** FAIL** ### Violations Found: 1. **Hashtag Requirement Violation:** - Required: 2-3 relevant hashtags - Found: Only 1 hashtag (#14 is a jersey number, not a proper hashtag) - Missing : 1-2 additional relevant hashtags 2. **Three-Part Structure Violation:** - Required: Hook, Main Point, Call-to-action - Found: Hook ✓ and Main Point ✓ present - Missing: Call-to- action element ### Compliant Elements : - Word count: 34 words (within 75-word limit) ✓ - Event /Game name: \PBF showdown\ ✓ - Venue: \Avalon Center\ ✓ - Team @ handles: @MetropolitanKnights and @AlpineWolves ✓ - Key player mentioned: Thompson ✓ - Emoji placement: ✓ - Casual, engaging tone ✓ ** To fix:** Add 1-2 relevant hashtags (e .g., #Basketball, #P B F, #Game High lights) and include a call-to-action (e.g., \Watch the full game !\ or \Don 't miss the highlights  \). For complete implementation details, workflow examples, and deployment instructions, see the example code on GitHub. Clean up The sample code created several AWS resources including Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases with S3 vectors, DynamoDB tables, Lambda functions, an AgentCore Gateway, an Amazon Cognito user pool, and AgentCore runtimes. To remove the resources created for this solution and avoid ongoing charges, run the 9-cleanup-optional.ipynb notebook. Conclusion In this post, you’ve seen how you can combine Strands Agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to create a powerful architecture for media operations. This approach directly addresses key challenges in content supply chain workflows: Intelligent orchestration: Breaking complex media analysis into specialized agents allows for focused, accurate reasoning while maintaining workflow context Scalable tool architecture: The separation between agent logic (using Strands) and tool execution (using AgentCore Gateway) creates a modular system that mirrors how media operations teams work Production-ready deployment: AgentCore Runtime provides managed infrastructure with automatic scaling, built-in security, and observability, eliminating operational overhead This architecture serves as a foundation you can extend and adapt to your specific media workflows. Whether you’re building content analysis tools, compliance validation systems, or automated metadata generation pipelines, these patterns provide a robust starting point. We invite you to build upon this Strands and AgentCore architecture to transform your media operations.

As I dug into HBO Max’s launch in 8 new European markets, it was hard not to see it as a masterclass in pure resilience. That still holds true today, with HBO Max about to complete its European rollout by launching in the UK and Ireland on 26 March.Netflix backing out and Paramount Skydance stepping up to buy Warner Bros Discovery for around $110 billion does not change that resilience story (on the contrary given how similar these two companies are) but it does change what benefits come out of it. Unlike the Netflix scenario, where the upside was mostly about engagement, IP depth and pricing power on an already dominant platform, a Paramount–WBD combo is a survival move: two mid scale players trying to build a credible number three. In the US, the deal narrative will obsess over domestic synergies, debt and global scale. In Europe, the questions are different: what happens to SkyShowtime, how much extra reach does HBO Max really unlock for Paramount+ and does stacking their sports portfolios on both sides of the Atlantic actually move the needle. To make this concrete, I have boiled the case down into three infographics and then unpack what each of them implies for Europe.Today at a glance: On The Media Odyssey Podcast, we thought we would cover earnings results from Paramount & WBD, then the news dropped about Netflix backing out and Paramount winning the bid. Half an hour became 50’ 😁👇🏻Media War & Peace Substack LIVE: Paramount + Disco Bros!Thank you Machine Cinema, Jean Carucci, Elena Neira, Bill Cunningham, Alex Stolz, and many others for tuning into my live video with Marion Ranchet… Listen nowa month ago · 24 likes · 15 comments · Evan Shapiro and Marion RanchetWhat happens to SkyShowtime? How far can HBO Max extend Paramount+ in Europe’s streaming wars?Turning two sports portfolios into one year round destinationComing up next: ​this piece is about footprint, subs and sports. The next one will go deeper into three additional areas: theatrical, advertising and linear TV. Subscribe nowWhat happens to SkyShowtime? SkyShowtime, the 50/50 Paramount–Comcast JV operating in 22 European markets, generated €275M revenue and a €544M operating loss in 2024, bringing cumulative losses to about €1.3B since launch and serves around 6.2M subscribers according to Omdia estimates.It runs on Comcast’s Peacock tech stack and combines Paramount, NBCUniversal and Sky content. The complication is obvious once Paramount absorbs WBD: the combined company would own HBO Max and half of SkyShowtime, two directly competing services in the exact same territories across the Nordics, CEE, Iberia and the Netherlands. That joint venture was built for a world in which Paramount and Comcast were non competing partners. Post merger, they are not. This boils down to four outcomes:→ Paramount buys out Comcast and folds SkyShowtime into HBO Max→ Comcast exits in exchange for long term content or tech leverage→ The JV is dissolved and markets are split→ Or regulators intervene and force remediesThe cleanest industrial outcome is consolidation. HBO Max is already live in all SkyShowtime markets, has global scale, brand equity and a deeper content engine. Maintaining a loss making €275M revenue platform next to a 130M plus global service creates brand confusion and operational drag. Comcast’s posture matters too. Brian Roberts has been de risking in Europe, not expanding. Sky Deutschland was sold. Cable assets are being spun. Selling its stake in SkyShowtime fits that capital discipline far more than doubling down.However, this is Europe. European Competition authorities will look closely at concentration in Poland, the Nordics and parts of CEE, where a combined HBO Max absorbing SkyShowtime and Paramount+ would materially increase premium SVOD density. My base case remains that SkyShowtime does not survive as a standalone brand. HBO Max becomes the group platform across Europe.How far can HBO Max extend Paramount+ in Europe’s streaming wars? Read more

Due to rising costs for servers, RAM, SSDs, and energy, Akamai has notified customers and partners of upcoming interim surcharges and pricing adjustments for contract renewals. Akamai shared candid data with me on the massive economic pressures they are seeing across their supply chain and the specific market drivers behind the updated pricing. While CDN pricing has declined steadily for years, the current hardware and energy markets are forcing a shift. Akamai provided a detailed explanation of why they are implementing adjustments to account for what they describe as significant market-driven forces. They noted that over the years, Akamai has worked hard to maintain economic stability for its customers and partners amid rising global infrastructure costs. However, they are now introducing what they call a modest adjustment in response to the economic pressures reshaping the industry. According to the data Akamai provided, the cost of server components has spiked significantly since October 2025. Specifically, their market costs for RAM have more than doubled, and SSD pricing has seen significant increases. Due to ongoing supply shortages, Akamai noted that server costs increased between 75% and 200% compared to the first half of 2025. These hardware costs are not stabilizing. In fact, they are continuing to climb on an almost monthly basis. This aligns with recent industry analysis, with some analyst firms noting that end-user prices for memory and storage could rise by 150% to 300% or more in 2026 and 2027, compared to 2025 levels. Hardware is not the only factor, with Akamai noting that energy costs increased by more than 200% in many regions. Personnel costs are also rising significantly, as the market for highly talented engineering and services talent remains highly competitive. Given the growth in server costs over the past few months and a forecast for double-digit increases to continue into 2026, the company explained that it can no longer absorb these costs while maintaining the same performance and security standards. To address this, Akamai is implementing two specific changes: Interim Surcharge: Effective April 1, 2026, a 3% surcharge will be passed through to customers and partners. Renewal Adjustments: Akamai will incorporate a price adjustment of up to 10% on contract renewals to reflect the current cost environment. In response to my questions about what they have done internally to offset these costs, Akamai was clear that they are working to mitigate the impact through a variety of internal optimizations. This included org structure adjustments and migrating their own internal workloads to Akamai Cloud to significantly reduce third-party cloud spend. Ultimately, Akamai views this decision as an operational necessity to maintain the security and performance levels its customers require. The company noted that these changes are required to fund the ongoing costs of infrastructure, maintenance, and innovation associated with managing increasingly sophisticated cloud and edge services. While nobody likes cost pressures, this is clearly a systemic issue across the infrastructure market, not isolated to Akamai. We are seeing similar moves from other players. Hetzner recently announced price increases of up to 50% for its services, and OHVcloud has implemented similar measures. This reflects broader market realities, where every provider is facing the same spike in server and power costs, and the current cost environment is likely to continue into 2027. I will continue to track how other CDNs and cloud providers respond to these same supply chain pressures.

For most of the live encoding era, the operator’s main job was picking a bitrate. You’d set a target, the encoder would hit it, and quality was whatever came out the other end. Simple content looked great. Complex content looked terrible. The encoder didn’t care because you told it to deliver bits, not quality. Then came a generation of smarter modes that flipped the question. Instead of “how many bits?”, you’d specify “how good?” and let the encoder figure out the bits. That was a genuine improvement. But the quality signal was always internal and opaque: a proprietary number, a “quality level” knob, or a perceptual model you couldn’t inspect or independently verify. Now a third wave is arriving. Several vendors are computing explicit perceptual metrics, specifically VMAF and its real-time variants, during encoding. In some cases, those metrics feed directly back into rate control. The quality signal isn’t hidden inside the encoder anymore. It’s named, it’s measurable, and in the most advanced implementations, it’s driving bitrate allocation frame by frame. From Bitrate Knobs to Quality Knobs This post traces that evolution through three phases and looks at what it means for your next encoder decision. Phase 1: Capped CRF, the Original Quality-First Control Before vendor-specific quality modes existed, the open-source world gave us CRF (Constant Rate Factor). The core idea: instead of targeting a bitrate, target a quality level and let the encoder vary the bitrate to hit it. Here’s some of the descriptive language. “The Constant Rate Factor (CRF) is the default quality (and rate control) setting for the x264 and x265 encoders… This is a one-pass mode that is optimal if the user does not desire a specific bitrate, but specifies quality instead.” https://huyunf.github.io/blogs/2017/12/05/x264_rate_control/ In practice, this means the encoder looks at each scene and decides how many bits it needs: “The x264 encoder uses Constant Rate Factor (CRF) as a rate control mode that prioritizes consistent visual quality over fixed bitrate. The encoder dynamically allocates more bits to complex scenes while using fewer for simpler ones, resulting in variable bitrate output.” https://ffmpeg.party/guides/x264/ When you pair CRF with a maximum bitrate constraint, you get what’s commonly called “capped CRF.” This is the original “set quality, not bitrate” control, and it still underlies a lot of production workflows. It was a real improvement over CBR and basic VBR, but the quality signal is entirely internal. You’re trusting the encoder’s own complexity model, not an explicit perceptual metric. There’s no VMAF score in the loop, no way to say “I want 93 VMAF on this channel.” You set a CRF number and the encoder does its best. Phase 2: QVBR, EyeQ, and Vendor Quality Modes The next generation kept the same basic idea, let the encoder decide how many bits each scene needs, but wrapped it in more sophisticated, vendor-specific quality models. QVBR (AWS Elemental) AWS formalized the quality-defined approach with QVBR, Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate: “When you use QVBR, you specify the quality level for your output and the maximum peak bitrate. The encoder determines the right number of bits to use for each part of the video to maintain the video quality that you specify.” https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elemental-server/latest/ug/using-qvbr.html “With quality-defined variable bitrate mode (QVBR), you specify a maximum bitrate and a quality level. Video quality will match the specified quality level…” https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elemental-live/latest/ug/qvbr-and-rate-control-mode.html QVBR clearly drives bitrate based on quality, and it’s a real step up from pure CBR or basic VBR. But the quality signal is an internal AWS metric exposed only as a numeric “quality level.” You don’t get to say “target VMAF 93.” You say “quality level 8” and trust that AWS has tuned that number to mean something perceptually reasonable. It works well in practice, but the signal is proprietary and opaque. Figure 1. Harmonic’s EyeQ EyeQ (Harmonic) Harmonic takes a different approach, leaning heavily on perceptual modeling: “EyeQ content-aware encoding utilizes AI to dynamically adjust encoding parameters based on what truly matters to the viewer — how the human eye perceives detail, motion, and contrast. By optimizing video quality perceptually, EyeQ achieves visually superior results at significantly lower bitrates. The compression technology intelligently distinguishes between regions of visual importance and less critical details, allocating bits only where they contribute most to perceived quality.” https://www.digitalmediaworld.tv/awards/harmonic-ai-powered-eyeq-content-aware-encoding That’s from an awards submission, and it reads like one. What we can say from it is that Harmonic describes EyeQ as a content-aware system that uses perceptual models to allocate bits. Whether that’s meaningfully different from other content-aware VBR modes, and what ‘AI’ means in this context, isn’t something the quote establishes. What it shares with QVBR is the key limitation: the quality signal is proprietary and unexposed. You can’t set a VMAF target, and you can’t independently verify what the encoder thinks ‘perceptually optimal’ means. The Phase 2 Pattern QVBR, EyeQ, and similar content-aware encoding modes from other vendors share a common architecture: they’ve moved from “you pick the bitrate” to “you pick the quality, we pick the bitrate.” That’s genuinely useful. But the quality signal is a black box in every case. You can’t independently verify what the encoder thinks “good” means, you can’t compare it across vendors, and you can’t set a target in terms of a metric you can measure yourself after the fact. Phase 3: Explicit Metric-Driven Systems (2024-2026) This is where things get interesting. A new set of technologies is making the quality signal explicit, named, and measurable. In the most advanced cases, a VMAF-class metric is computed in real time and fed directly back into rate control. The encoder doesn’t just promise quality. It measures quality using a metric you can independently verify. Figure 2. Real-Time Video Quality Assessment with pVMAF Synamedia: pVMAF and QC-VBR Synamedia has been the most explicit about putting a named perceptual metric inside the rate control loop. Their pVMAF (predictive VMAF) is designed specifically for real-time use: “pVMAF’s ability to deliver highly accurate VQM with only a negligible increase in CPU usage (~0.06% increase in CPU cycles for FHD encoding) — making it ideal for real-time video quality assessment.” https://www.synamedia.com/blog/real-time-video-quality-assessment-with-pvmaf/ That 0.06% CPU overhead number matters. Standard VMAF is too expensive to run inside a live encoding loop. pVMAF is fast enough to run in-line without meaningfully affecting encoder performance. And Synamedia doesn’t just use it for monitoring. They’ve integrated it directly into rate control: “Proactive rate control: pVMAF can also play an active role in rate control, acting as a feedback mechanism during constant-quality encoding. This functionality is already integrated into Synamedia’s QC-VBR (Quality-Controlled Variable Bitrate) rate control algorithm, ensuring that the target quality is consistently met without sacrificing efficiency.” https://www.synamedia.com/blog/real-time-video-quality-assessment-with-pvmaf/ On the operational side, Synamedia exposes pVMAF as a transparency and targeting tool: “Unlike traditional ‘black box’ VBR implementations, Synamedia’s vDCM provides transparency through pVMAF-based quality insights… Operators can specify desired pVMAF values to prioritize video quality based on channel importance.” https://www.synamedia.com/blog/streamlining-video-encoding-operations/ This is metric-driven rate control in the most direct sense. The quality signal is a named, VMAF-class metric. It runs in real time inside the encoding loop. Operators can set target pVMAF values per channel. And because pVMAF correlates with standard VMAF, the quality targets are independently verifiable, not just trust-the-vendor numbers. Figure 3. MainConcept’s VMAF-EReal-Time, AI-Powered, and Live-Ready MainConcept: VMAF-E and vScore MainConcept has taken a similar approach with VMAF-E, their real-time approximation of standard VMAF: “VMAF-E, developed by MainConcept and part of the vScore video quality metrics suite, is an AI-powered breakthrough in video quality measurement. Performance closely matches standard VMAF, but is optimized for dynamic, time-sensitive streams… Built into the encoding process, VMAF-E analyzes in coding order, not presentation order, so your results are truly real-time.” https://www.mainconcept.com/vmaf-e Two things stand out. First, VMAF-E is explicitly designed to match standard VMAF’s accuracy while running fast enough for live encoding. Second, it works in coding order rather than presentation order, which is a technical requirement for operating inside a live encoding pipeline where you can’t wait for future frames. MainConcept is also explicit about where VMAF-E sits in the encoding architecture: “VMAF-E is fast enough to be utilized within the rate control loop of the encoding process and can be computed in coding order.” https://blog.mainconcept.com/constant-target-quality-encoding-driven-by-perceptual-fidelity That’s a direct statement: within the rate control loop. Not monitoring. Not post-encode analysis. The metric feeds back into bitrate decisions during encoding. The broader vScore suite adds operational visibility: “Real-time feedback empowers operators to optimize encoding settings on the fly, fostering quality control and rapid response at any scale.” https://www.mainconcept.com/vscore Like Synamedia’s pVMAF/QC-VBR, MainConcept’s VMAF-E/vScore represents explicit metric-in-the-loop bitrate control: a named, VMAF-class metric used during encoding, not just after. Figure 4. Meta and FFmpeg. Architecting real-time metrics into live transcoding. Meta + FFmpeg: In-Loop Metrics at Hyperscale Meta’s recent work with upstream FFmpeg brings real-time quality metrics into the open-source ecosystem, though with an important distinction from Synamedia and MainConcept: “Using upstreamed patches and refactorings we’ve been able to fill two important gaps that we had previously relied on our internal fork to fill: threaded, multi-lane transcoding and real-time quality metrics.” https://engineering.fb.com/2026/03/02/video-engineering/ffmpeg-at-meta-media-processing-at-scale/ “In the end, we can produce a quality metric for each encoded lane in real time using a single FFmpeg command line. Thanks to ‘in-loop’ decoding, which was enabled by FFmpeg developers including those from FFlabs and VideoLAN, beginning with FFmpeg 7.0, we no longer have to rely on our internal FFmpeg fork for this capability.” https://engineering.fb.com/2026/03/02/video-engineering/ffmpeg-at-meta-media-processing-at-scale/ What Meta describes is real-time, per-lane computation of quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF-type metrics) during encoding, at hyperscale, using upstream FFmpeg rather than a proprietary fork. That’s significant for the broader ecosystem because it means these capabilities are available to anyone building on FFmpeg 7.0+, not just Meta. However, it’s important to note what Meta does not describe. The blog frames this as measurement and analysis, not closed-loop rate control. Meta is computing quality metrics inline during encoding, which is a prerequisite for metric-driven rate control, but the blog does not claim they’re feeding those metrics back into bitrate decisions. The primary stated benefits are de-forking (getting off their internal FFmpeg fork and onto upstream) and real-time quality visibility across their encoding fleet. Whether Meta uses these metrics to steer bitrate internally is something the blog doesn’t address. Figure 5. Netflix: the ultimate technology endorsement. Ateme: TITAN, VMAF, and Bitrate Savings Ateme positions its TITAN platform and content-aware encoding around VMAF-validated quality: “Our encoding solutions consistently deliver up to 20% bitrate savings across a wide range of formats and codecs… The result? … Superior VMAF scores, reflecting true perceptual performance.” https://www.ateme.com/reimagining-video-quality-metrics-and-efficiency/ This tells us that Ateme’s encoding pipeline is designed and tuned around VMAF. Engineering decisions, tuning parameters, and validation workflows clearly use VMAF as a primary quality measure, and the 20% bitrate savings claim is framed in terms of maintaining or improving VMAF scores. What this does not establish is whether VMAF runs inside the rate control loop during encoding, the way Synamedia’s pVMAF and MainConcept’s VMAF-E explicitly do. Based on this published material, the strongest supported claim is that Ateme is VMAF-tuned and VMAF-validated, delivering documented bitrate savings at equal or better perceptual quality. Whether the rate control loop itself is metric-driven isn’t something the public documentation addresses. Ateme recently got a valuable technology endorsement when Netflix signed a multi-year deal to deploy TITAN Live for its live streaming workflows. The article notes that TITAN uses VMAF alongside subjective assessments to minimize visual artifacts, which reinforces the VMAF-validated positioning described above. https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2026/03/03/ateme-signs-multi-year-titan-live-transcoder-deal-with-netflix/ Pulling the Trend Together The progression is clear. Phase 1 (CRF) moved us from “you set the bitrate” to “you set the quality.” Phase 2 (QVBR, EyeQ) made quality-driven encoding more sophisticated but kept the quality signal proprietary. Phase 3 is making the quality signal explicit, named, and in the most advanced cases, directly driving rate control. Two vendors, Synamedia and MainConcept, have published explicit statements that their VMAF-class metrics operate inside the rate control loop. Meta has brought real-time quality metrics into upstream FFmpeg at hyperscale, creating infrastructure that could support closed-loop control even if Meta hasn’t documented using it that way. Ateme has built its optimization and validation pipeline around VMAF, even if the rate control loop role isn’t publicly documented. Taken together, these examples suggest a clear direction: perceptual quality metrics are moving from post-encode validation tools to real-time encoding signals, and in some cases, to active rate control drivers. Here’s the landscape in a table: Live quality control technologies Technology / Mode Provider Primary Quality Signal Drives Bitrate? (How) Capped CRF Open-source (x264/x265) Encoder-internal complexity heuristics Yes — Varies bitrate to maintain a constant CRF-defined quality target. QVBR AWS Elemental Internal “Quality Level” (1-10) Yes — Quality-defined VBR that caps at a user-defined max bitrate. EyeQ Harmonic AI-powered perceptual model of human vision Yes — Content-aware bit allocation; prioritizes regions of visual importance. pVMAF + QC-VBR Synamedia pVMAF (Predictive VMAF) Yes — Explicit feedback loop; pVMAF informs the QC-VBR rate controller. VMAF-E + vScore MainConcept VMAF-E (Real-time VMAF proxy) Yes — VMAF-E runs within the rate control loop in coding order. In-Loop Metrics Meta + FFmpeg 7.0+ PSNR / SSIM / VMAF No (publicly) — Used for real-time monitoring and fleet-wide visibility. TITAN / CAE Ateme VMAF used for tuning and validation VMAF-tuned/validated; closed-loop role not publicly documented. What to Demand from Your Next Live Encoder If you’re evaluating live encoders today, this trend has practical implications for what you should be asking vendors. First, ask whether the encoder exposes a named perceptual metric during encoding. Not a proprietary quality level, not an opaque score, but a metric you can independently verify, like VMAF or a documented VMAF-correlated variant. Real-time visibility into a known metric lets you compare quality across vendors, across channels, and across time in a way that proprietary quality levels never can. Second, ask whether that metric is used in the rate control loop. There’s a meaningful difference between an encoder that computes VMAF after encoding (useful for monitoring) and one that uses VMAF to drive bitrate decisions during encoding (useful for quality guarantees). Both Synamedia and MainConcept have documented this capability. If a vendor claims quality-driven encoding but can’t explain what metric drives it or where it sits in the encoding pipeline, that’s worth pressing on. Third, ask about metric targeting. Can you set a per-channel VMAF target and have the encoder allocate bits to hit it? Synamedia’s pVMAF-based channel prioritization is the clearest public example of this capability. If your operation runs a mix of premium and economy channels, the ability to set explicit quality targets per tier, measured by a metric you can independently measure, is more useful than a single global quality knob. The broader point is this: quality-first encoding has been available for years, but the quality signal has been a black box. The most interesting development in live encoding right now isn’t a new codec or a faster chip. It’s the emergence of transparent, measurable, independently verifiable quality signals that sit inside the encoding loop. Your next live encoder should let you see them, set targets against them, and ideally use them to drive bitrate directly. That’s where the field is heading, and the vendors who’ve gotten there first are already publishing the results. The post The Next Big Feature in Live Streaming: VMAF-Driven Bitrate Control first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

The biggest decisions in the National Football League (NFL) don’t always happen under stadium lights. More often, they’re made weeks later — when scouts are replaying drills frame by frame, analysts are running probability models late into the night, and front offices are weighing roster needs against contract markets and draft boards. By the time a name is called on draft night, the data story behind that pick has already been building for months. For years, that decision layer lived almost entirely behind closed doors. The NFL Next Gen Stats team and Amazon Web Services (AWS) set out to open it — not with commentary, but with computation. They built NFL IQ, a living offseason intelligence platform that lets fans explore how roster construction really works, how free agency reshapes team needs, how prospect signals change draft probabilities, how consensus projections move, and how every new transaction sends ripple effects across the league. Running on AWS and powered by Amazon Quick, the platform transforms offseason chaos into an interactive analytical experience that updates continuously as the market moves. The ambition wasn’t to simplify the offseason. It was to let fans navigate it the way decision makers do. “NFL IQ is really about enhancing the fan experience and deepening the fan connection between the team, front office and the roster itself,” said Mike Band of NFL Next Gen Stats Research & Analytics. “The goal is to put them in the war room — to see what teams are actually looking at when they make roster decisions.” Transforming the Offseason into a Unified Roster-Building System From the outside, the offseason looks like a sequence of events — workouts, signings, projections, and selections. Inside football operations, it behaves like a system. Each input changes the math. A veteran signing reduces positional urgency. Reduced urgency shifts draft probability. Draft probability alters trade value. Prospect measurables affect fit scores. Everything connects. NFL IQ was designed to model those connections directly. Instead of freezing moments, it recalculates context. When roster data changes, team need indicators change. When team needs change, draft likelihood curves shift. When consensus projections move, targeting clusters update. The platform treats the offseason as a living model, not a timeline. “Rather than just looking at prospects, we’re taking a more holistic, 360-view of how a team turns over and tries to improve their roster,” said Keegan Abdoo, Senior Manager at Next Gen Stats. “Free agency is just as important in determining who a team becomes as the draft — and now fans can see that interaction instead of guessing at it.” What emerges is not a prediction machine but a decision map — one that shows how teams balance uncertainty, probability, and need. How Amazon Quick Scaled NFL Research Tools for Millions of Fans What makes NFL IQ feel fast and deep at the same time is the analytics engine underneath it. The platform is built on Amazon Quick, the same cloud BI environment the Next Gen Stats research team already uses to explore tracking data, test metrics, and generate broadcast insights throughout the season. That continuity matters. It means the fan platform is not a simplified export — it’s an extension of the research workflow itself. “Quick is the engine that powers our research,” Band explained. “It lets our analysts filter data, find patterns, test ideas — and surface insights fast. That same speed is what lets this platform stay fresh.” Because Quick supports rapid dashboard authoring and high-performance querying at scale, analysts can move from idea to live visualization quickly — often within the same working session. Instead of long product cycles, the build process becomes iterative and researcher driven. “Because it’s so intuitive, the barrier to entry is low,” Band said. “An analyst can say, ‘I want to see this stat or this view,’ and we can get it built and published fast. That changes how ambitious you can be with what you show fans.” It also changes how rich the experience can be. Visual layers, probability charts, and interactive team views aren’t static exports; they’re native analytical surfaces rendered at fan scale. Separating Draft Signal from Draft Noise Draft season is overloaded with opinion. Hundreds of mock drafts compete for attention, often contradicting each other. Teams leak selectively. Analysts speculate confidently. The result is volume without clarity. NFL IQ approaches the problem differently: don’t pick a voice — model the market. Through its collaboration with Grinding the Mocks, a popular NFL Draft analytics project, the platform aggregates thousands of mock draft projections and converts them into probability distributions that evolve over time. Instead of asking who a team will pick, the platform shows who they are most likely to pick — and how that likelihood is shifting. “Grinding the Mocks was built on a simple premise: the NFL Draft community collectively knows more than any single analyst. We’ve spent years turning that collective intelligence into structured, AI-driven data that aggregates mock drafts at a scale no individual analyst can match. This includes surfacing patterns, consensus shifts, and prospect momentum that reveal how the league is actually thinking, “said Benjamin Robinson, CEO and Founder of Grinding the Mocks. “There’s a ton of noise in draft coverage,” Abdoo said. “When you synthesize across the whole ecosystem instead of relying on one source, you start to see real signal.” Those probability surfaces reveal momentum, convergence, volatility, and positional clustering — patterns that single mock drafts can’t show. Fans can watch how a prospect rises after a workout, how consensus tightens around a pick range, or how team behavior shifts expectation bands. “Any one mock draft is going to be wrong,” Band noted. “But when you look at the crowd signal together, it becomes directionally right — and that’s where it becomes useful.” The result is draft intelligence that behaves more like a forecast model than a rumor feed. Built to Move at the Speed of Football One of the defining technical choices behind NFL IQ was responsiveness. The offseason doesn’t update politely — news breaks in bursts. Signings appear through trusted reporters before official logs update. Values emerge in fragments. NFL IQ was engineered to move with that reality. When credible information lands, roster models update and downstream analytics recompute, from team needs to availability boards, probability curves, and fit indicators. “We designed this to evolve every day,” Band said. “The offseason is dynamic. The dashboard should be too.” That responsiveness turns revisiting the platform into a habit, not a one-time visit. Each return reveals a slightly different analytical landscape — new signals, new implications, new probabilities. Start Exploring Inside NFL IQ NFL IQ works because it doesn’t just answer questions — it invites exploration. It gives fans a way to test assumptions, trace implications, and understand why decisions make sense — or don’t — through data. It transforms offseason conversation from rumor to reasoning. The hidden analytical game is now visible. And once you see how the decisions connect, it’s hard to look away.

Nearly 8 in 10 Europeans spend at least 2 minutes choosing what to watch every time they sit down and for almost a quarter of them that search stretches beyond ten minutes, according to RTL AdAlliance's 2025 Living Room report. In the time it takes to find something to watch, viewers are returning to the home screen of both their Set Top Box, Connected TV and subscription platforms again and again. Samsung TV users, for example, visit the Samsung TV home screen five times a day on average. In that window of indecision, the home screen owns them completely and every tile, banner and row on that screen is competing for the same moment of attention. This is the reality of streaming in 2026. Organic discovery still exists but it is shrinking fast as the sheer volume of content across platforms turns the home screen from a navigation tool into a marketplace. Banners, featured rows, dedicated hubs, contextual sports rails: all of it is up for grabs, all of it can be bought and crucially all of it can now be measured.That is what this column is about.Subscribe nowIntroducing Above The FoldAbove The Fold is a new column produced by Streaming Made Easy in partnership with Looper Insights, the leading CTV merchandising analytics platform. The company was founded in London in 2017 and built a dataset tracking how content and apps are promoted across 250+ CTV devices, including smart TVs, set top boxes, gaming consoles and streaming sticks, as well as 600 web stores across 120 markets. Their technology captures what viewers literally see on screen at any given moment, covering both paid and editorial placements. Their proprietary metric, MPV (Media Placement Value), measures visibility across paid, earned and algorithmic placements. $MPV converts that visibility into dollars while pMPV forecasts impressions. Together, they turn the home screen from a mystery into something measurable and actionable.Above The Fold exists because visibility on the home screen is no longer accidental. Someone decided what you saw. This column looks at who, how and whether it worked. And what better way to kick off this column than with Peacock’s Legendary February!Peacock’s Legendary FebruaryOn February 8, 2026, Super Bowl LX and the opening of the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics landed on the same day, with Olympic competition running through the day and the Super Bowl anchoring primetime. NBCU packaged it all under one brand, “Legendary February” and bet that Peacock could carry the weight of both.The bet seems to have paid off. According to Nielsen, Super Bowl LX drew 125.6 million viewers across NBC, Peacock, Telemundo, NBC Sports Digital and NFL+ (unlike Tubi last year, we don’t know how many viewers Peacock garnered). On the subscriber side, Peacock added 968,000 new subscribers on Super Bowl Sunday alone, with 33% opting for the Premium Plus tier, more than double Peacock’s usual 14% share, according to Ampere Analysis. Churn the following day came in at 5%, less than half the 12% Paramount+ saw after its 2024 Olympics run. But the viewer and subscriber count only tells you the outcome. It does not tell you how viewers actually found their way to the content, which platforms delivered the most visibility or what the promotional effort was worth in measurable terms. That is where Looper Insights’ data comes in.Game day on the Home ScreenI’ve asked the team at Looper Insights to track Peacock and NBC’s promotional activity across key CTV environments on February 8, focusing on homepage banners, featured rows, dedicated content hubs and promotional integrations. LG TV’s featured page placement used bold Seahawks vs. Patriots visuals, a prominent “Watch Live” CTA and clear time-zone messaging that removed any friction around tune-in. DIRECTV positioned its banner above the live sports rows, exactly where viewers already hunting for live content are looking. Xumo Charter went for the Sports page, landing the Super Bowl tile inside the “Live and Upcoming on Network TV” row where sports-native intent was already high and the audience was primed.Outside the top three platforms, star power did its own work. With Bad Bunny confirmed as halftime headliner, several platforms leaned into music and entertainment angles to widen appeal well beyond traditional football audiences. They understood that February 8 was not just a game, it was a pop culture moment and they promoted it accordingly.The campaigns’ visuals, placement values and impression data are in the Looper Insights report that you can download here. Join us at Streaming Made Easy Live - Lisbon on April 13th during StreamTV Europe. Registration details here. Use my code (SME10) to get 10% off here.We just released our programming here. A lot of great content is coming your way. Seventeen days on the Home ScreenWe then tracked Olympic promotion across key CTV platforms throughout the Games window, measuring which environments delivered the strongest visibility and what creative approaches drove viewers into NBC and Peacock’s content. The strategies varied significantly by platform and the results are detailed in full here.The most valuable single execution of the entire Olympics campaign belonged to Roku. NBCUniversal and Roku launched a dedicated 2026 NBC Winter Olympics Experience, a US-exclusive hub centralising NBC broadcast coverage and Peacock streaming for the Milan Cortina Games in one place. On the Roku Sports Zone page, a takeover promotion dominated the top of the page with bold Milan Cortina 2026 branding and Olympic iconography, intercepting high-intent sports viewers at the exact moment they arrived. A second placement inside the dedicated Olympics hub delivered a fully branded environment with structured event modules, live scheduling, and clear tune-in signposting, reducing navigation friction while keeping both NBC and Peacock front of mind throughout the Games.Together these two Roku placements were the highest-value executions of the entire Olympics campaign, pairing top-of-page dominance with a sustained destination experience that kept viewers coming back across the full 17-day window.The campaigns’ visuals, placement values and impression data are in the Looper Insights report. Download it here. What this means if you are not NBCUniversalThis is US data on US platforms but the mechanics are universal and the stakes in Europe are rising fast. The placement economics on Samsung and other CTV platforms work the same way. What changes is the competitive context, the regulatory framework and the budget reality.European broadcasters fight hard for app-level prominence on CTV platforms, backed by regulatory frameworks that should guarantee a seat at the table. What those frameworks do not guarantee is that anyone clicks. Legal prominence gives national services a visible position on the home screen. Paid visibility still decides who captures the moment when a viewer is actively deciding what to watch.The question for every European broadcaster and streamer is not whether the home screen is a pay-to-play environment, because it already is, but whether they are investing accordingly.That’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻In our next edition: HBO Max launches in the UK on March 26, completing Warner Bros. Discovery’s European rollout after years of Sky exclusivity. A new entrant on one of the most contested home screens in Europe with The Pitt, Euphoria Season 3 and TNT Sports as its opening hand. We will track how the launch campaign plays out across UK CTV platforms: where the app lands, what content leads the promotion and whether the placement strategy matches the ambition.Enjoy your weekend and see you next week for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

You’ve likely heard the term “digital sovereignty” more frequently in recent months. When France announced that 2.5 million civil servants would migrate away from Zoom and Microsoft Teams to the domestically developed Visio platform, it brought the concept into sharper focus. But what does sovereignty actually mean for network operators and content owners delivering OTT video? What is Data Sovereignty? Data sovereignty refers to the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance of the country where it’s collected or stored. For video streaming, this covers several layers: the video assets you’re delivering, subscriber viewing habits and device information, and the operational metrics that drive your business intelligence. When you use a third-party global CDN, this data typically traverses and resides in infrastructure outside your direct control, and often outside European jurisdiction. These aren’t abstract concerns. They affect everything from regulatory compliance to cost predictability to how you differentiate against competitors. Why It Matters Now The regulatory environment is tightening. The EU’s upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act aims to establish eligibility requirements for cloud providers serving European public sector needs. While focused on government procurement initially, these standards tend to cascade into private sector expectations, and the direction of travel is clear. Geopolitical uncertainty is also a factor. Trade relationships and data-sharing agreements between regions are less predictable than they were five years ago. Infrastructure dependencies that seemed low-risk may warrant reassessment. The Franco-German Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in November 2025 launched a joint task force, with recommendations expected later this year. Then there’s the cost question. External CDN pricing is often opaque and subject to change, particularly for high-bandwidth video delivery at scale. When your margins depend on someone else’s pricing model, you’re not fully in control of your business. The Private CDN Model A private, on-net CDN addresses these concerns by bringing delivery infrastructure inside your network. Rather than sending viewer requests to external servers, you deploy caching and delivery nodes within your own network topology: at your data centres, peering points, or edge locations. Content stays closer to subscribers, data remains in your domain, and you control the economics. Beyond regulatory alignment, there’s a clear operational advantage. Subscriber viewing data, content analytics, and performance metrics all remain within your governance framework. You eliminate external transit fees and gain predictable infrastructure costs that scale with your business. When you control the delivery path, you also control latency, bitrate adaptation, and edge placement: the factors that determine whether subscribers stay or switch. Key Capabilities to Look For When evaluating private CDN solutions, prioritise: Cloud-native architecture: Enables deployment on your existing infrastructure without hardware lock-in Video-specific optimisation: Generic CDN technology wasn’t built for streaming; look for adaptive bitrate support, low-latency modes, and efficient live/DVR caching Centralised orchestration: You need visibility and control across your entire delivery footprint Standards compliance: Open Caching compatibility ensures interoperability as the ecosystem evolves Taking the Next Step NEA CDN from Ateme was purpose-built for this model. It deploys on your infrastructure, supports all major streaming formats, including low-latency HLS and DASH, and provides the orchestration tools to manage delivery across your network. European operators using NEA CDN report bandwidth optimisation improvements of up to 30% while maintaining full control of their subscriber data, and reducing energy consumption by up to 66% compared to traditional approaches. The operators who understand their options now will be best positioned as the regulatory and competitive landscape continues to shift. About the Author Mark Haines CDN Product Manager & OTT Streaming Solutions Manager at Ateme Mark brings 18+ years of experience in OTT streaming & Content Delivery Networks. With a background spanning product management, solution architecture, and business development, he helps content owners, telcos & network operators navigate modern streaming infrastructure, from CDN strategy and live video delivery to cloud-native OTT platform design. At Ateme, Mark leads product direction for the NEA CDN portfolio and drives OTT & streaming solution strategy for major telcos and network operators worldwide, having previously spent 5 years as a Global Solution Architect.  Prior to Ateme, he held solution architecture and business development roles at Velocix, part of Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Video division. L’article Data Sovereignty for Video Delivery: What European Operators Need to Know est apparu en premier sur Ateme.

Introduction The media and entertainment industry is undergoing a fundamental shift toward cloud-based live production workflows. Broadcasters want to realize new avenues of revenue by unlocking global workflows, produce more content with fewer resources, and drive viewer engagement at scale. This shift reduces costs through decreased crew travel and capital expenses for production hardware that sits idle between events. It provides scalability and agility to handle variable production schedules without building for peak capacity. Cloud environments offer experimentation and innovation where you can test new technologies without disrupting live productions. They improve sustainability through reduced carbon footprint from decreased travel and more efficient data center operations. They also provide access to a global workforce that can operate productions from anywhere in the world. Deterministic timing and synchronization are critical in broadcast operations. These are often achieved with clock-driven sequential processing where each component passes frames directly to the next stage in a workflow. When you lift and shift traditional broadcast workflows to the cloud, they face a fundamental challenge: how can these systems preserve frame-accurate synchronization? In this blog, we discuss how asynchronous processing architecture using the Matrox ORIGIN framework unlocks modern software-defined media workflows. This approach provides scalability and resiliency for live media applications while maintaining broadcast-grade frame accuracy. Limitations of synchronous processing In a scenario where a workflow has multiple live inputs (A and B), a video mixer and output; each stage waits for the previous one to complete its processing: Figure 1: Live broadcast workflow with 2 inputs, a mixer, and an output While the synchronous, clock-driven model guarantees temporal order through hardware synchronization, it creates critical limitations for distributed cloud deployments: Vertical scaling only: Adding capacity means upgrading to larger hardware with hard limits on maximum inputs. You cannot simply add more compute nodes to increase capacity. Tight coupling: Components communicate directly in a fixed topology, making it difficult to add, remove, or restart individual services without disrupting the entire pipeline. Asynchronous architecture with deterministic timing Matrox ORIGIN implements an asynchronous processing model that decouples control from compute while maintaining deterministic timing guarantees. The architecture consists of three core components: Media Services: Independent software components (mixers, Input/Output (I/O) handlers, scalers, keyers, encoders) that process video/audio samples without direct coordination with other services. Each service runs in its own process for maximum isolation. Control Tracks: Metadata channels that provide frame-by-frame control instructions, enabling operators to interact with a unified interface despite distributed processing. Media Fabric: A distributed data transport layer that runs as a background service on each compute node. It manages the exchange of uncompressed media frames (“grains”) by coordinating local shared memory pools and inter-node network communication. The Fabric provides a unified API that allows services to retrieve content using logical identifiers, effectively decoupling data consumption from the physical location or identity of the producer. But without direct synchronization between components, how does the system ensure frames across all nodes remain temporally aligned? The answer is a deterministic timing model that defines exactly when each frame must be produced and when it becomes available for consumption; grain-based time reference. In ORIGIN’s timing model, time is measured in discrete intervals called “grain intervals,” each representing one frame period (for example, 1/29.97 seconds for 1080i59.94 video). Every grain carries a sequence number that maps directly to absolute time through a precise equation: NominalTimestamp = GrainSequenceNo × GrainInterval + EpochReference  This formula ties each grain’s sequence number to an absolute time reference (Unix epoch: January 1, 1970, 00:00 UTC). The result: every frame across every process and host has a predictable, deterministic timestamp. Enabling stateless architecture Stateless architecture is a software design approach where an application tier (such as a server or a microservice) does not store any session data, configuration, or context about previous requests on its local file system or memory. Each incoming request is treated as an independent transaction, containing all necessary information for the server to process it from scratch. This approach enables scalability, elasticity, and fault tolerance. Matrox ORIGIN follows this design approach. Each media essence track within a stream is accompanied by a control track. This control track, decoupled from the media track and the media service instance (example underlying compute), declares the characteristics, actions, and desired state of the stream. This decoupling and stateless approach allows the application to be easily scaled and ported to different instances, AZs, or regions where a stream frame accurately resumes its functionality based on the definitions described in the control track. This approach is analogous to the definition and implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) where a template, a JSON or YAML document, declares what resources must be deployed and how they are configured, effectively giving the resources personas as they spin up. Let’s take a simple example: for a given video track, based on time offsets defined in the control track, we change the slate color from red to green to blue to orange and to red again. The control points are described as shown: Figure 2: Control points of a video track This control track describes the intended state of the service over a defined timeline. Each value represents a control point, specifying the desired state the service must assume at a precise moment in time. By externalizing intent in this way, the system can deterministically reproduce behavior without reliance on local state. This mechanism enables fully deterministic, frame-accurate output across the system, regardless of where or when the media service instance is executed. The diagram below illustrates the resulting output of the video track as the defined control actions are applied over time. Figure 3: Video track within a stream with defined actions over time. The action points are defined by the control track Scalability Going back to our example of a live production, every component in the system, regardless of when it joins or which compute node it runs on, can now independently calculate which frame sequence number corresponds to the current time. This temporal independence means new components can join the system at any time by: Synchronizing their system clock to Amazon Time Sync Service Calculating the current frame sequence number Beginning to produce or consume frames at that temporal position As such, you can scale the system by deploying additional compute nodes that connect to the Media Fabric. Producers commit media frames (grains) using strong identifiers, composed of a unique stream name and a sequence number. This structure allows consumers to retrieve specific frames based solely on their identity, without needing to know which specific producer instance supplied them. In a live production workflow, this enables a serial composition pipeline. For example, a mixer consumes multiple input grains, processes them, and then commits a new resulting grain with its own identifier. This output then serves as the input for the next stage, creating a chain where media is processed sequentially across multiple independent services. Figure 4: A mixer consuming two input grains, processing them, and then committing a new resulting grain with its own identifier To expand this point, consider that as frames move through the pipeline, each processing step produces a new frame with a new identity. For example, two input frames are composited to create a new frame with the mixer, which is then consumed by an output. While each frame contains different content and therefore has a unique identifier, the sequence number remains constant throughout processing. Figure 5: Processing steps in a workflow where producers and consumers interact with the fabric to commit and request frames using their unique identifiers Keeping the same sequence number ensures that all producer clients contributing to the final frame operate within the same commit window. Each client waits for the required inputs, performs its processing step, and commits its output independently. There are no direct connections between clients; instead, data flow is the result of multiple self-contained tasks executing concurrently within a shared commit window. Fault tolerance The same architectural principles that provide horizontal scaling also provide resilience through three mechanisms: Multiple Redundant Producers Across Availability Zones Multiple producers can publish frames with the same stream identifier to the Media Fabric. Consumers request frames by identifier—they don’t care which producer supplied it. If one producer fails, others seamlessly maintain continuity without manual intervention. The system uses this capability for cross-AZ resilience. If one Availability Zone experiences issues, producers in other AZs continue publishing frames with the same sequence numbers within the same timing windows, and consumers experience no interruption. Failure and recovery scenario: Let’s say that in our example, a mixer component crashes at some frame sequence: Kubernetes detects the pod failure and starts a new instance The new mixer synchronizes to Amazon Time Sync Service It calculates the current frame sequence number based on the current time It begins consuming input frames from the Media Fabric starting at the current sequence It begins producing output frames within its commit window Downstream consumers continue reading from the fabric with minimal disruption Loosely coupled component lifecycles Because producers and consumers communicate through the Media Fabric rather than directly, they operate independently. If one component restarts, others continue unaffected, providing rolling updates and fault recovery without system-wide disruption. Software Upgrade scenario: A new software version is available for the video mixer service ORIGIN Kubernetes controller starts a new pod running a second instance of the video mixer service The controller then terminates the original pod Downstream services running on other nodes don’t see any dropped frames Hardware OS Maintenance scenario: A patch is available for an EKS node group Node upgrade is triggered New worker nodes are added to an Auto Scaling group and are available in EKS Old nodes begin to drain pods ORIGIN Kubernetes controller detects pod shutdown events and schedules new pods to be started on new nodes New pods are started, and start consuming and producing media content Downstream services running on other nodes don’t see any dropped frames Implementation on AWS Matrox built and tested a distributed live mixer application. The system started with a baseline configuration handling 10 concurrent 1080p50 live inputs (1080p 50fps, 2 channel PCM audio at 48KHz) and progressively added compute nodes to the EKS cluster. The system then scaled to over 110 concurrent uncompressed video inputs (without any reconfiguration of the ORIGIN software or operator interfaces). The key performance metrics were: Frame accuracy: Sub-frame synchronization maintained across all distributed services Latency: Consistent processing latency regardless of input count Failover: Seamless transition when simulating instance failures across Availability Zones Resource efficiency: Dynamic pod scaling based on actual workload, with unused capacity automatically released Figure 6: Architecture diagram for Matrox ORIGIN running on AWS in a resilient mode The system used the following AWS services: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster: Spans multiple Availability Zones for high availability, with Kubernetes managing pod placement, health checks, and automatic failover. Amazon EC2 instance types: Mixed instance deployment using c6in.8xlarge instances (CPU-optimized with 50 Gbps enhanced networking) for I/O-intensive services and g4dn.4xlarge instances (GPU-enabled) for effects processing and compositing. Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA): Provides Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) support for ultra-low latency media transport between instances, critical for uncompressed 4K workflows requiring up to 100 Gbps bandwidth. Amazon Time Sync Service: Provides microsecond-accurate UTC synchronization across all compute nodes, allowing the deterministic timing model to function reliably across distributed resources. Elastic Load Balancing: Distributes traffic to ORIGIN API endpoints across multiple instances for redundancy. Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Grafana: Real-time monitoring of frame processing rates, latency metrics, and resource utilization. Conclusion In this post, we discussed how asynchronous processing architecture unlocks the cloud’s full potential for live media production by providing both vertical and horizontal scaling while maintaining broadcast-grade frame accuracy. By replacing hardware synchronization with software-based timing contracts and decoupling components through a content-addressable Media Fabric, you can build elastic, resilient production systems that scale to hundreds of inputs without sacrificing precision. Visit Matrox ORIGIN to learn more about ORIGIN

For media companies, delivering highlights to social platforms quickly is a competitive advantage that directly drives viewership and monetization. With hundreds of live events across multiple leagues, many organizations lack resources for manual clipping and reformatting key moments for every game. The key moments still happen — but without a scalable way to capture and distribute them, and the opportunity to engage fans and grow audiences goes unrealized. AWS Elemental Inference solves this challenge, enabling media companies to capture the excitement of the moment and share it with fans as it happens. Fox Sports worked with AWS to leverage AWS Elemental Inference, a fully managed AI service that automatically detects key moments and transforms live and on-demand broadcasts into vertical video content optimized for any platform. Alongside AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and AWS Elemental MediaConvert, the new service was used to automatically detect key moments from live sports broadcasts, extract video clips, reformat them for 9:16 vertical social platforms, and surface them in a review portal — all within seconds of the moment occurring on-air. This blog describes the prototype solution AWS built, including the architecture, key design decisions, and the business logic behind each component. Solution Overview For a digital content creator working in live sports, the traditional workflow involves monitoring broadcasts across multiple screens, manually identifying key moments, clipping them, reformatting them for vertical social platforms, and distributing to various channels. This solution collapses that workflow into a single, automated experience. Throughout the broadcast, video clips of key moments appear automatically in a web portal — detected, extracted, and verticalized within 20–30 seconds of the moment occurring on-air. From there, editors can review, search, tag, edit, and distribute finished content to social channels, in one, unified workflow and application. The following three main components enable this experience: A user-facing web application provides the interface for content review, editing, and distribution. An automated clip harvesting pipeline handles the detection-to-clip lifecycle. A video editing and download pipeline supports post-processing workflows such as trimming, stitching, and MP4 export. The solution combines AWS Elemental services for the media-specific services with a serverless backend for orchestration and storage. AWS Elemental MediaLive ingests and encodes the live broadcast. AWS Elemental MediaPackage V2 prepares the live stream for clip extraction by segmenting the content and maintaining a rolling window of recent footage that the system can harvest from on demand. AWS Elemental Inference analyzes the video in real time, detecting key moments and generating vertically cropped output for social platforms. AWS Elemental MediaConvert handles video transcoding for editing and download workflows. The serverless layer — AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) — ties everything together with event-driven processing and durable storage. The Web Portal Experience The web portal provides digital content creators a single workspace for managing the full lifecycle of live sports highlights. From the home screen, operators create live events and monitor incoming clips as they appear in near-real time. Clips come with AI-generated tags and descriptions, making it easy to identify and categorize moments. Editors can filter clips by event, search across metadata, and add custom tags – making it fast and intuitive to find the right clips to share across social platforms. Once a clip is selected, a modal opens with instant time-shifted playback directly from the source stream. A built-in video editor provides a visual timeline that displays individual HLS segments, allowing editors to perform trim, split, delete, and merge operations directly in the browser. Each edit produces a new versioned asset, so the original clip is always preserved. Editors can iterate on multiple versions without risk of overwriting source material. Example of video editor view with time-shifted playback – Courtesy of Fox Sports The reel builder allows operators to select clips from across different events and time periods, arrange them in the desired order, and trigger highlight reel generation. Multiple reels can be processed simultaneously, with real-time status tracking in the interface. When content is ready for distribution, editors can batch-trigger MP4 downloads for any combination of clips and reels and share the resulting download links with colleagues. Each clip and reel also includes a feedback form where editors can submit ratings and comments. This feedback is stored against the asset in the backend, providing a structured way for the team to capture editorial preferences and iterate on output quality over time. Example of how the reel builder works Clip Harvesting Pipeline When a live broadcast is running, AWS Elemental Inference continuously analyzes the video stream and detects key moments within single-digit seconds. Each detection emits an event to Amazon EventBridge. This event contains PTS (Presentation Timestamp) values, descriptive tags such as “goal” or “celebration,” and an AI-generated description of the moment. The event triggers the harvest pipeline, which extracts the corresponding video segment from the live stream through AWS Elemental MediaPackage V2 and stores it in Amazon S3. The following is an example of an event emitted by AWS Elemental Inference: { "version": "0", "id": "94277336-b607-61f6-4bb2-2f21453862a5", "detail-type": "Highlight Metadata Generated", "source": "aws.elemental-inference", "account": "123456789012", "time": "2025-11-01T02:22:09Z", "region": "us-west-2", "resources": [ "arn:aws:elemental-inference:us-west-2:123456789012:feed/abcdefg1234567890" ], "detail": { "timescale": 90000, "startPts": 158576733129000, "endPts": 158576733849000, "description": "Goalkeeper makes a diving save to deny a close-range shot", "tags": [ "save" ], "callbackMetadata": "highlight-metadata" } } Once a harvest job is completed, an AWS Lambda function validates that the extracted video contains actual content. Empty or failed harvests are cleaned up automatically. For successful harvests, the clip metadata is updated in DynamoDB with the final status and the end-to-end harvesting time. Service diagram showing the harvesting pipeline As seen above, Elemental Inference events carry rich metadata, but they do not inherently identify which live event or game the highlight belongs to. The solution addresses this with an “active event” pattern. Operators activate a single event at a time from the web portal, and the harvest pipeline queries DynamoDB for the currently active event each time a new highlight arrives. The incoming clip is then stamped with that event’s ID and name. This design is deliberately simple, matching the real-world workflow where an operator is always focused on a specific broadcast. Video Editing & Download Pipeline Both the video editing and MP4 download workflows follow the same asynchronous processing pattern but use separate queues and Lambda functions to avoid resource contention. In each case, a user action in the portal triggers an API call that places a job in an SQS queue. A processing Lambda picks up the job, performs the video operation, stores the output in S3, and updates the job record in DynamoDB. The user monitors progress from the portal and can stream or download the result once processing is complete. Architecture drawing of the video editing and download pipeline process The clip editor supports trim, split, delete, and merge operations, which editors apply through the visual timeline in the web portal. When an editor saves their changes, the operations are submitted to the processing pipeline. The processor retrieves the source HLS segments from S3, applies the requested operations using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, and uploads the result as a new versioned asset. For content distribution, editors can trigger MP4 downloads for multiple clips and reels simultaneously. The download pipeline converts HLS content to MP4 format using Elemental MediaConvert and generates a pre-signed S3 URL for retrieval. Once a download job has been completed, the resulting URL can be shared and reused by other team members without re-triggering the conversion. This avoids redundant processing and makes it straightforward to distribute finished content across the editorial team. Results With this solution in place, editors no longer need to switch between multiple tools or coordinate handoffs across teams. Instead, they work within a single portal where they can monitor incoming clips with clear status indicators, review AI-generated vertical crops alongside the source feed, and move content through an editorial workflow — all while the broadcast is still live. The prototype solution built for Fox Sports demonstrates how AWS Elemental services, combined with a serverless event-driven architecture, can reduce the time from a live moment to social-ready content to seconds. For media companies looking to scale their digital coverage across more events and leagues, this approach unlocks content that was previously too costly or resource-intensive to produce. “AWS Elemental Inference exemplifies the power of the partnership between Fox Sports and Amazon Web Services to rapidly turn innovation into real-world impact. What began as a hackathon concept — addressing the reality that nearly 90% of Fox Sports Digital content is consumed vertically — has evolved into a production-ready, machine-learning–driven solution built for live sports at scale. Powered by AWS Elemental Inference, the solution integrates seamlessly into our existing live production and distribution workflows, enabling the real-time creation and delivery of vertical content to fans across multiple major sports leagues.” — Ricardo Perez-Selsky, Sr. Director, Digital Production Operations, Fox Sports If you are interested in building a similar workflow, we plan to publish a reference implementation soon. Further Reading AWS Elemental MediaLive Documentation AWS Elemental MediaPackage V2 Documentation Amazon EventBridge Cross-Region Event Routing AWS Elemental MediaConvert Documentation

From ST 2110 to software-defined live production How Premium Stadiums Are Rethinking Live Production at the Edge UHD is no longer an aspiration for stadium production; it has become the operational baseline. At the same time, SMPTE ST 2110 has moved from early experimentation to real-world deployment, redefining how live content is handled inside major venues. The challenge today is no longer about adopting IP, but about deploying it in a way that preserves the reliability, predictability, and performance that live sports demand. Across Europe and beyond, some of the most iconic football stadiums (venues that have hosted top-tier continental competitions for decades) are now facing the same inflection point. Production infrastructures originally designed around SDI and fixed-function hardware must evolve to support UHD, IP-native workflows, and higher operational density, without increasing latency or disrupting well-established production practices. This is where a new approach to contribution at the edge is emerging. Rethinking Contribution Inside Modern Stadiums In many premium stadiums, contribution systems were deployed years ago to meet the needs of linear production workflows. While these platforms delivered reliable service, they were never designed for a world where uncompressed UHD over IP, redundant ST 2110 networks, and software-driven orchestration would become standard. As production requirements evolve, limitations become increasingly visible. Native ST 2110 ingest is required, UHD channel counts increase, and integration with IP control systems such as NMOS becomes mandatory. At the same time, expectations around latency remain unchanged: live production teams expect the same deterministic behaviour they have always relied on. Rather than extending legacy architectures, many stadium operators (often working through experienced system integrators or service providers) are now rethinking contribution from the ground up, starting at the edge. A Software-Defined Edge Built for Live Sports Ateme’s approach to stadium contribution is centered on TITAN Edge, a software-defined platform designed to consolidate multiple contribution roles into a single, flexible system. Encoding, decoding, gateway functions, and baseband bridging are all delivered through one software stack, running on standard COTS servers. This architecture allows UHD and HD contribution services to coexist naturally, while supporting both ST 2110 and SDI environments. In practical deployments, compact server footprints can handle multiple UHD services alongside HD channels, ingesting uncompressed ST 2110 feeds with SMPTE 2022-7 redundancy, while remaining fully compatible with existing SDI infrastructure. Most importantly, this increased density does not come at the expense of latency. The platform is designed to preserve the deterministic performance required for live sports production, even as capacity and flexibility increase. IP-Native by Design, Not by Compromise In modern stadium deployments, IP is no longer treated as an extension of SDI, it is the foundation. Ateme’s stadium architectures are built around PTP-synchronized ST 2110 environments and integrate seamlessly with NMOS-based control systems already deployed by system integrators and venue operators. UHD flows are distributed intelligently across multiple high-speed network interfaces, ensuring bandwidth headroom and resilience without introducing operational complexity. This design allows production teams to work across IP and SDI workflows transparently, without changing established operational habits. The result is an infrastructure that adapts to production, rather than forcing production to adapt to IP. Real-World Linear Use-Cases Inside the Stadium Within this architecture, TITAN Edge supports a wide range of linear contribution use-cases that are common across premium sports venues. UHD and HD feeds are encoded and redistributed internally for live production, technical monitoring, and in-venue displays. The same platform can also be used to prepare clean, synchronized contribution feeds that are handed off to downstream broadcast infrastructures outside the stadium. These workflows are firmly positioned within the scope of internal production and feed preparation. The focus is on normalization, synchronization, and contribution reliability, ahead of any rights-controlled or public distribution handled by third parties. Preparing for OTT Without Redefining Today’s Workflows While linear contribution remains central to stadium operations, OTT requirements are increasingly part of long-term planning. Stadium operators and service providers need to be ready for new workflows without introducing unnecessary complexity today. This is where TITAN Live complements the contribution architecture. Designed for high-density, real-time encoding and packaging, TITAN Live enables the generation of multi-profile OTT streams from UHD and HD sources ingested over ST 2110 or SDI. These capabilities support controlled use-cases such as internal preview streams, remote technical access, engineering validation, or club-owned content workflows like interviews and behind-the-scenes production. By keeping OTT capabilities modular and separate from core contribution, stadiums gain future flexibility without disrupting existing operations. Hardware That Enables Evolution, Not Lock-In A key enabler of this approach is Ateme’s use of modern COTS servers powered by the latest-generation CPUs. Hardware configurations are sized according to workload (high-density contribution at the edge, OTT processing where required) while preserving headroom for future services. This model ensures that new formats, codecs, or workflows can be introduced through software evolution rather than hardware replacement, extending platform lifespan and protecting investment. The Shift to IP-Native Stadium Production Across premium stadiums worldwide, live production infrastructures are undergoing a fundamental shift. Fixed-function appliances are giving way to software-defined platforms, and SDI-centric designs are evolving into IP-native architectures. Contribution systems are no longer single-purpose devices, but flexible building blocks designed to evolve over time. By combining UHD density, ST 2110-native design, deterministic latency, and future-ready OTT capabilities at the edge, IP-based architectures provide stadiums with a stable foundation for today’s production needs, while remaining ready for future formats and workflows. Owning the Future of Stadium Content For premium stadiums, modern infrastructure is no longer just about producing live events, it is about enabling long-term fan engagement. Immersive formats and club-owned content are becoming strategic assets, helping venues strengthen relationships with fans and extend engagement beyond match day. To support this evolution, stadiums need ultra-low-latency contribution at the edge, combined with flexible IP-native processing that can adapt over time, in close collaboration with service providers and integrators who remain central to day-to-day operations. By combining TITAN Edge for efficient, low-latency contribution and TITAN Live for advanced transcoding and packaging, Ateme delivers a coherent, future-ready platform built for the realities of modern stadium production. Together, Ateme’s solutions provide a platform designed to support not only today’s events, but the next decade of immersive stadium experiences. Explore related insights TITAN Edge webinar: recording available TITAN Edge Unlocks HTML5 Rendering Contribution is Changing, TITAN Edge is Ready The Glossary of OTT Contribution About the Author Julien Mandel Solution Marketing Senior Director at Ateme Julien joined Ateme in 2001, starting in the Hardware Department before moving into Product Management, where he led the launch and evolution of the Kyrion product line. In 2017, he co-founded the BISS-CA standard with the EBU, reshaping the secure distribution of international live events. He is currently Solution Marketing Director for Contribution and Distribution, driving partner and customer engagement around the Kyrion and TITAN product lines. L’article How Premium Stadiums Are Rethinking UHD Contribution at the Edge est apparu en premier sur Ateme.

A compact, expert‑level glossary designed to clarify the most important monetization concepts found in modern OTT advertising workflows — with a strong focus on SSAI (Server‑Side Ad Insertion), revenue uplift, cost reduction, and operational efficiency. A Addressable Advertising The ability to serve different ads to different viewers watching the same stream, based on demographics, behavioral data, or contextual signals. This eliminates “campaign waste” and boosts CPMs by delivering ads only to relevant audiences. Ad Decisioning System (ADS) A system that receives viewer or contextual data and returns which ad should be served for each opportunity. ADS is queried per user during an ad break and must handle high volume, concurrency heavy requests. Ad Inventory Split The process of dividing advertising inventory into targeted audience segments rather than selling by “spots” in a spray model. This increases revenue by accommodating more campaigns in the same inventory. C CSAI (Client‑Side Ad Insertion) A method where the video player fetches and inserts ads on the user device. CSAI suffers from buffering, device fragmentation, and ad blockers, making SSAI preferable for premium video. CPM (Cost Per Mille) The advertising pricing model based on cost per 1,000 ad impressions. SSAI can generate between $116 and $584 per subscriber per year depending on the region. Creative QC (Quality Control) Validation checks performed on ad creatives to detect errors such as missing audio, corrupted files, incorrect durations or encoding mis‑matches before insertion. Automated QC reduces operational overhead. F FAST Channels (Free Ad‑Supported Streaming TV) Linear channels created from VOD libraries and monetized entirely through advertising. FAST is one of the fastest growing revenue segments, expected to reach over $10B in the US by 2027. First‑Party Data Viewer data collected directly by the streaming service (e.g., demographics, content consumption, affinities). Critical for targeting, personalization, and CPM uplift, especially in a post‑cookie world. H House Ads / Promos Self promotional ads run by the service provider. Many ADS platforms charge CPM for house ads, which results in unnecessary costs. SSAI platforms should natively schedule and track promos without ADS fees. L Low Latency SSAI SSAI adapted to DASHLL and HLSLL workflows for sports and time sensitive content. Requires fast decisioning and prefetching to avoid losing short window ad insertion opportunities. M Manifest Manipulation The core technique behind SSAI: replacing primary content segments with alternate content segments inside HLS/DASH manifests in real time. Used for ads, VODtoLive, personalization, and more. Measurement & Beacons Tracking signals (client‑side & server‑side) used to confirm ad impressions, quartiles, interactions, and viewability. More measurement = higher advertiser trust = higher CPMs. O OMID (Open Measurement Interface Definition) IAB standard enabling consistent, verifiable measurement of viewability and impressions across devices. Essential for premium inventory and revenue uplift. Operational Load (Ad Ops) The time and resources required to troubleshoot bad creatives, integration failures, or measurement issues. Advanced SSAI platforms reduce operational load via automation and manage-by-exception workflows. P Pre‑Fetch (VAST Decision Pre‑Fetching) Technique where SSAI requests ad decisions before an ad break, reducing load on ADS, lowering latency, and minimizing missed opportunities. Pre‑Fetch (Ad Creatives) Downloading and transcoding all active creatives ahead of time to ensure they are ready at the moment of insertion. S Scalability (Elastic SSAI) The ability for SSAI infrastructure to dynamically scale up to millions of concurrent viewers during events — and scale down afterward to avoid unnecessary cloud costs. Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) A technique that stitches ads directly into the video stream server‑side, preventing ad blocking, improving QoE, and unlocking higher CPMs. SGAI (Server-Guided Ad Insertion) A hybrid SSAI/CSAI model where servers mark ad breaks but clients fetch and stitch ads. Greatly reduces infrastructure cost — as low as one-eighth of SSAI. T Targeting (Audience Based) Delivering ads to precise audience groups defined by demographics, behavior, location, device, or content affinity. Directly drives CPM uplift. V VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) IAB standard defining ad response formats. Used for decisioning, tracking, and creative metadata. VAST prefetching helps reduce load and cost. VOD‑to‑Live Technique turning VOD libraries into 24/7 linear channels via manifest manipulation — enabling new monetizable FAST channels. L’article The Glossary of Monetization: Getting your jargon right est apparu en premier sur Ateme.

Live streaming now reaches audiences across continents in real time, but language barriers still limit how many people can engage with this content. Traditional subtitle generation methods, which rely on manual translation services or prerecorded content workflows, can’t keep pace with the demands of live broadcasting. In this post, we share a solution that delivers accurate subtitles in multiple languages for live events, synchronized with the spoken word, without adding video streaming latency. Although many real-time subtitling solutions exist, nearly all face the same fundamental compromise: they must choose between accuracy and latency, with most opting to add significant video streaming delay to achieve acceptable translation quality. This post explores how Amazon Web Services (AWS) services break this trade-off entirely with automatic real-time multilingual subtitle delivery that maintains broadcast-quality synchronization and contextual accuracy while keeping your video stream at its original latency—transforming live content accessibility without sacrificing viewer experience or cost efficiency. Challenges in real-time multilingual subtitling The media industry faces several critical barriers when expanding live content to international markets: Cost prohibitive translation services – Professional translation costs escalate rapidly as content libraries and target languages grow, making global expansion financially challenging for many organizations. Scalability limitations – Traditional subtitle workflows can’t handle sudden demand surges during major live events, sports finals, or breaking news coverage. Trade-offs between quality and speed – Manual translation offers quality but introduces delays that make live subtitling impossible, whereas automated solutions often lack contextual accuracy. Technical complexity – Integrating multiple translation services, synchronization systems, and delivery networks requires significant technical expertise and infrastructure investment. Limited language support – Many existing solutions support only major languages, leaving substantial global audiences underserved. These challenges prevent organizations from maximizing their content’s global potential and accessing new revenue streams from international markets. AWS services for real-time multilingual subtitling AWS provides a comprehensive suite of services that work together seamlessly to deliver real-time multilingual subtitles without compromising quality or scalability. The solution uses: AI-powered speech recognition – Amazon Transcribe provides real-time speech-to-text conversion with support for custom vocabularies and domain-specific language models—essential for handling industry terminology, proper nouns, and specialized content. Advanced language translation – Amazon Bedrock with Amazon Nova foundation models (FMs) delivers context-aware translations that maintain the original content’s meaning and tone across multiple target languages, going beyond literal word-for-word translation. Scalable media processing – AWS Elemental Media Services handle live stream ingestion, transcoding, and delivery with built-in redundancy and automatic scaling to meet demand fluctuations. Real-time data management – Amazon DynamoDB provides millisecond-latency storage and retrieval for time-synchronized subtitle segments, providing accurate synchronization even during high-traffic events. Global content delivery – Amazon CloudFront intelligently routes requests and delivers subtitles with minimal latency to viewers worldwide. The intelligent caching mechanisms help avoid extensive costs on subtitle file construction. What does the solution architecture look like? The end-to-end workflow creates two parallel processing paths, one for video delivery and another for subtitle delivery, which converge at the content delivery layer. Live stream ingestion and processing The workflow begins when your live stream reaches AWS Elemental MediaConnect through supported streaming protocol. MediaConnect acts as a reliable transport service, providing built-in redundancy and monitoring capabilities essential for live broadcasting. From MediaConnect, the stream splits into two distinct paths, video processing and subtitle generation. Path 1: Video processing follows this flow: The stream flows to AWS Elemental MediaLive for transcoding into adaptive bitrate (ABR) format. This provides optimal video quality based on viewer device capabilities and network conditions. The processed stream is sent to AWS Elemental MediaPackage for packaging and delivery preparation. Path 2: Subtitle generation follows this flow: A parallel stream copy is sent to Amazon Transcribe for real-time speech-to-text conversion. The transcribed text passes to Amazon Bedrock with Amazon Nova for translation. Custom vocabulary support handles industry-specific terminology and proper nouns accurately. Intelligent subtitle processing The solution detects sentence boundaries (such as periods, question marks, and exclamation points) in the transcribed text to identify complete thoughts before sending them for translation. Rather than translating individual words or phrases, the subtitle processing workflow waits for complete sentence delimiters from Amazon Transcribe before triggering translation. This approach provides several advantages: Contextual accuracy – Amazon Nova foundation models can analyze complete thoughts, resulting in more natural translations No additional latency – The solution keeps subtitles in sync with spoken words without adding additional video streaming latency—a critical differentiator from most existing solutions that operate by adding video streaming latency for accuracy Language structure optimization – Particularly beneficial for language pairs with different word orders (for example, subject-verb-object compared to subject-object-verb structures) Improved readability – Subtitles appear as complete, coherent thoughts rather than fragmented phrases Dynamic subtitle assembly and delivery Translated subtitle segments are stored in Amazon DynamoDB with precise timestamps for real-time retrieval and synchronization. The delivery mechanism uses a sophisticated routing system. For media requests, video content requests route directly from Amazon CloudFront to MediaPackage for optimal streaming performance. For subtitle requests, WebVTT subtitle file requests follow a more complex path: CloudFront routes requests to Amazon API Gateway AWS Lambda functions retrieve timestamped subtitle templates from MediaPackage Lambda queries DynamoDB for appropriate translated content based on requested language and timestamp Dynamic subtitle insertion occurs in real time Complete WebVTT files return to viewers synchronized with the video This architecture keeps subtitles synchronized with video content while providing flexibility to serve multiple languages without duplicating video streams. Key services and concepts We use Lambda@Edge as a cost-efficient reverse proxy to intercept VTT chunks. The service intercepts the VTT chunks and modifies them by inserting the corresponding chunk creation time (timecode). This enables subsequent processes to fetch the appropriate subtitles from Amazon DynamoDB, which are generated by the automatic transcription and translation process. When the solution is deployed, it creates two unique Amazon CloudFront distributions. The first CloudFront distribution acts as a reverse proxy that uses one of the HLS Ingest endpoints from MediaPackage as its origin and triggers Lambda@Edge to intercept and modify the VTT chunks in real time generated by MediaLive. The following figure shows the Lambda@Edge association configuration in CloudFront, which enables real-time VTT chunk interception. Figure 1: Amazon CloudFront with Lambda@Edge association The second CloudFront distribution is for traditional media delivery to viewers and has two origins configured using the Behaviors tab: *.vtt routes to subtitle origin (API Gateway), which invokes AWS Lambda to retrieve the appropriate subtitle in the respective language in real time Other requests (default) route to video or audio origin (MediaPackage endpoints) for providing real-time streaming to end users The following figure shows the behaviors configured for specific path patterns Figure 2: Behavior configuration in Amazon CloudFront For the MediaLive HLS group destination URL, the format should be ‘{CloudFrontUrl}/in/v2/{HLS ingest endpoint id}/{HLS ingest endpoint id}/channel’. Credentials required to access the group destination are automatically generated when the CloudFormation stack is deployed Note: We’ve achieved the best results with a 4-second HLS segment length. Other segment lengths will also work, but they need to be tested. The following screenshot shows the MediaLive HLS group destination configuration with the CloudFront URL format for the MediaPackage ingestion endpoint. The credentials section and HLS settings are automatically generated. Figure 3: MediaLive HLS group destination configuration The complete solution architecture is illustrated in the following figure. Figure 4: High-level architecture of the solution User experience From the viewer perspective, the solution provides seamless, broadcast-quality subtitle delivery with instant language switching capabilities. Users can select from multiple subtitle languages through standard video player controls. Language selection is clearly displayed, and switching between languages occurs instantly without interrupting video playback. The subtitle display maintains professional broadcast standards: Proper timing – Subtitles appear and disappear in sync with spoken content Natural phrasing – Complete sentences provide readability and comprehension Consistent formatting – WebVTT standard means compatibility across devices and players This solution uses the natural latency inherent in streaming formats such as HLS and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), which is typically about 15 seconds, to process and optimize translations in parallel, so that additional end-to-end latency isn’t introduced to the viewer experience. For scenarios with rapid speech patterns or minimal pauses—such as fast-paced sports commentary—the solution can use the AWS Elemental MediaConnect buffer delay to accumulate longer transcription segments, providing large language models (LLMs) with additional context for more accurate translations. From an accuracy perspective, the solution employs the Amazon Transcribe next-generation speech FM, which delivers high-accuracy transcriptions optimized through custom vocabulary support and domain-specific tuning. When combined with the context-aware translation capabilities of Amazon Bedrock, the solution maintains both linguistic precision and the original tone of the content across supported languages. The solution automatically scales to handle varying loads, from intimate webinars to global sporting events with millions of concurrent viewers. Key benefits of the solution The solution offers several benefits: Cost efficiency – Eliminates expensive manual translation services while providing superior scalability. Pay-as-you-use pricing means costs scale with actual usage rather than peak capacity planning. Global market access – Instantly expand content reach to new international markets without traditional localization barriers. Support for multiple languages enables simultaneous global distribution. Broadcast quality results – AI-powered translation maintains context and tone while delivering subtitles with broadcast-standard timing and synchronization. Automatic scalability – Infrastructure automatically scales to meet demand without manual intervention, handling everything from small corporate events to major international broadcasts. Future-proof architecture – Built on AWS services, the solution automatically benefits from ongoing AI improvements and new language support without requiring architectural changes. Rapid deployment – Use existing AWS infrastructure and services to implement the solution quickly, without building custom translation or delivery systems. Getting started with real-time multilingual subtitling The solution is now available as an open source implementation on GitHub, providing complete deployment guides and customization options. The repository includes: Complete infrastructure as code (IaC) templates Step-by-step deployment instructions Customization guides for different use cases Performance optimization recommendations To deploy the real-time multilingual subtitling solution, follow these steps: 1. Review the architecture documentation and assess your specific requirements 2. Clone the solution repository: git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-auto-multilingual-subtitle-for-live-event.git 3. Deploy the solution in a development environment for testing 4. Customize language selections and subtitle formatting for your brand 5. Integrate with your existing live streaming workflow 6. Monitor performance and optimize for your audience patterns Conclusion Real-time multilingual subtitling helps media organizations expand globally. By combining AWS Elemental Media Services with AI-powered transcription and translation through Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Bedrock, organizations can eliminate traditional barriers to international market entry. The solution delivers broadcast-quality results while automatically scaling to meet demand, reducing costs significantly compared to traditional translation services. Most importantly, it opens new revenue opportunities by making live content accessible to global audiences in real time. Whether you’re broadcasting live sports, corporate events, news, or entertainment content, you can reach every audience, in every market, as events unfold by using AWS powered real-time multilingual subtitling. For technical implementation guidance and to explore how this solution can transform your content delivery strategy, connect with your AWS solutions architect or visit the AWS for Media & Entertainment solutions page. Further reading GitHub repo – Sample Auto Multilingual Subtitle for Live Event Supported languages and language-specific features in the Amazon Transcribe Developer Guide Custom vocabularies in the Amazon Transcribe Developer Guide Custom language models in the Amazon Transcribe Developer Guide Deliver video streaming with CloudFront and AWS Media Services IBC 2025 demo – Unlocking new audience markets with automatic localization for live sports

Today, media companies (such as broadcasters, streaming platforms, news and sports media outlets, and major film and television studios) face an increasingly complex content landscape. Under pressure to create more content with fewer resources, they need to keep up with rising audience expectations for faster, more personalized, and higher-quality content. Media teams often rely on a wide range of specialized tools and cloud services, including transcoders, media asset management (MAM) systems, playout systems, and analytics platforms. These systems frequently use different metadata formats and lack consistent ways to communicate with one another. This fragmentation leads to inefficiencies across operations. For technical teams managing workflows, such as live-to-VOD (video on demand) transformation or automated highlight generation, the lack of a centralized orchestration layer means they must manually connect systems. This slows down delivery timelines and increases the risk of human error, especially in fast-paced environments such as live sports or breaking news. That’s where qibb comes in. As a low-code orchestration platform designed specifically for the media industry, qibb uses Amazon Web Service (AWS) Cloud services to streamline operations and enable more adaptive and intelligent media workflows. Together, qibb and AWS help media organizations automate and scale workflows, so they can deliver personalized content faster and more efficiently. Orchestrating media with qibb and AWS The low-code orchestration platform of qibb integrates with AWS media services, third-party applications, and partner solutions across the media ecosystem. This includes services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon Transcribe, as well as key media-specific tools, such as MAM systems, content delivery networks, and analytics solutions. This broad integration capability confirms that media companies can connect their entire technology stack, both in the cloud and on premises, without extensive custom development. Customers can: Build, deploy, and adapt media workflows faster – Reducing time to market and supporting rapid iterations Integrate cloud services without heavy development effort – Reducing reliance on custom coding and costly integrations Control and monitor costs at every step – Verifying efficient resource usage and transparent cost management through centralized dashboards By combining the robust infrastructure of AWS with the orchestration capabilities of qibb, media companies can build and run content workflows that process large volumes of video assets daily. They can also apply AI-based metadata tagging or automate live-to-VOD turnaround within minutes. Advanced workflow automation: Real-world use cases The following are five real-world use cases where the integration of qibb with AWS can provide significant benefits. Personalized highlight generation for tailored viewer experiences Traditionally, creating personalized highlight reels required significant manual editing and extensive resource allocation. Now, with qibb orchestrating AWS services, media companies can deliver variations of content based on predefined criteria, such as player focus, game moments, or viewer segments. qibb coordinates Amazon Rekognition to identify key visual elements—such as specific players, actions, or events—and then uses that data to generate context-specific highlight packages. These workflows are integrated with existing systems (such as MAM systems and editorial tools) so teams can set rules for which moments to include for different types of audiences. For instance, when Amazon Rekognition detects a specific player’s face or relevant on-screen statistics, qibb can capture that moment, trigger transcoding, apply dynamic overlays, and format the clip for multiplatform distribution. It then routes the content to AWS Elemental MediaConnect for live streaming or to Amazon CloudFront for on-demand playback. By unifying these processes, qibb reduces content turnaround time from hours to minutes. Media companies can supply relevant and tailored content to viewers while maintaining operational efficiency. What’s more, the dashboard capabilities of qibb provide real-time insights into workflow performance, surfacing key metrics such as content processing times, distribution statuses, and metadata generation. Through a single, intuitive dashboard, operators can monitor workflow performance, address issues in real time, and optimize processes on the fly. This built-in integration provides media companies with a unified workflow that connects content processing, distribution, and metadata management across platforms. The following workflow shows how a video uploaded to Amazon S3 automatically launches a qibb flow. The workflow branches: one path uses Amazon Rekognition to analyze faces and on-screen text, and the other uses Amazon Transcribe to convert speech to text. qibb combines all of this to identify key moments, sends them into the MAM system, and the MAM drafts highlight clips. qibb wraps it up with monitoring dashboards showing workflow status. Figure 1: High-level personalized highlight generation Automated multiplatform distribution Content distribution has historically been labor-intensive, requiring manual configuration for each delivery channel. AWS and qibb now automate this entire pipeline. Content ingested through Amazon S3 triggers workflows that dynamically transcode videos into optimized formats using AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Amazon Rekognition enriches these assets with near real-time metadata, making the content discoverable and contextually relevant. The low-code workflow orchestration platform of qibb confirms that each piece of content is automatically routed and optimized for distribution channels such as over-the-top (OTT) services, social media platforms, and traditional broadcast channels. In addition to this, qibb triggers additional workflows, such as archiving content to a MAM system, notifying teams on Slack when content is published, and generating metadata reports for further analysis. This unified workflow accelerates the entire distribution process, so media companies can execute operational tasks through a single orchestrated flow, focusing on creative efforts rather than repetitive tasks. With customizable dashboards, teams gain at-a-glance visibility into content status and distribution progress, which supports quick operational oversight without duplicating earlier details. The following workflow shows a file landing in an S3 bucket and instantly triggering a qibb workflow. The process splits: one branch sends the file to MediaConvert, the other processes it with FFmpeg. Both outputs go back into an S3 bucket. Quasar then runs a quality check. If the output meets quality standards, the file moves on to distribution platforms. If it fails, the team is notified on Slack. Figure 2: High-level automated multiplatform distribution Dynamic storage and archive management Managing storage efficiently is a key operational challenge for media companies dealing with large volumes of content. With qibb, media organizations can automate intelligent tiering across storage solutions, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier. Within these services, content is archived, retrieved, and retained according to business rules, depending on the access patterns to the content. For example, a broadcaster can set up a qibb workflow that automatically moves content from Amazon S3 to S3 Glacier based on defined retention periods. This workflow uses the dashboard capabilities of qibb to provide visibility into storage utilization and content lifecycle events, reducing storage costs. Automated notifications are sent to content managers after assets are archived or deleted, which helps manage the entire lifecycle process efficiently, confirming that no asset is overlooked. The following workflow shows how media is archived. It starts with Iconik marking a file as past its retention date. This triggers a qibb workflow that identifies what needs archiving, verifies file integrity, and transfers the media to an S3 archive bucket. After that, it generates a deletion list, Iconik removes the expired items from the MAM system, and qibb finishes the flow by displaying storage and cost details on monitoring dashboards. Figure 3: High-level storage and archive Multicloud and hybrid media workflows For media companies that operate in both on-premises and cloud environments, qibb provides an orchestration layer that connects AWS services and existing infrastructure. By integrating AWS services with third-party media tools, qibb helps organizations modernize their workflows without disrupting established workflows. For instance, a post-production house can ingest content through on-premises storage, process it with AWS services (such as Amazon Transcribe or Amazon Rekognition) and then archive it in Amazon S3 or a third-party MAM system. This approach provides companies with the ability to maintain their existing systems while extending workflows into the cloud, modernizing processes at a pace that aligns with their operational and budget requirements. The following screenshot shows the qibb visual workflow editor in which AWS and Slack nodes are connected in flows. You can drag integrations from the right into the canvas to build or extend automations. Figure 4: qibb visual workflow editor Maximized engagement and revenue with AI-driven content monetization Generic, one-size-fits-all content strategies limit audience engagement and monetization potential. qibb can orchestrate AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services, such as Amazon Bedrock for foundation model (FM) access and Amazon SageMaker AI for custom ML model training and deployment. Media companies can assemble personalized content, enhancing viewer relevance and opening new monetization opportunities. By using viewer analytics, media companies can orchestrate content creation workflows through qibb to generate tailored highlights and content variations optimized for different viewer segments. For example, personalized sports highlight reels can be dynamically created to focus on viewer preferences, such as favorite athletes or teams. The result is more relevant, engaging content that boosts audience retention, increases viewer satisfaction, and maximizes revenue streams through targeted monetization strategies. The following screenshot shows the qibb cost monitoring dashboard. Figure 5: qibb cost monitoring dashboard Realizing tangible business outcomes The AWS and qibb partnership delivers clear, measurable business impacts for media organizations: Efficiency and speed – Reductions in content turnaround time by up to 40%, empowering media companies to rapidly respond to live events and trending topics. Operational flexibility and scalability – Dynamic resource allocation that scales workflows instantly, accommodating spikes in content demand without cost overruns. Personalization at scale – Automated workflows help media companies deliver tailored content variations to large and diverse audiences efficiently. By eliminating repetitive tasks and streamlining content packaging, teams can serve relevant, engaging content to more viewers without increasing production overhead. Transparent cost control – Near real-time visibility into operational expenses confirms resources are efficiently utilized and costs remain predictable. Unlocking media workflow potential with AWS and qibb Together, AWS and qibb empower media organizations to overcome workflow complexity and capitalize on real-time, personalized content opportunities. Media organizations can now streamline complex operations and gain faster access to advanced content workflows that were previously difficult or costly to implem Discover how qibb on AWS can transform your media workflows. Explore the possibilities today at qibb on AWS Marketplace, contact an AWS representative to learn how we can help accelerate your business, or contact qibb directly for a personalized demo. Further reading Video semantic search with AI on AWS AWS for Media & Entertainment AWS Media Services

Hard to have your earnings when a new episode of the Netflix/WBD/Paramount saga drops! We couldn’t resist but still managed to cover Pinterest, TF1 and Roku. Speaking of Roku, everyone is framing The Roku Channel as a FAST/AVOD success story. That framing is incomplete. Most analyses reduce Roku’s rise in Nielsen’s Gauge to “Free TV momentum” and move past Roku’s ability to monetise the same attention across advertising AND subscriptions. No I’m not talking about apps on their App Store, I’m talking about their own app, The Roku Channel, which is number 2 (after YouTube) on their platform in terms of engagement. Roku is rebuilding the bundle from the bottom up by collapsing free and paid viewing into a single, continuous journey. Inside The Roku Channel, viewers move from free linear channels to on-demand titles and into premium add-ons (e.g. HBO Max, AMC, Paramount Plus etc.) without ever leaving Roku’s UX, billing or recommendation environment, which allows Roku to stack ad yield and subscription revenue on the same viewing time. Roku is not just capturing ad dollars, it is positioning itself upstream of monetisation decisions. If your Roku Channel strategy stops at FAST/AVOD distribution, you are only playing the top of the funnel. I unpacked this premium layer in a recent edition of Streaming Made Easy, including the 72 subscription services on Roku, pricing logic, gaps and more.If you don’t believe me, hear it from Anthony Wood directly.Our final earnings season’s live is set for Friday 27th at 4pm GMT so we can cover WBD and Paramount’s earnings.See you then,Marion

Contextual advertising matches ads to content rather than to people. The logic is straightforward: a viewer watching content about home renovation is likely receptive to a Home Depot ad at that moment, whereas a behavioral retarget from last week’s browsing is not. The problem is that behavioral targeting depends on third-party data that is becoming increasingly unavailable as privacy regulation tightens and identifiers disappear. Over the last few years, AI-based technologies, including automated speech recognition, computer vision, and large language models, have given marketers a much more accurate read on the content’s topic, tone, and mood, making contextual targeting a serious strategy rather than a fallback. Contextual ads have always had a role in CTV. But for most of its history, contextual was the fallback option when better targeting data wasn’t available. Targeting by show genre, channel, or network was blunt but serviceable, and the main job was avoiding bad adjacencies rather than finding the right moment. Two things changed. Privacy regulations and signal loss have made behavioral targeting harder, putting contextual targeting back on the table as a primary strategy rather than a safety net. And AI rebuilt what contextual can actually do. What used to mean keyword lists and genre labels now means scene-level analysis; reading the objects on screen, the dialogue, the emotional tone, and using all of that to place ads in specific moments rather than broad content buckets. The results when it works are notable. In an IAB Tech Lab article contributed by Amazon Ads, Amazon shared that a PepsiCo campaign using AI-driven contextual targeting reported 3x ROAS and a 62% reduction in cost per acquisition. A BlueAir campaign with agency Tinuiti saw CPMs drop 42% and new-to-brand customers increase 34%. Those are outlier results, not guarantees, but they show the ceiling. They prove that when you stop targeting a generic ‘Sports Fan’ and start targeting the specific moment of a game-winning goal, the advertising becomes a service rather than an interruption. The timeline below tracks that journey from 2015 to where things are headed in 2026, showing how contextual went from a blunt genre filter to something that can read emotional tone in a live sports broadcast. If you want to go deeper than the timeline (or if you have no idea what ROAS, CMP, and cost per acquisition mean), my course, Streaming Monetization 101, covers contextual advertising, the privacy frameworks that made it relevant again, and the broader ad tech stack it sits within. Here’s the timeline. 2015: Genre as Targeting In 2015, contextual targeting mostly meant matching ads to the content on a page or the program on a screen. On the open web, advertisers relied on page‑level keywords, topics, and basic semantic analysis; on TV and early CTV, they aligned campaigns with shows, channels, or broad genres. It was valued as a privacy‑friendly, brand‑safe way to reach likely‑interested audiences based on what they were consuming in the moment, but it wasn’t yet treated as a finely tuned signal for intent or nuance. 2018: Blocklists and Blunt Instruments Advertisers layered on keyword blocklists to avoid unsafe or off‑brand content. That helped, but it was crude—over‑blocking legitimate inventory and missing genuinely problematic adjacencies. Industry discussions began to distinguish “brand safety” from “brand suitability,” but the underlying tools were still simple: keyword and category rules. Good overview of the safety vs suitability shift: https://www.peer39.com/blog/brand-suitability 2019–2020: Captions as Contextual Signal As automated speech recognition and captioning got cheaper, the dialogue inside long‑form video became searchable. Contextual moved from “this is a comedy on Channel X” to “this scene is about money, health, or politics.” It was still noisy—ASR errors, sarcasm, and complex news tripped the systems—but it was a real step beyond genre. Background on computational analysis of scripts/subtitles: https://research-api.cbs.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/109009600/Computational_Content_Analysis_in_Advertising_Research.pdf 2021: Computer Vision Sees the Screen Computer‑vision models started detecting logos, products, faces, and activities directly from video frames. The image became a signal alongside the transcript. A beer brand could find scenes with people drinking; an auto brand could surface road or garage moments. Contextual stopped depending entirely on what characters said and started looking at what was actually on screen. Logo/visual detection context: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3611309 2022: First Multimodal Fusion Vendors began combining transcripts, visual cues, and basic audio signals into unified content scores. Instead of separate “text” and “image” classifications, systems produced a single view of what each piece of content was about and how intense or emotional it was. This was the first practical version of multimodal contextual for video and CTV, even if coverage and accuracy were uneven. Multimodal CTV overview: https://www.anoki.ai/multimodal-ai-for-ctv-101 2023: Contextual 2.0 – LLMs Enter Large language models have changed expectations for what “understanding content” means. IAB Tech Lab describes this as the point where “the old limitations of contextual targeting fade away” because AI can “recognize deeper semantic connections” and see not just what’s on a page, but how it relates to behaviors and predicted actions. Vendors started talking about “Contextual 2.0” instead of just keyword lists. This is not a return to cookie-based tracking. While legacy targeting follows a specific individual’s browsing history, Contextual 2.0 analyzes the intent inherent in the media itself. It recognizes that a viewer watching a high-performance car review is in a “purchasing mindset” regardless of who they are or what they searched for an hour ago. IAB Tech Lab / Amazon Ads piece: https://iabtechlab.com/the-ai-leap-in-contextual-advertising-transforming-a-legacy-solution/ 2024: The Moment, Not the Show On CTV, the most visible shift was scene‑level targeting. Instead of buying an entire show, advertisers could buy specific moments inside it—tagged by theme, mood, objects on screen, or emotional tone. Anoki’s description captures the point: “a single program can contain many different contexts and emotional moments,” and scene‑level intelligence lets you target the ones that actually fit your message. Scene‑level targeting intros: https://www.viantinc.com/insights/blog/ctv-scene-level-targeting/ https://www.anoki.ai/post/hot-for-summer-scene-level-contextual-targeting-for-ctv-ads 2024: Proof It Works (At the High End) Contextual AI moved from deckware to case studies. In the IAB Tech Lab / Amazon Ads article, BlueAir’s campaign with Tinuiti using AI‑driven contextual reportedly delivered 2.4x greater detail page‑view rates, a 42% CPM drop, and 34% more new‑to‑brand customers; PepsiCo’s Prime Day effort reported 3x ROAS and a 62% lower CPA. These are outliers, but they showed the ceiling was real. Case‑study details: https://iabtechlab.com/the-ai-leap-in-contextual-advertising-transforming-a-legacy-solution/ 2025: Privacy‑Safe and Standardized As cookies deprecate and/or get disabled by userss and identifiers get constrained, contextual is being reframed as “privacy‑first precision.” IAB Tech Lab emphasizes that AI‑driven contextual is strengthened by industry‑wide adoption of IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomies, which standardize how AI‑derived context is labeled and traded. The AI handles the understanding; the taxonomy makes it interoperable between buyers and sellers. Taxonomy and privacy framing: https://iabtechlab.com/standards/content-taxonomy/ https://iabtechlab.com/event/taxonomy-mapping-made-ai-easy/ https://www.aidigital.com/blog/contextual-advertising 2026+: Emotional Intelligence and Live Moments (Projected) The next frontier is emotional and live context. Roadmaps discuss “enhanced emotional intelligence,” “narrative arc awareness,” and “emotional journey mapping” across shows, so campaigns can follow tension, relief, or celebration rather than just topics. At the same time, publishers are piloting real‑time contextual for live content, where ads respond to the high-density data of a live stream, like a scoring play or a shift in crowd volume, rather than the static genre tags assigned weeks before kickoff. This moves the target from a broad category like “Live Sports” to a specific psychological window where viewer engagement is at its peak.: https://www.anoki.ai/multimodal-ai-for-ctv-101 https://www.streamtvinsider.com/advertising/nbcu-debuts-real-time-contextual-ad-targeting-live-content What This Means Now Contextual targeting has traveled a long road from genre labels to scene-level emotional analysis, and it is still moving. The infrastructure is real, the early performance results are encouraging, and the privacy alignment is genuine. The friction is now operational rather than technical. Three primary bottlenecks remain: the lack of standardized scene-level metadata across different buying platforms, the absence of creative versioning that can automatically match an ad’s tone to a scene’s sentiment, and the difficulty of attributing a sale to a specific moment rather than a broader campaign. Until these workflows are automated, the technology remains a high-touch tactic rather than a standard programmatic buy. If you are buying or building CTV advertising today, the question is not whether contextual works. It clearly can. The question is whether your stack is ready to use it at the granularity that makes the difference between a genre label and a scene-level moment. That is exactly what Streaming Monetization 101 covers. More information here. The post Contextual Targeting’s Second Act: Past, Present, and Future first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

In conjunction with Super Bowl LX, Comcast’s Xfinity announced the launch of what they call “RealTime4K”, a new ultra-low-latency technology with a 30 Mbps bitrate supporting Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos, compatible with an Xfinity X1 XG1v4 or Xi6 TV Box, or an XiOne streaming TV Box for Xfinity Flex. Comcast is positioning RealTime4K as a 4K delivery architecture designed specifically for premium live sports and optimized for both speed and visual fidelity. Unlike traditional 4K streams that rely heavily on compression, the technology is engineered to reduce latency while maintaining high-bitrate video and immersive audio formats. While the brand name to consumers uses the term 4K, it’s important to note that it is not native 4K and that Comcast’s source feed is 1080p HDR. Comcast’s RealTime4K uses DASH and HLS to stream to set-top boxes, and via the Xfinity Stream app, compatible customer-owned streaming devices (Xumo Stream Box, Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku, Samsung and LG TVs) can also get the 30 Mbps stream but without the ultra-low-latency functionality. Comcast set-top boxes further use low-latency DASH (LL-DASH) to remove delays introduced by segment packaging and client-side buffers. For the encoding pipeline, Comcast uses HEVC and Dolby Vision Profile 8.1, with a bitrate ladder that caps at 30 Mbps and supports full 4K resolution on both the first and second rungs. And since last year’s Super Bowl, Comcast has integrated the latest Dolby Vision improvements into its encoding pipeline. For audio encoding, Comcast RealTime4K always includes Dolby Atmos, natively produced when available from the content provider and, otherwise, upmixed by Comcast. Comcast encodes Atmos at 768 Kbps and delivers it as DD+JOC. For Super Bowl LX, Comcast partnered with NBCUniversal and used a JPEG-XS source feed. Typical 4K live events are compressed to 50-70 Mbps using HEVC before being sent to distributors. Using JPEG-XS at over 300 Mbps allowed Comcast to avoid a generation of HEVC encoding, significantly improving picture quality and reducing latency by about 5 seconds in the video production pipeline. The core of Comcast’s RealTime 4K video pipeline is a DASH live ingest, powered distribution transcoder, and CMAF linear origin. The transcoder accepts JPEG-XS as input (or HEVC mezzanine when JPEG-XS isn’t available) and generates all needed renditions while minimizing overall delay. The transcoder publishes each chunk of media, as it is encoded, to the CMAF linear origin. The origin provides access to DASH manifests and segments to both the just-in-time packager (JITP) for live playback and Comcast’s Cloud DVR system. Comcast has partnered with MediaKind for transcoding while building its own CMAF linear origin and JITP. For Super Bowl LX, Comcast used its on-premises CDN to deliver the RealTime4K feed, but also uses the same LL-DASH video architecture to power partner systems using public CDNs such as Akamai and CloudFront. Beyond the architectural claims, Comcast also put RealTime4K into a live, high-stakes environment during a full day of Olympics and Super Bowl coverage, plus streaming coverage on Peacock, making Sunday, February 8, the most-trafficked day ever for video streaming on Comcast’s network. According to internal testing Comcast conducted during the event, the RealTime4K feed on Xfinity delivered latency that was between 9 and 49 seconds ahead of vMVPD streaming services, even as the network experienced its most-trafficked day for video streaming to date, driven by a mix of IP video streams (including the RealTime4K feed) and streaming on Peacock and other platforms. During my testing of the Super Bowl LX stream, I was unable to test Comcast’s RealTime4K latency myself, as I am not in Comcast’s footprint; otherwise, I would have included them in my Super Bowl LX latency chart. As of today, Comcast RealTime4K technology is free for all customers, with the primary limitation being the hardware requirements for the ultra-low-latency verison of the stream. For customers who do not currently have compatible hardware, the company is offering device swaps to 4K-enabled Xfinity equipment at no additional cost. Customers can also visit a nearby Xfinity store to exchange their existing X1 TV box for a 4K-capable one. Comcast is positioning RealTime4K as the preferred delivery model for live 4K events going forward, not just for showcase events like the Super Bowl, and is already in talks with other programming partners to bring this technology to their live 4K events this year. The company has also emphasized its ongoing commitment to continuous network improvement, focusing on further optimizing delivery, throughput, and video pipelines to push the limits of video quality, latency, and immersive live-viewing performance. If you have had an opportunity to check out the RealTime4K tech at your home, please feel free to share your experience in the comments. I’ll be hands-on with the technology and offering soon, and will provide updates to this post once I see it in person.

Netskrt Systems has carved out a meaningful foothold in the global streaming video market, particularly tier-one live events such as NFL football games, supporting both TNF on Prime Video and the recent Super Bowl on Peacock. It has done this in a manner unlike most of its competitors, focusing on broad, deep deployment of pure software POP instances that reduce its underlying costs. The cost factor is the key, since historically we have seen CDN vendors grow capacity at the risk of burning a lot of cash. The net result, the company tells me, is the ability to operate profitably under the demanding price umbrellas imposed by global streaming platforms. And this does show up in its numbers. Netskrt has built far more capacity and generated more revenue with less invested capital than its CDN peers, at its current size. With about $30 million in invested capital, Netskrt expects to exceed a 1:1 capital-to-revenue ratio in 2026 and a 1:4 capital-to-capacity ratio. Conventional CDNs typically operate closer to a higher multiple, but few disclose the ratios publicly. Netskrt informs me that its current “steady state” capacity is about 65 Tbps, but notes that because software instances can be spun up when and where required, whether on bare metal, virtual machines, or containers, the effective capacity that can be instantiated in 24 to 48 hours is substantially greater. In fact, when it wants to, Netskrt said it can even spin up capacity in cloud-based spot instances in minutes. This approach, which the company likens to a software-defined CDN, gives Netskrt considerable flexibility while also taking a sledgehammer to capital costs. Further, it’s a stratified infrastructure. Where Netskrt sees persistent, long-lasting demand for capacity, it can deploy iron to meet that demand in a manner that leans more toward CapEx than OpEx. Where it sees the reverse—in particular, the bleeding edge of spiky demand curves associated with live sports that are inherently seasonal, it can lean in the opposite direction. Executing this is more than just a business strategy; Netskrt says it requires CDN technology capable of positioning and repositioning content, as well as live-streaming POPs, in response to a complex array of real-time conditions. Roughly half of Netskrt’s capacity is embedded in last-mile ISP networks, with the balance allocated to its mid- and global tiers. From a geographic perspective, Netskrt now reaches across North America, South America, Europe and regions in APAC. Netskrt’s current growth trajectory, which has picked up significantly over the last year, will see it reach 150 Tbps by the end of 2026. Their partnerships with large network and bare metal suppliers like Lumen enable them to ramp up to these levels quite quickly. The company recently conducted a survey with professionals from 55 global ISPs to better understand how major events impact network performance. You can check out the results from that study here.

I recently consulted with a company that was running capped CRF-type encoding across four codecs simultaneously: x264, VP9, NVIDIA H.264, and NVIDIA AV1. The first two were VOD encoding, the second two live. I was genuinely impressed by the sophistication and practicality of this video engineering setup, so I asked the client if I could share what they were doing. The client graciously agreed, but only on the condition that they remain anonymous. So, here goes. The capped‑CRF and QMAX strategies you’ll see here were all in production before I arrived; my role was to measure how well they worked and help tune them to a consistent VMAF target across genres. You’ll see why in the discussions below. By way of background, capped CRF is sometimes dismissed as the poor man’s per-title encoding. Single pass, no complexity analysis, no shot detection, no AI, no machine learning. Just set a quality target, cap the bitrate, and let the encoder find its equilibrium. But the genre data tells a more complicated story. The same QMAX that delivers pristine anime at 985 kbps will leave your sports content looking like it was streamed through a screen door. Sports at QMAX 30 demands nearly 5,000 kbps to hit a 95.60 VMAF. General content at the same QMAX needs 1,014 kbps to reach 89.57. Same parameter, completely different outcome. That gap is why genre-specific tuning matters and why using a single parameter set across all content is a false economy. This article walks through the implementation, including command strings and genre tables, across four codecs. A field guide to making capped CRF work in a multi-codec world. H.264 – Capped CRF for VOD The basic capped CRF command used by the client was: -crf 27 -minrate 1500k -maxrate 6000k -bufsize 3000k This combination delivered an average VMAF quality of 90, which felt a bit low for a premium content distributor, so I set a target VMAF of 93 for all codecs/encoders. Testing across multiple CRF values showed that CRF 24 delivered an average of 92.81, requiring a bitrate boost of around 40%. This would also boost low-frame quality, or the quality of the lowest frame in the file, by an average of 6.05 VMAF points. As you may know, low-frame scores can indicate transient quality issues that reduce QoE. As you can see in Figure 1, the capped CRF was doing its job, adjusting bitrates significantly between the different content genres while maintaining relatively stable quality levels. As Figure 1 also shows, customizing the CRF value by content genre might provide some valuable fine-tuning, enabling more precision in achieving the target quality level at the most efficient bitrate. I’ll discuss my recommendations in this regard at the end of the article. Figure 1. Which CRF value delivered VMAF 93 among the different genres? Reviewing the sports genre, however, revealed that low-frame scores were particularly low. I checked Bitrate Viewer and saw why; the 6 Mbps cap was imposing a hard limit over most of the file. As with CBR encoding, hard limits cause low frame rates. Figure 2. Bitrate Viewer showed that the cap was imposing a hard limit. I then encoded at the same CRF values, with caps of 9 Mbps and 12 Mbps. As you can see in Figure 3, this reduced the average bitrate slightly, from 5,292 for CRF 24 in Figure 1, to 4965 for CRF 26/12M cap in Figure 3. This also boosted low-frame quality from 63.81 to 75.21. Figure 3. Retrying the CRF values at higher bitrate caps. What about bitrate variability, which is always a concern when boosting the max rate? The maximum rate increased from 6211 kbps to 7284 kbps, a 1.1 Mbps increase that isn’t particularly worrisome. However, because the clip achieved VMAF 93 with a CRF value of 26, the overall bitrate dropped from 5542 kbps to 4593 kbps, almost 1 mbps. Figure 4. The same Sports-1 clip as in Figure 2, encoded with CRF 26 at a 12 Mbps cap. Same approximate VMAF, much lower overall bitrate. The lesson? When adjusting CRF values, it also pays to experiment with maxrate and, sometimes, VBV. For more on capped CRF settings for H.264, check out my article Choosing the Optimal CRF Value for Capped CRF Encoding, one of the most frequently viewed articles on the Streaming Learning Center. VP9 and QMAX With VP9, the client surprised me with a technique I had never seen before. Rather than using capped CRF, which is a legitimate mode with VP9, the client set bitrates extraordinarily low, and set the quality floor using the QMAX control as shown below. Note that this was a two-pass implementation, while the H.264 and two live examples discussed below were all single-pass. -b:v 1800 -minrate 900 -maxrate 2610 -qmax 30 In theory, it’s a kind of reverse-capped CRF. To explain, with capped CRF, you tell FFmpeg, “encode at this quality level (the CRF value) but don’t exceed this bitrate (the cap).” With QMAX, you tell FFmpeg “encode at this very low bitrate, but don’t let quality drop below this quality level (the QMAX value).” My first instinct was to try capped CRF. However, after hours of testing, I found that cappedCRF delivered roughly the same quality as the QMAX-based approach, but often at bitrates up to about 50 higher. That was obviously a non-starter. So I pivoted back to QMAX and used VMAF 93 as the target to map out per‑genre QMAX values, which identified where they could safely drop bitrate by 20%+ without hurting quality and where they needed to spend more Using VMAF 93 as the target, Figure 5 shows the required values to achieve a VMAF score of 93 across content genres. Again, you can see the per-title impact of the QMAX-driven command string, which adjusts the bitrate significantly across content genres while maintaining relatively similar quality. At a high level, the command string clearly worked well. Figure 5. Finding the right QMAX value for different genres. Interestingly, with sports, which is one of the most costly and high-value content types, the client could achieve the target VMAF at QMAX 33 or 34 while reducing the bitrate by 21%+. Achieving the same quality level as anime would require a QMAX of 25 and a bitrate boost of 32.4%. Again, I discuss my recommendations in this regard below. Those were the two VOD examples, which I analyzed first. Then it was time to focus on the live applications. Capped CRF for Live Video I’ll start by saying that during my time at NETINT, which manufactures ASIC-based transcoders, the company had enabled capped CRF transcoding, which I documented here and here. But I had never worked with NVIDIA transcoders in this mode before. For NVIDIA H.264 and AV1, the client’s capped‑CRF framework was already sound; my contribution was test the CQ values by genre so the top rung clustered around VMAF 93 instead of overshooting into unnecessary bitrate. NVIDIA H.264 The client transcoded live streams using the NVIDIA L4 GPU. One of the great things about most hardware transcoders is that their command strings are similar for all supported codecs, and that was the case with NVIDIA’s implementations of capped CRF, which was the same for H.264, AV1, and HEVC, the latter of which the customer did not deploy. Here’s the basic structure. -c:v h264_nvenc -cq 32 -rc:v vbr -maxrate 6000k -bufsize 6000k As you can see in the command string, the client’s default value was 32, which delivered an average top-rung VMAF score of 94.76, well above the target. Testing at different CQ values showed that a CQ 34 would achieve the target 93 at a much lower bitrate across all genres except 50 fps sports footage. Figure 6. Finding the optimal CQ value for NVIDIA’s capped CQ H.264. NVIDIA AV1 The command string for the client’s AV1 transcoding was this. -c:v av1_nvenc -cq 43-rc:v vbr -maxrate 6000k -bufsize 6000k As you can see in Figure 7, the cq-based transcoding proved effective, with bitrates ranging from 1 Mbps for news and drama to 4.7 Mbps for 50 fps, all from the same command string. However, there was much more diversity in the CQ value that delivered the 93 target with AV1 than with H.264, with values ranging from 41 for high-energy entertainment and 50 fps sports to 45 for news and 25 fps sports, two genres you would never expect to see in the same category. Figure 7. Finding the optimal QC values for NVIDIA AV1 transcoding. For the record, though the client didn’t deploy HEVC, the same command string structure worked for HEVC with the L4. Different cq values, of couse, but the same basic command string. Putting Per-Genre Based Encoding into Action So let’s discuss what to do about these genre-based findings, which have both theoretical and practical implications. From a theoretical perspective, the question is how many files do you have to test to identify when a genre is sufficiently different to be treated differently. There is no magic number, but I recommend 10 to 20 test files to demonstrate that the genre is different enough to warrant separate configurations. From a practical perspective, how easy is it to deploy different values for different content? If you’re a FAST service with news, sports, entertainment, and similar channels, it’s pretty simple. If you’re a traditional broadcaster, with news at 6:00, variety shows from 7 – 8, and then action series from 9 – 11, not so much. The broader finding is worth stating plainly. If you’re running multi-codec delivery and haven’t done genre-based tuning, you’re likely leaving both quality and bandwidth savings on the table. The genre gaps documented here, like sports versus news, anime versus general entertainment, are real and measurable, and the right parameter values aren’t obvious without systematic testing. That’s where engagements like this one typically start. If you’d like to explore what that looks like for your stack, reach out. The post Capped CRF in a Multi-Codec World: FFmpeg and NVIDIA Implementations first appeared on Streaming Learning Center.

The streaming industry talks endlessly about content, user interfaces and recommendation algorithms (guilty as charged 🙋🏻‍♀️). What gets overlooked is the infrastructure actually delivering video from server to screen.When your stream buffers during a penalty kick or your 4K documentary drops to potato quality, that’s not your device, it’s the delivery network failing you.I'm tech savvy, not technical (I can already hear the engineers cringing). Honestly, most people in the streaming industry aren't either. So I sat down with Ian Franklyn, MainStreaming’s Chief Revenue Officer to make sense of it all. The Waze for Video“The Internet was not designed for delivering television,” Franklyn said “It’s the Wild West.” It was designed for emails, web pages and small file transfers. Traditional content delivery networks treat video like any other data, pushing it through the same pipes used for everything else on the internet.MainStreaming takes a different approach. The company operates its own dedicated edge delivery network, purpose-built for video (edge what?). “We’re building highways specifically for trucks rather than making trucks share lanes with bicycles.” Ah gotcha! Franklyn uses another road analogy to explain how MainStreaming’s intelligent routing works. “If you think of how Waze operates, it analyses traffic in real time and suggests the best route. We do the same thing but we do it for video.”The system analyses every viewing session in real time. Network conditions, device capabilities, delivery performance. When it detects congestion or quality degradation, it automatically reroutes traffic through better paths.The difference from traditional CDNs is control. “We control the last mile. We’re not reliant on somebody else to figure it out. We have something like 300 different paths that we’re analysing all the time.”This matters most during live events when millions of viewers tune in simultaneously. A football match kicking off, a major announcement during a political debate or a decisive moment in a championship. These are the moments when generic CDNs struggle and MainStreaming’s infrastructure proves its value.Breaking the traditional modelTraditional CDN pricing works like a toll road. Every stream that passes through gets charged, typically per petabyte of data. For most events, broadcasters can estimate costs but live sports throws that predictability out the window.“That event was really popular, which is great, but our CDN bill is now five times more than we thought it was going to be.” Franklyn describing a common problem for content providers.The other issue with public CDNs is congestion. Multiple streaming services share the same infrastructure, creating bottlenecks during peak events. When everyone’s delivering live sports simultaneously, quality suffers.MainStreaming offers a hybrid model that addresses both problems. For high-value live sports content, they build dedicated private delivery networks for individual clients. Instead of charging per stream, they charge based on network capacity (e.g. the size of the road itself, not the number of cars on it). “If they need two lanes, we’ll charge them for two lanes. If they want 10 lanes, a superhighway, we’ll charge for a superhighway. As long as the content provider puts their traffic down that road, it ends up being very cost efficient.”The result is predictable pricing, no congestion from other services and costs that typically run about half what public CDN models charge. The system can seamlessly switch between private and public networks, routing traffic intelligently based on real-time conditions.But the real innovation is how they structure deals. Rather than the traditional client-vendor relationship, MainStreaming works on revenue share arrangements that bring all three parties to the table: the CDN, the ISP and the content provider.“It’s very transparent to everyone because you’ve got the three parties: us, the ISP, and the content provider. It’s very transparent about what the costs are, who gets what.”MainStreaming is European-rooted (headquarters are in Milan), with strong presence in Germany and the UK. The company works with Deutsche Telekom, Sky, RTVE and BT alongside DAZN and Rai. This European focus creates an interesting dynamic in a market dominated by US hyperscalers and global CDN providers.Join us at Streaming Made Easy Live - Lisbon on April 13th during StreamTV Europe. Registration details here. Use my code (SME10) to get 10% off here.We just released our programming here. A lot of great content is coming your way. Degrade, don't blockThe Waze analogy extends beyond routing to anti-piracy. Because MainStreaming analyses every viewing session in real time, the system can identify suspicious connections that look like pirate streams.The difference from traditional anti-piracy solutions is that MainStreaming controls the actual delivery of the video. When they identify a suspicious connection, they don’t just block it. Pirates will immediately create another connection. Instead, they can throttle the quality or desync the audio.“The end viewer still gets the stream, but they’re getting a really bad experience. They’re then incentivized to say, hang on, why don’t I just pay and actually subscribe to the legitimate stream rather than paying less but getting a bad experience.”This matters most for live sports, where piracy spikes during major events and traditional blocking methods prove ineffective. The ability to degrade rather than block creates a better outcome. Converting pirates into paying subscribers rather than playing whack-a-mole with VPNs and new connections.Winning the Sports FanWhich brings us back to the living room. When telcos, streamers, broadcasters and platforms are all fighting to own the first click, sports is a must have. Rights are expensive, expectations are high and a single buffering incident during a crucial moment can send fans to a competitor (or a pirate site). “Acquiring rights is only half the battle” Franklyn said. “Delivering a flawless, immersive experience is where fans are won or lost.”At Streaming Made Easy Live - Lisbon, Franklyn will join operators and streamers to examine who’s actually ahead in the race for the sports fan’s living room. What does a winning viewing experience look like in 2026? Where are the technical gaps that still frustrate fans? And what separates the players building loyalty from those just renting attention?You’re in?🗳️ Poll timeThat’s it for today. Comments, shares or likes come a long way 🙏🏻Enjoy your week and see you on Thursday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!

Live sports production and delivery have changed tremendously in the past decade, backed by cloud and streaming advancements making it more accessible to a broader range of organizations. TV 2 Norway has helped pioneer this incredible transformation, building a video platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that can support the live streaming of more than 20,000 sporting events each year, including 1,000 simultaneous live broadcasts. Reaching nearly every household in the Nordic region, as well as audiences across Europe, TV 2 Norway delivers content through traditional linear channels and the TV 2 Play app, powered almost entirely by the AWS Cloud. When the company set its sights on streaming more live sports programming to viewers a few years ago, it knew that an on-premises video pipeline just wouldn’t cut it anymore. TV 2 Norway needed the ability to support significantly more streams, from professional level leagues to youth matches, across football, handball, ice hockey, basketball, volleyball, and more. It required a new level of automation and scalability, which it found using AWS Media Services. “After doing some research, I realized that AWS was the best option to build our new video platform with the cloud. AWS has the best stability and availability, and we could easily automate AWS Media Services with clear APIs,” shared Rune Jordal, Video Architect and Team Lead at TV 2 Norway. “Being able to support 20,000 live event streams in a single year was always the goal, which made AWS the obvious choice. Based on our current trajectory we’ll hit that next year.” Automating scalability In its multi-year journey to expand its live sports catalogue, TV 2 Norway first focused on developing a video solution that could economically support high volume, niche audience content. They also needed an approach that could be easily replicated and required little or no staffing. Jordal and his team built and tested a proof-of-concept in late 2020 using AWS Media Services and AI cameras installed by a third-party vendor in various locations across the region. The technical setup was designed to be fully automated, from camera to end-user, including the spinning up of AWS resources only as needed. After an extensive testing phase, they put the new solution into production, began building features on top of it, and continued to scale. Today, the video platform comprises AWS Elemental MediaLive for live adaptive bitrate (ABR) encoding. It compresses the incoming camera signal and encodes it to support playback on as many devices as possible and with varying network quality. Then, AWS Elemental MediaPackage segments and prepares the video for the content delivery network (CDN) to serve to viewers. Presently, TV 2 Norway uses Amazon CloudFront for caching before the CDN delivery, as well as a CDN failsafe. AWS Lambda provisions resources for live channels on an as-needed basis using a CRON expression that runs at regular intervals to check when matches are scheduled to begin. Content is automatically recorded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), where it is made available to distribution partners or moved to deep storage. Benchmarking success Just four years ago, TV 2 Norway streamed more than 2,500 sporting events on its TV 2 Play app, and has steadily increased the volume every year. In 2025, Jordal expects the platform to surpass 16,000 live streams and hit 20,000 in 2026. To make this goal a reality, both TV 2 Norway and the AWS Media Services team quickly realized that scaling the platform for their needs would mean rethinking the way they build media workflows in the cloud. “AWS Media Services are meant to protect customers so they aren’t impacted by another organizations high traffic, and they’re also geared toward traditional broadcast workflows. It took us some time to figure out how to architect our solution to scale in the way we needed to accommodate all these live streams,” Jordal recalled. “Direct communication with the AWS service team helped make the process much more straightforward. They understand our challenges and are on the ball helping to envision new ways of working.” Based on the initial success of its lower-tier live sports streams, TV 2 Norway felt confident moving its premium events to the AWS-powered workflow and has migrated some aspects of its linear channels to AWS as well. The company continues to leverage physical infrastructure for receiving and encoding signals in some cases but often pushes content back to the cloud in a hybrid approach. “I’d estimate as much as 90% of our streaming and broadcast workloads are now on AWS,” noted Jordal. “It’s easier to automate and simplify workflows in the cloud, and that frees up hands to focus on other aspects of the business, instead of routing signals. We’re able to accelerate our speed of development using Lamda and Step Functions for orchestration.” Modernizing linear workflows With the scalability of the TV 2 Norway video platform firmly established, Jordal is setting his sights on other ways the cloud can benefit the company. Top on his list, bridging the linear and over-the-top (OTT) worlds and incorporating more automation in traditional processes. “Linear channels follow a separate path from what we’ve been doing with the cloud. Joining OTT and linear would be a very big challenge, but a fun one at that,” Jordal mused. He continued, “One of the most important things AWS brings to us is the ability to quickly prototype. It’s extremely easy to build new features and test them out to see if they’re a good idea or not. The combo of AWS and generative AI is very useful.” For example, using generative AI to develop base code, the TV 2 Norway team was able to build a UI that manages how URLs are delivered to end users and redirect traffic if needed. They built and tested the feature in one day, then pushed it into production. As TV 2 Norway continues to innovate, AWS will remain key to the company’s ability to experiment, scale, and grow into new areas. Learn more about AWS Media Services, or get in touch with an AWS for Media & Entertainment representative.

Updates from 5.45pm (GMT) game at Villa ParkFollow us over on Bluesky | And get in touch: email BarryThose teams: Unai Emery makes seven changes to the team that started against Brighton in midweek. Marco Bizot, Pau Torres, Victor Lindelof, Lucas Digne, Ross Barkley, Leon Bailey and Tammy Abraham all start.Newcastle make six changes to the side that started against Tottenham, as Eddie Howe brings in Aaron Ramsdale, Lewis Hall, Sandro Tonali, Jacob Murphy, Nick Woltemade and William Osula. Continue reading...

Ireland 20-13 ItalyAzzurri led at half-time for first time in DublinAfter what felt like 40 days and 40 nights of darkness and rain, the sun came out in Dublin. Cold, yes, and a grey day by kick-off but bright enough to throw light on an Ireland side scrambling for their footing, and a bullish Italy one looking to break new ground.Never having won a Six Nations game in Dublin might be the sort of statistic to weigh you down. The Azzurri carried it like a backpack with only a couple of bits and bobs. For the first 40 minutes of physical, narky and very watchable Test rugby, they looked like they have never looked before at this venue in this competition: a well-rounded side with self-assurance to go with passion. By the end of 80 minutes the picture had changed only to reflect a shortage of finesse to finish, as they pounded away in the Ireland 22 before James Lowe lifted the siege. Continue reading...

Senators said repeal was ‘particularly troubling’ and was counter to EPA’s mandate to protect human healthMore than three dozen Democratic senators have begun an independent inquiry into the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a huge change in how the agency measures the health benefits of reducing air pollution that is widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.In a regulatory impact analysis, the EPA said it would stop assigning a monetary value to the health benefits associated with regulations on fine particulate matter and ozone. The agency argued that the estimates contain too much uncertainty. Continue reading...

Updates from 4.40pm (GMT) game at MurrayfieldGet in touch: mail Daniel with your thoughtsEverything points to an English victory. Form, logic, reason, the laws of nature.But none of that counts in this, does it? This is Scotland. This is Murrayfield. This is the land of bagpipes and tartan and haggis and all the other cliches that swirl around the discourse whenever the aul enemy have the temerity to roll up north and expect a triumph. Continue reading...