A new blogpost from Netflix’s developers sheds light on how measuring its HDR streams with the video multi-method assessment fusion (VMAF) metric has optimized its encode ladders. This claims to have reduced the company’s storage footprint and data usage, while improving QoE for subscribers across all viewing devices. The arrival of HDR-compatible VMAF (HDR-VMAF) has allowed Netflix to create HDR streams with dynamic optimization (DO) encodes, rather than a fixed ladder, which offers predetermined bitrates regardless of the content being encoded. Netflix says its own internal traffic has moved entirely from 100% fixed-ladder HDR encodes, as of August 2021, to 100% HDR-DO encodes by May 2023 – just under two years. The headline stat is that the optimized ladder takes…