We weren’t messing around when we said October 2020 would mark the biggest month to date in the journey of video compression connoisseur V-Nova. We can exclusively reveal that LCEVC (MPEG-5 Part 2) is fresh from receiving Final Draft standard specification status from MPEG just days ago (official PR pending), while we have also caught wind that a number of big name deployments and partner projects are already in the pipeline for the coming months.
While standards are a blessing, the path to deployment is a real slog. It can be years before product development around a standard eventually leads to an implementation, particularly where hardware is involved, but the beauty of LCEVC is that early implementations are already in plain sight. Endorsement quotes from executives at Mediaset, Eleven Sports and Al Jazeera – pledging to be early adopters of the technology – are right there on lcevc.com for all to see, without the formalities of confirming public deployments.
V-Nova isn’t out of the woods just yet, however. The company may have proved most of the technology world wrong by convincing MPEG to embrace its software as an integral component of future video standards, but there remains a lot of apathy around LCEVC. That is where V-Nova’s biggest challenge lies, in convincing the remaining doubters that LCEVC is what it says it is – i.e. supercharger software capable of reducing computational complexity of any video codec, including next-gen codecs, while reducing encoding and CDN costs by as much as 50%.
Now with standardization complete, it’s time to start seriously looking at the business cases for LCEVC, keeping in mind that LCEVC is not a codec. We already mentioned Eleven Sports being an early adopter of the technology, demonstrating the clear use case for OTT live sports and esports. A company like Eleven Sports, which has travelled the world hoovering up sports rights as it expands into long-tail content, is left with a dilemma whereby it boasts hundreds or even thousands of live channels, which are expensive to transcode, and many of these channels have low user concurrency. This creates demand for transcoding efficiency, to deliver high quality streams to a higher proportion of viewers.
Meanwhile, the endorsement from Italian broadcaster Mediaset is all the evidence we need that LCEVC can establish itself across both broadcast and OTT, live and on-demand. This will obviously include the Mediaset Play OTT service, while CTO Luca Poloni praises the retrofittable and backwards compatibility of the enhancement standard for improving video delivery on top of its existing workflows. LCEVC is backwards-compatible for 4K and even 8K broadcast, with moderate bandwidth increases over HD, where the video enhancement information can be sent via broadband with upscaling.
Al Jazeera Media Network’s show of support, on the other hand, directs LCEVC into the wild world of news and web publishing, as a global media conglomerate with a strong ad-supported business model. Maintaining a higher quality of advertising while slashing transcoding and bandwidth costs in half and lowering start times is a no-brainer for any publisher.
Another target market is social networks. While these platforms are not intrinsically driven by video quality, they are increasingly driven by video, particularly live video, and what they do care about is engagement, so the two are effectively joined at the hip. Costs reductions in delivery combined with increased engagement provides a compelling case for social networks to explore LCEVC, which does not need to create separate workflows, but can directly be applied to the basic h.264 workflow, as well as more advanced codecs such as HEVC, VP9, and AV1 when they are supported.
Hand-in-hand with the case for social media platforms, is the case for improving user-generated content, based on LCEVC’s amenability for battery-efficient phone encoding. This allows social networks to upload content at higher quality, generating obvious ripple-effect benefits to the rest of the archival/transcoding workflow also in absence of LCEVC.
This segues us nicely into the world of Zoom and MS Teams that have enveloped all walks of business and personal lives this year, where LCEVC has the potential to relieve the real-time processing constraints that come with video communications. Let’s just say that V-Nova sees LCEVC enabling some rather philanthropic activities in the future in the world of video communications (presumably after making some money first).
Of course, all the benefits of LCEVC can be realized in VoD too, but less obviously in the sense that there are fewer qualms around transcoding efficiency and bandwidth bottlenecks in the on-demand world, thanks to techniques like caching at the edge or on the device itself.
One final LCEVC use case lies in VR and immersive video experiences, where resolutions exceed 4K and so the benefits of implementing the technology here are quite clear. VR has hardly been high on the agenda for video streaming companies in 2020 and, besides, these experiences are only as good as the networks they ride on. Advanced video compression technologies like LCEVC, combined with fixed and wireless network enhancements, will gradually improve these experiences for the end users while lowering costs for service providers. We can tease that V-Nova has something pretty exciting lined up in the VR realm, which should be revealed before the year is out.
Forgive us for sounding like a broken record, but without the customers to back-up its own testaments of how great the underlying technology really is, V-Nova is back at square one – effectively all mouth and no trousers, in other words. But the difference to a few years ago in the days of Perseus pre-standardization, is that we know V-Nova is on the cusp of some potentially game-changing customer deployments and industry partnerships. Once V-Nova is given the green light in the coming months, Faultline readers will be the first to know about any movements, with exclusive insights to boot.
Of course, while standardization is complete, the licensing model is not, an area which is arguably more complex than the underlying technology itself. We will avoid diving into the political dog fight around royalties on this occasion, except to remind readers that V-Nova is currently devising with customers and IP lawyers how to position its licensing strategy at an aggressively low price point, without appearing to devalue the reputations of partner companies involved in LCEVC.
Will this be a case of meeting in the middle, or will the licensing scales start low and gradually creep up? For now, V-Nova assures us the low-pricing strategy is non-negotiable, which is easy to say at this stage, although we should note that LCEVC licensing will be priced very differently from actual video codecs. Most importantly, V-Nova must navigate its licensing strategy with ninja-like aptitude, or risk losing the support of companies like Dolby, Qualcomm and InterDigital, which must be kept on side.