S01E01: Game of Streams

Our Media Solution Consultant, 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.

The first month of 2017 took off where 2016 ended when it comes to the TV industry. We see a continuous increase of alternatives for cord cutters, also outside of the US. And it is becoming easier and easier to stream video through internet. In this post, that is intended to be a monthly series, I will share some reflections from the online streaming industry during January.

The needle more towards online streaming

In U.S., the alternatives for cord cutters has been around for some time. Sling TV was one of the first services to offer live streaming versions of the same channels as the cable companies. And despite initial problems, AT&T has gained more than 200,000 customers for its video streaming service, DirecTV Now. Sony’s PlayStation Vue has also become a main player in the streaming TV market and we have YouTube Unplugged and Hulu coming up with live TV services.

We now see similar movement also in Europe. The satellite broadcasting giant Sky has announced the start of a shift towards online streaming with its Sky Q TV service. Sky earlier offered a slimmed-down streaming package, Now TV, but Sky Q will take the next step and offer a full package through streaming.

With a few exceptions, the Swedish market has so far only seen online streaming services as add-on services for already paying linear TV subscribers. But now Telia Company has started to open its online TV service, Play+ for others than their broadband subscribers, starting with its mobile subscribers.

I believe that this is the start of a new trend towards pure online live streaming offerings also in Europe.

It’s getting easier to stream video through internet

During Storvretacupen, the world’s biggest floorball tournament, SolidTango (a Swedish cloud-based streaming video platform) through its sports channel SolidSport broadcasted all 1369 matches live. This is a world record in live streaming from the same event.

Early this year Comcast Technology Solutions announced, together with the Swedish UX partner Accedo, an expansion of its all-in-one direct-to-consumer (D2C) solution to help content providers build online TV services.

These are just two examples of services that make it easy to stream live video. As the technology get more accessible we will see more and more local online streaming events. This trend has only started, local and user generated content will take an increasing share of the consumers viewing-time.

Binge or weekly episodes, the battle of SVOD

SVOD continue to grow and getting even more popular. As an example, Netflix closes in on 100 million subscribers. But HBO Now was ahead on its US SVOD rivals in most categories of a new customer satisfaction survey conducted by Strategy Analytics.

Behind the big SVOD players, we see an increase of more niche-focused SVOD services coming up. For these to survive SVOD aggregation is vital. Amazon Channels is one example that already has collected about 100 SVOD partners.

The latest topic for discussion has been binge watching versus weekly episodes. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has challenged HBO in an open letter: “BBC has become the first major linear network to announce plans to go binge-first with new seasons, favouring Internet over linear viewers. We presume HBO is not far behind the BBC.”. As Hastings mentioned, BBC has announced that it will release complete seasons online before they are available on linear TV.

And in Sweden, we’re starting to see the same trend where for example Viaplay releases series as soon as they are available. Also, SVT (Swedish public broadcaster) made complete series available online at the same time as the first episode was aired.

Standards and royalties

The discussion around royalties continuous. MPEG-LA frequently look at different possibilities for patent pools. “DASH pool is a first step toward multiple pools over all ABR technologies”, hinting towards HLS.

We also see patent and standards fights in other areas. End of December, Nokia sued Apple for infringing eight patents related to H.264 encoding and decoding. This could be the start of a long patent suit that could lead to an increased cost of H.264.

In the same topic, YouTube has stopped encoding 4K video in H.264 format, to focus on “delivering the best 4K experience exclusively through VP9.” Consequently, people watching through Apple Safari can’t watch 4K through YouTube, but people using other browsers can.

These stories will for sure continue…

To watch out for the coming months…

The first weekend of February Fox Sports will stream Super Bowl without pay-TV authentication requirements. MLBAM will provide the backend services and final encoding and Akamai, Limelight, and Level3 will handle the delivery. This is taking live streaming to the next level.

The mega-mergers in the industry will continue. AT&T has acquired DirecTV and have Time Warner pending. Several industry publications are now reporting that Verizon has started preliminary talks with Charter (the second largest cable company in the U.S.) to discuss a merger. I think that we will see more of this very soon, also in Europe.

Finally, latency will become increasingly important for online streaming, especially for live events. CMAF Low Latency Chunks is one technique that is discussed as a solution, WebRTC is another. WebRTC is a very interesting alternative for streaming video moving forward, especially for live events and enterprises.

Follow me on Twitter (@Svensson00) for regular updates and news.

Eyevinn Technology is a Swedish based consultancy company with consultants sharing a passion for the technology for a media consumer of the future.