# iReplay.tv

> iReplay.tv is a streaming and broadcast company run by a collective of engineers. It hosts a directory of freelance, contract and permanent media streaming and broadcast specialists available for hire, plus self-service streaming tools.

## Hire media, streaming & broadcast talents

- [Talent directory](https://ireplay.tv/media-streaming-broadcast-talents): Hire freelance, contract or permanent streaming and broadcast specialists, streaming and broadcast engineers, video player specialists, OTT platform developers, encoding and transcoding specialists, and native app developers (iOS, tvOS, Android, Roku, Fire TV). Expertise includes HLS, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC, RTMP, SRT, low-latency streaming, OTT and FAST platforms, VOD2Live playout, transcoding/encoding (FFmpeg), DRM, server-side ad insertion (SSAI), and player development (hls.js, Shaka Player, video.js, AVPlayer, ExoPlayer). Filter by region (Europe, North America, Middle East, Asia-Pacific), remote availability, and engagement type.
- [Remote talents](https://ireplay.tv/media-streaming-broadcast-talents/remote): Remote-friendly streaming and broadcast professionals.
- [Freelance talents in Europe](https://ireplay.tv/media-streaming-broadcast-talents/freelance/europe): Freelance streaming specialists based in or open to Europe.

## Tools

- [AI Ad Generator](https://ireplay.tv/tools/ad-generator): Turn any product or service page into a ready-to-post video ad. Paste a URL and the AI reads the page and your brand book, then renders finished ads in every format from one job: 16:9 (YouTube, web, connected TV), 9:16 (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) and 1:1 (feeds), plus optional 4K cinema masters (1.85:1 flat and 2.39:1 scope, DCP-ready), a broadcast/FAST TV conformed encode with CEA-708 captions, and a connected-TV squeezeback overlay. Every ad includes WebVTT captions and a matching Suno music prompt. No filming or video editing. First ad free with no login, no credit card and no API key: a watermarked 9:16 preview plus a clean pause-ad still. Removing the watermark starts at $8, or $12 for all three formats, then pay per ad with no subscription. Bringing your own Anthropic API key is an optional alternative, not a requirement. Typical turnaround is 15 to 35 minutes. Available on the web and as native apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. Supports bulk generation for ecommerce catalogues and running the ads as pre-roll/mid-roll on TV channels.
- [Premiere & Live Countdown](https://ireplay.tv/tools/premiere-countdown): Build a branded YouTube premiere/live countdown with a scannable QR code.
- [Video Quality Analyzer](https://ireplay.tv/tools/video-quality-analyzer): Free no-reference bitstream analyzer for HLS and DASH. Paste a playlist, manifest or segment URL and it downloads a real segment, decodes every frame, and shows a per-frame bitrate chart (one bar per frame, sized by the bits it cost and coloured by I, P or B type) with the actual picture for every frame beneath it, the per-frame bitrate view desktop bitstream analyzers are bought for, in a browser and free. It reports keyframes sitting mid-segment with no scene change and quantifies the wasted bitrate; keyframes correctly placed on scene cuts, which it explicitly does not count as waste because a P frame at a hard cut costs nearly as much; scene cuts where rate control ran out of headroom; IDR versus open-GOP I frames read at NAL level; B-pyramid use; microbursts over 100/250/500/1000 ms windows against the declared BANDWIDTH; gradual transitions such as dissolves that no cut detector flags; and frame rate or bitrate the manifest declares but the media does not match. VOD and live streams are judged by different rules, and it generates the ffmpeg/x264 settings that fix what it finds. Important: this is no-reference analysis and is NOT VMAF, PSNR or SSIM. Those are full-reference metrics that require the original master file for comparison; no master is uploaded here, so no such score is reported. VMAF tells you how good an encode is, this tells you why and what to change.
- [Streaming Analyzer](https://ireplay.tv/tools/stream-analyzer): Analyze an HLS or DASH manifest against industry best practices: encoding ladder and bits-per-pixel, codec profiles and levels, GOP, frame rates, target duration, DRM signalling, failover and content steering, with Apple mediastreamvalidator included. Manifest-level companion to the Video Quality Analyzer, which works on the frames instead.
- [Vertical Reframe](https://ireplay.tv/tools/vertical-reframe): Convert 16:9 landscape video into vertical 9:16 clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight and RedNote. Unlike automatic reframing tools that track motion and pan, this one detects the scene cuts, pre-positions a 9:16 crop window on every shot, and HOLDS that framing for the shot, so the preview is exactly what renders. The reason is measured: on a 12-minute broadcast of 141 shots the motion centroid wanders a median of 33% of frame width within a single shot (on a talking head it follows a moving mouth, then jumps to whoever moved last), so a crop driven from it chases noise, and a pan that chases noise looks worse than no pan. Per-shot 'follow the action' is available for footage that genuinely travels. Clip edges always snap to a scene cut, never mid-shot. Crop width is adjustable from a tight 9:16 slice to the whole frame, letterboxed on a blurred background, for shots no crop can survive such as full-width titles, wide establishing shots and crowds. Several clips per source, queued while the previous one renders; the expensive analysis pass runs once per video. Output is 1080x1920 H.264 with AAC and a WebVTT subtitle file per clip with language auto-detected. Free with no account: 100 minutes of generated video, free clips carry a small watermark. Bringing your own API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or ~20 OpenAI-compatible providers) removes the watermark and switches to a vision model picking the subject shot by shot; the key runs the job and is deleted after. Rendering runs on iReplay hardware either way, so a key pays for the model, not the compute. Aimed at broadcasters, channel operators, event producers and VOD libraries with 16:9 archives, not only at consumer creators. Output matches the top rung of the My TV Channel portrait ladder, so clips can become a 24/7 vertical channel with no upscaling.
- [Streaming Cost Optimizer](https://ireplay.tv/tools/cdn-optimizer): Reduce CDN and streaming delivery costs.

## Blog

- [Streaming & broadcast blog](https://ireplay.tv/blog/): Articles on OTT streaming, video encoding, players, and broadcast technology, written by the iReplay.tv professionals.
- [What is a Media Forward Deployed Engineer?](https://ireplay.tv/blog/media-forward-deployed-engineer-ai-video-audio-streaming/): Definition of the Media Forward Deployed Engineer: an engineer who embeds with a broadcaster, streaming service or media company and owns an AI system end to end inside their environment, scoping it, writing the production code and keeping it running, with domain depth in video and audio rather than only in models. Distinguishes the role from a consultant (who delivers a report), a systems integrator (who installs a vendor's product) and a vendor's own forward deployed engineer (who is paid to make one product fit). Covers why the role exploded (postings up 800%+ Jan-Sep 2025 and 1,000%+ year over year into 2026; OpenAI's deployment business backed by $4B+; Anthropic's $1.5B joint venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs to embed engineers in banks) and why it exists at all (MIT's GenAI Divide found 95% of enterprise AI pilots produced no measurable P&L impact, with failures clustering on integration rather than model quality, and specialised outside teams succeeding ~67% of the time against ~33% for internal builds). The core of the article is nine things generic AI engineers get wrong about video: a 90-minute match at 25fps is 135,000 frames so the engineering is deciding which frames the model ever sees, using I-frame placement and motion vectors the encoder already computed rather than sampling every Nth frame; frame-accurate timecode (drop frame vs non drop frame, 29.97 vs 30, PTS vs DTS, decode order vs display order) because an answer "around 42:17" is useless to an editor cutting on a frame; where the model runs being a contract question (TPN, MovieLabs, CDSA) and encrypted streams being undecodable so every pixel-based quality metric is off the table under DRM; quality having a number that someone signs off on (VMAF, PSNR, SSIM, EBU R 128, ATSC A/85, Apple's HLS authoring spec); unit economics where the cost unit is an hour of content and an archive runs to tens of thousands of hours, with a 2-10 second cloud round trip disqualifying anything live; saliency-based 16:9 to 9:16 reframing; AI in a broadcast chain being a component with an SLA needing confidence gates, deterministic fallbacks and a frame-level audit trail; 24/7 systems being handed over rather than delivered; and the agent tool surface in a live playout system. Includes five interview questions for hiring one (cost model for a 40,000 hour archive, DRM's effect on approach, what to do with a timestamp, how to sample frames, and behaviour when the model is unavailable on air), and honest guidance that the $300K-$1.2M compensation figures quoted for forward deployed engineers describe US frontier-lab in-house packages weighted toward equity, not what media pays or what an independent specialist in Europe charges. Draws on the Norsk webinar "When AI Runs The Stream" with Adrian Roe (co-founder and CEO of id3as, makers of Norsk) and Juan Pablo Saibene (co-founder and CEO of Qualabs, Montevideo), including designing so mistakes are cheap, a funnel that promotes model explanations into a deterministic layer once a human approves them, and the bottleneck moving from generating clips to validating them. Available in 15 languages.
- [From product page to video ad in every format](https://ireplay.tv/blog/product-page-to-video-ad-every-format/): Guide to turning a product or service page URL into a ready-to-post video ad in 16:9 (YouTube/CTV), 9:16 (TikTok/Reels/Shorts), 1:1 (feeds) and 4K cinema (1.85:1/2.39:1) formats using an AI ad generator, with a step-by-step, an aspect-ratio reference table, cost guidance, and how it compares to UGC/avatar ad tools.
- [Pause ads: what they are, what they cost, and which of the numbers hold up](https://ireplay.tv/blog/what-is-a-pause-ad-ctv-specs-examples-data/): Reference on the CTV pause ad format: a still image ad shown when a viewer pauses a stream. Includes a definition, a screenshot of a pause ad running in a real player, and a platform-by-platform spec table drawn from first-party documentation (YouTube appears after 10 seconds, static image 1080-1350px, reservation only in 35 countries; Prime Video 1920x1080 min with a 196x196 QR; Disney+/Hulu/ESPN 1085x770 transparent PNG with a 12-business-day turnaround; Peacock after 5 seconds; Roku Channel via Roku Ads Manager with a 2-week turnaround; Paramount 1920x1080). Also covers format history (Hulu launched it in 2019 with Coca-Cola and Charmin after research found viewers were strongly against a video pause ad), pricing (Index Exchange June 2026: buyers expect under a $15 CPM, publishers value it at $15-25+, with 70% of buyers naming lack of standardisation as the main obstacle), and the provenance of commonly-quoted effectiveness stats (NBCUniversal measured a 41% lift in ad memorability on Peacock; the widely-repeated claim that viewers like the format traces to an n=8 qualitative study; the 51% take-action figure attributed to the Video Advertising Bureau has no findable source; the 91% brand recall figure ships with no sample size or date). Includes the publisher-side implementation: detecting a real pause vs a buffering stall, and counting one impression per creative per session rather than per display.