MediaMelon, Inc.: Optimizing Internet Video Streaming Experience

With the proliferation of smart phones and faster mobile networks, online video streaming is increasingly becoming popular with users as an easy and convenient way for information and entertainment consumption. The users seek broadcast quality video performance from their broadcasters and video on demand service providers. However, this puts strain on mobile networks and blows through the users’ data caps. “A common scenario is that as the size of the online audience enlarges, either bandwidth requirements increase or consumers are provided with a less-than-high-quality viewing experience,” remarks the MediaMelon’s CEO Kumar Subramanian. Instead of throttling or capping video streaming for binge video customers, the service providers can use MediaMelon’s QBR technology to dynamically adjust bitrate and save 30-50 percent bandwidth while keeping video quality high. The company achieves this feat by combining visual quality analysis with adaptive streaming algorithms to more efficiently allocate bits between simple and complex scenes.

As an innovator focused on improving and optimizing the internet video streaming experience, MediaMelon assists clients to enhance video quality and minimize the costs of streaming through their streaming optimization and analytics products. “We are not introducing any new compression techniques, streaming formats or re-processing the video,” notes Subramanian. The CEO further adds, “We are bringing a high-impact technology that delivers a quantum improvement in streaming performance, using available network capacity to push quality instead of just more bits.”

The QBR technology helps the video players conserve bandwidth on easy scenes so that the downloaded bitrate can be boosted for more difficult scenes. Using perceptual analysis information and predictive buffer management, QBR reduces artifacts without causing stalls in playback or compatibility problems. As a result, the clients can increase savings during peak usage times, squeezing more life out of the existing wireless infrastructure. In addition, QBR upgrades existing streaming workflows and systems. It uses existing encoders, players and asset libraries and simply adds new metadata to them, allowing packagers and players to optimize adaptive bitrate streaming.

Furthermore, the SmartSight and SmartRoute products from MediaMelon allow clients to monitor video and audience metrics for better decision making. MediaMelon’s SmartRoute helps enhance the client’s Multi-CDN system to reduce streaming costs with traffic routing decisions based on numerous business and analytics rules. Using MediaMelon’s SmartSight analytics and video experience monitoring technology, video traffic can start to be re-routed around bottlenecks as soon as problems are detected or when programmed thresholds are exceeded. All of these services let content platform providers improve their services and demonstrate added value to their customers.

The firm’s QBR easily integrates into any current video service workflow through APIs, adding value across the entire online video environment, augmenting the capabilities of streaming encoders, video players, companies, online video platforms and CDNs. “Our technology intelligently goes beyond current adaptive bitrate schemes to significantly improve quality and bitrate performance— providing a dramatic advantage that content owners and video service providers can employ to enhance the viewing experience while utilizing streaming infrastructure more effectively,” explains Subramanian.

For the days ahead, MediaMelon will work toward establishing a strong presence in the media space by building more solutions and designing more services that will be hailed for their virtues of quality, reliability, and simplicity. However, it will not be the software or implemented technologies by which MediaMelon will measure its success, but by the number of customers achieving their goals successfully.