Shaping the future of online video
By Guido Meardi, CEO & Co-founder, V-Nova
Streaming Video Alliance has recently produced an excellent white paper on shaping the future of online video. In this annual survey, SVA explores consumer perceptions and behaviours around watching video on mobile phones. SVA concludes a number of key findings from this data:
- Over 25% of consumers watch more than 2 hours of video on their smartphones each week
- One of the biggest challenges facing the online video industry is delivering “broadcast quality” experience
- For millennials (ages 18-34), screen size is far less of an issue while buffering leads to frustration
People are increasingly using their mobile phones to watch online video, and the mobile component of multi-device premium packages is critical to the overall customer experience. However, what maximum bandwidth can be used for video in order to guarantee a suitable user experience with the real capacity of mobile data network in peak times? Doing the maths properly, the answer is a surprisingly low number, which does not allow traditional codecs to operate properly. It is also important to underline that the hard constraints of mobile network capacity are going to persist for the foreseeable future, since demand is growing at least as fast as capacity.
The PERSEUS codec technology has been developed to address this global problem now, with the available data network capacity and compatibly with all the existing ecosystem of decoder devices.
PERSEUS is a new codec software solution which, via a simple software upgrade, enables operators to provide high quality video at unprecedented bandwidth operating points. The consumers watching video on their mobile phones can now also watch video in low coverage areas, stream many more hours of video within the same data package and overall enjoy a great user experience with HD video, fast time to play and no buffering. At the same time, the operator can save money across the whole value chain, with lower encoding costs, lower storage costs and lower transmission costs.
Practically speaking, with a simple software upgrade, PERSEUS allows operators to stream premium live and VoD video at bitrates as low as 100 kbps, 720p HD video below 400 kbps and Full HD video below 1 mbps, even for complex content such as live sports. This translates into unprecedented reductions of time to play, instances of buffering, data rate costs per minute for the end user and CDN and storage costs for the operator. At the same time, the lighter processing power footprint of PERSEUS translates into increased encoding and transcoding density, i.e., more live channels and more VoD assets encodable per unit of encoding costs.
In a world where consumers want to stream video whenever they want and wherever they are, the PERSEUS codec software allows operators to turbocharge their services and profitably address this demand.
