The State of High-Definition Streaming
But despite all these efforts, there still exists a gap between what it costs to deliver HD and what content owners can expect to generate in terms of ad dollars off of that video, which makes making a business case that much more difficult. "I think we’ve worked a good partnership with Limelight and Akamai and been able to negotiate very low rates for serving higher bits, which is starting to make the economics work," says Berryman. "But today the CPM rate most of us are getting still isn’t high enough so there’s a gap between the revenue per viewer on air versus online. Until that gap can be made up, it’s a very tough business model to sustain."
Living Up to Expectations
Beyond the delivery cost, the CPMs, and the technologies that make all this possible, there’s one other major variable in this equation: the expectations of users moving into an online HD world.
"We’ve been saying this for six years: consumers come to internet-delivered media with a set of expectations that are determined by their non-internet media experiences," says Gordon. "That’s really very different from the thinking of the first wave of CDNs who were focused on accelerating the delivery of webpages. They were playing in their own sandbox that had very clear limits. The internet is its own self-referential environment because there’s nothing to compare a webpage to something else. That’s not true for multimedia content. We compare those experiences to our traditional experiences. Those qualities are: it starts when I push play, it uses the whole screen and not just one little corner, it plays continuously, and so on."
As online video moves into an HD world, it begins to compete even more directly against those expectations of traditional, offline media like broadcast and DVD. "For something that’s a short clip, people understand that they’re going to get a preview or a sample," says Rockwell. "When you’re creating something that’s like a TV experience, they’re naturally going to have an expectation that it’s going to look more like it does on TV."
And that sets up anyone trying to deliver HD full-screen video to try and survive a high wire act, as failing to live up to those standards set out by traditional media can be fatal. "It stands to reason that as long as you can preserve the quality of the overall delivery, higher definition is something they appreciate," says Rockwell. "But the moment it starts to buffer or stutter, it’s not worth it. It’s very, very negative. You should assume you’re going to lose that viewer.
"We’re trying to figure out how far we can push up the quality without risking those kinds of problems," he continues. "Anyone who’s trying to push to higher quality has to be careful that there aren’t any portions of users who are unable to view the experience."
But simply offering more videos encoded at more bitrates isn’t necessarily the answer. "Users most often don’t really know how much bandwidth they have available, so they’re likely to go click on a higher-bitrate file and assume they should be fine. Then they have problems and blame the content provider for that," says Rockwell.
And to some degree, this isn’t the worst of it. Gordon cites three other concerns: Many people are still on older computers that are unable to process and play back HD video; most users on multimegabit connections are using cable modems that rely on shared network capacity that doesn’t guarantee they’ll have the bandwidth they’re paying for available to them; and there’s still the basic fact that many computer monitors aren’t HD-capable, making it even more difficult to determine if it’s worthwhile to try and deliver HD video and risk losing viewers despite making every attempt to improve the user experience.
But not everyone is so worried about leaving the unwashed masses out of the HD loop. "Unfortunately, when you’re pushing forward there will be some people who are left behind. Even with YouTube, some people don’t have fast enough connections. That’s the reality we just have to face. Fortunately in our case the video degrades rather gracefully, so someone on a slower connection just has to wait a bit for it to buffer," says Lodwick. "Hopefully the new opportunities to watch HD will inspire people to upgrade their computers and save up for a new camera. The whole of HD is very aspirational."
And really that’s what this transition into HD is all about: aspiring to make the most of what’s possible online.