Hello readers,

Erik here! As mentioned in the opening blog post, I will mostly post about innovations. Today I kick off with some work in progress on a feature that we call stream splicing.

What is stream splicing?

Stream splicing works by manipulating media data just before it leaves the media server. For example, this allows you to switch media sources or insert generated content while maintaining bitstream and container compliance, thus allowing advanced features without requiring player awareness or being limited to specific protocols.

What can I do with stream splicing?

The real power of this technology is that it allows you to adapt basically any stream on a per-viewer basis. While this gives us many feasible use cases, I will handle three of these in today's post.

• Adaptive bitrate switching
  
  I will start out with a re-imagining of a widely used technology which allows for quality selection in your streams by your viewers. The established solution works by generating a Manifest, which is generally a playlist of various qualities of a single stream. This playlist is requested by a video player, and allows the player to select the best quality based on factors like display resolution and available bandwidth. Using a separate playlist for each quality, the player will request the actual video data. If the actual data segments are keyframe-aligned between the various qualities, the player is able to switch to a lower or higher quality on segment boundaries.
  
  While being a proven solution which allows you to reach a wider audience, an individual user may still opt to select a higher quality than his available bandwidth allows him to view. The technology is also restricted to segmented protocols, reducing the usability for applications with requirements on low latency. On top of this, players will probably request a segment of a higher quality to see whether it is received fast enough in order to switch to it, effectively wasting bandwidth as a single segment is requested twice but only played once.
  
  Using stream splicing to achieve the same effect on the server side allows you a more fine-grained control over what your viewer gets to watch. Looking at the actual state of the server machine, which blocks on the data connection if the viewer is not reading data fast enough, a connection can be forced to a lower quality regardless of what the player requests. By not relying on client-awareness of quality switching, a more low-level sync can be achieved while providing compatibility with both progressive download and low-latency streaming protocols. Where bandwidth is limited or costly viewers can also be forced to a lower quality stream as demand increases. Doing this allows for more clients to connect while you’re working on scaling up.
  


• Stream personalisation
  
  In applications everywhere, individualisation is gaining terrain over a one-fits-all mindset. On large scale platforms it is becoming a requirement and your customers expect to see this option. However, using existing technologies for streaming often makes it really cumbersome to give your viewers a default language in either audio or subtitles.
  
  Our flexible triggers API already allows you to take specific actions based on events within the media server. Combining this with server side manipulation of your stream data, you can automatically select and influence the default language a single user will receive based on, for example, their user profile on your platform. The addition of extra triggers in our API will not only make it easier to implement these kind of options on your platform, it will allow for full integration of the stream splicing feature into your existing system.
  


• Advertisement injection
  
  Probably one of the most important elements of any streaming platform is monetization. While there are multiple solutions readily available to serve advertisements to your viewers, innovations like ad blockers on the client side prevent you from reaching every viewer, cutting into your profits. While fully encoding the desired advertisement into your stream ensures your viewers will see the advertisement, it does not allow the same flexibility given by client-side advertisements. In this scenario every viewer gets the same final stream.
  
  The latest Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) specification adds support for server side advertisement stitching and tracking, allowing the dynamic insertion of advertisements into a video stream. Combining this with splicing allows for individualized advertisements to be inserted without needing a custom player and effectively combats ad-blockers.
  
  While not covering the entire range of possibilities, the examples above should give some insight into what you will be able to do with this technology. If you have a specific use case that's not covered here and you want to know whether we can help you achieve it, feel free to contact us to discuss in more detail.
  

When will it be ready?

As already mentioned this is currently a work in progress. We are about to start with testing it in the field, and are open to applications of interested parties. Assuming the field tests are successful, a release containing stream splicing will follow shortly after.

Feel free to contact us with any questions regarding the progress or field tests of this new feature at info@mistserver.org.

Our next blog post will be by Carina, explaining more about our recently released meta-player.

- Erik