The market of streaming video content has been expanding rapidly with increasing number of companies becoming aggressive. to serve consumers content of their choice. More than half of global broadband Internet users watch television content that is streamed online or on an alternate platform every week. Fifty-four percent of broadband Internet users turn to streaming or alternate platforms weekly for TV content. Nontraditional viewing totaled 10.8 hours a month, or 7 percent of total global viewing time. Younger broadband Internet users (18- to 34-year-olds), spend more time consuming TV content across all platforms. Ten percent of the time this group spends viewing content is done via nontraditional means. A total of 74 percent of the same group watch TV nontraditionally weekly. This same group also spends 18 hours more monthly viewing TV content in general - an average of 167.7 hours - than the average time spent watching by nonbroadband users. Recent studies suggest that nowadays people are spending slightly less time watching scheduled broadcast TV, and are spending more time watching streamed television online. More than 44 percent of people globally watch Internet-based on-demand TV more than once per week, while about 80 percent watch broadcast TV more than once per week.

Social media usage has clearly impacted the way viewers watch TV. More than 40 percent of the people use social media on various devices such as smart phones and tablets while viewing television programming.

Trends

The number of devices connected to IP networks are expected to be twice as high as the global population in 2015. There are expected to be two networked devices per capita, up from one networked device per capita in 2010.

Driven in part by the increase in devices and the capabilities of those devices, IP traffic is expected to reach 11 GB per capita in 2015, up from 3GB per capita in 2010. The unabated demand for online video is expected to reach a double-digit year-to-year growth forecast through 2012.

In 2014, the volume of mobile data sent and received every month by users around the world is expected to exceed by a significant amount the total data traffic for all of 2008. It is expected that video streaming will experience the fastest growth of any IP traffic type at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 62 percent between 2008 and 2014.

Mobile video is expected to grow at a CAGR of 131 percent between 2009 and 2014 as people access more YouTube, Netflix, and high-bandwidth material on their mobile devices.

Shipments of over-the-top (OTT) set-top boxes (STBs) - also known as streaming media players and digital media adapters - have witnessed sizable growth over the past two years and are expected with more than 3.6 million units shipped in 2011. The streaming IP video is quickly becoming a common feature in consumer electronics rather than a core function. As a result, some suppliers of streaming media players are de-emphasizing their stand-alone OTT STBs in favor of concentrating development on streaming media software platforms.

The increasing availability of Internet-connected TV sets and hybrid STBs are expected to impact the long-term viability of the streaming media player market.

Despite the challenges, the worldwide installed base of streaming media players is expected to surpass 15 million by 2015.

Video is expected to drive worldwide mobile data traffic past the 60,000 petabytes level in 2016, up from 8000 petabytes this year. The streaming video and television is expected to surpass web and Internet traffic by 2015.

Another important factor driving online video consumption is the uptake by consumers of devices with larger screens than handsets, such as laptop computers, tablets, and other devices, the research firm said. The result is traffic generated by devices other than handsets is expected to surge from about 65 percent of all traffic this year to more than 75 percent in 2016.

Challenges

More viewers with more screens watching more content more of the time is great news. For broadcasters, however, the changing and fragmented video streaming landscape poses technical challenges as there is a wide variety of media platforms, transport protocols, device screen resolutions, and decoding abilities. For content owners striving to ensure that their streaming infrastructure can support whatever new gadget with whatever new feature captures the consumer interest, this can mean an endless round of competition just to stay in place. Content owners that want to take maximum advantage of the trends can encounter high costs both for infrastructure and operations, and considerable risk.

The streaming challenge. Video streaming is increasingly a delivery method of choice to TVs as well. A new generation of STBs, 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.

To maintain the best possible viewing experience across multiple devices and network connections, methods like adaptive streaming are becoming increasingly important, which include flash dynamic streaming, HLS, smooth streaming, and the newly minted dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard. A system that accomplishes any-screen streaming must support all of the above.

Fragmented streaming. Fragmented networks are inflexible and complex to deploy and maintain. For the content provider that wants to take advantage of any-screen streaming opportunities, the traditional approach has been implementation of discrete media server infrastructures, each targeted at delivery to specific media platforms. This so-called segregated workflow streaming has a number of limitations, chief among them being complexity and high cost. In fact, the approach requires buying, implementing, and maintaining multiple separate technical infrastructures - for instance, Flash media servers to support Flash player-equipped devices, including Microsoft IIS for Silverlight.

An additional drawback of segregated workflow is inflexibility. Guess wrong now, and the content provider may have to replace everything much sooner than necessary. And even if the provider guesses right, an inflexible system will fail to keep pace with inevitable market shifts. In any event, the adoption rate of individual media platforms and devices is sure to change, making it difficult to predict the future.

Unified streaming. Media server software forms a crucial link in the streaming media delivery chain. The right media server software can provide a unified infrastructure for multiscreen video delivery, streaming content simultaneously to the viewer's chosen device over any connection. A unified server can ingest a single set of live streams or on-demand H.264 video files and stream them over multiple protocols simultaneously. This eliminates the need for specialized, client-specific encoders, and reduces VoD storage requirements because all content can be stored in one common file format.

A unified platform offers support for the most relevant live transport protocols, such as RTSP/RTP, MPEG-TS, RTMP on the ingress, and the same in addition to various flavors of HTTP streaming on the egress. The architecture of the unified platform should be flexible enough to allow migration to new protocols as they evolve, and it should not be constrained by potential changes in encoder preferences.

Innovations in a unified server platform also enable users to enhance it with value-added features. These may bring incremental revenues, reduce cost or further simplify delivery workflows. Broadcasters that source premium studio content may value the ability to implement digital rights management (DRM) protection that spans all served screens.

Unified streaming networks are streamlined, easy to operate, and infinitely scalable. For large-scale streaming, multiple servers must provide the clustering ability to deliver live or on-demand streams. If it includes dynamic caching capability, unified media server software can transfer content on demand to points closest to the viewer, enabling operators to centralize content storage while also improving the performance of edge servers. The unified server's APIs must also enable integration with back-end systems. Depending on size and aspirations, a broadcaster may choose to employ a content delivery network (CDN) or a streaming service provider. In assessing the suitability of a service provider, the flexibility, scalability, reliability, and diversity of media platforms supported by its infrastructure should be considered.

For broadcasters and other content providers, the web's evolution presents both new opportunities for business expansion and new challenges, particularly keeping costs and revenues in line now and for the future. Implementation of a flexible unified media server platform is one strategy for supporting cost-effective streaming services that reliably deliver the goods to a fragmented marketplace today while keeping up with changes tomorrow.

Many traditional TV service providers are also trying to navigate the change management associated with delivering mobile video. They are accustomed to having control over their own networks and determining when, where, and how content is delivered. Now they have to put that trust into the hands of partners and mobile operators, creating a complete shift in thinking for proponents of a relatively stable and safe way of sharing content with subscribers. Content is now being pushed across multiple networks with varying amounts of bandwidth, requiring providers to figure out the best model to do this without compromising quality. Features like adaptive streaming from Apple have helped to resolve this issue on devices like the iPad, but solutions do not yet exist across all platforms and operating systems. As a result, it is necessary to work with outside companies that can offer these capabilities. WiFi availability also helps to eliminate some of the bandwidth issues. TV providers will have to work more closely with mobile operators to understand delivery mechanisms and work to create a mutual agreement on best practices.

Technical challenges. Another major challenge for all of these content and service providers is how to scale their mobile video services economically. There are a number of costs associated with extending this business model, such as acquiring and ingesting large volumes of content, offering new services to new devices and securing digital rights - all of which will contribute to the additional monetization of existing content over the long term.

Mobilizing content enables service providers to reach their subscribers on their terms, driving stickiness and deepening relationships as TV viewing evolves into a customer-driven experience. This does not require that all service components be managed in-house. Networks and providers can choose to outsource the entire mobile entertainment service to a trusted vendor or to streamline and reduce costs by offloading resource-intensive processes such as content acquisition, ingestion and encoding - ensuring critical scale and quality assurance while maintaining control.

Overall, while the challenges associated with video streaming services are plenty, the potential upside with regard to increased customer loyalty, reduced churn, and acquiring new customers from areas outside traditional network build-outs are significant for incumbent TV service providers. Through the intelligent use of technology solutions and services, it is possible for these providers to cost-effectively scale their offerings while ensuring a high-quality video experience and maintaining tight control over their customer relationships.

Major Players

Netflix, Hulu, and now Amazon offer subscription models, while others like Apple run on pay-per-view basis. The future of streaming business looks bright and offers many opportunities for players in this industry. Netflix is certainly ahead of the game so far and does have a head start over most of its competitors. Sixty-one percent of movie streaming in January and February 2011 came from Netflix; meanwhile, eight percent came from Comcast Video-on-Demand, four percent from DirectTV, four percent from Time Warner Cable, and four percent from Apple. Netflix's subscriber base was 12 million in 2009, which marks a 67 percent increase.

While Amazon Prime's library of just 5000 titles pales in comparison with Netflix's 20,000, Amazon already has strategic relationships with content providers through its Amazon Instant Video, which carried 90,000 titles. Moreover, Amazon can direct its spending efforts on licensing more content by using its core business to drive the growth of its streaming segment.

The last five to six years have been amazing for video. Web sites such as YouTube and Vimeo have set the standard for uploading and sharing video. The latest foray into streaming video is likely to be YouTube as it treads carefully into new territory. YouTube is taking on streaming live video through a new channel called YouTube Live which aims to bring more original content to the site and gives users another reason to stay on longer.

Apple has embraced video and pushed downloadable content through the iTunes store. Netflix has moved into the streaming video arena which has big content providers worried.

Hulu was ranked by ComScore as the ninth most popular video viewing site with almost 27 million unique viewers. Hulu is merely another OTT player streaming YouTube videos, the subscription service also delivered almost 1 billion ads, or about 19 percent of the total 5.3 billion ads viewed in June 2011.

In addition to the above, several new players are getting into the video-delivery business. RIM, the BlackBerry maker, is building an Apple TV-like STB. Codenamed Cyclone, the media hub connects to TV sets via HDMI, and it is Wi-Fi enabled. The box connects with Netflix, YouTube, and in-home media sources.

For the former Netflix subscribers, Amazon Prime Instant Video will soon carry CBS network programming. The Amazon/CBS deal will include all episodes of Star Trek. The Amazon service will provide access to 6000 movies and TV shows. Streaming player Roku has released the Roku 2. The device provides access to 300 channels, including iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus, Crackle, and Amazon. Sports fans can access subscription-based feeds of MLB, NBA, NHL, and UFC. And if that is not sufficient, the Roku player has an enhanced remote allowing viewers to wave the remote at the TV to play games like Angry Birds.

For those who prefer the stability of big-box stores, retailer Wal-Mart intends to challenge the dominance of Netflix through its recent acquisition of streaming service Vudu. Viewers will be able to stream movies and television shows through more than 300 devices, including HDTV sets, Blu-ray players, and the Sony PlayStation 3.

The Associated Press and Streamworks, a global streaming company, is offering Associated Press Television News (APTN Direct) to digital publishers as the first high-quality online stream of the live video news service. APTN Direct covers and supplies breaking news to nearly 200 broadcasters worldwide. AP was the first news agency to launch a live coverage service in 2003, covering the invasion of Iraq in real time. Until now, the service was only available to customers via satellite. The new Streamworks solution will make the live service available via online, mobile, and tablet devices to meet the demand for live content from digital platforms.

The Future of Streaming Video

With streaming video growing by leaps and bounds, and with thousands of TV and movie offerings available through services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and iTunes, soon traditional video platforms could become relics of a bygone era.

But there are still a few kinks to be worked out before streaming video renders more traditional viewing platforms obsolete. Firstly, there's an immediacy to live television that streaming services just do not have. Sports fans, avid news watchers, and the impatient will always flock to their TV sets rather than wait for content to become available online, at least until video streaming services begin providing live broadcasts. Now ESPN and CNN are offering live streaming content on their websites. The future of streaming may not be consolidation, but it is likely that, in the not-so-distant future, just about all programming will be available online through one service or another.

The second hindrance is limited libraries of subscription services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Though Netflix has a massive library of online streaming films and TV shows, but they are still a bit slow on new releases. Most TV shows do not become available on Netflix until the entire season has ended, and new movies are usually only available by DVD. Netflix has recently raised the price of its DVD-by-mail service in an attempt to steer subscribers toward the streaming-only option, but the streaming library continues to be more limited and dated than the DVD option, though assuredly more convenient.

Finally, streaming services are being challenged by some networks. While both Netflix and Amazon have recently made deals with major studios to distribute their content, others are pulling the plug on streaming in an effort to draw in more viewers to live broadcasts, which continues to be the most profitable aspect of the business, bringing in billions of dollars every year in advertising revenue. Even Hulu's ad-supported service only shows a fraction of the ads that would be shown on TV.

Next-generation networks will certainly encourage the popularity of video, but it will probably also change the way one watches. Faster speeds will encourage individual users to stream more video, made even easier because so many users accessing via laptops or with Apple devices that have front-facing cameras. Live streaming sites will also see huge opportunities for broadcasting live events like concerts, sports, or newscasts to users who cannot watch at home in front of their TVs.