The Streaming Showdown: Netflix’s Quest to Master Live Video Encoding
Anne Aaron, Netflix’s senior encoding technology director, has a problem. Or rather, she has a dozen problems. Each time the streaming giant attempts to conquer a new front in the never-ending battle to deliver flawless video to millions of users, a new challenge arises. And Aaron, ever the encodng aficionado, can’t help but think about it.
"We have to support a huge variety of devices," Aaron said, recalling the company’s early days when it approached streaming like everyone else in the online video industry. "Really old TVs, new TVs, mobile devices, set top boxes: each of those devices can have different bandwidth requirements." It was a nightmare, with the company forced to encode each video with a bunch of different bitrates and resolutions according to a predefined list of encoding parameters – or "recipes" – as Aaron and her colleagues like to call them.
But Netflix wasn’t satisfied with simply keeping up with the Joneses. The company wanted to disrupt the status quo, to reinvent the wheel. And that’s when Aaron’s team hit upon the idea of re-encoding the entire catalog with yet another novel encoding strategy, or new codec. It was a bold move, one that would allow Netflix to deliver better-looking streams over slower connections and save bandwidth in the process.
And then came live streaming. At first, it seemed like a minor inconvenience, a brief detour from the main road. But as the company began to broadcast live events like the Screen Actors Guild Awards and eventually the WWE, it became clear that live was a different beast altogether. "With live, it’s even harder to anticipate complex scenes," Aaron said, recalling the first time she watched the SAG Awards.
The stakes were higher, the pressure greater. A single hiccup, a brief delay, and the entire operation could come crashing down. But Aaron’s team persevered, working tirelessly to optimize encoding settings for live content. And when Netflix launched its first live stream, a Chris Rock comedy special, the results were stunning. The video was smooth, the sound was crystal clear, and the company had finally cracked the code.
But that was just the beginning. Next up: cloud gaming. The concept was simple: render games in the cloud, stream them to users, and reap the benefits of a seamless, latency-free experience. But the reality was far more complicated. "With games, your latency is even more stringent than live," Aaron said, shaking her head. It was a whole new level of challenge, one that required her team to rethink everything they thought they knew about encoding.
And yet, despite the setbacks, the failures, and the frustration, Aaron remains optimistic. "In the codec space, people were saying that 20 years ago," she said. "In spite of that, we still find areas for improvement. So, I’m hopeful."
As the streaming wars rage on, one thing is certain: the stakes have never been higher. Will Netflix’s encoding wizards be able to tame the beast, to conjure up the perfect stream every time? Only time will tell. But for now, Anne Aaron is focused on the next challenge, the next hurdle to overcome. And that’s where the real excitement begins.
