Rayburn Recap: Fox Super Bowl bitrate, Netflix scores encoding patent

Dan Rayburn Industry Voices

Welcome to the latest installment of Dan Rayburn's  Streaming Insights & Intelligence, a weekly insights column on StreamTV Insider where the industry analyst puts facts and figures to the news you need to know about. Join the discussion on LinkedIn and check back each week as he recaps key industry happenings.

For the week of January 22, 2025, Rayburn is tracking Fox, Netflix, Vimeo and more:

  • FOX shared with me its encoding bitrate ladder for the Super Bowl, with the max bitrate topping out at close to 15Mbps. 

    FOX will capture the game in 1080p, upscale it to 4K HDR, and digitally distribute it to vMVPDs and FOX’s platform, including Tubi. The 2024 Super Bowl stream on Paramount had an average minute audience of 8.5 million and required users to authenticate. As they did in 2023, FOX’s 2025 Super Bowl stream won’t require authentication on FOX’s platform. 

    Over the last three years, viewers of the Super Bowl stream across Paramount, NBC Sports and FOX averaged 15% growth yearly. You can see all of the viewership numbers for the previous Super Bowl streams from 2012-2024 in this blog post.

  • The new Firefox release (verison 134.0) added hardware acceleration support for HEVC video playback for Windows users. It can now offload the rendering process of videos encoded with H.265 or MPEG-H Part 2 codec from CPU to GPU, leading to smoother playback, reduced CPU usage and lower power consumption. More details from this engineering blog.
  • It took 16 years of litigation, but Vimeo has defeated a copyright infringement claim by Sony Music and Universal Music Group over music posted to the platform by its users. 

    The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright protected Vimeo. The court also rejected the labels' argument that the DMCA did not cover Vimeo because it profited from the infringement while having the "right and ability to control" it.

  • On January 14, 2025, Netflix was awarded a patent for optimizing encoding operations when generating encoded versions of a media title. 

    Netflix's sequence-based encoding application generates an encoded media sequence based on the first and second encoded shot sequences. The application for this patent was a continuation of a co-pending U.S. patent application titled "Optimizing Encoding Operations When Generating Encoded Versions of a Media Title." Link to patent 12200235

  • Altice and Nexstar announced they have reached a new carriage agreement, and all Nexstar programming has been restored to Altice USA’s Optimum TV customers. 

    It's comical that they said both companies "partnered on the best deal" for their customers, followed by the sentence, "Specific terms of the agreement were not released." Once again, in these carriage disputes, the customer is held hostage while companies play out their dispute in the media and then say customers should trust them that a good deal was negotiated. I think we need less regulation in the market, but carriage disputes are one place I wish companies were forced, by law, to disclose the deal terms.

Dan Rayburn is an analyst in the streaming media industry, with regular TV appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and Schwab Network amongst others. He is conference Chairman for the NAB Show Streaming Summit in Las Vegas each year, and his streamingmediablog.com website is one of the most widely read sites for broadcasters, content owners, OTT providers, Wall Street money managers, and industry executives. He also has a podcast at danrayburnpodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected]

Dan Rayburn’s Streaming Insights & Intelligence is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.