[opendtv] Re: Tech Dirt: Nielsen Finally Realizes That TV Viewers Are
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:43:51 -0400
On Jun 13, 2013, at 5:33 PM, "Manfredi, Albert E"
<albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Craig Birkmaier wrote:
>> The reality is that most servers now host multiple versions of video
>> files, encoded for delivery at various bit rates.
>
> So? How does that contradict anything I said? And as to adjusting the stream,
> that's also true for Flash!
I don't know about contradiction, but we are dancing around the real issue.
h.264 is beginning to dominate Internet video delivery versus the use of the
most recent Flash codec, VP6. This is true whether the video is being streamed
from any number of "open" server architectures or the proprietary Adobe Media
Server 5 family. When I say "open" I mean using free or lower cost industry
standards versus the relatively expensive Adobe server architecture; the trend
is strongly toward HTML5.
And it is well worth noting that the Adobe servers now support HTTP/HLS so that
they can deliver streams to mobile devices that do not support Flash, which is
nearly all of them.
So when you connect to an Adobe server, you may well be receiving h.264
delivered via RTMP, but you may be getting the file via HLS. TheAdobe server
and Flash players support both.
Since you don't support subscription services, you don't get to see what
Netflix is doing. It ain't Flash. They have been using Microsoft Silverlight
for more than 5 years for both PCs and Macs.
In April they announced they are moving to HTML5, as Microsoft has announced
End of Life for Silverlight in 2021.
http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/04/html5-video-at-netflix.html
By the way, Netflix now represents about 33% of all Internet streaming video
during peak hours (prime time). Streaming video to mobile devices is still a
much smaller market, but is slated to grow 90% by 2017 according to Cisco.
You may fine the following report from Cisco (published May 31st) interesting.
Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2012–2017
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-481360_ns827_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html
Video Highlights
Globally, consumer Internet video traffic will be 69 percent of all consumer
Internet traffic in 2017, up from 57 percent in 2012. This percentage does not
include video exchanged through peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. The sum of all
forms of video (TV, video on demand [VoD], Internet, and P2P) will be in the
range of 80 to 90 percent of global consumer traffic by 2017.
Internet video to TV doubled in 2012. Internet video to TV will continue to
grow at a rapid pace, increasing fivefold by 2017. Internet video to TV traffic
will be 14 percent of consumer Internet video traffic in 2017, up from 9
percent in 2012.
Video-on-demand traffic will nearly triple by 2017. The amount of VoD traffic
in 2017 will be equivalent to 6 billion DVDs per month.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) traffic will deliver almost two-thirds of all
video traffic by 2017. By 2017, 65 percent of all Internet video traffic will
cross content delivery networks in 2017, up from 53 percent in 2012.
Clearly this information supports Bert's contention that the Internet will be
the dominant infrastructure for delivery of video…
Someday.
Unfortunately, this report does not attempt to compare what is happening via
the Internet with overall TV viewing. OTT is growing rapidly, but is still a
tiny portion of all TV viewing.
> Among the players I have installed in my PC, it's pretty obvious that Flash
> gets the preference. And when it's playing, it's easy to see how the bit rate
> of the Flash stream adjusts itself to the speed available on the net. I think
> the way Flash does it is simply to offer multiple streams of the content, and
> it makes rather abrupt shifts to the better stream, if it deems that okay.
> Easy to notice, if you somehow start out on a low res stream (which seems to
> happen, for instance, at least on abc.com, when you slide your player back to
> some past scenes and resume from there).
Yes, Adobe updated RTMP to handle adaptive bit rate streaming along the same
lines as HTTP/HLS. The methodology is to pull video from a high quality file on
the server and encoded it at multiple bit rates after negotiating with the
player to determine capabilities and bandwidth. The player then requests the
best quality it can support based on real time network dynamics. There is a
good illustration of this here:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CD0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAdaptive_bitrate_streaming&ei=zpe8Ucz8LoTs8wTWg4D4Dw&usg=AFQjCNHxpJQxPZKGeTg4NvmNRwIa-T2d8Q&sig2=VA0x0wW0oJWRdC_q3NYYQw&bvm=bv.47883778,d.eWU
>
> On Hulu, I think it's on Hulu, they even show what stream got selected. There
> are 240p, 360p, and 480p streams available, and your player automatically
> selects one. You can even force a selection, although sometimes that doesn't
> work too well.
This is NOT the same as I described above. It is an additional layer that lets
you determine the target resolution. They still use adaptive streaming at
different bit rates just at different levels of resolution.
To be clear, adaptive streaming does not change the resolution of the raster
being delivered, it changes the quality of the encoding. Unfortunately, higher
levels of compression DO reduce delivered resolution, as is often the case with
1080i sports delivered via an ATSC broadcast, or worse, a lower bandwidth path
from an MVPD.
> I think you will find, if you look it up as I did, that RTMP is very much
> still in use today. But WHO CARES? I'm just trying to get across here that
> your constant mention of H.264, as if it were some streaming protocol
> ALTERNATIVE to Flash, is quite incorrect.
As I said, we have been dancing around the real issues here. Unfortunately
FLASH is often used in multiple contexts: codecs, streaming protocols like RTMP
and RTMP-T, animation, games, etc.
The important take away here is that we are moving toward open industry
standards; HLS is well on its way through the standardization process, as are
other key components of the video subset of HTML5. And the trend is to
incorporate support for all of this directly by the brewer, rather than via
plug-ins like Flash.
Regards
Craig
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