Interview with a Compressionist

Name: Derrick Freeman

Location: Columbus, Ohio

Title/role: Instructor, Video Streaming and Compression Consultant, Webcast Producer

Company: Freeman Compression

URL: www.freemancompression.com

How did you get started in video compression or video streaming?

Around 1999, I got started with video compression at the City of Dayton when I needed to encode videos for our SCALA system, which was being used to display graphics, text, and other information for our government TV station’s channels. I came across a program called Media Cleaner Pro 4.0, and it helped me get the compression done and taught me a great deal about compression by reading the product manual.

What role does compression/streaming play in your daily work?

In addition to the work with my company, I work full-time at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center as a webcast producer for our Continuing Medical Education webcast. Streaming and compression are big parts of what I do weekly. We produce a weekly webcast, and I periodically need to encode videos of medical procedures and surgeries as video segments in our webcasts. In addition, I compress a three- to five-minute video of the beginning our webcast to upload to our YouTube channel. I then embed the YouTube video in our blog. We also have an audio podcast created from our webcast recordings for listeners.

For trainings, with my training company, most of my time is spent researching and testing encoding with the latest codecs and formats for teaching training classes and providing consulting to clients. In addition, I write articles and tutorials on streaming and compression for our readers as well as other websites. During classes, I’ll teach students hands-on about video encoding for computers, tablets, and mobile devices. I’ll also guide them through encoding workflows for adaptive streaming. Students are also being taught about live streaming.

For consulting projects, I create video compression presets for clients encoding for on-demand streaming or live streaming. I also install and set up their Wowza Streaming Engine streaming server and will make recommendations and configure the desired type of media delivery with Wowza for the client.

What surprises you most about video compression today?

There appears to be so much more science involved with compression today, and many cloud encoding tools are available. In addition, many CDNs have taken the need for the hands-on compression experts out of the workflow. Many encoding tools and products allow content producers to perform video compression without an expert. Although video compression experts are still needed, their roles have changed, and they may be more involved in creating educational resources, creating manuals, or providing consulting to encoding and streaming companies.

I’m really surprised at the influence of YouTube and Facebook and the interest of many to deliver live streaming on their social media networks. I’m also surprised that we live in a day where everyone knows what streaming is and that it’s so prevalent around the world. In 2002, I remember having to do a search for streaming video, and you could barely find it on most websites. At that time, NASA and the White House were two of the early adopters of delivering streaming media. Today, it seems that almost every website has streaming media available.

How has video compression changed in the time you’ve been working with it?

Video compression has changed and become much more advanced. There’s also a greater need for compressionists in many companies and organizations. From my view, there are more individuals involved in the video compression and streaming space, and money dedicated to encoding and streaming appears to be more extremely plentiful.

What’s the one thing you wished you had known about video compression when you were starting out?

I wish I would have known that video compression and streaming media would become more mainstream. I also wish I would have known that everyday people (nontechnical folks) would be viewing streaming using computers, tablets, mobile devices, and OTT devices, and that large social media companies would be driving the growth of the streaming media marketplace.

What’s the next big thing we should be watching in the world of video compression?

I think AV1 is the next big thing in the world of video compression. I’m excited to see what will occur when this new codec is available in encoding tools, in streaming servers, and on devices.