From Oscar® to Emmy®

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has recognized technology arising from a collaboration among Disney Streaming, DisneyResearch|Studios, and Disney Studios Technology with a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award. This award-winning technology creates advanced approaches to the video codec pipeline, which is becoming ever more important in the modern era of streaming ultra-high-definition content.

In a distributed video transcoding service, a piece of video needs to be cut into multiple chunks to process it in parallel in a host of servers. A naive approach of cutting at fixed intervals leads to a loss of encoder efficiency and a sacrifice in visual quality.

The Disney collaboration has developed a method to provide both local and global optimization strategies for making these cuts that are both efficient and produce better-looking results.  This technology includes data-driven content characterization of video assets to optimize parallel processing and minimize loss of quality.  Effectively, the system learns what it is looking at before placing its cuts.

Congrats to all the recipients across Disney: Scott Labrozzi, Yuanyi Xue, and Jim Zimmerman from Disney Streaming; Jared McPhillen from Disney Studios Technology, Erika Varis-Dogget from StudioLAB; and Christopher Schroers from DisneyResearch|Studios.

This latest award continues the DisneyResearch|Studios win streak after the recent receipt of an Academy Award® for Technical Achievement.