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SyncCast: The Move to Automate Quality Control for New Media

Digital media technology provider boosts video output over 40%

Overview:

SyncCast is a leading provider of digital media technology and content delivery solutions and has over a decade of experience throughout the interactive digital media community with extensive experience in application development, system integration, hosting, managed services, connectivity and content distribution solutions. The company is an expert in the development and integration of complex digital rights management solutions, placing specific emphasis in working with the entertainment and broadcast industries for the secure delivery of their digital media assets.

Challenge:

Since the company’s founding in 1999, SyncCast has partnered with Microsoft to develop enabling solutions for digital data distribution services. In November 2006, Microsoft tasked SyncCast with developing a video distribution service for its newly launched Xbox 360 to enable users, via Xbox LIVE (Xbox’s online entertainment network), to download digital video content.

Microsoft required over 500 hours of content be available for the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace by the November 2006 launch date and 1,000 hours in time for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2007. SyncCast only had three months to meet the requirements, processing the media, developing the necessary tools and applications and create the delivery infrastructure.

Ezra Davidson, Executive Vice President of Business Development, and his team at SyncCast had one overarching challenge – developing quality media in a short amount of time.

“Xbox Video Marketplace is the only IP download service offering HD movies and TV shows today. HD files are 10 times the file size of most other video on download sites. The large HD file sizes magnify problems such as bit-starvation, video corruption and interlacing, that can be created in the digital files we process,” explains Davidson. “We also deal with a lot of broadcast content that has looks fine on a small computer screen but becomes unacceptable when viewed on a larger screen.”

“We learned that about 10% of all the content we receive from content providers can’t be played or processed at all. Of the 90% that can be viewed, about 25% has some type of serious problem that was not obvious until the quality control process was well under way. This issue became a time sink for our team, forcing them to watch hours of movies and video clips to look for defects, which seriously disrupted workflow,” said Davidson. “15 - 20% of the time, the problem is related to poor audio. The rest of the time it’s video corruption. We needed a solution that could help us quickly identify where the video or audio problems existed and their level of severity.”

Solution:

Davidson’s team chose Semaphore, an automated Quality Control solution from Inlet Technologies, as the solution to their problem. Inlet’s history as a leader in digital media and its substantial work with Microsoft in processing WMV files was well known to SyncCast, as was Inlet’s breadth of experience in the HD field. Aside from its automated functionality, it was Semaphore’s customizable nature that appealed most to SyncCast’s encoding team, allowing them to develop specific quality alerts for quick identification of audio and visual “hot-spots” within content. The combination of automation, customizability and hot-spot identification would save the encoding team valuable time within the QC and encoding processes.
Results :

During the three months leading up to CES, SyncCast was able to identify 71% of all the audio issues and 30% of all video issues in the files processed immediately after encoding, thus reducing the amount of flawed content making it into the workflow and loopback processes by 67%.

“If we don’t catch an error until it gets to our preview site or, even worse, to production, then up to 24 hours of additional work is required to pull the content, re-encode it, then put it back through the QC process,” said Davidson. “Semaphore automatically checks all encoded content for potential problems with the audio and video before it gets any further along in our workflow.”

One of Semaphore’s most valuable features to SyncCast is the ability to look at a short segment of video, often less than five minutes, to determine if it should move forward in the quality control process. If a problem exists, either with the audio or video, SyncCast can quickly determine the severity and either fix the issue or have the content’s provider resend the material.

The sheer size of the files, often around six gigabytes and 45 minutes to 2.5 hours in length, makes Semaphore’s automated and efficient nature highly important. With Inlet’s solution, SyncCast can process 60 minutes of HD content in under five minutes. Without Semaphore, all quality control would be done manually at a 1:1 ratio, with each frame being checked by hand for audio and visual flaws.

The automated metrics inherent in Semaphore provides SyncCast with the necessary information to correct specific problems within encoded video clips. This allowed SyncCast to determine the appropriate remedy, such as adjusting bit-rates or re-encoding the entire file.

“Semaphore’s efficiency is a huge benefit for us and our clients, especially Microsoft, since over 1,000 hours of content were needed for Xbox Video Marketplace by CES 2007. We were initially going to have over four months to process the content but the first files did not arrive until the first week of November. With CES in early January, this gave us less than 60 days to process the content,” concludes Davidson. “Without Semaphore, we would only have been able to process about 700 hours of content, obviously failing to meet Microsoft’s requirement. Semaphore boosted our productivity by over 40%, essentially making the impossible possible.”

Inlet Technologies™
1121 Situs Court, Suite 330
Raleigh, NC 27606
919.856.1080 phone
919.256.8123 fax
info@inlethd.com
www.inlethd.com