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Comment by philipallstar

2 months ago

> There’s basically zero innovation in online video.

AV2 is coming out this year.

> Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.

What do you mean?

8 comments

philipallstar

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afavour  2 months ago

Can’t speak for OP but personally I’m thinking of things like the ability to actually add new features. Like what Netflix did with the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror years ago. Online video is extremely locked down when compared to the web.

  • olyjohn  2 months ago

    Probably because there are over 9000 different TVs with their own proprietary apps on each one. So the easiest thing to do is just go with the lowest common denominator which is just giving you a menu to play a simple video.

    • afavour  2 months ago

      For sure. But something like Bandersnatch shows that it is technically possible. Not for all devices of course. But there could be some kind of open standard companies implement and startups innovate on. But no one with power has an interest in doing that.

walterbell  2 months ago

20 years ago, it was possible to seamlessly merge video clips from multiple streaming RealPlayer servers into a single composite video stream, using a static XML text file (SMIL) distributed via HTTP, with optional HTML annotation and composition.

This is technically possible today but blocked by DRM and closed apps/players. Innovation would be unlocked if 3rd party apps could create custom viewing experiences based on licensed and purchased content files downloaded locally, e.g. in your local Apple media library. The closed apps could then sherlock/upstream UX improvements that prove broadly useful.

  • phantomathkg  2 months ago

    It is not blocked by DRM but different codec. Even if you have two MP4 files, but if they were encoded differently ffmpeg will still need to do some computation to join them.

    • walterbell  2 months ago

      Gapless playback with MSE would require identical encoding, which is likely more prevalent in the Apple catalog than the wild west of Youtube. Client-side transcode would require DRM cooperation.

      For two video streams with different encodings, swapping between two media players + prefetch can give a close approximation of a continuous video stream.