Manuel Briand
Manuel Briand

I make streaming look and sound better — for less.

I’m a Principal Media Streaming Engineer at Disney. I design the Content-Aware ABR Stacks behind Disney+ and work on Objective & Perceptual Video Quality, Dialogue Clarity and Automated QC. Before that I architected DIRECTV’s 4K/HDR/Atmos launch, co-developed DTS:X and ITU-T G.719, the first full-band audio standard for video conferencing.

Get in Touch View Resume

Career

  1. ENSSAT 2003 Engineering Degree and MSc 🇫🇷 Lannion
  2. INPG / Orange 2003–2007 PhD in DSP & Computer Science 🇫🇷 Grenoble / Lannion
  3. Ericsson 2007–2011 Research Engineer 🇸🇪 Stockholm
  4. DTS 2011–2015 Senior R&D Engineer 🇺🇸 Calabasas
  5. DIRECTV / AT&T 2015–2021 Principal Systems Architect 🇺🇸 El Segundo
  6. Disney 2021–Present Principal Media Streaming Engineer 🇺🇸 Glendale

For 23 years I’ve worked on how media looks and sounds: codec standards at Ericsson (ITU-T G.719), DTS:X at DTS, the DIRECTV 4K/HDR/Atmos launch at AT&T, and now content-aware ABR stacks, perceptual quality, dialogue clarity and automated QC for Disney+.

Teams bring me three questions: is the quality good enough, why is this content or system behaving this way, and what should we do about it. More and more, my answer is automation and machine learning that carry a trained ear and eye across an entire catalog.

Patents
16 invention families, 36 granted US patents, plus a Disney family pending in the US, Europe, Japan and China
Awards
Two CTO Awards, at Ericsson and at DTS
Education
PhD in DSP and Computer Science, Grenoble INP

Results

15%less Disney+ VOD delivery, on average

An ABR Stack for Every Format

I design the content-aware (CAE) ABR stacks behind Disney+, one for each format: SDR, 4K HDR, IMAX and now 9:16 vertical video in UHD and FHD, SDR and HDR. Per-variant objective and perceptual scoring cut VOD delivery by 15% on average, weighted by viewing, and up to 40% on some of the most-watched titles. Content-specific presets save hundreds of thousands a year in CDN costs.

In the Pipeline

9:16vertical video: sound that follows the crop, in development

Cinema Sound for Vertical Video

Disney+ vertical video is mostly cropped from 16:9 masters, but cinematic mixes are made for the full widescreen frame. I invented a way to use the cropping data to re-balance the soundfield, so the sound follows what stays in the 9:16 picture. It is still in development, not yet in production. Patent pending.

In the Pipeline

100%of Disney+ devices, no new licensing

Dialogue Clarity for Every Device

A patented, backward-compatible way to make dialogue easier to understand on every Disney+ device. Production integration is complete on Skywalker Sound’s CODA Edge (on-premise, containerized). With Fraunhofer, I co-developed DIS, an objective score for dialogue intelligibility. Paper at the AES Show 2026 in Nashville, Tennessee.

The AES Talk

24×faster than real time, 30 languages

QC That Knows Where to Look

I’m building automated pipelines that score every rendition and send only the segments that need a human to a reviewer. The dub and subtitle language checks, built on open-source ML models, flagged no file falsely on a 187-file validation set and run about 24× faster than real time.

The Case Study

50%+less egress and fewer production issues

Simpler Delivery

At AT&T I pushed leadership to adopt CMAF across live and cloud DVR: one set of segments instead of duplicate MPEG-TS and fMP4 copies. Egress costs and production issues fell by more than half.

Technical Leadership

Teaching Teams to Judge Quality

At DTS, DIRECTV and now Disney, I train QC teams to run subjective reviews. Today I’m teaching the ingest and QC teams to use and improve the automated QC pipeline.

Growing Engineers

Both interns I supervised during my industrial (CIFRE) PhD at Orange Labs went on to PhDs. At AT&T, an intern I mentored was hired full time, and I led a Cal State LA student team on a KPI-emulator project.

Shaping Industry Standards

Founding member of the CMAF Industry Forum, with contributions to ITU-T G.719, the ATSC 3.0 audio submission that became DTS:X, DASH-IF guidelines, Apple’s HLS authoring spec and CTA WAVE. Member of the Alliance for Open Media (AV1, AV2, IAMF) and SVTA. Reviewer for AES and IEEE.

Industry and Standards Work