Voices of Video
Explore the inner workings of video technology with Voices of Video: Inside the Tech. This podcast gathers industry experts and innovators to examine every facet of video technology, from decoding and encoding processes to the latest advancements in hardware versus software processing and codecs. Alongside these technical insights, we dive into practical techniques, emerging trends, and industry-shaping facts that define the future of video.
Ideal for engineers, developers, and tech enthusiasts, each episode offers hands-on advice and the in-depth knowledge you need to excel in today’s fast-evolving video landscape. Join us to master the tools, technologies, and trends driving the future of digital video.
Voices of Video
Save 66%: Why Your Video Streaming Budget is Going Up in Smoke
The numbers are staggering: using AWS Media Live for HD video processing costs approximately $10,117 per stream over three years, while the NetInsight/NetInt solution delivers the same capabilities for around $3,500 – a reduction of 66-70%. These aren't theoretical projections but real-world figures that are opening eyes throughout the industry.
We explore the innovative partnership between NetInsight and NETINT, showcasing how strategic edge processing can dramatically reduce video streaming costs while improving quality and flexibility.
• NetInsight's Nimbra Edge platform integrated with NetInt VPUs creates a powerful ecosystem for video processing
• Edge processing at venues offers significant advantages over cloud-only approaches
• Cost analysis shows 66-70% savings ($10,117 vs $3,500 per stream over three years)
• Cloud commitments often create vendor lock-in that limits flexibility
• The solution is cloud-agnostic, allowing deployment on-premises, in any cloud, or through specialized platforms like Akamai
• Upcoming features include enhanced ad insertion capabilities targeting the American market
• Edge processing reduces latency and network load while improving cost efficiency
• "Use cloud for scale, use the edge for specificity" provides a guiding principle for modern video workflows
Reach out to Adam at NetInsight or anyone on our teams with questions about implementing these solutions in your workflow. Until next time, happy encoding!
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
Voices of Video.
Mark Donnigan:Voices of Video. Voices of Video.
Adam Nilsson:Voices of Video.
Mark Donnigan:Welcome back to another episode of Voices of Video, and we are continuing in the session that we began, or the series. I think you could say more accurately that we began before NAB, where we were talking with a number of our partners, that is, the VPU ecosystem partners, and today I'm super happy to have Adam Nielsen from NetInsight back with me. So first of all, adam, welcome back to Voices of Video.
Adam Nilsson:Thanks for having me.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, we had such a good conversation, you know, before NAB, and you were giving some incredible updates as to your integration with NetMVPUs and Nimbra Edge. Wow, I assume we were so busy. I don't think we really got to talk much during NAB, now that I think about it.
Adam Nilsson:No, I went by your booth and you were all busy and we didn't have much time.
Mark Donnigan:It's like yeah it's good and you guys the same. I went by your booth and you know it was jammed. So you know, I'm always polite in that way. It's like, okay, you know they're having real conversations, they don't need to talk to me right now. So, anyway, well, you know what, what, what were the? You know, I would say the results, the takeaways. What were customers telling you at NAB? Yeah, give us the download.
Adam Nilsson:Oh, wow. Well, for us it was a huge step right, because what we're doing is something very new for us. Well, after our last interview, there was some people mentioning I saw that we're back. We're going more towards distribution and OTC.
Mark Donnigan:Tommy Flanagan wrote up a great piece about you and I think that's exactly what he said. Net insight is back.
Adam Nilsson:Exactly so a lot of people came up just based on that. People were excited hearing about okay, what is it that you guys are now doing again? And this you know the possibilities we have with this. Well, collaboration, working together, integrating your product into our Nimble Edge platform opens up this new type of workflows which the customers hadn't really thought about, because our Nimble Edge platform has been mostly focused on the transmission side and now we can do a lot more with that. So people wanted to understand how can I leverage this product packaging in an efficient way, making my day easier, saving money but also enabling uh, a bunch of stuff. I actually so fun thing after we had our interview, I was actually contacted by uh, an organization, a un organization, regarding ai in third the third world countries, like how ai can become the democratizing thing to share content into third the third world. You know where you need low bit rates and stuff like that and we can do that. So it's been. It's been a lot of great and cool feedback.
Mark Donnigan:Well, I'm so happy to hear that. You know, we it's very intentional that we are positioning our collaboration as as as like an ecosystem, rather than just you know and I say this, you know when I'll find a fondness rather than just two logos saying hey, we like each other. It seems like so many you know press releases that come out we see in the industry are like Company A is working with Company B Out there that actually are cool and they're like, yeah, that's cool, but most people are like I don't really care, like what are you going to do for me? Like what's Company A plus Company B, you company B, going to do for me? And so this really has been the focus in NAB. Our conversations were just, I mean, exactly like what you referenced.
Mark Donnigan:You know, years where people are 100% laser focused on cutting costs, and I think vendors now get it. You know, a year ago there were a few holdouts that were waiting for the return to the good old days big fat RFPs and budgets you know that are, you know, and deals that can last for three years and five years and those days are gone. Not only is it about cost, but it's about doing more with less, which you can say well, isn't that cutting cost? In my view, it's a little bit different, though, because you can cut costs by just hammering your partner down, just telling them I'm sorry, I'm going to buy unless you give me X percent discount, and eventually, oftentimes, a seller kind of has to go well, okay, I got to cut my price, that's cutting costs, but that's really not, and I'd like your reaction to this, because it's not really what I am hearing, what we're seeing.
Mark Donnigan:What we're seeing is, yes, we need to reduce OPEX, and sometimes by very meaningful amounts, but we need higher density because we need to reduce our power footprint. You know, in other words, even if my cost is only reduced by a relatively small percentage, if I can reduce my power footprint, that's a win or it's. You know, we have a particular business model that only will work if we can get our stream costs down to, you know, below some threshold, you know, in other words, at some point, which then opens up revenue. Right, that was a different way to look at it. So I'm just curious if you, you know, we're kind of hearing or seeing or observing the same kind of thing.
Adam Nilsson:Yes, so I definitely did. So. One of the reasons why we wanted to go in this direction was, of course, because the transmission part is a place where you do want to cut costs. Like that is something that is becoming, uh well, more and more feasible and easy to get, and there's different solutions out there and people want to cut that cost. But what they want to do is to reduce, as you said, the footprint in general, and having a vpu in order to make more high density stuff and be more efficient in the way you do things is a way of being cost conscious. It doesn't really mean that you might, you know, there will always be an upfront investment. I would say you, you know you're going to buy your equipment, yeah, or or you can, you know, leverage the cloud, because we have that as well. But if you can be really mindful of where you use these products, you can save yourself a bunch of well, money, but also a bunch of time. So there's different ways of looking at it, and I think what customers came to me with was, you know, they saw this as a huge opportunity of a little bit centralizing what they do to fewer systems. So that's a way of cutting costs as well. Right, they don't need to use, they don't need to send streams into third parties. They can do it from one central place. And the cool thing with that is, when I say central, it's like, yeah, it's, it's almost like an orchestration. But the thing is, your equipment, like the vpu cards, can be either used on-prem or in the cloud, so, depending on your needs, they can use them on the input side, they can use them on the output side, they can actually use them in between, uh, the source and destination, depending on you, on what you want to achieve.
Adam Nilsson:If you have one stream that you want to send out to 10 takers and it should have the exact same config, you want to do that, transcode that transformation. You want to do it on the input side because you just want to do that once. You don't want to do it on the output side, where you have 10 different, you know. Or it's the other way around You're sending it to 10 takers. They want different configs. They want to do it on the output side because you know you want to set each config there, you want to reduce latency, and all that, and our solutions working together, gives you as a user, that flexibility and I think that got a lot of cogs rolling in the minds of our you know customers and potential customers. And that was the cool part that they saw opportunities. They didn't say, oh, I'm going to save myself cost. They said this gives me an opportunity to be more efficient, to give my customers better value, and that is the cool part of it.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, I love it. I love it. Why don't you, for those people who are not familiar with Nimbra Edge or don't know the architecture, can you give a really quick flyover of what the architecture is, how the system is built?
Adam Nilsson:If you think of it, it's easy enough as an SDI router in the cloud. So you have sources, you have destinations and you can transport it using ARQ protocol. So we use REST, and what we've done then is that, adding to that, we've integrated your solution to that using APIs and all that so that once we take a stream in, we can run that through different processes using the VPU. So we have a transformation engine that makes it possible to do compression, bitrate, you can do resolution changes, you can do audio shuffling and audio codec changes and a bunch of cool stuff, de-interlacing, and a bunch of stuff, all using our solution, together with yours. So think of it as an SDI router in the cloud with some secret sauce, some extra sauce in there, with the VP who's helping out.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, you touched on this. Yeah, thank you. I'm just conscious. We always assume, oh, everybody you know kind of knows our solutions. Not everybody does, so it's good to you know, to let them know.
Mark Donnigan:You referenced something that I would love to get your feedback on how much of a trend this is, absolutely. That is, you were saying that people are starting to maybe think about how, on the input side meaning like in the stadium, in the venue might be the most efficient place or the best place to create your APR ladders, rather than what is happening now in pretty much 100% or at least 99% workflows, where they're know they're taking a single camera feed. They're usually sending up to the cloud you know, or to you know the cloud. It could be their private data center, it could be one of the cloud vendors you know, so you understand what I mean by the cloud but sending it to some other location, then they're creating their ladders, then it's being distributed to the origins, the CDN, et cetera. Is this becoming a real trend, like this idea of doing the transcoding in the venue, and just why touch it again? Like you know, I create my ABR ladders and I just distribute them from there.
Adam Nilsson:Yeah. Yeah, there are definitely use cases where I would say that that is the most efficient and the cheapest way of doing things, and I think what has been difficult before is that, due to the fact that you don't have equipment everywhere, maybe you don't have resources to do everything everywhere, that hasn't been possible, but with this solution you can do that and that is sort of the cool part. So what we've sort of really tried to bring to the market and make them understand is that we're trying to make that achievable, so that you have the flexibility of saying you know what? I want to do this as quickly as possible, reduce latency, just get it out there, because I don't need to touch those feeds or those streams. That's right as they leave the venue.
Adam Nilsson:You know, I just want to touch them there and they're all good, we'll send it out, we'll distribute them, and that is a very efficient way of doing things. So I think just looking at that type of value and trying to understand what the user and the customer is trying to achieve, you can you really can pinpoint where it's the most efficient, where's the most efficient place in this chain of distribution to do it. So, yeah, I definitely see us going more towards doing it at the venue. There will always be stuff, things, transformations you would do closer to the taker, but yeah, we'll see a change in that, I think.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, yeah, taker, but they're, yeah, we'll, we'll see a change in that. I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's um so interesting how, uh, architectures are being, you know, reinvented or or or enhanced or things that, theoretically, I can remember years ago and when I say years I mean this had to have been more than 10 years ago where Cisco gave a presentation with Comcast at the cable show. This goes back to when that still was happening in its engineering incarnation. I know it's sort of changed directions through the years. I don't even know if it's still going going, but this had to have been 2013, 14, you know, maybe 15.
Mark Donnigan:And the whole presentation was the benefits of effectively distributing a single profile, so your highest bit rate profile over the network and then encoding or transcoding at the edge. And you know and I don't remember, of course, all the details, it was too long ago, but you know and I don't remember, of course, all the details it was too long ago, but you know Cisco was showing how much you would reduce the load on the network. There was, you know, complexity and everybody in the room. I mean the room was packed. You know it was packed Like people want to hear about this. I don't think there was anybody that left and went oh yeah, that's a great concept. Never worked. Everybody was excited.
Mark Donnigan:The problem is it didn't work because it was just too expensive then to encode in software on CPU. And then how are you going to get enough compute at the edge of a large network? So you might be able to do it in a few regions, and you know, but if you're talking about serving all of the users with this topology like it just wouldn't work. So I've always remembered that because and this was before, in fact, actually interesting enough NetInt was born right around that time as 2015,.
Mark Donnigan:The company was founded, you know so, and I'm quite certain because at the time we were focused on a in a slightly different area. So I can almost guarantee that our founders, um, didn't weren't even aware of this presentation and all of this. So it's not like it was this coordinated thing like oh, wow, that's brilliant, let's go build a company, you know, to produce custom IP, to be able to actually pull this off. But you know, that's what has happened now. And now this whole concept of being able to encode at the edge, really do edge processing, do it cost effectively and, frankly, have it provide a better. Not just reduced cost, but a better result for the user. Now it's finally here, so we're really excited that you're pushing this, you know, in that direction.
Adam Nilsson:Yeah, we did a presentation at NAB. We wrote a paper and we did a presentation regarding the edge processing and how that, you know, allows for these localized adaptation without actually burdening the cloud, and how that will save you egress costs and it will improve latency. And you know, in the end the cloud is used for scale. Use cloud for scale.
Adam Nilsson:It's great at that, but do use the edge for specificity because that is, you know, not all streams need that heavy cloud involvement and that is just super important. So making conscious decisions about this will help you so much and you know, once you talk to customers about that, you know people get confused because they hear NetInside and NetInt and they think it's the same company.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many times did you have people come in and go hey, I love NetInt and you're like well, we're NetInsight, but we like NetInt too.
Adam Nilsson:Love them, we work with them, we know the guys, we're all happy. But yeah, so when we talked about this it's funny, it's like a light bulb coming up for some people they're like oh, you can actually do this. It's not just something like what we talked about or what we wrote about. It's not like a theoretical thing. It's something you can actually do. There's a product available to do that and that is the cool part, that it's out there. People can get it.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, amazing. Well, speaking of this white paper, I'm glad you brought it up because you've got some numbers in there that are, I'm sure, we're, eye opening. I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but I'm guessing you had more than a few customers walk into the booth at NAB and be like okay are these real?
Mark Donnigan:customers walk into the booth at nab and be like, okay, are these real? You know, and so maybe you can give a preview, as you know, or tell uh, the audience, um, you know what the data, the real data, you know, because these are real numbers. This isn't, you know, kind of modeled in a lab. In theory, you know like this is real.
Adam Nilsson:So no, we, we, we checked what the difference would be between doing things in the cloud versus doing it on-prem, using the vpus, and especially on the the encode side, but also on decode side. And I think what we suggested is that you can at least get a like a 66 to 70 percent decrease in cost leveraging on-prem equipment. And I must say, when I say that, because people did come up saying that can't be real and sure you can say, sure, if you look at list prices and I will say we were very, very nice about that, because we didn't take the largest list prices, we went for the median once. Yeah, yeah, sure it. In the us market, we, we, it's a more expensive so you would save even more.
Adam Nilsson:Um, uh, but what was cool about that is like, no, that this is, this is true. Sure you, you can sign up and you could probably get a three-year contract with a lower cost, but then you're, then you've invested for, you know, for three years. Do you want to be that, do you? You don't want the flexibility of all that, so it's, it's a huge cost saving if you do it in the right way, and just being able to talk about that and you know it sounds like a sales pitch but it's not. It's about just giving people getting the mindset there because there's a vendor lock-in you would get by leveraging the cloud sometimes that I think you can avoid if you're clever.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, that is so key. I really want to piggyback on just what you finished with there that vendor lock-in and not to sort of, oh what do you say? Push on the wound, because I know everyone just wakes up one day at some point and says what have I committed to? You know? I mean, I mean these commits are real and you pay the bill regardless, and so you're forced them to find things for, you know, to push to the cloud, which, hey, good for them. You know what an amazing business model and way to guarantee revenue in the future, but what a bad business rationale for the user, for the customer. So I'm going to read some. I'm going to read the numbers, the per stream cost, Because you know I really want this to sink into folks about how much more when we use things. You know words like 66% less, 60, 70% less. Okay, you know, does that translate to $10, a hundred dollars, a million dollars? You know what does that translate to.
Mark Donnigan:So your analysis showed using media live. So AWS, media live, and this was a U? S. I think you chose the North Virginia location. Obviously, you know locations can change, but you're very explicit.
Mark Donnigan:You modeled it with that location for a three year per stream cost and you modeled nothing crazy. It was like 10 streams. You know you have the monthly cost here and you know you multiply by 36 months and you come up with a number. But per stream for three years it was $10,117.80. So just call it $10,000. $10,000. Okay, Everybody's kind of thinking in their mind probably at this point yeah, that sounds about right. There's probably somebody that's like, oh, they're paying too, you know, like I get a better deal. And there's probably others that are like Holy cow, how can I get that price? You know. So, anyway, the point is we are totally aware that mileage will vary in terms of you know how much business you're giving AWS and you know whether it was the end of the month or not or the end of the quarter. Okay, now using NetInsight, and this includes your software licensing costs, right, adam?
Adam Nilsson:Yep.
Mark Donnigan:Okay, yeah, I just want to double check because that's also important, because sometimes I've seen companies do models where it's like, yeah, they're looking at operational costs but then they kind of conveniently forget to say, oh, but our software is like so this is fully loaded. That per stream cost on NetInsight with VPUs would go from a little over $10,000 per stream to $3,500. So that's like one third. Yeah, it's. I mean, yeah, it's one third the cost, one third. So that's where the this 66, 67% and again, depending on you know factors like codec resolution, you know codecs and resolution. So like, if you are wanting to, you know HEVC 4K. I'm guessing that these, you know this AWS costs like doubles or even triples. Right, if you were to do 4K.
Mark Donnigan:Or maybe you modeled 4K, but I think this is hd this is hd.
Adam Nilsson:That's what we modeled, yeah okay, okay, yeah.
Mark Donnigan:So again, the point in this is that, um, this is real data, this is you know, this is all real and I just really encourage anybody who's listening, you know, who's saying like, wow, that does sound good, we should take a look at it. You really really should take a look at it. You know, model your scenario and you know, as I always, you know, even hear customers say back like you know what, even if in our case, it's only a 40% savings or God forbid, a 35% savings, I'll be doing backflips. You know like the numbers are so profound.
Adam Nilsson:So yeah, oh yeah, for sure. And the thing is, even the numbers we came up with ourselves, based on our solution and yours, I would say that those are also. You know, depending on the amount a customer wants to buy, those prices will also go down. I would say that's a worst case scenario what we've modeled there.
Adam Nilsson:So you know, it just shows that I don't want to put like a big dark, you know thing over the cloud, because I think the cloud is great, I think there's great stuff leveraging the cloud. But I think as a user and a customer, you really need to be aware of where you should spend your money and when it makes sense to spend it on cloud and when it doesn't. And I would say that we have very good arguments for not using the cloud on the edges, because we can make it possible Everything you edges, because we can make it possible Everything you want we can make it possible.
Mark Donnigan:Awesome, awesome. Well, where can somebody go to get this white paper? Is it on your website?
Adam Nilsson:We're about to publish it quite soon on our website. I think it will be available in the upcoming days, and then you can get it from NAB as well, I think. But it's about to be published on our website. I think it'll be available in the upcoming days, and then you can get it from NAB as well, I think. But it's. It's about to be published on our site soon enough.
Mark Donnigan:Okay, okay, great. Well, we'll make sure we link up to it and you know, so people can very easily download it, because I I think this is going to get sent around some of the largest platforms out there and, you know, will definitely be reviewed. So, adam, where are your customers actually operating this hardware? So, if they're on AWS, today, netapp VPUs are not on AWS, so it's not like they can just select those instances. So, you know, are they running in their own data centers? Do you have partnerships? Are you hosting? What does that look like?
Adam Nilsson:So, well, we're cloud agnostic, so you can run the solution in any cloud you want, no matter if it's AWS or Oracle or GCP or whatever it may be. You can run it on your own data centers and, together with your solution, you can put that in a box. You can use that with our boxes or they can buy your boxes. The integration is there, and then the cloud integration with Akamai also will be available. Has that been public yet?
Mark Donnigan:Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah, yeah, netent VPUs on the akamai connected edge uh, connect to cloud oops, connect to cloud are, yeah, very real that can be leveraged as well.
Adam Nilsson:So you know, it depends on where the customers want to run it, but that is what we're trying to provide. Like it, we give you the flexibility of almost running it wherever you want, and that is the cool part of this. So most of our customers right now run it on-prem, so they would run it on either you know the encode solution or they would run their decode solution. But we are seeing more customers wanting to use it in the cloud, especially now that it's also available.
Mark Donnigan:On Akamai in particular, yeah.
Adam Nilsson:Yes.
Mark Donnigan:That's great. That's great. Well, the key takeaway there, in my mind, is that you offer flexibility. You're not locking someone in to either one particular platform or another or a limited. You know. As long as the resources that are needed are available, then you can run it anywhere. So yeah, that's great.
Adam Nilsson:Correct and that has always been sort of a key thing for us to be open and agnostic and all that.
Mark Donnigan:So yeah, yeah, amazing, yeah, it's very cool. Well, yeah, it's very cool. Well, what's next for you? You know, where are you taking Nimbra Edge, you know, and let's talk about kind of the near term, you know? So, any new features coming out, being announced, any, yeah, so, well working together with you guys.
Adam Nilsson:I know we have a bunch of stuff coming up during the year. I'm sure there will be more new cool features There'll be more announcements.
Adam Nilsson:Yes, so now it's about getting it out there, putting it in the hands of customers and getting it into production. We're also introducing this together with at the end of this year, we'll have an ad insertion solution focused on the American market and especially localized ads, where you can run this together. So that is our sort of next step Bring more features based on our joint effort, and especially the ad insertion part. So that's going to be, I think, tremendously fun and bring a lot of value to the market.
Mark Donnigan:Yeah, amazing, well, good. Well, adam, it was great talking with you again. I really appreciate your time and congratulations. You know, on all of the hey anytime, I actually wrote Tommy Flanagan a little note. I said hey, anytime someone gets some props from you, boy, it's a good day. Tommy's a great guy. I got so stressed.
Adam Nilsson:People say to me.
Mark Donnigan:These guys have seen your list.
Adam Nilsson:I'm like what have I said?
Mark Donnigan:Oh, no, what's Tommy going to say? No, tommy's a great guy. One of the things I actually do appreciate I don't know if everyone appreciates it is he says it how it is and maybe he has a slightly different view than we will at some times, but he says it how it is and the point is he did rightfully identify that NetInsight. Netinsight is doing something, you know, really new, really revolutionary, I think. Maybe saying you're back implies you were gone, which you clearly were not as a company. So but hey, it's, you know it's great. So, yeah, keep up the good work. We're excited for our partnership together and, you know, we're going to be talking about more exciting things in the not too distant future. So now I'm looking forward to it.
Mark Donnigan:Awesome, awesome, well, good, all right, well, thank you for all of those who are supporting Voices of Video. We certainly hope you find a ton of value in the content. We certainly hope you find a ton of value in the content and, by the way, if you have any questions, log them. You can reply to any of the numerous posts that we put out there. Put a comment in there. We actively monitor comments and we're happy to follow up. Reach out to Adam at NetInsight, you can reach out to me. You can reach out to anybody from either of our teams. I think both companies are pretty accessible, so love to talk to you and answer questions. So until next time, as I like to say, happy encoding.
Adam Nilsson:This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies. If you are looking for cutting-edge video encoding solutions, check out NetInt's products at netintcom.
