Epic Labs LightFlow Optimizes OTT Workflows with New Tools

At IBC 2019, Epic Labs will debut two new features available in LightFlow that will help businesses manage their video workflows more efficiently.

In IBC 2019, Epic Labs will conduct practical demonstrations of how your LightFlow video platform Makes the most of artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize OTT workflows through improving the quality of experience and the cost reduction, depending on the key performance indicators (KPI) and the standards of each company.

In reality, every time a user presses play to consume a video over the Internet, there is great complexity that begins with the nature of the content itself: is it an action movie, a sport, a documentary? Is it VoD or Live? what device is being used? where is the viewer?

Starting from these premises and the business model (whether it is a subscription or advertising model, for example) LightFlow allowsadapt video distribution according to each context for each playback.

In most cases, OTT operators deal with this issue with a one-size-fits-all approach but manually. However, Epic Labs' proposal attempts to address each step of the workflow in the most standard way to ensure that it fits any requirement, seeking the ideal in terms of efficiency and quality of experience.

To achieve this, LightFlow takes advantage of the use of perceptual video quality metrics y machine learning algorithms to individually optimize the quality of each of your videos with the most effective bitrate.

Because it can be easily integrated into any existing media publishing workflow, whether you're integrating into a premium subscription business, publishing free, ad-based video content, or even leveraging your catalog of online media assets, LightFlow can increase your audience engagement while reducing your total cost of ownership.

LightFlow utilizes this artificial intelligence to perform intelligent analysis of video content (by title or by scene), resulting in the best quality bitrate performance. To do this, he introduces the concept of LQI, a video quality metric which represents how well the human visual system perceives specific video content at different bit rates and resolutions.

This improves the viewer experience and increases user engagement, while reducing your CDN (delivery and storage) and transcoding costs by 30-40% on average.

But it's not just a question of video quality. Leveraging machine learning and the LightFlow engine, the platform provides access to contextual cognitive services such as facial recognition, content moderation or taxonomy classifier.

LightFlow API permite una quick and easy integration with your video workflow. Epic Labs offers a set of easy-to-use APIs that allow you to focus on what's really important to your business. All you need to integrate your media workflow with LightFlow is a few easy, guided steps.

It is noteworthy that this platform can be deployed both in the cloud and on premises. With a modular architecture, each component can be selected independently and seamlessly integrated with your existing video workflow.

Multi-CDN y DRM

Aiming to expand the scope of workflow that can be optimized, Epic Labs will debut at IBC 2019 two new functions available in LightFlow that will help businesses manage their video workflows more efficiently.

The function multi-CDN, announced in April 2019 at NAB in Las Vegas, is now operational. Multi-CDN helps customers optimize the delivery of video content. Companies can model their business rules and combine them with real-time CDN performance, using both criteria to determine the optimal CDN in each case to improve the quality of the viewer experience and reduce costs. With this information, LightFlow balances video delivery whether you want to improve the quality of the experience or be more cost-effective. All in real time.

The functionality DRM allows customers to integrate the DRM provider of their choice to protect content copyright and prevent piracy and unwanted distribution of content, ultimately protecting the customer's investment in content rights. In the first version, LightFlow supports the DRM providers Irdeto (link) and EZDRM (link).

With these two new capabilities, LightFlow by Epic Labs manages the entire content preparation workflow: encoding, packaging, and copyright protection.

Integration with AWS

Finally, note that AWS CloudFront is now supported by the LightFlow Multi-CDN feature. Epic Labs has expanded DRM content protection capabilities, adding support for Irdeto y EzDRM.

On the Multi-CDN side, LightFlow, which was already fully integrated with Akamai y Fastly, has now added the AWS Content Delivery Service (CloudFront). With these three options, LightFlow's Multi-CDN functionality is capable of delivering optimized flows to any part of the world. Another improvement is that the LightFlow Multi-CDN module can be used through APIs or by DNS redirection.

Regarding DRM support, LightFlow is now integrated with EzDRM and Irdeto vendors, supporting their full range of protection modules: Widevine, Fairplay and PlayReady. This makes content protection more effective.

These two enhancements, DRM and Multi-CDN, make LightFlow easy to integrate into any existing workflow.