CMAF, Vod2Live, SDR-to-HDR

This article is part 14 of the "21 Thoughts on Video Streaming in 2021"-series.

Nick Krzemienski gives us a couple of 2021 takes, more specifically about CMAF and CBCS, about Vod2Live, and about SDR-to-HDR.

CMAF. Will this actually be the year organizations can finally stop using CENC (CTR) and only CBCS? I’ve done the math, and we’d only loose about 3% of customer device support as the year progresses, so I plan to finally drop CENC (CTR) on dash.

So now we know Nick's view on our article on CMAF and CBCS!

Vod2live. When channel X is playing a re-run of episode Y and you also carry the VOD  for Y, you can shutdown your linear encoding, and point customers to the static VOD content. I’ve begun exploring this project, but there are ad restrictions from content owners. That said, I believe we will see a serious trend of content owners themselves leading the way with these kind of efforts.

I see the value in this, and this is something people have been doing in the past. I'm curious about the ad restrictions though!

SDR-to-HDR upscale. Personally, I believe that this is hands down the most useful way to increase a customers perceived video quality. With the costs of HDR-enabled screens being extremely reasonable now (latest series 5 50in TLC 4K RokuTV w/ DoVi & HDR is only $399), this year could definitely be the time to explore what you could do for your customers experience.

This is probably a research field I'd devote myself in if I had the intellectual capacity. SDR-to-HDR algorithms not only enhance the video quality, but they would also be super valuable for upscaling archived (read: old) videos. Throw in some Machine Learning and AI, and do this at run-time on the client-side, and you got yourself the future of video streaming.