Netflix: Toward A Practical Perceptual Video Quality Metric

[HardOCP News]

Netflix says it has developed an open-source tool that measures videos based on the best "perceptual quality" given the constraints of the bandwidth available and device used for viewing. In the end, Netflix feels this method gives you more for less and offers the best quality video streams to its subscribers.

Improving video compression standards and making smart decisions in practical encoding systems is very important in today’s Internet landscape. We believe that using the traditional metrics - metrics that do not always correlate with human perception - can hinder real advancements in video coding technology. However, always relying on manual visual testing is simply infeasible. VMAF is our attempt to address this problem, using samples from our content to help design and validate the algorithms. Similar to how the industry works together in developing new video standards, we invite the community to openly collaborate on improving video quality measures, with the ultimate goal of more efficient bandwidth usage and visually pleasing video for all.

 

[Deleted member 245375]

Bleh, that's all fine and dandy but what they need to do most of all is get better long term licensing agreements in place with the movie and TV studios so they can keep showing given movie and TV shows instead of continually having to dump stuff and then "restock" at a later time or even worse not get some content at all because they can't get the agreements and pricing locked down.

Never had issues with Netflix service itself, my issue is it pisses me off whenever I go to find something to watch, I think of something with that "Hey, yeah, I haven't seen that in years, wouldn't mind checking that out again, let's see if... shit, they don't have it, not even on DVD..." kind of result.

MOAR CONTENT DAMMIT

 

[Ski]

Tiberian,

I agree with you 100% that Netflix would do better in securing licensing deals with the studios to gain access to their library of movies would be more effective, however... for the studios to do that would be industry suicide. Hear me out.

If you noticed the trend the past few years, Netflix has taken an aggressive approach at establishing it's own native content of shows under their own umbrella. This is largely in result because the studios would not budge in any type of reasonable financial agreement to allow their movies to be put on Netflix, because in the long term it would eat into their profits and ultimately cut them out completely if Netflix became a juggernaut, which they have believe it or not. And they were able to accomplish without the studios help. The studios are now stuck between a rock and a hard place because more and more individuals are watching their movies and TV online then they are in DVD/Blu-Ray rentals, and now that Netflix has established itself as a powerful studio itself, it might come to a point where Netflix might buy out the studios themselves in the coming years. I could go on and on with the economics, the technological aspects in terms of 4k adoption, and the metadata aspects, but this gist is enough to give reason why the studios won't ever sign off on their library. To do so would mean they'll lose the control...

 

[Deleted member 245375]

I'm well aware of the potential economic and financial fallout with respect to Netflix becoming a juggernaut (they already are, have been for some time now as already noted) and yes I realize they're doing their own programming because of issues with lack of content from the studios that will participate (and who are now creating streaming revenue themselves, aka HBO Go, and so on). It'll all work out as time passes as more possibilities present themselves.

I haven't had "cable TV" for over a decade now because my apartment complex provides me with roughly 55 channels (mostly the basic cable stuff one would expect from a basic package) as part of my rental agreement so, that just saves me $35+ from Cox I suppose. I split my actual Internet access with a neighbor so we don't pay as much (he doesn't pay for cable TV either for the same reason) so we're good. Cox recently pushed out bandwidth to 150Mbps which was a nice boost I suppose but they didn't increase the cap: they kept it at 700GB which should have been pushed to a full terabyte along with the bandwidth increase but they didn't. Not really a concern as we typically end up just under that cap on an average although last month we did push it to close to a terabyte.

Cox doesn't give a shit, they didn't even send out the typical "you went over your cap this month" email - I check the bandwidth regularly myself with their Internet tools but again it's just not a concern anymore, they don't really do much of anything to anyone going over their cap unless it's like 40x the cap itself (which I couldn't do even if I wanted).

There's still a huge gigantor amount of content that's not on any streaming service at all, tons of old TV shows, old movies, etc, but someday I figure there'll be pretty much anything anytime anywhere and we'll all be happy when that comes along.