Comcast Business

VIPER (Video IP Engineering & Research), is a startup division within Comcast’s Technology and Product Division and spun out from IP Video and online projects originated within Comcast Interactive Media. We are a cloud-based, IP video infrastructure that’s been built to deliver a broad mix of on-demand video, live TV streams and an assortment of other digital media to an array of connected devices in the home.

We are a small (but growing) and nimble team. Our team is actively engaged in technology improvement and we are constantly looking for ways to optimize video delivery. The question we ask ourselves daily is "what can science and technology do for Comcast?", and as we work collaboratively, we create and build some amazing stuff together.

We are a group of intelligent engineers who work as hard as we play...and we get to play a lot and enjoy what Denver has to offer because we truly embrace our work-life balance.

We write the software that originates and delivers all the live and on-demand video for XfinityTV. Our adaptive streaming formats include Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, Microsoft Smooth, and MPEG DASH. And our content plays on iPad, Android, and Xbox. We serve more than 100 million video fragments per night. And that number keeps going up.

Our video players are built in each device's native languages. We currently have players on iOS, Android, AS3 (Flash), and Xbox. We use git, jenkins, and TestFlight and believe strongly in doing code reviews and automated testing. We have tons of devices and are constantly getting new toys to play (test) with.

We use the Cloudera Apache Hadoop stack to store, process, and search vast amounts of IP video related data. Storm is used for real-time stream processing and is the heart of our real-time architecture. Both HBase (noSQL) and MemSQL (newSQL) are also key components in our real-time architecture.

And we are creating software to manage and streamline deployments of IP Video infrastructure to sites around the country, as well as scripts and tools for validating the performance and interoperability of various vendor-sourced application components.