The panoramic blueprint of the video cloud, the promised land of imagination

Does the video have borders?

In the past, the answer was yes.

At that time, the video may be locked in the TV and closed on the big screen. But as more and more hardware devices enter the home, as network technology changes layer by layer, as computing capabilities continue to upgrade, as video encoding and decoding capabilities continue to improve... Video has become a new information carrier. As the foundation of the big video industry in the new era, the video cloud has been given a key mission that can transform society.

On July 10th, "Imagine"-2021 Alibaba Cloud Video Cloud Panorama Innovation Summit and Global Video Cloud Innovation Challenge Finals Award Ceremony was held in Beijing. Regarding the future development prospects of video, regarding the panoramic blueprint of the video cloud, regarding the multi-sectoral linkage of academia, art, and venture capital, and regarding the multi-dimensional exploration of developers and audio and video technologies, through the collision of views at this summit, we seem to be Already we can see the bright road of future video development.

From video to hyper-video, the role of video cloud is overweight

In the past few years, the term video has been mentioned more and more. So what is video ?

To put it simply, the transmission of information has gradually joined the video as a carrier. As the threshold for video production continues to decrease, user acceptance continues to increase, and user usage time continues to increase, and the era of full video content has arrived. At the same time, video not only shines in the consumer field, but also generates new demands in various industries such as education, conferences, medical care, and finance.

The overall time consumption that users spend on video is obviously increasing, and the interaction of the entire society based on video in various business scenarios is also increasing. "The content is evolving more to video, and the forms of interaction are more diverse. Compared with the previous , 160ee4c3ce9b6c is a super-video era ." Alibaba researcher and head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Video Cloud, Lin Hao Define these current changes.

If you want to define an era, you need to understand the era. Lin Hao explained that the ultra-video era has five major characteristics, ultra-content, ultra-interaction, hyperlink, ultra-language ability, and ultra-future vision . From an analytical point of view, it means that the form of video continues to evolve, the interaction is richer, its dissemination has crossed language restrictions, and it can also affect the daily life of the public through AR, VR and other channels.

So how did the era of hypervideo come about? Lin Hao believes that 5G has played an important role. The large bandwidth of 5G has promoted the development of AI and IoT into intelligent networking; 5G has activated ultra-high-definition video and VR/AR, making the network peak rate reach 20Gbit/s, and the wireless interface delay 1ms, the resolution is significantly improved; more importantly, 5G has opened up a new format of digital content. Whether it is digital games, interactive entertainment, film and television animation, three-dimensional images or digital performances, the performance capabilities and forms of video have been greatly improved. Rich.

More importantly, cloud + video has formed a catalyst for scene innovation, making it possible to reality and reality 160ee4c3ce9bcc. The cloud-side-end integration collaboration allows the edge computing power to move up, and the cloud computing power to sink, reducing processing pressure and latency; the cloud-integrated audio and video technology makes it possible to have a consistent dual-end experience; after the development of AI technology, it is realized The empowerment of the full video link has intelligently subverted the past content production methods; at the same time, mixed reality technology has also broken through the new form of content and interaction, making the last barrier between the physical world and the digital world broken and linked, allowing video This carrier has more possibilities.

Steve Jobs said, "With , people pass information with lower bandwidth, and higher bandwidth will be used to convey emotion ." The birth of the ultra-video era is not only because of the increase in bandwidth, but also because of the evolution of technology. .

Technology evolution is divided into two major directions, namely the evolution of content and the evolution of interaction. The evolution path of content follows the greater density, more dimensions, more senses, and topological space , and its specific performance has also formed a video of text, image, audio and video, live short video, information and knowledge. , And even full-scene content video, and finally form an immersive content form. The evolution of interaction follows the multi-terminal link, multi-person sharing, space breaking, and the seamless integration of virtual and real . The evolution path has formed a process from offline, online, and interactive full-scene online to immersive interaction.

From this, it is not difficult to find that immersive interaction and content form will be the real future that we can explore. " information will naturally pass from one interactive object to another. The number will coexist and enhance with the physical. "

The way of interaction like "Ready Player One" is by no means a fantasy. Of course, behind all imagination is the deep mining of technology. Behind the video will not be the upgrade of single-point technologies such as AI, data, codec, etc., but the construction of the entire technical system based on the video cloud. Video cloud is not only a cloud technology, but also constantly evolves in the overall video technology. Whether it is three-dimensional or holographic, it must continue to evolve and layout, and finally allow more integration of video and scenes, thereby realizing digital intelligence. "Innovation on the cloud, value creation" empowered by audio and video.

The base of the big video industry, the evolution of the video cloud industry

With the development of hyper-video, the Internet is also developing. When evaluates the value of a certain industry, it is no longer the number of equipment used, but the number of time . While the dividends in various fields of the Internet have almost dried up, video-related fields showed huge dividends last year. And Xu Fanlei, deputy general manager of iResearch Institute, said that this dividend will continue.

From the perspective of industry development, the big video industry at this stage has fragmentation, decentralization, high-definition, real-time , which means that on the demand side, everyone’s pursuit of video tends to " "Short, frequency, and fast", the pursuit of the ultimate picture quality experience requires real-time audio and video, and real-time interaction to reshape the value of video applications, thereby covering many industries such as financial services, medical care, public utilities, social networking, education, and consulting.

And if we raise our perspective and survey the course of information dissemination in human history, then the role of video in it is also very important. Initially, human communication is more of body language, which requires high physical strength and is easy to be ambiguous; then, humans have language, which will not have physical problems but will be constrained by space and time, and it is difficult to pass on; later we With text, it has been worry-free to pass on for thousands of years, but the natural threshold of text and the lack of information richness have prompted the emergence of video. And video is also continuing to evolve, from the initial TV, to offline player video, to the current real-time audio and video and interactive video.

The video is still not perfect. There are two main problems. The first is the linearity of the video. Although it can be fast-forwarded to a certain place, it cannot achieve a global overview; the second is that the modification is slower and more difficult than the text. higher. Based on these problems, the industry will increasingly integrate with video. In other words, video is no longer an industry, but a kind of underlying basic capability . Video applications based on the video cloud will become a must. Video has become a must, so it can be said that "video cloud is the base of the big video industry in the new era."

The in-depth combination of industry and video affects more than just products, and the pattern of many industries has changed as a result. However, due to the complexity of the industry, their demands for video capabilities are different but they have certain commonalities. The first is required easy to integrate, easy measurement , it needs to be lower cost, more flexible scaling capacity to try to achieve on the cloud, agility trial and error can be quickly put into production.

Therefore, the video cloud needs to provide different solutions and process support in different links such as production, processing, transmission, and consumption. In addition to the depth and division of labor by cloud services, the video itself can also greatly reduce the threshold for producing high-quality and valuable videos.

In this process, cloud services are extremely important to the blessing of video. In the production, the video cloud can provide intelligent content processing capabilities, greatly improve creative efficiency and achieve efficient media asset management. In processing , the video cloud achieves the optimal balance of cost and image quality through video processing and intelligent coding. In the transmission link, the video cloud is based on CDN intelligent acceleration, cloud-side-end collaboration, reducing transmission delay and saving bandwidth costs. In the final consumption link, the video cloud can also provide diversified gameplay such as beauty, beautifying, and immersive interaction to enrich the user experience.

After integrating the industry, the video cloud itself is also continuously evolving. Although the video cloud is mainly concentrated in the Internet and pan-entertainment fields at this stage, it already has the ability to provide support in different links and can continue to evolve and develop in various industries; at the same time, video cloud solutions also give users more Choose, whether it is application-level capabilities or industry-specific general-purpose platform companies, different users in different dimensions can have different answers.

In addition, the video cloud is still pursuing the extreme at the technical level. Although it is not really mature to solve the problems of high-definition, real-time and interactivity, software defines everything is cooperating with hardware processing such as routers, storage, and computing At the same time, low-code development has also appeared in a large number of video clouds and video industries, which can allow practitioners to call functions faster and more agilely, improve ease of use, and achieve easy invocation and integration.

In the future, it is possible to create more innovations based on the video cloud, which can provide users with more links, lower thresholds, and show more inclusive energy. The video cloud technology has become a base function for the overall video industry and the big video industry.

The sustainable development of video cloud, technical difficulties and breakthroughs

As an industrial base, video cloud has a major feature of compatibility and inclusiveness. In particular, to increase the current user for interactive video, presentation and immersive experience requirements, AI depth into the will be key cloud video and video industry innovation. When the video cloud opened up new ground in social, entertainment, education and other fields, deep learning also continued to play great value in many aspects such as image, voice, language, and big data feature extraction. It can be said that future breakthroughs in video cloud technology will be driven to a certain extent by artificial intelligence based on deep learning.

In the roundtable forum at the end of the event, Wang Shuhui, a researcher at the Intelligent Information Processing Laboratory of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the era of deep learning has brought about the third rise of artificial intelligence. This rise is mainly for application purposes, making deep learning Technology has good results in many tasks, but its core has problems. Therefore, in order to achieve a breakthrough in video technology, the should solve three major technical problems .

• First, the existing deep learning relies too much on data, and its processing performance of data and the use of knowledge are not enough. Therefore, based on this consideration, the knowledge construction of network multi-modal and cross-media data will be a major issue in the future. Important development direction;
• Second, it is necessary to build a good knowledge base to support the reasoning work of the machine system, so that the machine can form analogy reasoning capabilities for data from any different sources.
• Third, in the early days, people were not equal to computers, such as human-computer collaboration during content creation. In the core process, algorithms, systems, and people need to be trustworthy. Mutual trust, collaboration, and trustworthy reasoning will be the main problems that need to be solved.

Of course, although AI has many problems, it also plays an important role in video. Bodhidharma Institute senior expert Xiexuan Song algorithm representation, AI play in the video role is divided into two categories, the first category is the most basic understanding of video or images, including classification, marking, detection, segmentation and so on; the second The class is related to the production class, such as production, editing, processing, erasing, rub-in, etc., which also includes the enhancements related to the underlying vision.

video image enhancement is a major application direction of AI . When the resolution is low, the video information experience will be very poor, and more vivid colors will add points to the experience; and a more immersive experience is for development direction. If you want to create a 4K content, details, fluency, and color, for example, are the key points to pay attention to. But from a technical point of view, the following three issues must be faced directly. First, the pursue, the more likely it is that there will be flaws . How to ensure the restoration of details and ensure the control of flaws is a core technology; second The source of the . There are generally two sources of data, such as low resolution and high resolution, low image quality and high image quality. The data acquisition ultimately often needs to be solved manually, which is a high-cost method. This is also a big difficulty; third, in the practice of AI technology, is also a problem to balance the effect and efficiency of

At present, AI is also moving in two dimensions. One is to go to consumers and serve everyone, and the other is to go deep into all walks of life to reduce costs and increase efficiency and create various opportunities.

Of course, driving innovation and technological upgrading, in the final analysis, is still . So the AI enthusiasm has been soaring for many years, and many schools have also started AI-related talents and education, but for the market and the industry, the problem of talent shortage is still serious, so where are the talents going? Wang Shuhui said that most of the graduate students he has brought have joined the industry battlefield. The school has already sent a large number of talents to the industry, but because the industry is developing too fast, high-level talents are scarce, and different laboratories have different positioning. Blindly expand the scale.

At the same time, the research in the laboratory separates the problem from reality and then solves the problem through mathematical methods. However, the requirements of the enterprise for the students are different, and they hope that the enterprise understands the business and uses it in practice. There is a long chain from academic research to business application, and it is difficult for students to realize plug and play. And those who realize this are obviously not only schools, but also industries and enterprises.

This year, Alibaba Cloud and Intel jointly hosted the Global Video Cloud Innovation Challenge in cooperation with Youku's strategic technology. The final award ceremony was held at the summit. This competition is hosted by Tianchi platform and Alibaba Cloud Video Cloud, focusing on the application and innovation of video cloud technology in the entire industry, attracting more than 4,000 participating teams from 23 countries around the world. The competition is divided into "algorithms" and "innovative applications" "The two major tracks, fully explore talents, encourage and look forward to the contestants to stimulate more imagination in the future.

Cloud Tianchi platform also released the Tianchi 160ee4c3ce9efc data set open source plan at the summit, covering more than 60 scarce data sets with real business scenarios in industries such as e-commerce, finance, logistics, medical care, and energy. Real business scenarios and data, together with social forces from all walks of life, create a professional scientific research big data platform.

The development of video cloud has become the choice of the times, has also transformed business and society, and has become the foundation of the big video industry; video cloud technology can be full of imagination, break through time and space, and make communication between people more seamless and harmonious. Cozy.

future is here, a brand new video world, are you ready?

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