Streaming Gets Smarter: Evaluating the Adaptive Streaming Technologies
How Does the Technology Fit Within Your Current Video Distribution Platform?
Whatever technology you choose, it’s important to remember that adaptive bitrate streaming is a discrete feature of your total media offering. Certainly, it’s possible to job out the video streaming function entirely, which is the typical strategy used by Move Networks’ clients.
On the other hand, once you commit to a platform—be it Flash, Silverlight, or any other—you invest in the technology and the personnel that create and support it. Perhaps as the adaptive bitrate streaming technologies evolve, significant differences in quality or cost may become apparent. However, even then, any decision relating to adaptive bitrate streaming must also factor in the other unique attributes of the overall platform and the costs of switching from one to another.
Do You Care About iPhones?
If you’re a media or entertainment company, you almost certainly do care about iPhones, and Apple’s support for adaptive bitrate streaming in the new iPhone OS 3.0 is a significant announcement. According to Bishop, to distribute video on the iPhone in the past, you had to create a custom application distributed via iTunes. While adaptive bitrate streaming was certainly possible, it could only have been produced as a custom implementation specific to the iPhone.
With iPhone OS 3.0, adaptive bitrate video is viewable in the iPhone’s Safari browser with no custom application required. Since you don’t need an Apple server to run the company’s adaptive bitrate streaming, Apple’s announcement minimizes the investment necessary to adaptively stream to the iPhone. And as Bishop points out, since 3G cellular bitrates vary much more widely than typical broadband streaming connections, adaptive bitrate streaming adds more value to watching video on the iPhone than to general computer-based streaming.
If iPhones are a relevant target for your streaming video, you need to investigate the deployment of Apple’s adaptive bitrate streaming for HTTP as soon as possible.
What’s Ahead?
Over the next 6–12 months, after all adaptive bitrate technologies have been deployed, debugged, and optimized, we can start to evaluate experiential differences, such as how smoothly each system switches streams and how each one functions under heavy loads. We can also determine whether it’s truly cheaper to stream HTTP over RTMP.
However, just when we get all the real-world data we need to make a truly informed decision, a new technology—Scalable Video Coding (SVC) for H.264—may emerge as a standards-based option for adaptive bitrate streaming. For those seeking a quick briefing on the new technology, you can read about it in my article "Scalable Video Coding: The Future of Video Delivery?" (www.streamingmedia.com/article. asp?id=11135&page=1).
If you’re choosing an adaptive bitrate streaming technology in 2009, SVC probably won’t be ready for serious consideration. But beyond that time frame, you should definitely check the status of H.264 SVC before making a technology decision.
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How do organizations like MTV, Turner, NBC, Deutsche Welle, Harvard, and Indiana University actually deploy adaptive streaming technologies? Read on for all the juicy details.
31 Dec 2010