Xerrades Telemàtiques - Guillem Cabrera (Rakuten TV) - Bringing cinema at home

Date: May 22nd, 15:00h

Location: C4-326B, EETAC. How to arrive

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 EETAC students.

Bio: Dr. 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.