An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: Annoying pauses in your streaming movies are going to become less common, thanks to a new trick Netflix is rolling out. It’s using artificial intelligence techniques to analyze each shot in a video and compress it without affecting the image quality, thus reducing the amount of data it uses. The new encoding method is aimed at the growing contingent of viewers in emerging economies who watch video on phones and tablets. “We’re allergic to rebuffering, ” said Todd Yellin, a vice president of innovation at Netflix. “No one wants to be interrupted in the middle of Bojack Horseman or Stranger Things.” Yellin hopes the new system, called Dynamic Optimizer, will keep those Netflix binges free of interruption when it’s introduced sometime in the next “couple of months.” He was demonstrating the system’s results at “Netflix House, ” a mansion in the hills overlooking Barcelona that the company has outfitted for the Mobile World Congress trade show. In one case, the image quality from a 555 kilobits per second (kbps) stream looked identical to one on a data link with half the bandwidth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More:
Netflix Uses AI in Its New Codec To Compress Video Scene By Scene
