Innovation vs. Optimization in Streaming Delivery
Since streaming began in the late 1990s, there has been a need for innovation. That’s because it was really a revolutionary re-imagining of traditional television delivery. The entire TV technology stack, from encoder to playback, had to be built with technologies suitable for delivery through the internet. This, in turn, caused innovations in core technologies, like HTTP, to better support delivering video. Streaming created ripples of innovation that we are still feeling today as technologists work across multiple industry bodies, such as IETF, SCTE, MPEG, 3GPP, and W3C, to further the work of making streaming analogous to (and better than) traditional broadcast.
But have we reached an inflection point? While innovation is good at the outset of a transformation (such as analog to digital video), it can become counterproductive to building sustainable businesses. Continuous innovation means taking away resources from making existing technologies more scalable, resilient, and reliable—three traits that are critical to the success of something like a streaming platform.]
Although there are lots of areas within streaming video where we can explore this, let’s use encoding as an example. At this moment, encoding for the majority of streaming video is handled through H.264 or MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec (AVC). This is largely because of its wide compatibility. An improvement over MPEG-2, H.264 was the first codec that was adopted readily by device manufacturers for mobile phones, computers, Blu-ray players, and televisions. As a result, H.264 is widely implemented despite licensing requirements for use.
Of course, there have been attempts at “royalty-free” options, such as VP9 and AV1, but switching codecs can be a complex process for streaming operators which, ultimately, impacts the availability of their content if devices don’t support the codec they want to use. But H.264 isn’t a bad codec at all. Yes, there are newer codecs which significantly improve compression (and therefore reduce the cost of delivering the video, such as H.265 or HEVC) without quality loss, but there is a lot of room for optimization within H.264. The algorithm responsible for encoding the content can be improved. In fact, companies like Visionular have done just that, sometimes even using AI.
Yet, as an industry, we continue to invent new codecs. Take Versatile Video Coding (VVC), for example. While an incredible achievement in lossless compression and efficiency, its adoption is minimal. Fraught with additional licensing requirements, and the hurdles of getting device manufacturers to include it on their equipment, VVC will probably not see any tangible impact on the industry for years. But how many people applied their expertise for years to develop it? Could that expertise have been better applied to optimizing H.264 or H.265?
It’s reasonable to invent different technologies or approaches in response to business pressures (such as licensing). In that case, VP9 and AV1 make sense (although licensing may come to haunt AV1). But at what point do we, as an industry, stop trying to invent new ways to do the things we are already doing well and start focusing our energies on making what we have already invented operate better?
It could be argued that streaming video’s immaturity as an industry calls for continued innovation in some areas. And while that’s true, I would argue that, collectively, we need to rebalance our efforts. Rather than spending 80% of our time on innovating, we need to spend 80% on optimizing, improving the operational efficiency and effectiveness of the technologies we have. When they don’t work correctly, we lean into innovation. Take Media over QUIC (MoQ). WebRTC, a real-time protocol used for chat and video chat, is being used to deliver ultra-low-latency streaming. But WebRTC doesn’t scale well, and it was never intended for segmented streaming video. MoQ fixes the problems with WebRTC for more reliable, scalable, and optimized ultra-low-latency delivery.
If we want streaming video to mature into the future of how we deliver television, we need to start focusing on optimization, and less on innovation.
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