What’s next in video technology: AI, avatars and more

Welcome to Lowpass! This week: How AI, avatars and other cutting-edge technologies can transform video, and Humane Maybe Pivot.

Last week, hundreds of video engineers flocked to San Francisco to discuss and learn about the latest developments in video technology at the industry’s annual Demuxed conference. Speakers at the two-day event talked about film grain synthesis, CNDs, content encryption and video processing on quantum computers – geeky stuff presented by insiders for insiders, without the heavy-handed sales pitches that dominate so many other industry events.

I had the opportunity to attend a day of Demuxed in person and recently watched a few panels from afar. And while I have to admit that some of the content went over my head – after all, I’m not a video engineer – I also really enjoyed the collaborative atmosphere Big Buck Bunny Jokes and behind-the-scenes insights into how some of the biggest media companies are using cutting-edge video technology to improve everyone’s streaming experience.

Some talks that particularly stood out to me because they outlined novel solutions to common industry challenges:

With live video, you have to fake it ’til you make it. Netflix is ​​known for both its commitment to cutting-edge technology and its intensive testing to ensure that the technology delivers what it promises. An example of this is the company’s video encoding work, which involves optimizing the encoding settings for each individual shot of a film or television show. I wrote a detailed article about it for The Verge earlier this year, in which I also noted that the company takes a fairly conservative approach when it comes to optimizing live video streams.

“We’re still in the early days of live streaming,” Anne Aaron, senior encoding technology director at Netflix, told me at the time, acknowledging that the main goal was to build a scalable and resilient live streaming infrastructure. “We’re starting with a little more industry-standard methods,” she told me for my article. “And we optimize from there.”

Last week, members of Aaron’s team at Demuxed explained a key challenge they face with Netflix’s fledgling live programming. “We have a lot more ideas than just live events,” said Netflix software developer Wei Wei. A/B testing each of these ideas at a live event would simply take too long, and running experiments that could go wrong at something as high-profile as a live NFL Christmas game is not the best way to run a live business build either.

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