AOMedia Member Spotlight with CoSMo Software
The AOMedia community mourns the loss of CoSMo Software CEO Dr. Alex Gouaillard, better known as Dr. Alex.
Dr. Alex will be remembered for his significant contributions to the AOMedia community (e.g. the RTP specification testing framework) and through his promotion of AOMedia throughout the industry. His upbeat personality made him a pleasure to work with and he will be missed.
Please introduce your company briefly.
CoSMo Software was founded by Dr. Alex Gouaillard in 2015 with the goal to develop tools to make WebRTC easier to use and adopt for any project. Dr. Alex had a unique vision that WebRTC would be the foundation of a new era of digital communication and broadcasting. In that time, the CoSMo team of WebRTC veterans have invested heavily in expanding the boundaries of WebRTC through R&D and contribution to key open-source projects.
In 2018 we developed Millicast, a platform-as-a-service that can scale any single real-time source stream to over 1 million concurrent viewers in WebRTC with under 500ms of end-to-end latency around the globe. Millicast is one of the first platforms to offer real-time AV1 encoding with SVC, enabling customers to maximize quality, optimize bandwidth, and support for features like HDR and 10-bit color.
What first brought you to AOMedia, and why did you decide to become a member?
As we are very active in real-time media standards, we saw AV1 as a natural extension of our work.
Having an intellectual property policy at the core of the Alliance was the key to avoiding problems we have encountered in the past, both as members of groups defining media technologies and as users of those technologies.
Royalty-free is good to have. But the real peace of mind is to have a predictable licensing contract right from the get-go.
What are you currently working on with regard to AV1? How will end-users benefit from your work? Businesses? Markets?
We worked primarily on the RTP payload specification for AV1, which reached 1.0 on March 1st, 2021. We also provided a reference media server implementation and test suite.
The technology is implemented in our Millicast real-time streaming platform, making it one of the few real-time AV1 usages in production along with Cisco Webex and Google Duo. The Millicast PaaS is available through an easy-to-use API, enabling our customers to build services and applications that need interaction at scale across diverse verticals, including auctions, gambling and betting, sports, gaming, content production, and more.
With many choosing to or forced to work from home, modern media solutions need to enable commercial-grade workflows with consumer-grade equipment.
AV1 is a godsend for us. With SVC enabled by default, it will allow us to improve a stream's resilience to packet loss and reduce adaptation time down to a couple of milliseconds, without any buffering or transcoding!
Better compression also offers the obvious benefit of using less bandwidth to deliver comparable quality to previous codecs, which for us means delivering a much better experience to the over 2 billion people that connect to the internet over 2~3G mobile networks in India, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa.