You Bought A VPU, Now Where Are The Brakes | Anatomy Of A Video Streaming Stack

The hardest part of streaming isn’t picking a codec or buying faster hardware. It’s making the whole system work together.

In this episode of Voices of Video, Mark Donnigan from NETINT sits down with Joe Waltzer, CEO of Arcadian, to break down the real anatomy of a modern video streaming platform and why teams so often stall at the last mile between a working demo and a production-ready service.

They walk through the core building blocks behind real-world workflows: CMS for metadata and app experience, DAM or MAM for managing assets, transcoding pipelines for device-ready outputs, and distribution systems spanning apps, APIs, and CDNs. Joe also highlights the often-overlooked avails and compliance layer, from licensing windows to geo blocking, and why mistakes here can turn into real business risk.

The conversation then zooms out to what matters today: cost pressure, practical uses of AI, and the push to bring services built for North America and Europe to underserved global markets.

They also dig into quality of experience. How studios define quality, why “good 720p” is real, and why viewers instantly feel issues like bad lip sync or subtitle timing even if they cannot explain them.

If you are building video pipelines, streaming apps, or end-to-end media systems, this episode gives you a clear view of what actually has to connect for quality, scale, and profitability.

Key topics:

• The five core systems: CMS, DAM or MAM, transcoding, distribution, and avails
 • Why “drop-in solutions” rarely exist in streaming
 • How Arcadian helps teams finish the last 5% to production
 • Integration vs building new platforms
 • Real-world operations: QC, audio sync, subtitles, edge cases
 • Cost reduction and where AI actually fits today
 • Scaling to underserved markets through efficiency
 • Why distribution matters more than “content is king”
 • Cloud gaming and the shift of bottlenecks to encoding
 • Studio quality standards and what viewers actually notice

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Transcript

Season Return And Guest Welcome

Mark Donnigan 0:07

Voices of video. Voices of video. The voices of video.

Voices of Video 0:12

Voices of video.

Mark Donnigan 0:17

Well, welcome back to this exciting episode of Voices of Video. And we are into, um, dare I say, an unofficial next season, the new season of Voices of Video. We did take a little bit of a hiatus there at the end of last year. And it's so good to be on the microphone, recording again, interviewing with so many amazing practitioners, experts building great stuff in the ecosystem, video streaming, video encoding. And today I'm joined again by Joe Waltzer, who is a CEO and the founder of Arcadians. So first of all, Joe, welcome.

Joe Waltzer 0:56

Hey, thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me again. It was uh great doing this with you last season. And I'm I'm thankful that you might be back for the next one. I'm looking forward to it.

Mark Donnigan 1:04

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, uh, I'm uh you know, I'm really happy for us to have this conversation because um you've been you've been supporting a number of our clients and our customers who are um building some really sophisticated workflows. And I thought it might be interesting to have you walk through the common functional building blocks that you encounter as someone who is retaining you to, you know, either build a video streaming service or a platform or maybe to, you know, make upgrades or to, you know, add features, et cetera. Because I think it's really important, you know, that we bring to the industry the end-to-end perspective. I always say that NetInt sells engines, but the reality is very, very, very few people that I know actually can build a car. I actually do have a friend, by the way, who actually does literally build cars as his hobby. You know, he's like, yeah. Um, but you know, he literally he'll he'll take an old classic 68 Mustang, which he's working on right now, or I think it's a 70, you know, strip the thing down to a frame, you know, you don't even know what it is, you know, and then he'll put a modern engine in it and put all kinds of uh braking system, etc. You know. Um, but for most of us, we need to go down to the Honda dealer and you know, test drive a few cars and work out with something that I don't have to build, right?

Joe Waltzer 2:40

Yep, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Donnigan 2:43

Yeah. So I I love that analogy though, because you know, we have found, and this is even why our two companies have engaged so closely, and you know, we're we're gonna be announcing some really exciting partnerships, even in terms of you helping more specifically, you know, with professional services and and uh some of the requirements of very large customers. Why don't we start with walk us through, you know, what the functional what the systems are, you know, when I say the the functional blocks, but the systems are in a modern, or shall we say, kind of typical video streaming workflow. Absolutely. And I think that'd be a great place to start our conversation.

Five Core Systems In Streaming

Rights, Avails, And Geo Blocking

Joe Waltzer 3:28

Yeah, great. So there's I would call there, I would say there's five sort of general, and these obviously depending on specific situations, some of these are the same system, but you know, do different tasks, so they're not always uh a completely separate thing. But we usually have what we'd call a CMS content management system, and that is what controls the flow of data through whatever system you're using for a modern mobile or you know, TV-based app that's that sort of lays out your headers and what images you want to do in marketing when you use it, sort of, you know, say hey, so the data we want to show on this website thing. So CMS is a very standard thing, obviously websites use it all the time, but we see that a lot. Um, there's always some sort of system to control the flow of the data. So there's always a CMS out there that we gotta talk with or that you know we're tying into. There's almost always a dam, some sort of or a MAM digital asset management or media asset management system, and that's the system that just says, here's all the stuff I have, here's all the videos, here's all the subtitles, here's all the audio tracks, here's the different cuts of the movies, and they're so those are usually controlled by two very different departments as well. So there's usually a media distribution team at the studios or at some of these big companies that control all of that content and they have a MAM or a DAM that they're using to sort of keep track of what they have. That's very common to see in these in these um workflows. And then you'll have a distribution system, and I'm lumping that together because that gets really complicated, but that's the app itself, right? There's an iOS or Android app somewhere, there's a TV, somewhere TV app, or a website or whatever you're using to actually show to users. But behind that, there's a CDN, right? So the media's got to be distributed close enough so it doesn't buffer. So there's CDNs, and then um there's APIs and a whole bunch of stuff that powers all of that. And the CMS will be integrated into that, so some people will will merge those two, but the CMS I always have separate because there's usually a different there's a different integration point with the apps and those APIs. So there's a distribution system out there that is very I mean, obviously that's the end result. So there's always a distribution system somewhere that needs to be talked to. And then the other one is uh there's transcoding, so that's the one that takes the media from generally the dam and then controlled by the CMS and it's told how to get from this format to that format because there's a hundred thousand different ways to package media for different platforms and OSs and screen sizes and resolutions and bit rates and codecs and frame rates and color color bit depth and yeah, different versions of I mean 4K and obviously I'm I'm glossing over all the details. Every one of these systems gets very specific and very detailed, and there's lots of just technical, you know, sort of intricacies with each one of them. And they're some of them are bespoke and they're custom-made, and some of them are off the shelf, and they'd have different integration points and issues and limitations. And um, some of them are you know 10, 15 years old, they've been built on for years, they people keep reusing the same systems, lots of complications with all of these points. Um and then there's one that's sort of out there that's uh not quite as known to most people, but it's it's the avail system. We always put that aside because that's sort of the legal and compliance system that gets missed, and that is a really important part of almost all distribution networks that doesn't get talked about enough, is that there's always some method to say this is something you can distribute, this is something that is legal to distribute, this is approved by corporate, you know, someone hasn't already sold these rights, you're allowed to do it. We don't see that in all of these of these um instances and workflows because a lot of companies just own everything and they're just like, you know, we're not worried about avails, we have the rights. And depending on sort of how they've managed their IP, that system is skipped in the sense that we don't have access to it. They're only sending us stuff that they already have rights to. So we don't always deal with an available system, but it's somewhere up the chain and you got to be ready for it and understand what the complications come with it.

Mark Donnigan 7:19

So I would actually I would actually argue that if you're dealing with any licensed content, yeah, I guarantee there is an available system. It just might be as simple as a geo block, you know.

Joe Waltzer 7:33

Absolutely.

Mark Donnigan 7:33

That's great. You know, so it may not be, you know, on some per title, there may not be some window, you know, where where something's coming available and then it's going away. Yeah. You know, and then all the complexities, but there could be a geo block. Well, uh a geoblock is an avail if you think about it. That's exactly right. I didn't think about that way. Well, then I better I better know if my user's in Mexico or at least do my best, you know, my best to try and determine that.

Joe Waltzer 8:03

Everyone has a geo block. I think everyone does that. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Donnigan 8:06

Exactly.

Joe Waltzer 8:07

Yeah, no one has formates for world-wide distribution.

Mark Donnigan 8:09

It's always a thing. If you're talking user-generated content, yeah, uh yeah, you know, then maybe not. But even then, like, you know, it's fascinating to think. Um, you know, there can be decency laws, you know, and so there could be certain types of filtering, maybe, that has to happen in certain countries or regions, or even certain types of content that can't be shown. Well, that's that's an available.

Joe Waltzer 8:34

Absolutely. Not every, I mean, not everyone's doing all their business in every country. I don't think I think YouTube is at its limits for you know where they want to send all of their content. So, yeah, it's a great point. It's as complicated as you can imagine and probably as complicated as you can make it. And they they've all got to talk to each other and they've all got to work right together because if they don't, I mean, sometimes there's some huge legal issues there, right? We don't run into that quite a lot, but you know, the potential is there. So you have to be aware of what is required and what's happening, and you have to be able to tie it all together because if you don't, huge mistakes can be made that can cause real problems.

Mark Donnigan 9:06

You know, during the pandemic, um uh and and and this is not that this was not relevant exactly to like availability of content in countries. Yeah. But although, you know, Netflix, as they were expanding, you know, eight or ten years ago, uh, you know, into various countries, they certainly did run into some issues where, you know, the national filmmakers and you know, the government's like, hey, we want to support our movie industry, you know, so we don't want you to just bring in all, you know, so you need to bring a certain percentage of, you know, whatever French films or Italian films or you know, whatever. But I can remember during the pandemic, early on in the pandemic, when uh I think it was the European Union, but it's certainly there were some European countries, and and I believe UK even, although with Brexit, you know, they're but anyway, UK will we'll consider them a part part of Europe in this discussion, were actually saying that Netflix had to cut their bit rates because of internet traffic, you know, and and and there and there were some valid and in my personal opinion, maybe not so valid reasons, you know, why they would say that. But it doesn't matter, is the point, whether you agree with it or not. You know, the point is that they have to adhere to that. And you can't be streaming a 20 megabit or an 18 megabit K file, you know, and I I'm just I'm going off memory, so uh listener will have to fact check me, but I think it was around 10 megabits, was like they couldn't stream above 10 megabits. Yeah, that's and that's you know, well, guess what that meant? It's gonna be hard to deliver high quality 4K at 10 megabits. Guess what? You had to make sure in those regions you're only sending maybe 1080p, or maybe you're sending, you know, kind of two and a half K or something.

Joe Waltzer 10:59

Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's yeah, I mean, we could probably talk forever just about all the wacky stuff.

Mark Donnigan 11:03

We could talk forever, you know, it becomes a little bit of a rabbit trail, but I do like the but but it but it shows again, you know, going back to kind of my my my extremely brief little intro, the reason why I'm excited to have this conversation with you is that yes, we sell engines, but at NetInt, we have to know how not only not only all the components of the car, yeah, but how each component interoperates, you know, what are the you know, what happens if you have a uh either a you know a too small of a braking system, for example, you know, yeah. So you've got a thousand horsepower engine, hey, you know, which the VPU I like to think is a thousand horsepower engine, but what if your braking system is is built for a for a 300 horsepower engine, you know, like you could have a problem, you know. Your car, yeah, your car can be in danger.

Joe Waltzer 11:58

Well, also if you've got a huge engine, you spend a ton of money on it, and it it's not profo and you're getting nothing out of it because there's a problem with, like you said, tires, or there's some other system that isn't talking to it properly, and now you're like, why'd I spend all this money on this great engine and I can't even get out of it? So yeah, there's it's a problem.

Arcadian Builds And Integrates Platforms

Mark Donnigan 12:17

You are working primarily in Hollywood with the largest studios, but you know, give us a a quick overview again of the systems that you're building and the work that you're doing, and then and then we'll circle back around to you know to talk into some more detail about you know the whole streaming workflow and you know what your team Absolutely.

Joe Waltzer 12:40

So my company, Arcadian, touches all of those systems. We we don't build a veil systems, obviously work with them, but everything else, distribution systems, transcoding systems, CMS's DAMS, we've built those sort of from scratch from different requirements from our clients. So we we sort of are in all of those places. One of the things that we found as we've done this for the past seven years now, is that our real specialty is getting clients' projects to that 100% mark. When I was in the studio industry before that, you would get a third-party solution and you'd integrate it and you'd work with it, and it wouldn't do what exactly what you wanted it to do. And you'd have to like make some custom and then then you'd get all this comment like, how do I do this? So our company mostly lives in between. We we work with a bunch of people who have a solution, like they already have a dam and they have a distribution and a platform. But to your point, they want to make that better. And so they want to get some VPUs and they want to put them in a server and they maybe want to do it on-prem, and that's a great they can see the use case and the business use case for that, and it's gonna save them lots of money. But then they like, wait a minute, we gotta damn knows to talk to that thing. So, you know, they've they've got this sort of problem of integrating everything together and then making it run properly. Like you said, the Android's got to talk to everything else. So that's where we spend a lot of our time, and we've built you know, apps that are streaming apps, iOS, Android apps, web apps. Um we built apps for we did a ride view app, which is in cars or you know, car-based streaming application. Um we've done some work with PlayStation. So we've been sort of all over at the end of the chain, but most of our real work has been in that upstream, getting all of those platforms, those those legacy platforms, those things that don't normally talk together to talk to each other and do it in a way that's efficient and it works and it it makes m maximizes all that stuff. So that's where most of our conversations end up with our clients is they have X, they want to get it to Y. They've kind of figured out Z in the middle there, but it's not it's not enough to get it to production. It's not working exactly how they want it to, and they want us to sort of fix it.

New Builds Versus Integration Reality

Mark Donnigan 14:36

So much uh I'm I'm curious how much of your work is, I'm going to call it integration, which again is incredibly important. But how much is integration and how much is building something brand new? Some either new app or yeah, you know, I'm just curious. That's a good question.

Joe Waltzer 14:54

I'd say it's probably 50-50 because there's always a the integration usually comes after the discussion for the app. So someone will say I have some content and I want to build an app and I'll we'll use Radview. That was one of our successful apps. I need to get this into a a car and I want to stream into a car. Yeah, it was Sony. Yes. It's in Mercedes and VinFest. So yeah, that's all out there. Check out Radview. If you have a Mercedes, you'll see Radview and Vinfest. So that's that's usually what we get to. Like, hey, we want to we have this sort of RFP or request for proposal for building an app that works in a Mercedes car. And that's great. Well, you know, sit down and have those conversations. We have a whole process we go through where we sort of have discovery and we we sit with the client, understand their needs. And then as we start having those in-depth conversations, we realize that, okay, where is the content coming from? And they may or may not have a distribution system for some other app. So okay, now we have to like fork that and tie into that, and now we have an integration point. And oh, this is you know, and this isn't a car, and now we have to be transcode this because what we're using now is the work with the different outputs, different bit rates, different Light. Yeah.

Mark Donnigan 16:04

Yeah, you need smaller bit rates, maybe audio formats are a big one.

Joe Waltzer 16:09

This car doesn't support this audio format. We need new audio formats. So now we're we're building another integration point because they probably already have a transcoding platform, but it doesn't support the outputs they need. So now we're we're tying into that. And so I would say most of our work starts at the project level where someone just has a solution in mind that they want to, I have a proposal. And then as we get deeper and deeper, we tend to end up building more upstream to sort of support that all end to end. And that's yeah, I would say that's a pretty normal workflow for us, is to start with the idea and then get to the integration point.

Mark Donnigan 16:39

Yeah, it's it's the fact that you're able to engage at the at the how do I how do I say it? I was gonna say like the conceptual point, but in a way that's what it is. Absolutely. Because they have an idea, right? You know, or and maybe it was mandated, like go figure this out. Or maybe it's literally like, hey, you know, I wonder, we've got this library of content, or, you know, or or there's this opportunity, I wonder if we could build something around that. So they have to come talk to you and bounce, you know, and and you're bouncing ideas back and forth. It's fascinating. And this is, you know, I I I I guess I'm almost going to be pre-announcing a little bit, which is okay because you know, we're already bringing you into opportunities, you know, net in opportunities. And really I would argue a hundred percent of the cases, but you know, then maybe there's a green field out there, I just haven't, I'm not thinking about. But when we're selling VPUs, yeah, the customer has an existing system or platform or something. It's it's not like they're just gee, we would like to encode video, you know. And so by definition, they have a car. You can you can tell I like cars, I kind of naturally you know gravitate towards that. So yeah, so in fact, uh, well, I can't quite see in the video here, but over on that side, there's some there's there's some cars up on the shelves there, you know. So anyway, you know, so so so it's like you know, we're you know, we bring the engine, but you know, we bring the engine with the VPU, but you know, but they have a car today. So they're like, this is amazing, the most amazing engine, but what do I do with an engine? And so that's where we're bringing you in. And you know, in some cases, it's just a matter of saying, oh, okay, you know, you're deployed on this, you know, public cloud, and you know, it's very well understood, you know, what that service is, how it works. We basically need to um, you know, rebuild the the primary features, or maybe we integrate with some other commercial solution that's already integrated the VPU, but there's always additional work to be done. And then, you know, occasionally it might be, hey, you know, yeah, we're using a solution, but we're really not happy with it. Let's talk about building what we really want. Yeah, you know, and so that's again where you would be doing not as much or really any of the integration. You'd be build literally building the platform, you know.

Joe Waltzer 19:11

Yeah, that's a lot of our conversation. I actually just had some interesting conversations with some potential clients on this week that were just that. Like we've we've seen the benefit of this new engine, we see the benefit of this new thing, but it it is a lot of VPU conversations because they're they really are an amazing solution for a lot of people. And I think you said everyone's streaming. So who doesn't want to stream more efficiently? I mean, the answer is everyone, so they're all very excited, and then they sort of get stuck with like this doesn't quite work. It's not it's there's no drop-in solutions in this world.

Mark Donnigan 19:39

I people might try to sell a drop-in solution, but I've never seen anything that just by the way, there are no drop-in solutions, right?

Joe Waltzer 19:46

It's all a little bit of a lie. There's always some integration point that you didn't think about, there's always some complication that you didn't quite consider, and then you get a little stuck and you're like, Well, is it I don't know how to fix this and now I'm I don't know how to move forward. And so we that's where we step in and have a lot of great conversations. Like, what do you, you know, what are you trying to accomplish? What are your pain points? And then me and my team, we've got all this great experience saying, Okay, well, these are uh the solutions for some of these pain points. This is how you do this, and it's all very technical. We talked about those five things, they're all different, it's all custom, it's there's no one size fits all answer. And that's sort of our our sweet spot, is where they're to get this project to the 100% mark, right? Because the drop-in solutions get you 80%, maybe 95% are the best case. But something's gonna not work the way you think it is, and you're gonna need to get some really deep technical stuff. And you don't want to have an internal team for that because there's never enough work to maintain that team. So external teams like mine are great. You give us a call, it takes us a you know, we'll give you a quote, it's a month, two months, two weeks, depends on sort of the scope, and then we can solve your problem and hand it off to you, and there you go. You know, we're there to support you for going forward. You call us if there's a problem.

Mark Donnigan 20:53

Do you ever get so I'm curious, post delivering the solution? Do you ever get pulled into like even people say, gee, it'd be great if you could stick around and operate this for us, you know, or you know, something that's a little more than just even like a maintenance agreement. I'm I'm sure you're not standard maintenance agreements just so that they know they can call you and you're gonna pick up the phone. But yeah, do you ever get pulled into more like even operating a platform?

Joe Waltzer 21:23

All the time. We have we have a media services team that's different than our RVCR development team that does just that, operates a lot of these platforms and and is they're transcoding specialists so they can help with the the complications of the actual transcode, not just the implementation of the workflow. So we do a lot of that. And that that's we sort of pride ourselves on that. Oh yeah, uh whatever we need. We've there's a whole nother world of how do we make sure this content is right and it's the right format, and we've got to test it because the audio tracks don't align or the subtitle tracks are off, and how do we work through that? And I mean, there's a whole world of just content issues that we could go into too, and we specialize in that as well as helping users. Work through that and then obviously building custom workflows to automate a lot of that and to speak truthfully about what's possible. Big subject. We have a lot of like, hey, can I just do this? And the answer is, yeah. It depends on how what your quality bar is. If you want the best quality stuff, hey, it's probably not there. But you know, if you want like just sort of a quickie check, then okay, sure, it'll catch up with some stuff. So just that's I think what I wanted to build our key on because I was in the industry. I service and being there for the client and working with them. And that's, you know, we want to get repeat business. We want people to be able to call us when they have a problem and say, hey, we had a great time working with you before. Let's let's work again. I think that's just how you grow a company like ours, a services company, to just be available, be honest, be up front, and just have those discussions and just be clear with what, hey, this is what we think, this is the best way forward, and and you know, go from there. And I think that's just uh that's right. I think that's just a good way to run a company, honestly.

Customer Priorities: Cost And AI

Mark Donnigan 22:55

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, we're really excited to have you in the VPU ecosystem booth at NAB. And I know that, you know, especially since you work extensively in Hollywood and NAB obviously being, you know, Vegas, so it's close, but you know, it it also is the show that all the studios attend and everybody goes to. So yeah, so for you know, any listeners who are listening and intrigued or saying, wow, I I think I could use someone like like Arcadian. We need help, you know, there'll be a great chance to uh go visit. You know, Joe will be there. I know a few other members of of his team, and you know, they'll be in our booth. That's the NetInt booth, the VPU ecosystem booth. Um, I just uh think it'd be a great opportunity. Well, Joe, you know, I um would be remiss if I didn't pick your brain a little bit on what, you know, it's it's not about like your prediction of the future in terms of either technologies that are gonna, you know, really catch fire or you know, everybody wants to know codex, you know, is it gonna be or 82? Or, you know, it's like anymore. I'm like, yes, you know, I have my opinions. We watch the market very closely, we talk to our customers a lot. So, you know, we get a lot of data. But I'm curious to, you know, just hear from you. What are your customers caring about today? What do they really care about? And I'm gonna purposefully leave that very open and broad. You can answer that from a technical perspective, from a business, from whatever, you know, just what are they caring costs that's um so the obvious answer is cost, right?

Scaling Streaming To Underserved Markets

Joe Waltzer 24:41

Everyone is hey, how do I do the same thing for? I mean, that's the age-old question. How do I do the same thing for less money or more efficiently? So I think a lot of our conversations start there. We have this process, it was working, now it's not. Sorry, my cat just jumped up on the table, of course. Now it's not. And so how do we make this better? How do we fix it? There's a mandate to save money, there's a mandate to do that. So that's a big question. AI is obviously on everyone's mind. How can that help me save money? Is usually the question there. And then the other thing I want to everyone's interested about is I think we've gotten to this point in the industry. And this is just my take and my limited sort of viewpoint, is that everyone's sort of figured out how to distribute the good stuff and get to the people. And Netflix is a worldwide, you know, um company, and they've they seem to have sort of plateaued with the number of users who are willing to pay for Netflix, and that's great. They're hundreds of millions of users, right? So I think we've we're at this point, we're yeah, 300 million, something like almost that. So we've got to this point where all the networks have sort of figured out how to do what they do and distribute to the people they have. We we've sort of turned this corner on distribution. And it's now becoming like, well, now that we've sort of sorted this out, how do we really squeeze every dollar we can out of this process? And how do we bring this to everybody everywhere? Because I think that's the next race is sort of these underserved markets, the people that are are everyone in the world wants to watch content. I mean, that's sort of this great part about this. The whole world is your market, honestly, right? There's I don't know anyone who doesn't want to watch a video, especially something that is relevant to them. So a lot of our clients are like, okay, great, we've we've put our stuff out there, we have a really powerful, it's a really robust streaming service, it's working amazingly. Um, it was built for sort of these American and European markets, and the margins were built based on those prices and the the we talk about AVOD and the ability to, you know, get CPMs in the $20 range, things like that. But you know, that obviously doesn't work for the whole world, and we just see this sort of untapped rest of the world market. So how do we get more efficient? Because if we run the same models and we just put that in, like, say Southeast Asian markets, we we just won't make any money because it's not built for that. That's when we start having conversations about VPUs and and you know, bringing maybe some stuff from the cloud to on-prem and what are the places we can sort of really get efficient. And that's that's where we've had some really great conversations about let's take a look at what you've built and let's see what you're trying to do, and let's see where we can help make the engine a little bit more powerful, but actually for less money. And so I think that's the next phase is people trying to figure out how to bring this system they've built that's been very successful to the rest of the world. And then obviously you talk about back catalogs, you're talking about people have really deep libraries that how do I make this profitable? How do I bring this because people want to watch this old stuff and always want to watch the latest thing? And yeah. That's been most of my interesting high-level conversations is about we wanna we wanna figure this out and dominate the market because someone's gonna figure out how to get this to everyone efficiently and how to make money on this for everyone. And whoever does that, that's YouTube's kind of ahead there, but everyone else is trying to figure it out too. And I think that's yeah, that's where we're at.

Mark Donnigan 27:53

Yeah, you know, we hear quite frequently content is king. And as anyone who's you know read some of my posts online or heard me on various, you know, podcast interviews, whatever, knows I abhor this whole idea of streaming wars. You know, I I I don't believe in it. It's absolutely a ridiculous concept. But you know, going along with that is this idea of content is king. If you just have, if you just have sports, you're gonna be rich. You know, you're gonna be successful. If you just have this, if you just have that. And reality is, is distribution is king. Distribution is king. And and I love you know what you're saying because of course we see this because we're living it every day. We're enabling a lot of these services. But oftentimes people will say, you know, when you know they've deployed or at some point through the sales process or whatever, they'll say, you know why we're really interested in this? You know, like, sure, sure, you know, we absolutely care about saving money and we're gonna save a ton. Yes, we want to reduce our energy footprint and this does it. So, like the obvious things, but that's that's not everything. Without this, we wouldn't even have a viable business. You know, or or we wouldn't, I can think of several very large cloud gaming platforms where uh the very first one that deployed VPUs and the second one said the same thing, but the very first one they said without VPU, we wouldn't even be able to offer to our customers a cloud game. Yeah, and not from a technical perspective. They of course they could do it technically, but it would be so obscenely expensive operationally that like no no one would even dream of it. And it's really fascinating because when you shift the mindset of adopting technology, not as just it's gonna it it it it's it's it's better, it's faster, it's cheaper. But better, faster, cheaper is good. But if it's an enabler to something that couldn't exist, that's where the value is created. And so I I just love that because and obviously, you know, we talk a lot, and so you know, I know about uh engagements that you're both working on and have worked on, and you know, and I know that it's like it's an enabler to being able to offer content, build a service that couldn't exist otherwise, you know, and uh that's a wonderful place to be.

Cloud Gaming Hits The Encoding Wall

Joe Waltzer 30:32

It is, it's a great point. I mean, we just had another conversation with another client about that same thing, and you see things like the sports streaming rates are just they're going up and up and up because sports know that content is king, and as they say, and and that they just are charging more and more and more. You can look at the deals the NFL's making to just see how that's getting nuts. And then they're not gonna that those prices aren't coming down. So all these people have that have these rates are like, I I gotta save money somewhere else because the sports rates are going up and up and up, but now my my costs can't just go up, people at some point will stop. So we have a lot of we've had some interesting conversations about how do I take these sports rights and how do I distribute them as efficiently as possible. Because I, you know, like you said, if you for the the cloud gaming, if if you if you can't afford to do it, then the market's just not there for you. And this these are enablers. It's a great way to put it. Just being able to open up a new line of revenue, a new way of doing things is is people are sort of opening their eyes to like this is possible now. I can make this work. The the technology is there, the the ability to deliver this in a in an efficient way is there, and now I can open up all these new markets. That's those are the most exciting conversations to have, because we have quite a few of those around sports, back catalogs, like I mentioned, that people are like, just was never efficient to do a back catalog distribution because it's it's just really hard and there's a lot of work, and now that things are just getting I don't want to say it's simpler, because it's still complex, but it's it's more approachable and it's it's it's achievable, it's doable. And that's and I think that's changed in the last five years because even five years ago, you would just say it's not you can't do it. It's not financially viable at this point to do what you want to do. So we just have to wait. But yeah, VP has unlocked a lot of those conversations for us for sure. That oh wow, I can do this now. And we have people say that it's the recognition, oh wow, it's that cheap. Like, yeah, it is. And like, oh, I have I have thoughts. Now that I have unlocked this, then let me get back to you with what we want to do with this ability.

Mark Donnigan 32:22

And you know, it's fascinating, you know, circling background on on the cloud gaming, the the other thing is it's opening up new entertainment experiences. Um you know, like, okay, if if you're um if you're satisfied, or if you just don't need a Kodak that's more efficient than H264, and if 720p or 1080p at the highest resolution is adequate, you know, um, and if you're willing to crush the bitrate a little bit, you know, actually it is possible because a lot of people are doing it to just continue to run CP software on commodities CPUs x86, spin it up on your favorite public cloud, and and have a great day, you know. Many, many, many workflows are still built on that. But the problem is that the consumer has not stayed there. The consumer now is carrying around a phone with OLED display on the phone that is in some cases their native 4K, you know, which is absolutely incredible how small those pixels are, you know. But but you know, they look absolutely amazing. And so now the consumer is going, well, wait a second, why does this not look good? You know, and then you put it up on a TV and it's like, well, wait a second, you know, Netflix looks awesome. Why does this service over here, or my local cable company or whatever, why does that not look good? You know, and it becomes a reference, right? And so the consumer is now pushing then this, this, this, uh, you know, is pushing everybody architecturally to technologies that can cost, you know, effectively, so meaning affordably, deliver 4K, record, uh, not record, ENCODE, you know, with high quality but at reasonable bit rates, all the things that you need. So cloud gaming is fascinating because still, you know, we have uh a couple extremely large platforms that use VPUs, and um there there still is a little bit of a perception across the industry, like, okay, it's fine, but it's certainly not gonna be your triple A games, not gonna be your double-A games, it's gonna be your, you know, the you know, the the leisure games, you know, like back backgammon online, yeah, you know, chess online, yeah, yeah. The games are a little better than that. But the the point is, like, you know, don't even dream. Well, it turns out that um now because GPUs are are are so amazing, so they can render these games with very, very high capacity, high density, the real bottleneck in these cloud gaming platforms is in the encoding. It's in the hardware encoding. And so all of a sudden it's like, well, wait a second, if we were to if we were to rethink how we're doing this and not use our built-in encoder in some SOC, you know, which is probably a 10-year-old chip, which probably the quality is not so great. It's using H264, it's not using H E B C or AV. You know, now not only are you enabling cloud gaming, but you're now now enabling the games that people would have said you're dreaming to be able to, you know, there's no way you're gonna deliver you know a triple A title with fast action at 60 frames at 4K, because the bandwidth is in all of our homes now, you know. So I say all of our homes. I'm speaking at North America, you know, I'm speaking, uh obviously different regions of the world, but even you know, I just recently got back from a trip through Asia, and I know we we had a chance to connect on that trip, and you know, using my virtual sim and and you know, just on my iPhone, I frequently was G at 30 or 40 or 50 megabits.

Joe Waltzer 36:21

Yeah, it's it's the world is catching up for sure.

Mark Donnigan 36:24

Yeah, and it's not and and I wasn't in Tokyo, you know, or I wasn't in you know, Beijing or Shanghai, or you know, the point is it's not like I was trying I wasn't way out in remote areas, but you know, I wasn't in a city where it's like, okay, but you were in, you know, yeah, no, you know, I would expect that.

Joe Waltzer 36:41

But a lot of people would expect to not have that kind of service, but it's there. Yeah, it's it's true.

Bandwidth Everywhere And The Attention Fight

Mark Donnigan 36:45

It was uh yeah, it was it was it it was just really mind opening to me, like, okay, you know, bandwidth, and it's gonna be five to seven years before even satellite server. I I mean it's just gonna be bandwidth will be ubiquitous. Now that doesn't mean free, it doesn't mean, you know, obviously if there's a huge building that's blocking the satellite, well, okay, you know, you're still gonna have a problem, right? But but you know, bandwidth is there. So now what we're talking about is the new compute architectures. Yeah. Are you seeing this? You know, because I know you're you know, you're you're talking to customers building all kinds of cool stuff. And I mean, does this resonate?

Joe Waltzer 37:27

Absolutely. It's it's a um it's a great point. It's is you want to be where the customers are. Like so for cloud gaming, there's the customers have an expectation, they have what they want, and it doesn't matter what you want to give them if you can't meet their expectations, whether they're realistic or not, it doesn't matter. Customers, like, I don't want to play 720p, whatever the latest game is. Yeah, I'm not having it.

Mark Donnigan 37:51

I don't want 30 frames per second.

Studio Quality Bars And Trade-Offs

Joe Waltzer 37:53

You know, and so you get you you you get you feel like, well, I then this isn't a viable business. And you know, we've seen obviously some of these these businesses close, but then as you so dig a little deeper, you realize that it's first of all, it's coming and you want to be ready for it. So, like you said, the the infrastructure, the networking, you know, cellular is just it's everywhere now. We have satellites that are doing high-I mean, Starlink is literally worldwide, and I've been to places in the middle of nowhere where they're getting a Starlink signal and they're you can game and play also stream 4K there. And that's that you know wasn't even around five years ago. So everyone is seeing this trend where the world is getting connected quick, and everyone knows that everyone loves content. They want to play games, they want to watch videos, and everyone has a limited amount of attention. And this is something that uh we've had a lot of conversations for everyone saying that basically everyone's attention at this point is saturated, especially in you know places like the States. You've only got so much time in a day to be on a screen, so now you're fighting for the quality of that attention, and that's a very limited commodity. You can't come out with some junky service, you'll just get pushed away by the service that's doing what you're trying to do, but doing it better. So everyone understands it. It's it's a quick, it's it's the world's moving fast, and people are seeing these trends and they wanna they want to get ready for it now because the first person there who does it successfully, the first person who gets that attention block, it's really hard to push that person, that that attention aside because people will just be like, hey, this is my cloud gaming service, this is the service I use, it works great, it meets all my needs. Why would I try another service? It's really hard, as everyone knows, to sort of break in with you have to have a better service then. And so everyone's I I think most of the conversations we have, especially around video streaming, but um, gaming is probably the same thing. We want to be there when the users get there. We want to, and that's soon. You say in two years for Starlink to be everywhere, you've got to start planning your systems now. You've got to start having your services ready today before when those clients are like they get connected. So what you want to have when that Starlink dish gets delivered to that farm in the middle of Indonesia and they turn it on, your service has got to be there waiting for that customer because that that's how you win customers and that's how you build services.

Mark Donnigan 40:01

So I everyone's talking about it I have an interesting question for you. You work with the studios, Hollywood Studios, and you know, we can't share the names, but you know, they're the obvious ones. Um Hollywood Studios are known for good reason. They spend 300 million on making a film. They want the qual, you know, they want to preserve that quality through all distribution chains at the absolute highest possible, and even then some, you know, if possible. So so they are known to have the you know the highest bar ever of any of the distribution or any of the content companies, I guess you would say, for quality. And yet, so the the question that I have is is this so they have this very high bar, and yet at the same time, you know, they have content that they can't afford to spend a lot of money maybe encoding or processing, or you know, or there's something else about the dynamics of the business where there has to be a trade-off. How does a studio think about this? Because they're doing it, you know, they clear they're capitalists, they you know, they they have an asset, they spent 300 million making the movie, they spent 300 million marketing the movie, they've got 600 million dollars, sometimes even more, right? But you know, and I know budgets are shrinking, but still hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. They're not just gonna go, well, we you know, we can't encode that, or we can't, you know, distribute that in the quality that we deem re so we're just not gonna do it. So, how do they approach this balance and trade-off? You must be in some interesting conversations, you know, where you hear them even debating this in real time, you know. How are they thinking about this?

Joe Waltzer 41:51

So we've had we're always in that little bit of a conversation about that about where's the line? And um, all the students we've worked with, yeah, there's usually a department or a team that's that sort of sets those standards. And a lot of what the golden eyes, right? Yeah, the golden eye. I mean, these are people who have this is their job, they know what to look for, they know, they understand um what to do. And a lot of that is not necessarily that they won't do a low quality version of something. I mean, they'll they'll do a 480p if it makes sense financially for them, and they'll do you know 720, and they'll they'll go you know a little bit, right? There's some lower limits, but most of the quality is about sort of the core quality so that the colors are not getting more messed up than they have to, because a lot of what happens at transcoding is you do a lot of tweaking, you do a lot of changing settings and doing a bunch of things that are required to sort of meet this very fine line of okay, this is 720, but it's it's good 720. And that's kind of a weird thing to say, but there's a such a thing as a good 720 in a base.

Mark Donnigan 42:51

Yeah, no, there that that absolutely is. That absolutely is. I mean, the Super Bowl, you know, it was well, it was distributed in 4K, but it actually was 1080p 60 upscaled, you know. But Comcast, you know, and they put out a great blog post. Dan Rayburn talked about it, you know, how they did this, you know, it I mean, they were using an iframe codec. I mean, and the Super Bowl looked amazing. Yeah you know, looked absolutely amazing, and it's 1080p.

Joe Waltzer 43:20

Yeah.

Mark Donnigan 43:20

I mean 1080p.

Joe Waltzer 43:22

There's a lot of conversations around that. It's a great point that that there's there's a technical limitation, everyone understands that, and they want to find solutions for that technical limitation of transcoding and distributing, but there's also a quality conversation that also has to be met. It's it's part of every conversation. I've never had a conversation in the studio where we build a work phone, someone said, I don't care what it looks like. That that just isn't gonna happen. Yeah, okay. Someone is gonna review it upstream that that is, like you said, the golden eye, and say, okay, this is acceptable as probably maybe the right word. But yeah, they're gonna review it and approve all of these workflows. And and someone for the Super Bowl, I'm sure there was someone who said, Yeah, this is a the 4K upscaling is done right, it meets our quality standards, quality is It's never not been part of the conversation. It's a great point. It's something else to take in into consideration for sure for all these workflows.

Mark Donnigan 44:06

But I think it's interesting, you know, and I just want to point out a nuance when you talk about quality, because and and look, it is absolutely the case that no two studios, no two streaming services, no two video platforms are going to view the word quality. And I really do put that in quotes the same way. You know, one, you know, could care, you know, about certain kinds of things, either based on maybe their content, you know, or something they clearly know about their audience and what their audience cares about, that the other one's like, ah, we don't care about that, but this other, you know, so um, so that's always the case. But you said something that was interesting, is that I think sometimes um quality is looked at like, okay, if I put two reference displays side by side, and I, you know, and I'm and I'm advancing frame by frame. Can I see the macro block? Can I see the, you know, and you, you know, and there's the image, and I've been in rooms with guys with their glasses on, six inches off the screen, you know, examining. That's one element of it. Okay, so I'm not making fun of that, but that's one element. But you said something. It's like, are you crushing blacks? Are you, you know, are you preserving color? Are you, you know, some of those things, and and I've been in sessions where like that was just completely dismissed. Nobody's looking at that. And I'm sitting here going, okay, that one clearly does not look as good, even though people are like, oh, I love how there's no banding, it preserves it, you know. There, uh and I'm going, but look at the color. Like it doesn't look right, you know? And people are like, oh, yeah, well, you know, but but but look, it does a better job on edges, you know. It's like okay, but it doesn't, but my eyes tell me that doesn't look real, you know.

Joe Waltzer 46:03

It's this really interesting hidden truth, I think, with consumers. It's fascinating, isn't it?

Mark Donnigan 46:07

You know, this whole thing.

Joe Waltzer 46:08

It's it's one of those things where people are like, does anyone care? It's always a question, like, who cares if you crush the black? Would anyone notice? And you you say to yourself, well, you know what, I mentioned 95% of consumers would never even see it. It just would look weird to them. But it it would look weird to them. And that's something that I don't think people it's hard to quantify. I think your gaming streaming, the the cloud gaming is a great way to put it. If you make a game at 1080p 60 frames a second, and you make a game at 720p, 30 frames a second, people will notice. They won't necessarily be able to visual or verbalize what is wrong with that, but they'll be like, this is it they're you know, the back of their brain will be like, this is less superior. I don't like this as much as I something's wrong. And they're not gonna call you and say, hey, this is 720 30. They're gonna just be like, I don't really, I don't like this. And so that's why I think quality is is this is this bar that the studios want to set, because they don't they don't want to have that. They they want to make sure that this is, you know, it's an art form too. Do you want to stay true to what the director's visions are and there's the whole you know thing with that? But I think that the smart people, and not everyone's smart, but I think everyone sort of gets this in the in the back of their mind that you don't want people to perceive your your service as low quality and having bad video transcoding and bad artifacting and those things, some of it's obvious, but some of it's not, but everyone notices it, and I've seen that before. And so that's I think why it's a really important discussion to have about quality. One of the great ways to think about it too, because video can be a little tricky to describe, is subtitling. So we do a lot of quality checks for subtitling. And when a subtitle is off and it's not quite aligned to the speaking, everyone here would be like, it's just it hurts your brain. And it's it's go go try to watch a video that has a misaligned subtitle. It's not it's almost unwatchable at some point. Same with misaligned audio. People misaligned audio will stand out immediately and you'll be like, This is I can't watch this, this makes me crazy.

Mark Donnigan 48:00

Oh, lip sync, lip sync. And you know, it reminds me, Joe, and and uh, you know, you've been the studio ecosystem for a long time, so this will really resonate with you. Maybe you even know the demo I'm talking about. I am pretty certain it was TA years ago. And when I say years ago, like it would have been 20 years, maybe even 25 years ago, which shows how long I've been sort of at all this. Did a demo, and what the demo was was super high quality video with low quality audio, like audio that was just clearly, you know, was low resolution, you know, it it it just clearly wasn't good. And then they showed the viewer a lower resolution video that you know was just not quite as sharp and not but with extremely high quality audio, and they asked which they thought looked better. It's very important, not which they liked better, which looked better. So they asked to make a visual, and do you know, like the majority of people chose the lower quality video, but with the higher quality audio. I remember it just, you know, it just really like challenged a lot of the assumption. And so why do we talk about all this? You know, the reason we talk about it is that I think, first of all, anyone working for even three days in video, you know, building a workflow, operating a workflow, you know, selling technologies, whatever, will know that video is hard, no two systems are built alike, they can use all the same standards, all the same tech buzzwords, and yet look completely different under the hood, you know. That's why, that's why Arcadian exists. But but I I I think it's I I think it's a very useful instruction, you know, for us to occasionally kind of check in even on our own, you know, dare I say, biases, you know, you know, biases. This technology is always better than that. Oh, this resolution is always better than that one. Oh, this codec is always better, this, you know, just fill in the blank is always better. Because again, you know, going back to like my comment about THX, like, you know, it's fascinating, right? At the end of the day, it's what does our user perceive? You know, and do they walk away and say, wow, every time I watch that service, you know, or watch that channel or watch, you know, whatever, you know, uh, I love it. And everything else just doesn't seem as good. You know, they can't quantify it, they don't need to quantify it. That's not their job, it's our job to understand why that is and deliberate.

Joe Waltzer 50:44

One thing we come across is that there's this, there's no solution. I mean, sometimes people think that there's an answer to the question.

Mark Donnigan 50:49

No, like off the shelf, like, oh, here's the that's what you need. You need model 773.

Joe Waltzer 50:54

Yeah. Uh you know, a streaming service on high-end 4K TVs is gonna have a very different requirement than a mobile, you know, Southeast Asian audience that with different, you know, like Note G, maybe, but you more LTE. So there's just like there's a user, but you know, sort of capital U user, but then there's the the lower, like each each platform, each streaming solution, each everything you do, it's always a question of where where you you know, where do you compromise? I guess is the best way to put it. Because there's always some like this would be the way to do it if you quality was your preferred, like I want the highest quality, great. That's not gonna work here, you're not gonna fuse it. So I want you know the most distribution possible. And you're like, great, now you've compromised quality. And I want the cheapest solutions that triangle of uh product manager use that is cheap, fast, and uh and good. Yeah, and so every project has that where where do you where do you find the balance?

Mark Donnigan 51:51

They're all yeah, you have the levers, right? You've gotta get them, and you know, and and every project is different. And yeah, well, that makes your job um yeah a challenge, but also really fun.

Joe Waltzer 52:03

I love it. We love that challenge. It's great.

NAB Plans And How To Reach Us

Mark Donnigan 52:05

It's it's yeah, it's great. Well, good. Um, you know, Joe, thank you again for coming on. Always love our talks. And uh actually I really liked um this one today because uh we we we went in some uh some interesting directions previously we've not covered, and yet I think are so important. I just want to end on this note, you know, I I hinted at it, um, but I but I don't think it's inappropriate to you know to say that um we are uh you know starting to work quite closely with you and the team. And for you know, any anybody who's looking to deploy VPUs, and even if you're not, but you could use the help of Arcadian, then make sure you come come talk to talk to them. Uh you can go to their website, of course, they'll be at NAB. You can send me a DM, I'll connect you. There's a Joe's online on LinkedIn, uh very easy to find. But we're we are really excited because um, you know, we have a very strong team to support our our product, but that's like supporting the engine, right? You know, so we have the mechanics to you know make sure that engine's really humming and make sure it works, but you know, we don't work on brake systems.

Joe Waltzer 53:18

Yep, that's what we're for. We'll fix your brakes.

Mark Donnigan 53:20

We don't fix suspensions. Yep. So we don't do body work. Absolutely.

Joe Waltzer 53:25

We love bodies.

Mark Donnigan 53:26

So, but that's what you know, that's that's what your team can can do. So it's good.

Joe Waltzer 53:31

Yeah, come come by anytime. We love to have conversations. As you can tell, I I could talk with Mark forever about all this stuff. Um it's a fascinating industry. I love it.

Mark Donnigan 53:39

Well, it's fun, you know, it's it's it's neat. And there's a lot of war stories. We were when we were in Indonesia, you know, a couple weeks back, you know, we were exchanging stories. Ah, do you know this guy? Oh, did you work with this team over there? Absolutely.

Joe Waltzer 53:52

And just to see it grow over the past 20 years and all the differences, I mean it's I love having conversations about this stuff. And so if you want to have a conversation, and I'd love to hear what you're doing with your solution, what you've seen in the industry, all that's just interesting to me. Stop by. I'd love to talk. Just I think that's I think that's the best part of this industry. It's lots of different takes and lots of different ways to look at the how to build the car, right? We have our way we've done it, but I would love to find a new way to build a car or hear about someone else's car building stories because I know that's what sort of gets me up in the morning and makes this fun for me, is just to have these conversations. It's great.

Mark Donnigan 54:25

Yeah.

Joe Waltzer 54:26

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Donnigan 54:27

Yeah, it's awesome. Well, good. Okay. Well, thanks, Joe. And uh you know, thank you to our to our listeners. Without you, we would, well, we'd just be talking to ourselves, which maybe we would do anyway.

Joe Waltzer 54:38

Yeah, that might be fun either way, but uh, it's glad to have people listen in and hopefully we can help someone.

Mark Donnigan 54:43

It's fun to have actual listeners who occasionally will write in or you know stop us at a trade show or you know, you know, contact us and say, hey, we really like what you do.

Joe Waltzer 54:54

This is for the listeners.

Mark Donnigan 54:55

If you are interested in joining Voices of Video, we are kick starting our new season around NAB. And so just reach out to me. You can, you know, send an inquiry through the website. There's a lot of ways to get in touch with us, and uh I'd be happy to hear what you're working on, see what you're doing. It does not have to be VPU oriented, it needs to be video oriented, but you know, reach out and I'd be happy to have a conversation here what you're building. So until next time, thank you again for listening. And as I sometimes say, happy encoding.

Voices of Video 55:33

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 NetInts products at netint.com.