Video quality is key in sport streaming!
Sports live videos are in a category of their own in the world of video streaming. Why is that? It’s just pixels, right?
Sure, but in sports, there’s a lot of movement, and viewers are laser-focused on small details: the ball, a hockey stick, a player’s jersey number… Not to mention horizontal lines, logos everywhere, and textured surfaces all over the video. All these elements make encoding sports video especially challenging, and furthermore, the audience has high expectations.
The two paths to better video quality
So, what can you do? There are two ways to tackle this:
- Increase the bit-rate to make sure there’s enough bandwidth to capture all the details.
- Or, go for compression efficiency with MK.IO!
Put your encoder to the test
Are you confident your encoder is the most efficient? The best way to find out is to test it. Here’s how we did it between AWS and MK.IO, and we’ll explain the results.
We picked a soccer video—the ultimate test for codecs when the ball zooms across blades of grass, cutting through diagonal white lines. We chose several bitrates to create a bitrate/distortion curve: 2, 4, 6, and 8 Mbps.
After encoding, we compared the output with the original video and measured distortion using several well-known metrics: PSNR, SSIM, MS-SSIM, and VMAF. We don’t mess around when it comes to quality!
Note: This benchmark was conducted in March 2024. While performance may have evolved since then, these results give a reliable view of the potential benefits.
MK.IO delivers up to 40% gain!
Here’s how we calculated the gain: for a fixed quality level, it’s the bit-rate savings.
For example, let’s fix our target at 98.5 MS-SSIM.
To reach this score, AWS needs 5.2 Mbps, while MK.IO only needs 3.7 Mbps: follow the green lines on the graph below.
((5.2-3.7)/5.2)*100 = -40%
Optimize your quality—or save $20K per month!
If you’re unhappy with the current quality of your stream, you can switch to MK.IO, keep the same bit-rate, and see a significant improvement in video quality.
But if you’re satisfied with the quality level, here’s the best part: you can reduce the bit-rate and directly cut your CDN costs without sacrificing quality.
Let’s do some quick math: With an average of 24 hours of streaming per month delivered to 50,000 viewers, the savings could be as much as $20,000 per month!
| Input data | value | CDN cost ($ / month) |
|---|---|---|
| Quantity of viewers | 50,000 | |
| Average viewing time per month (hour) | 24 | |
| CDN cost ($ / GB) | 0.025 | |
| Old bit-rate (Mbps) | 5.2 | 70,200 |
| New bit-rate (Mbps) | 3.7 | 49,950 |
| Saving ($ /month) | 20,250 |
Seeing is believing: the visual difference
Still skeptical? Look at the images for yourself.
When we compared subjective quality, it was clear, as our codec expert observed:
It's particularly visible on shots with grass. There’s severe wobbling with AWS, but it’s much more stable with MK.IO.
If you don’t notice the difference, consider lowering the bit-rate to save on CDN costs!
Even more potential with MK.IO
And by the way, we’re not even pushing the codec to its full potential. With the default presets, you’re already getting great results, but if you need even better quality, we’ve got options. Just remember, it’s always a trade-off between efficiency and processing cost.