Harmonic AI-Powered EyeQ Content-Aware Encoding
Category Video Processing
Today’s audiences demand superior video experiences across an ever-expanding range of devices and networks. As a result, service providers face a major challenge: how to deliver exceptional video quality while controlling bandwidth, storage and delivery costs. Harmonic’s AI-powered EyeQ™ content-aware encoding offers a groundbreaking leap forward in video processing efficiency, leveraging artificial intelligence and deep insights into human visual perception.
At its core, EyeQ content-aware encoding utilizes AI to dynamically adjust encoding parameters based on what truly matters to the viewer — how the human eye perceives detail, motion and contrast. By optimizing video quality perceptually, EyeQ achieves visually superior results at significantly lower bitrates. The compression technology intelligently distinguishes between regions of visual importance and less critical details, allocating bits only where they contribute most to perceived quality.
To address the latest developments in premium content delivery, EyeQ is enhanced to optimally handle High Dynamic Range (HDR) content and deliver high bandwidth savings while preserving the full benefits of emerging standards, including HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and others.
Boosting Bandwidth Efficiency and Cost Savings
What’s especially innovative about Harmonic’s AI-powered EyeQ content-aware encoding is its ability to reduce bandwidth requirements and minimize cloud and CDN storage costs by up to 50% while maintaining high video quality. With EyeQ-enabled video quality, service providers can save approximately $1,100 per day, assuming 300,000 viewers watch video content for two hours daily. Those savings scale proportionally with larger audiences and longer watch times, making EyeQ an invaluable tool in today’s streaming landscape.
Delivering Outstanding Video Quality
By leveraging the function of the human visual system, EyeQ ensures crisp, artifact-free video even at low bitrates. It dynamically adapts to content type, from fast-paced sports to cinematic dramas, preserving texture and motion fidelity where it matters most. The result is a more immersive viewing experience across all devices.
A key benefit of AI-powered EyeQ content-aware encoding is that it can be set to a higher peak rate to maintain quality in complex video segments. This capability enables infrequent but complex sequences to use more bits, while overall bandwidth usage remains significantly lower compared with CBR encoding. For example, in a relatively simple 90-second sequence with a single complex video transition, an EyeQ stream with a peak rate of 6.8 Mbps would consume much less bandwidth than a constant-rate stream at 4.2 Mbps, while still delivering a higher overall quality of experience for the viewer.
Improving the viewer Quality-of-Experience
EyeQ content-aware encoding substantially enhances viewers’ quality of experience. By reducing the overall bandwidth used for a given quality, EyeQ-enabled services are less prone to lower-quality profile changes, show less re-buffering and provide faster channel change times. The viewer sees better video quality for a longer period, resulting in a smoother QoE, no matter what the bandwidth conditions are.
A Competitive Advantage for Video Streaming
Harmonic’s AI-powered EyeQ content-aware encoding represents a transformative innovation in video processing. Leveraging cutting-edge AI algorithms to model the human visual system, EyeQ content-aware encoding delivers real-world cost savings and top-tier video quality. The encoding technology is used by leading service providers and broadcasters around the world, including New England Sports Network (NESN) for live sports delivery.
EyeQ content-aware encoding is 100% compliant with compression standards and interoperable with existing decoders. With CDN costs growing with every new viewer, and viewers spending more and more time watching streamed video, EyeQ content-aware encoding is a game changer for the industry. With EyeQ, service providers can lower total cost of ownership (TCO) on their infrastructure investment and stay ahead in the ultra-competitive video streaming world.
