Look Out For New Way To Improve Quality Of Video
Video quality has been a strong theme at the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
The challenge is that the ability to display a higher and higher quality of moving picture on to screens has developed faster than the capacity to transmit it.
When you stream a film, television channel or video clip, your device is often capable of giving you a more consistent quality than you get in practice. Engineers have built in two techniques to deal with this, both of which annoy us as viewers. The first is ‘re-buffering,’ when your film stops and waits for the signals to catch up and fill the buffers again before it restarts.
The second is ‘suboptimal resolution,’ which plods on with the show at a degraded quality of display, sometimes quite heavily pixelated. So, Netflix boss Reed Hastings declared at MWC an intention to make these issues history ‘like dial tone,’ with a reference to those early pre-broadband days of dial-up modems.
Elsewhere at the show, and outfit called Giraffic was exhibiting one of the key technologies that can make this happen.
Their ‘Adaptive Video Acceleration’ (AVA) uses innovation techniques to respond to lag on the internet to keep the quality up.
It works by making multiple connections to a provider’s servers, such as those operated by Netflix, taking different streams from a film or programme in parallel and stitching them together electronically at the display end. It is now being installed in SmartTVs and set top boxes by leading manufacturers and is making its way to mobile devices as well.
If you have plans to invest in any of these, AVA may be worth looking out for.
