BROWSING POSTS BY

James Varndell

VP Product | Playback

James has built his career around video, helping media companies and video publishers to create great content and reach every viewer. His focus is on Bitmovin's Playback products, ensuring they help developers to reach every device with outstanding quality playback. James also has in-depth knowledge of media management and video editing software.

Developers Product Updates

Why Android Set-Top Boxes Are Critical to the Future of OTT (and How Bitmovin Helps Get Them Right)

Set-top boxes (STBs) remain central to streaming strategies for broadcasters, telecom operators, and OTT providers globally, providing for viewers who value a consistent TV experience with a familiar remote control interaction. These devices span multiple operating systems, including Android, RDK, and Linux, each with unique technical characteristics and user-experience considerations. Among these, Android-powered set-top boxes…

Developers Product Updates

How Purpose-Built Observability Improves Streaming Quality and Reduces Churn

General-purpose observability tools were built for infrastructure, not video. When streaming teams try to adapt them to player-level workflows, they hit immediate limits: no native understanding of buffering or bitrate shifts, no visibility into ad session behavior, and monitoring agents that can degrade playback on lower-powered devices. This post explains why video streaming demands its own observability layer, and how Bitmovin’s Observability delivers session-level playback data, unified SSAI, CSAI, and SGAI ad tracking, and AI-assisted diagnostics to help teams detect issues before viewers notice them and resolve them before they drive churn.

Developers VidTech

Should You Build or Buy Video Observability? The TCO for Streaming Services and OEMs

Building video observability in-house sounds like the ultimate control play, until you factor in the real cost. This post breaks down the true TCO of building vs. buying a video analytics and observability solution, with tailored scenarios for OEMs, OVPs, broadcasters, SVOD, and AVOD platforms. From engineering overhead to scalability risks and revenue blind spots, discover which approach actually makes sense for your streaming operation.

Innovation Developers Product Updates

Understanding MCP: A New Way to Access Your Data with Agentic AI Workflows

As AI systems move beyond simple question answering and toward agent driven workflows, access to reliable, structured data has become a central challenge. Large language models are effective at reasoning over natural language, but they still depend on well defined interfaces to interact with real systems such as analytics platforms, operational tools, and content services. Without a consistent way to expose those systems, teams are often forced to build custom integrations or rely on fragile prompt based approaches that are difficult to maintain at scale.

Developers Product Updates

Strengthening playback observability with Bitmovin’s Observability collectors

Playback quality defines the success of every streaming service, shaping how viewers perceive the value of the content they consume. A single session can generate hundreds of signals that reflect performance, including start-up times, buffering events, and error codes. The challenge is that these signals are reported differently depending on the video player in use,…

VidTech

Highlights from RDK Tech Summit 2024

What is RDK? RDK stands for Reference Design Kit. It’s an open source software bundle for video, broadband and IoT devices. It’s commonly used in consumer devices which include video streaming apps, for example, set top boxes and is a popular development platform for service providers in the cable, satellite and OTT industries. What is…

Developers

Applying Playlist APIs to Bitmovin’s v3 Mobile Player SDK

Bitmovin’s video player is available for nearly all devices, platforms, and implementations. As the number of use cases and devices grows on a global scale, it’s imperative for a video player to be supported on as many devices as possible and enable development teams to launch services quickly. Bitmovin’s Player empowers developers by providing reference APIs…

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