MASTEAM talks - Gerard Solé and Guillem Cabrera - Rakuten TV, bringing cinema at home

The Master's degree in Applied Telecommunications and Engineering Management
(MASTEAM) organizes a weekly series of activities (talks, technical visits, discussion pannels) that complement the academic activities with real-world experiences from companies, research centres and institutions in the main topics of the master: Internet of Things, Smart Cities, 5G mobile communications, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Radio (SDR), cloud computing, augmented reality and audiovisual services, among others.

Speakers: Gerard Solé and Guillem Cabrera (Rakuten TV)

Title: "Rakuten TV, bringing cinema at home"

Abstract: Video Streaming services are one of the latest success cases on Internet services. The landing of Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime Video in Europe lead the market to a huge growth in terms of users in the last 5 years. Before all them arrived to Spain, Wuaki.tv started in Barcelona back in 2009 as a cinema new releases streaming service. Few years later, the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten acquired the company, rebranded it to Rakuten TV and expanded the service across many European countries.

Offering a high quality video streaming service to many different connected devices (from smart TVs to mobile phones) poses many technological challenges. In this talk we will overview our technological stack, focusing on the problems we faced while preparing media contents and deliver them to our users. We will cover topics such as large-scale, distributed and low-latency video streaming in the wild, multi-bitrate encoding and multi-DRM protection. After this summary, we will present a success case of an internal project we faced to deliver Ultra High Definition contents in our platform. We will discuss the technological problems we solved and introduce some of the technologies we implemented to improve our users experience. Finally, we will show the career opportunities available within Rakuten TV for MASTEAM students.

Bio: This talk will be conducted by two EETAC-graduated engineers working at the Playback team in Rakuten TV.

Gerard Solé is an engineer with interests on high-traffic services, who got his BSc from EETAC, where he is currently enrolled in the MASTEAM program. He had the opportunity to move to Rakuten TV as a streaming engineer, developing solutions to improve a real-life streaming service.

Guillem Cabrera is an extremely curious engineer who got his BSc in Telematics and his MSc in Telecommunications from EETAC (former EPSC) and a PhD on internet distributed systems from the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3 - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). After that, he moved to Rakuten TV as a streaming engineer, where he contributes to improve the streaming quality of the VoD service.

When: October 3rd, 17:30h (duration 1h)

Where: Building C4, Classroom 021B, EETAC, Campus Castelldefels UPC. How to arrive