Our intent at PlayStation Vue was to make an Over-the-Top (OTT) streaming video content delivery system that was the most robust possible – improving the speed, reliability, and efficiency with which customer-selected Digital Video Recordings (DVRs) were stored and delivered.
In this Technical Operations Center Whitepaper, entitled "The Digital VCR: Creating 21st Century Content Delivery Efficiencies While Supporting Customer-Centered Usage Expectations" which I co-authored with broadcast design engineering expert Neil Peters, we laid out the technical specifications required to create an innovative new DVR logic. This method of content recording and delivery vastly simplified the PlayStation Vue workflow processes at Sony Interactive.
Our encoding partners delivered an Adaptive Bit Rate HLS stream segmented into smaller chunks, roughly 5 seconds in length, as a means of providing a consistent video stream, so the customer would experience fewer buffering interruptions. In turn, our methodology of efficiently storing these segments from the supplied live streams, allowed us to retain a unique representation of their recordings, and return that unique representation to the customer on demand, in order to deliver enhanced services to customers, such as 28-day Digital Video Recording (DVR).
The next-level DVR logic our team designed at PlayStation tied that television content to individual users in an objectively verifiable way, attaching metadata to the content, and controlling the length of play availability, all while respecting copyright and fair use rights, as mandated by law. All of this made the PlayStation Vue uniquely able to offer DVR on any stream, regardless of signal acquisition means or encoding vendor type.
This Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) shows a basic, high-level view of how streaming data flows from content providers, across a network to customers, in addition to how data flows into the control rooms of Technical Operations, where personnel can monitor traffic and determine quality control. The PlayStation Vue team delivered reliable, cloud-based HD video streaming content to over 745,000 customers during high-profile, high-traffic, live events like the Super Bowl, World Series, or the Oscars, as well as provided consistent service day-to-day across 1,149 channels nationwide to 210 Designated Market Areas (DMAs) across America.
In January 2020, our PlayStation Vue team was awarded the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS), for "Pioneering Development of Large-Scale, Cloud-Served, Broadcast-Quality Linear Channel Transmission to Consumers."
