Optimizing Audio and vide0 for The Age of Multi-Screen Delivery

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presented by

Welcome to the first installment of the Dolby Innovation Series, a tool to provide you with information on important issues impacting the world of media and entertainment processing.

Dolby has a long history of providing innovative user experiences, and that ethic of innovation continues today. From the original Dolby Noise Reduction to the recently announced Dolby Vision, Dolby has continued to deliver new and better user experiences.

This inaugural issue is dedicated to the importance of premium sound for today’s multi-screen video viewers. It discusses many of the issues associated with delivering that premium audio experience. Future issues will cover new developments in the entertainment experience as driven by new technologies like Dolby Vision and object-based audio.

The Dolby Professional Solutions Innovation Series

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presented by

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Audio and Video Content Processing in the Cloud4

Adaptive Bit-rate Video Shouldn’t Mean Lackluster Audio7

How Poor Audio Quality Impacts the Bottom Line9

Quality Sound Sets the Bar for Superior Online Video Experiences16

Addressing Workflow Complexity for Adaptive Bit-rate Audio12

Delivering a Premium Multi-screen Experiencewith Multi-channel Surround Audio18

Summary22

contents

As pay-TV operators roll out multi-screen initiatives, they are looking to rapidly deliver these services in a cost-effective and reliable way. Many see the cloud as a way to meet this challenge. Cloud computing allows them to reduce media processing costs, increase revenue, improve service and business agility, and generally enhance the entire customer experience.

One set of applications that clearly benefits from cloud-based services is online video media processing and transcoding. For any video to be streamed online, the video must first be transcoded and packaged for delivery to the multitude of screens across the devices used in the home, office, and on the go. As these services roll out, they drive the need for media processing services, which benefit handsomely from the operational efficiencies enabled by cloud-based transcoding services, especially when compared with in-house solutions.

Audio and Video Processing in the Cloud

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Things are starting to change, as demonstrated by the fact that several of Dolby’s partners have shown that transcoding and other content optimization and delivery capabilities can now be effectively delivered via a cloud-based service. Companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure Media Services, Akamai, Encoding.com, Elemental Technologies, and Brightcove now deliver or plan to deliver cloud-based media processing solutions, enabling the user to experience seamless high-quality content delivered over the Internet.

The emergence of cloud-based transcoding services has led to a growing debate over the efficacy of cloud-based transcoding services versus in-house transcoding services. Let’s be blunt: moving specific functions to the cloud offers benefits that other solutions simply cannot match. We begin with market addressability.

In spite of the many advantages of cloud-based media processing, media companies have been slow to adopt cloud resources. There are real differences between media processing and IT infrastructures, derived primarily from the disparities in the workflow model. For example, running a media delivery service requires high levels of reliability and synchronization between audio and video content processing. Combined with the requirement for high levels of content security and protection, there has been some resistance to moving critical business applications to the cloud. So while the move to the cloud in general IT environments is well underway, the move has been much slower in the video processing ecosystem.

Market Addressability

The proliferation of playback devices and the consequent shift in viewing patterns means the audience is not only wider, but more diverse in terms of their access and consumption points. To reach this audience, providers must transcode their video libraries to support the numerous screen sizes and resolutions. Cloud-based services allow video suppliers to quickly and easily expand their infrastructure to scale seamlessly with the changes in viewing patterns and to support new initiatives around those patterns.

Furthermore, cloud-based services allow pay-TV operators to leverage their content archives to drive increased user engagement. By using the cloud to scale their transcoding capacity on-demand, content providers can address new demand as it emerges.

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Lowered Capital Expenditures Cloud transcoding can be significantly more cost-effective than those used today, which are highly complex and daunting. In-house infrastructure must handle peak demand, and for businesses that have cyclical or intermittent needs, this leads to high levels of capital infrastructure that lies idle much of the time. Cloud transcoding services can be implemented on a pay-as-you-go basis and thus easy to scale to demand – a tremendous benefit when compared to in-house transcoding services. Cloud transcoding services can also be plugged into a pay-TV operator’s backend and seamlessly transcode without disturbing the operator’s front end.

Using cloud-based services, operators only need to pay for services when they need them, on demand. So for video providers that are cyclical or experience spikes in their media processing requirements, the cloud can help them avoid stranding vast amounts of capital.

Reduced Risk Cloud services offer a much easier path for service providers looking to deliver services across multiple devices. According to a recent Accenture report, 20% of consumers would be willing to pay more to be able to access services across multiple devices. At the same time, the explosion of new devices increases risk because transcoding needs can change on a dime as new devices come to the market.

The emerging multi-screen ecosystem is creating new revenue opportunities for archived content, but supporting the infrastructure for a one-time project to convert a video library into new distribution formats can be cost prohibitive. The inability to precisely determine the transcoding volume also means that operators evaluating services do not know which devices or the volume of the transcoding services needed.

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Summary

Media processing in the cloud will be a force with which to be reckoned, both on the part of pay-TV operators and content providers. It is clear that cloud computing and distributed storage technologies are a viable solution for implementing a digital media architecture that is sustainable and future-proofed. In the end, the question is not whether the pay-TV industry will leverage the cloud for new services, but when and how they will begin.

1 Michael Greeson, The Relevance of Audio Quality in Smart TV, Tablet, and Smart Phone Purchases (TDG, 2013).

© 2014 TDG

ABR Doesn’t Have to Mean Lackluster Sound

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Adaptive bit-rate (ABR) streaming has revolutionized the delivery of video online. Without it, companies such as Netflix and Hulu simply would not be able to deliver the quality of experience they do today. Unfortunately for service providers, creating and maintaining all the different video formats necessary to support their customers’ devices has become a major headache. As if that was not enough, they have to worry about all the different audio profiles, as well. And worry they must, because skimping on audio quality could derail consumer demand for their video service offerings.

The Diffusion Group recently queried net-connected device owners regarding the importance of audio in their device purchases. Among smart TV owners, for example, more than 85% of respondents rated audio as an important consideration

in deciding between competing television sets.

For a device dedicated to delivering a high-quality entertainment experience, this is not a big surprise. That said, for tablets and smart phones—devices that handle a multiplicity of tasks—consumers were only slightly less demanding in this regard: 68% of tablet owners and 63% of smart phone owners said audio quality was important in their purchase decision.1

Clearly, audio quality is a critical feature for consumers looking to buy new devices. Being certain the quality of audio measures up to audience expectations is thus a key concern. Does this mean that service providers must optimize sound for each device they target?

But is not there already a standard for that? MPEG HE AAC, introduced in 2004, provides support for encoding audio for applications including multi-channel and stereo delivery.2 It is widely supported in many devices, as well as popular ABR solutions such as Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and MPEG DASH. So use HE AAC and you’re done, right?

Not so fast. New research suggests there are problems with relying on HE AAC.3 Though the standard promises much, actual implementation falls far short. This is due primarily to the fact that each company that implements this standard does it in a slightly different way. As noted in a recent paper, “Nine Years HE AAC,” these inconsistencies have qualitative consequences: “…there is a significant difference in quality between different HE AAC Implementations. Some of these are easily noticed even by consumers.”4 As a result, many pay-TV providers resort to sending the lowest common denominator audio, stereo HE-AAC, and forgo providing their customers with the benefits of a truly high-quality audio experience.

Luckily, there are alternatives that do not suffer from the inconsistencies of HE AAC. Dolby Digital Plus is an advanced audio codec that will support the connected devices that customers will use to consume content. Within a single audio stream, everything from high-quality 7.1 channel surround to 2.0 stereo is supported. The codec even includes enhanced surround sound for mobile speakers and headphones. It also supports all the popular ABR streaming technologies.

When it comes to delivering streaming video to your subscribers’ connected devices, figuring out how to make sure your customer gets a great picture can get complicated, and fast. Fortunately, providing a superior audio experience doesn’t have to add to that complexity.

2 Stefan Metzer and Gerald Moser, “MPEG-4 HE AAC v2 – Audio Coding for Today’s Digital Media World,” EBU Technical Review, January 2006. 3 Martin Wolters, Gregory McGarry, Andreas Schneider, Robin Thesing, “Nine Years HE AAC – Technical Challenges Using an Open Standard in Real-world Applications,” Audio Engineering Society Convention Paper 8650, April 2012. 4 Ibid., p. 10.

Ideally, service providers would like to keep things simple by encoding the audio once and generating different audio profiles automatically for all targeted devices. Moving from top-quality 384-Kbps 5.1 surround sound for the smart TV, all the way down to 64-Kbps stereo for a smart phone on a mobile network, should be a seamless, hands-off process.

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Gone are the days when a viewer would put up with poor video or audio quality online. In the age of quantum video—the multi-conduit, multi-context, multi-screen universe in which we now exist—a vast array of entertainment choices is available at the flick of a finger. Fail to deliver the quality of experience to which the viewer is accustomed and punishment is dispensed swiftly. For example, in 2011, a 1% increase in the time a video was stalled resulted in a consumer watching, on average, three minutes less video. In 2012, that grew to eight minutes. In 2013, the same 1% increase in delay resulted in viewing 11 minutes less.1

As an online video provider, particularly if you sell ads, these numbers should strike fear into the heart. If viewers watch eleven minutes less video, they see two or three fewer ads, meaning the consequent loss of revenue can add up fast. For a site with 100,000 viewers a day, for example, this could mean a loss in revenue of over $1.4 million a year. This is tangible proof that, in an online world of wafer-thin margins, a quality video experience could be all that is standing between you being in the black or the red.

Audio plays a crucial role in and has a far broader impact on the video experience than is widely acknowledged. For example, 41% of US tablet users and 32% of smart phone users believe having audio and video in qualitative sync is extremely important.2

How Poor Audio Quality Impacts the Bottom Line

1 Conviva, Viewer Experience Report (Conviva, 2013). 2 Rovi, Rovi Insights Volume 2 (Rovi Corp, 2013)

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Bad Sound Quality Can Cost You Your Audience!

The same holds for game consoles, which for all intents and purposes are high-powered broadband entertainment systems. With 85% of game consoles connected to the Internet,3 delivering a high-quality OTT multimedia experience is imperative to user satisfaction – and that means both audio and video quality must be at their best.

Interestingly, providing high-quality audio can actually help compensate for poor video quality. Your viewer’s sensitivity to poor picture quality such as pixilation and desaturation actually diminishes if the audio quality remains satisfactory.4 The converse is also true: if the sound quality is poor, your viewers will be more sensitive to picture problems.

These expectations are not confined to in-home stationary AV experiences. Today’s consumer also expects an excellent sound experience from their mobile devices. According to research from TDG, 70% of pad users and 63% of smart phone owners say audio quality is one of the primary reasons they purchased their specific device.

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Any way you look at it, the quality of sound matters.

3 Michael Greeson, Video Behavior in the Age of Quantum Video (TDG, 2013). 4 Leslie Gaston, Jon Boley, Scott Selter, Jeffrey Ratterman, “The Influence of Individual Audio Impairments on Perceived Video Quality,” Audio Engineering Society Convention Paper, May 2010, p7.

More often than not, however, the audio quality of video ads is vastly different from the shows into which they are inserted. Often ads are too loud, distorted, or streamed in mono while the shows themselves are in pristine Dolby Digital quality. For viewers that are streaming audio and video to mobile devices connected to their home stereo systems, this can result in them noticing an annoying change in the quality of the audio or, worse yet, audible clicks and pops as the system moves from surround sound to mono or stereo and back again, as an ad starts and finishes.

Connecting mobile devices to one’s home entertainment system to enjoy OTT video is more common than many believe. In fact, 37% of laptop owners, 33% of tablet owners, and 22% of smart phone owners report connecting their mobile device to their home entertainment system for this very purpose.5 Given the regularity of this behavior, it should be a legitimate concern for service providers.

This difference, while distracting when watching on a television, can actually be painful for viewers listening through ear-buds on a tablet. Given the fickle nature of online viewers, one bad experience with an ad on a tablet or smart phone could mean losing a significant segment of your audience.

The message is clear: provide a consistent, high-quality sound experience for shows and movies is critical to audience satisfaction, both on its own and to help compensate for streaming video issues.

5 Michael Greeson, Relevance of Audio Quality in Smart TV, Tablet, and Smart Phone Purchases (TDG, 2013).

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Can you afford to provide video services without great sound?

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% Users that Connect Device to TV to Watch Online Video

Watching a TV show on a tablet or mobile phone and streaming Internet-delivered content to the TV in the living room have become the new normal. With the wide availability of video-enabled devices – including tablets, game consoles, smart phones, and Internet-enabled set-top boxes and televisions – consumers have come to expect their favorite media will be available on any device, over any network connection, and delivered at the same high quality they have come to expect from traditional broadcast and cable television services.

As a result, multi-screen video has become a must-have service for traditional pay-TV operators. Forward-looking digital TV operators around the world have already begun to employ alternative video delivery technologies for over-the-top (OTT) video to complement their traditional broadcast services. In some cases, operators have gone beyond their managed network footprint to “unmanaged” third-party networks to support their subscribers when on the go, and to reach new subscribers that do not have access to the operators’ managed network.

Addressing the Workflow Complexity of ABR

The Technological Evolution of Multiscreen Entertainment Models

While tremendous advancements to the broadband delivery network infrastructure have been made in the last decade, the bandwidth requirements of video traffic in many cases still represent a challenge for the delivery of high-quality video. This challenge has given rise to new methods of video transport that can provide a consistent quality of video experience to consumers on any device and across any network over which their content is delivered.

The evolution of video delivery transport has led to a new set of de facto standard and standards-based adaptive bit-rate delivery protocols from Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, DECE Ultraviolet, and MPEG-DASH that are now positioned for broad adoption. Adaptive bit-rate (ABR) streaming technologies are of particular interest to operators as they look to roll out new multi-screen services. It is an effective and complementary delivery method over both managed and unmanaged networks that have varying levels of bandwidth availability.

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With the rise of these new delivery methods and rapid growth in the number of video-enabled devices has come a considerable increase in the complexity of the workflows needed to support content delivery.

Among the challenges facing multi-screen content delivery is the number of frameworks that must be supported and the fragmentation of implementations inherent to those frameworks. Operators have to support a very wide variety of different devices and device ecosystems, each with its own framework and specific implementations.

For example, there are numerous ways to stream video content to a device, including formats such as:

• RTMP, • Progressive download, • HTTP live streaming (HLS), • Smooth Streaming, and • HTTP dynamic streaming (HDS).

As well, different devices come with different screen sizes, DRM systems, packaging protocols, operating systems, and playback clients. This drives an increase in complexity of the content delivery by over two orders of magnitude compared to traditional pay-TV content delivery workflows.

Netflix, for example, supports more than 900 different devices and multiple delivery options and, as a result, encodes 120 different version of every movie it provides. While frustrating, it gets worse when an operator looks at all the permutations that come along with each ecosystem. At this time, there are over 2,500 versions of the Android operating system available, and being able to guarantee support for just a fraction of these versions would raise tremendously the number of variants required.

Complexity of the Video Streaming Chain

CFF

HLS

A Paradigm of Complexity

Broadcasters and OTT providers are both investing heavily to lower this operational complexity and make it easier to deliver high-quality audio and video to their customers. Not only will this reduce operational costs, but it will also allow operators to focus on working with content creators and their own production teams to bring amazing new experiences like glasses-free 3D and Dolby Vision to their customer’s homes.

To date, service providers have been focused on video delivery when it comes to setting ABR profiles. In general, audio has been something of an afterthought for their service delivery chains, and in many cases service providers have resorted to providing only a single profile for audio. For example, in looking at Apple’s specifications for total bit-rates, it recommends 40 Kbps for all audio streams. Many other services recommend the same and, in cases where service providers do switch

between different audio profiles, many just use two sets of audio parameters (one mono, one stereo) that share the same sample rate and bit depth.

The obvious negative to today’s approach is that audio quality does not scale with video quality. This should be a concern for service providers in movies, TV shows, concerts, and similar media where audio quality is a significant component of the overall experience. Consumers using mobile devices are are unfortunately presented with a lower quality of experience than the immersive surround sound they enjoy with their home services over the traditional delivery network. This dichotomy can be rationalized, but only until that point where consumers realize that there are services available to ensure that their mobile audio and video synch to optimize the experience. This is what audio ABR technology does.

Simple Sets You Free

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Dolby® Digital Plus – Supporting Dynamic Audio AssignmentA key reason that some operators are hesitant about providing multiple audio profiles is their concern that switching from one profile to another will result in audible pops that may occur when switching between streams using different audio parameters or various audio solutions. This is one of the issues that Dolby Digital Plus addresses. As shown on the left, Dolby Digital Plus allows operators to switch from mono to stereo to multichannel surround sound as the bandwidth available goes from low bit-rates to high bit-rates.

Dolby Digital Plus provides an end-to-end solution that enables seamless audio adaptive switching across bit-rates and channel configuration changes that protects against the audible clicks and pops that operators are trying to avoid. It provides unparalleled distribution model support for both file-based and live multiscreen delivery across a broad set of frameworks including MPEG-DASH, HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS Adobe HDS, and DECE UltravioletTM.

Dolby Digital Plus enables the delivery of high-quality audio to any compatible device and any distribution workflow, including broadcast, over-the-top (OTT), and on-demand. It includes scalable, adaptive, and bandwidth-efficient multichannel coding designed for bandwidth-constrained delivery networks. It also provides technologies such as loudness control and device-playback sound optimization that further enhance the end-user’s audio experience. Widely supported within the digital entertainment ecosystem, Dolby Digital Plus enables service providers to deliver high-quality multichannel audio entertainment to consumers on any compatible device while addressing the increased complexity of new content delivery formats and lowering their operational costs.

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1 Ian Walker, BBC iPlayer Monthly Performance Pack (BBC Communications, April 2013) http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns827/networking_solutions_sub_solution.html (accessed on August 16, 2013).

Quality Sound Sets the Bar for Superior Online Video Experiences

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Delivering high-quality video and audio experiences would not be nearly as difficult if consumers just stopped moving the goal posts!

It seems that every six months there is yet another new device to which service providers must deliver video. This means new operating systems and platforms replace the older, standardized versions to which we have finally become accustomed. For example, in its latest iPlayer Performance Pack, the BBC said that iPlayer TV show requests coming from PCs fell from 52% in April 2012 to 39% in April 2013.1 In that same period, the share of requests coming from tablets more than doubled from 8% to 19%, while smart phone request shares grew just as strongly, doubling from 9% to 17%.

It is no longer enough to simply say you ‘deliver video’ to multiple devices: your customers expect a high-quality experience, which presents an enormous challenge for video service providers. The open Internet comes with a lot of baggage that makes delivering a high-quality online video experience a hit-or-miss affair.

In this environment, what is the best strategy to optimize the video experience to every device, regardless of its operating and transcoding systems? To answer this question, we must first understand how streaming video is delivered on the Internet.

Most streaming video is currently delivered using adaptive bit-rate (ABR) technology. Using this approach, when available Internet bandwidth shrinks, the quality of video is degraded so that the bandwidth used to deliver the video fits what is available at the time. To date, this is only done for video, meaning the service provider never really delivers a high-quality audio experience. They tend to default to using just 64kbps stereo without variance.

While this presents an “okay” audio experience, subscribers who have access to high-data rate access are unfortunately left with a suboptimal experience. This does not have to be the case. Service providers could easily optimize the experience for their viewers and lower the audio rate should such degradation be required.

But this begs an important question: is it best to deliver equivalent audio and video together or sacrifice audio quality to maintain video quality? Most would respond “save the picture quality.” Not so fast! There is compelling evidence that audio quality is as, if not more, important than video quality.

In a paper for the IEEE, a team of scientists compared the overall viewer experience of a video clip at different video and audio quality settings. What they found was surprising: viewers reported the best experience when audio and video quality were at their highest. However, if the video quality was lowered and the audio quality maintained, the overall experience was much better than if both were degraded together. This effect became even more pronounced as video quality was lowered.2

This is very good news for video service providers. Video typically uses 10 to 20 times more bandwidth than audio. If Internet conditions get tricky, lowering video quality will reduce the bandwidth needed to deliver the show much more than lowering audio quality, yet maintaining audio quality has the biggest positive

impact on overall experience. This is the reverse of what common sense would suggest.

In the world of Internet streaming, you cannot predict ahead of time how much bandwidth will be available to deliver a show or movie. However, you can optimize any video experience by maintaining audio quality while allowing the video quality to change with bandwidth fluctuations.

Adapting to the Challenges of Internet Video Delivery

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2 Michal Ries, Rachele Puglia, Tommaso Tebaldi, Olivia Nemthova, Markus Rupp, Audiovisual Quality Estimation for Mobile Streaming Services, Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems, September 5-7, 2005, p4.

Mean Opinion Scores for Video Clip with MPEG for / AAC Encoding

Delivering a Premium Multiscreen Experience with Multi-Channel Surround Audio

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Audio Quality Matters

The market for multi-screen entertainment has exploded, leaving many service providers struggling to find clear competitive differentiators to help them acquire and retain subscribers. To this end, they are now focusing on delivering high-quality video as a lead element in their customer outreach and service differentiation, where ‘quality’ is measured as a function of the quality of service (QoS) provided, as well as quality of experience (QoE).

When looking at both QoS and QoE, it is important to note that this entails not only examining video quality but also audio quality, where both are measured across a variety of listening and viewing environments. Unfortunately, among video service providers audio quality has been an often-overlooked component of the end-user’s experience, this despite the fact that consumers place high value on the sound quality during video viewing. Their expectations impact the entire ecosystem for delivering multi-screen entertainment; from the studios creating the content to the manufacturers delivering the end-user devices that play the content.

It is clear that many content creators understand this and have included the development of a compelling audio experience in their original vision. Great entertainment experiences are created by a combination of sight, sound, and story. In order to recreate an artist’s original vision for their movies, the entire multi-screen ecosystem has to be prepared to deliver not only high-quality video but high-quality audio, as well.

Opportunities & Challenges in Delivering High-quality Sound

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1 Cisco, Cisco Visual Networking Index (Cisco, 2013).

According to the 2013 Cisco Visual Networking Index,1 more than 88% of Internet traffic is delivered to the home over broadband connections and the bulk of that traffic is video. Yes, it is true that consumers increasingly use their tablets and smart phones to watch online video. However, the primary point of entertainment content consumption remains the TV and the home theater system, an environment where consumers are accustomed to an exceptional sound experience delivered in 5.1 Surround Sound.

Unsurprisingly, the home experience sets the bar for portable and mobile sound experiences – a very high bar indeed. This has important implications for content owners and multi-screen service providers looking to ensure that their customers are getting the quality of experience they have come to expect from traditional broadcast and cable services.

The opportunity for delivering high-quality multi-screen entertainment is enormous and growing, as mobile devices become a preferred playback platform for many connected users (tablets, in particular, with over 225 million units expected to ship globally in 2013). In spite of the fact that audio is an important element of the user’s experience, there is a huge opportunity for improving the quality of audio on mobile devices. As the variety of end devices on which users consume content has expanded, and as the number of consumers that engage content using mobile entertainment devices has grown, the ability to deliver high-quality audio has failed to keep pace. This at a time when service differentiation is becoming increasingly difficult….

To succeed in this new multi-screen world, service providers must address the business and operational challenges created by the growing variety of distribution models and the rapidly expanding variety of end-user playback devices. For example, each file-based or adaptive streaming protocol requires a dedicated version of each stream, meaning each device requires content to be encoded in different video and audio formats.

Taken together, these factors drive increased cost and complexity in the systems needed to deliver online entertainment across the multi-screen entertainment ecosystem.

Another key challenge that accompanies the rapid expansion in the number of devices is platform interoperability. Service providers do not control the end-user devices and consequently have no control of the device decoder implementation.

Consequently, operators often cannot guarantee that the end-to-end solution will work as planned, meaning service providers cannot guarantee the quality of experience for their users.

This in turn erodes the service provider’s ability to differentiate themselves on QoE and gain the commensurate increase in customer satisfaction and reduction in service churn that accompanies such enhancements.

Turning Challenges into Opportunities

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To address these challenges, Dolby has created Dolby Digital Plus, a trusted audio platform that works across the entire multi-screen ecosystem. From content creation to distribution to the final HD experience, Dolby Digital Plus delivers premium multichannel audio that is as close to the original sound mix as it can get.

The Dolby Digital Plus ecosystem for service providers addresses the needs of any video operator, whether it involves OTT, online, mobile, cable/IPTV/DBS, or broadcast delivery. It includes solutions for content encoding, content distribution, and device playback, and supports the enhanced playback experience that will address the need for high-quality audio delivery.

Leveraging Dolby’s innovative home theater technology, Dolby Digital Plus provides optimized audio that delivers on the content creator’s vision for high-quality sound on all devices, across all networks, regardless of limitations. Dolby has long been the sound of HD in living rooms and among over-the-top services, and with Dolby Digital Plus is now the sound for playback on any device.

Dolby Digital Plus produces clear, high-definition audio that allows service providers end users the following benefits:

Delivering Premium Multi-screen Audio with Dolby® Digital Plus

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• Delivers a natural headphone surround experience for video; • Provides enhanced volume and better performance from tablet speakers; • Maintains consistent volume at the level set by the consumer for hassle-free

listening; • Enhances dialogue and suppresses unwanted sounds, so every word of a story can

be heard; and • Offers easy connectivity from tablets, game consoles, PCs, or mobile phones to

existing home theater system for authentic multi-channel surround sound that can scale up to 7.1 channels.

Dolby® Digital Plus

In today’s multi-screen universe, service providers are challenged to provide high-quality video to each and every consumer screen, regardless of location or device. Given the qualitative variations inherent in delivering IP-based video over the open Internet, operators are turning to cloud-based adaptive bit-rate solutions to help deliver the best video experience possible.

Unfortunately, for most video providers adaptive bit-rate audio is an afterthought, which leaves their customers with two choices: mono or stereo. In today’s multi-screen, multi-device universe, this is hardly adequate.

As discussed in this issue of Dolby’s Innovation series, audio quality:

• Is a primary consideration in consumer decisions to purchase specific brands and types of video-enabled devices, and

• Plays a tremendous role in the overall quality of video experiences, so much that most consumers will turn away from a video with poor audio quality.

Legacy video providers have long understood the necessity of high-quality audio in creating a compelling television experience. This same logic applies to smaller screens, but even more so. In fact, high-quality audio can compensate for poor video in ways never before acknowledged.

Yes, having Dolby-quality sound in a theater setting or on a big-screen TV is a no-brainer. But ensuring that your mobile and portable viewers have the best audio experience possible can be a critical differentiator in an increasingly competitive multiscreen market space.

The message is clear: a consistent, high-quality sound experience for shows and movies is critical to audience satisfaction, both on its own and to compensate for streaming video issues – whether that involves broadband TV, online, mobile, legacy, or broadcast delivery. Dolby’s multiscreen audio solution, Dolby Digital Plus, includes solutions for content encoding, content distribution, and device playback, regardless of the device and its the contextual parameters.

summary

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With almost 50 years of history in advancing the quality of media, it is not surprising that Dolby is the industry leader in delivering superior audio and visual experiences. Whether on the small screen (like a smart phone, tablet, or PC) or the big screen (be it a television or in a theater), Dolby technology is likely behind it.

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About The Diffusion Group (TDG) TDG provides actionable intelligence on the quantum shifts impacting consumer technology and media behaviors. Since 2004, our market research and advisory services have helped hundreds of technology vendors, media companies, and service providers understand how consumers access, navigate, distribute, and consume broadband media—whenever and wherever they may be.

For more information about The Diffusion Group, visit www.tdgresearch.com

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About Dolby Dolby is changing the way we experience entertainment by delivering the next generation content encoding, distribution and playback innovations for audio and video. Building on decades of innovation, industry know-how and extensive partnerships across the ecosystem, we are partnering with Broadcasters, PayTV operators and OTT service providers to ensure consumers get to immerse themselves in the narrative like never before.

For more information about Dolby, visit www.dolby.com

Produced for Dolby® by The Diffusion Group, Inc., 2014. All rights reserved.