11 years of content, and counting
S04E08: Game of Streams (11 years of content, and counting)
Our Media Solution Specialist, Magnus Svensson, is sharing his reflections from the online streaming industry in this post. This is part of a monthly series so make sure to follow us here if you don’t want to miss an episode.
A recent study by Ampere Analysis showed that the average U.S. household has access to almost 100,000 hours of content, from an average of 3.8 streaming services in a home. That is more than 11 years’ worth of content and more keeps coming every day. With an increasing amount of services that all compete for the same resource, the customers’ time, it is important to make an attractive offering.
With the rapid increase of new offerings, we will see alternative business models to sustain the competition. The services and vendors with the most flexible and attractive offerings will survive. The streaming equipment vendors must understand that if their customers are successful, they will become successful. By being innovative and help to create a better experience for the viewers their products will be used more, and in the end, generate more revenue.
Long gone are the upfront costs and huge initial investments, replaced by consumption-based price models where the parties share the risk and reward. Long gone are the long sales cycles and endless contract negotiations, replaced by self-sign up and pay as your grow pricing.
I believe that cooperation, openness, and standardization will drive the industry forward. Economics of scale will drive cooperation, openness, and sharing knowledge will drive innovation and standards will drive flexibility.
Video aggregation?
The big tech giants are all trying to strengthen their position in the video streaming space. We have lately seen announcements and reports from Google, Comcast, and Apple while Amazon is always exploring new ways to gain footprint.
Google is working on a streaming video service aggregation feature within the Chrome web browser that they will call Kaleidoscope. And we also see signs that Google’s new streaming device will be out soon. The device has been known as “Sabrina” would be based on Android TV and with a remote control.
According to Protocol, Comcast wants to develop its set-top box software into an operating system for smart TVs. By this Comcast would take the fight with Roku, Amazon, and Google, both for the control of the TV experience but also for the ad money.
Apple, which also tries to win the fight for the TV aggregation role, has had a hard time to attract subscribers. As the one-year free subscription since the launch is about to expire, reports state that Apple is planning to extend the offer. What might be the better offer is the planned bundle of its services such as Apple Music and Apple Arcade, with Apple TV+. Adding to this, Apple is reportedly teaming with ViacomCBS which would offer a discounted access to CBS All Access and Showtime.
The aggregation role for television is attractive for many reasons and many players will try to gain footprint. With this comes bundles to make attractive offers and create stickiness. Moving from cable bundles to streaming bundles.
Improved encoding
Netflix has again proved to be the master of efficient encoding. With shot-based encoding, dynamic optimization, and improved encoder settings they manage to optimize the bitrate ladders they managed to produce a 4K animation video at 1.8 Mbps. With the new improvements implemented they need 50% less bitrate to achieve the same quality with the optimized ladder. Netflix has started to re-encode the 4K titles in their catalog to generate the optimized streams and we expect to complete in a couple of months. The next step is to find similar optimizations to the HDR streams.
To watch out for the coming months…
Disney+ will finally launch in Sweden together with the other Nordic countries. It will be interesting to follow the impact on the Nordic TV and streaming market.
Magnus Svensson is a Media Solution Specialist and partner at Eyevinn Technology. Eyevinn Technology is the leading independent consulting company specializing in video technology and media distribution.
Follow me on Twitter (@svensson00) and LinkedIn for regular updates and news.
