Touchstream: 2016 Online Video Industry Predictions

The streaming revolution is happening at an ever-quickening pace as consumers become more comfortable with the concept and the quality of delivery improves. For this momentum to continue, it will be the quality of experience that drives the streaming industry fully mainstream led by encoding and delivery as well as the intersecting influence they have on each other.

On the encoding side, the key development we see being important in the coming year is HDR. 4K was an interesting experiment that needed to happen, but it doesn’t appear to have delivered the real and practical improvements viewers want. We hope to see a reasonable HDR standard emerge with appropriate colour gamut and bit depth. Add to this the next generation of compression like H.265, and we should end up with significantly better quality video streams that will be able to get down most modern Internet pipes, which is vital.

On the delivery side, the role CDNs play is becoming increasingly important. We see more and more of our customers adopting a multi CDN approach. This is an integral step as it pushes the big incumbent CDNs to improve their service and be more competitive. We believe the CDNs that dominate will be the ones who have a more transparent relationship with the content owners and who actively work together to improve and optimise the service quality. CDN’s will have to be more accountable for their performance and with dynamic CDN switching relatively easy to implement, those CDNs that don’t perform will suffer as a result. Overall, the quality of delivery will be improved by the CDN providers that are more proactive and forward-thinking.

Our view on content delivery would not be complete without addressing the ever increasing insatiable appetite for mobile streaming. Mobile streaming is a very exciting area with distinctly different challenges and potential solutions. We think 2016 will be the year that LTE broadcast begins to be rolled out and start to become the dominant force in mobile live streaming.

See the rest of 2016's Executive Predictions in "Related Articles" below, or you can download the entire batch as a PDF.

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