This month’s Cloudinary innovation update covers some critical developer-focused updates. Namely, a faster, more streamlined version of adaptive bitrate streaming for video, AI background removal specially designed for car images, and the new user interface designed to help developers onboard quickly and speed up asset organization workflows.
You can also learn more about these features and see them in action on Cloudinary Academy or our YouTube channel.
For a detailed list of all the latest innovations, don’t forget to check out our release notes.
One of the primary challenges with streaming high-quality video is buffering. In fact, buffering can lead up to 53% of mobile viewers to quit watching a video (source). Buffering takes place when the video bitrate exceeds the bandwidth available, which is often determined by the playback device and internet connection. The higher the video quality, the higher the bitrate. Because most video is viewed on the go there is a higher likelihood of buffering due to bandwidth fluctuations.
In recent years, Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) has been the solution to this critical problem as it encodes the video into smaller segments of 2-10 seconds and adaptively selects a streaming profile (combination of format, bitrate, and resolution) for each chunk depending on bandwidth availability.
While Cloudinary has been supporting ABR for video for some time, we are now releasing a faster, more streamlined version that performs the encoding process on-the-fly when the video is first requested by a viewer. Developers can now upload high-quality videos to Cloudinary within seconds and enable near-instant streaming. It also eliminates the need for any advanced data preparation or video encoding expertise.
Cloudinary automatically selects the appropriate streaming profile based on video content, playback device and internet speed to always ensure best possible video quality while minimizing bandwidth costs. Delegate the drudgery of manual encoding and setting up streaming profiles to Cloudinary and free up your developers to focus on what matters most!
Automatic background removal for images works by identifying an object in the foreground and erasing the background. This is especially challenging with cars because the background may still be visible through the windows. This leads to manual intervention and is not scalable when dealing with thousands or millions of car images.
To address this issue, our AI Background Removal capability now includes special handling for cars to identify and remove background that may be visible through windows.
Developers can programmatically apply this transformation by adding below parameter to the image URL
- During upload / update: background_removal: “cloudinary_ai:car”
- On-the-fly: e_background_removal: hints_(car)
You can apply additional effects, like adding a drop shadow or applying a green screen style backdrop, to further enhance your image.
Media Explorer – Asset Organization UI for Developers
With Cloudinary, both marketers and developers can leverage a single platform to collaborate and manage assets at scale. While our media library offers a robust asset management option for marketers, we are now excited to release a user interface specifically for developers to address common asset organization workflows.
This intuitive interface allows developers to get a folder view of all the assets they have uploaded to Cloudinary, and dive deeper into a specific asset and view, add, or edit all the metadata and tags. Troubleshooting and debugging asset-specific issues is now a breeze for developers!
Users can toggle to a developer mode and get connection code for various SDKs and code snippets for common actions such as upload, search, or edit an asset. This speeds up asset management workflows for developers by reducing context switching.
Media Explorer is currently in a beta version. Request access and let us know what you think.
That wraps up our key product highlights for the month of February. Stay tuned for more updates!
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