the connected world supplement special report Supplement sponsored by
Together, the drop in the cost of bandwidth and the concurrent proliferation of video-capable devices are driving up the number of PCs, smartphones, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and tablets being used, as well as users’ IP traffic. Unabated consumer demand for online video also fuels the remarkable growth of multi-platform and multiscreen media delivery models. Alex Dobrushin, chief marketing officer at Wowza Media Systems, discusses how to make multiscreen delivery both manageable and affordable.
Strategies for adaptive bitrate streaming
‘mediacasters’. While offering such companies new opportunities for expanding their reach and revenues, however, the evolution of the video streaming landscape also poses significant technical challenges. Content providers today must be able to understand and accommodate a wide variety of media platforms, transport protocols, and device screen resolutions and decoding abilities.
T
he increase in viewers, number of screens, and volume of content being watched is a powerful trend and a positive one for broadcasters and other
Alex Dobrushin, chief marketing officer at Wowza Media Systems.
What’s more, they - and their streaming infrastructures, in particular - must be prepared to support the emergence of new mobile devices with new features and capabilities. It is a never-ending game in which providers that want to capitalise on changing consumption trends face critical decisions and substantive risks in building out their infrastructure and operations. The difficulty of making forward-
Engineered
according to the Wowza
commitment to ‘any screen done right’, the Wowza Media Server 3 provides the
adaptive streaming capabilities that are key not only to cost-effective operations, but also to delivery of the best possible viewing experience where and when it’s wanted.
looking business and technical decisions is compounded by the fragmentation and ongoing evolution of the video streaming landscape. While providers must address the demands of mobile video delivery, they must also address streaming to television sets and a growing array of set-top boxes and receivers, many of which use different protocols and formats. For example, the popular Roku media player is shifting away from the traditional RTSP and MPEG-TS protocols to Web-centric alternatives such as Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming, and/or other variants of HTTP streaming. The need to encode/transcode
media for a broad range of targets adds further complexity to streaming
S28 l ibe l the connected world supplement september/october 2011 l
www.ibeweb.com
services. The resolutions appropriate for video-capable mobile phones can differ, ranging from 240p at 20 frames per second (fps) to 360p at 30 fps or higher, and the average bit rates required likewise span a range. Desktop computers support much higher resolutions, up to 1080p at 30 fps, depending on the available bandwidth enabling or limiting this service. A lower bitrate stream that’s visually appealing on an iPhone will likely look fuzzy on a television equipped with a set-top box. Consequently, the provision of a quality viewing experience over multiple platforms can require multiple encoding renditions of the same content. This process not only represents additional costs for live encoding equipment, but also for media storage of VOD assets in various formats. Content providers typically have
addressed multiscreen media delivery through implementation of discrete media server infrastructures - Flash media servers to support Flash player- equipped devices, Microsoft IIS for Silverlight etc - and parallel delivery workflows targeted to different platforms. For most companies, this has been a less-than-ideal approach.
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