As on demand, high quality (HD) and personalized video consumption becomes the norm for TV and Internet TV usage, carriers must find cost-effective ways to distribute content while maintaining high-quality of experience. Meanwhile the rapid adoption of video streaming - be it for VOD implementations or internet TV deployments - has forced service providers to confront the fact that their costs are quickly rising; the combined expenses of streaming servers, peak time ingest bandwidth, last mile bandwidth oversubscription, OPEX and CAPEX all contribute to the rising expenses associated with the service adoption.
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On-demand services have no economic or technological scaling efficiency and consumer adoption of these sticky services is detrimental to the service providers’ profitability.
Further straining the complexity of service deployment is the issue of consumer diversity, revealed with the growth in content offerings.
In the past, subscriber viewing habits were explained with the “90-10” rule in which 90 percent of subscribers were watching 10 percent of the content. However, current large-size VOD deployments have changed the “90-10” rule consensus in two significant ways:
- Diverging Consumer Taste - Ever growing shifts in consumer taste has migrated the 90/10 paradigm towards a 70/30 split
- Massive Content Libraries - Huge pools of content resources makes pre-positioning the “head” of the long tail an impossible task, as even 10% of a 10,000 title library can reach 1000 titles
Complicating matters even more is the rapid adoption of High-Definition (1080P) quality video content. These high-quality files, which are quickly becoming the consumer standard, are often 6 times the size of normal or Standard Definition video files. This makes the issue of bandwidth heavy video delivery over heavily congested infrastructure that much more difficult.
To remain profitable and competitive, providers must develop a video delivery architecture that maximizes service quality while minimizing infrastructure and operational costs.
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