By
S. Scott Grizzle, M.A.
Back in the early days of streaming, it was extremely complicated, and you could only stream a postage stamp size video to dialup devices. Today streaming is mainstream, and more people are beginning to view more than traditional Television. Online video is being used for conventional content including entertainment, news, education, and enterprise communications. In the near future you will see more content enrichment, metadata creation and recommendations coming from machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.
In the early days streamers and content creators were still using Mpeg 2 files and Real Media. Then there was the migration to Window Media and finally h.264. H.264 took a while to get fully ratified; Microsoft knew they had a competitive advantage on the industry with VC-1 which was a variant of Window Media for the transport or delivery. With these advancements in codecs the industry was able to go from grainy 25kpbs and postage stamp (it’s only for the web) video to 1080p broadcast quality video. To do a webcast in those days’ location added to the complication. DSL and T1 lines where rare for a typical webcaster to get. So, it was very common to get dual or multiple ISDN lines (Integrated Services Digital Network). This meant bringing in a specialist to condition the lines. This added to the complication of delivering live content.
In 1995-2002 prior to the modern online video platforms and content sites the industry discovered interesting content and unique ways to deliver. One of the largest events back then was the Victoria Secret Fashion show. Additionally, there were events like what real networks did with the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners, Discovery Channel dot com launch, The Steve Harvey show, and many associations using the internet to help broadcast their messages. Early on major brands experimented using the internet to stream videos to help position their brands.
As the Internet was growing back then we saw a lot of companies get into the content delivery business. Some are no longer around (Enron, Global Crossing, and others) while others like Akamai are flourishing. As mentioned before the Victoria Secret live stream broke the internet with the amount of viewers. These early days started paving the way for modern day adoption of online content and entertainment distribution.
Back in the early days I was lucky to do a lot of events like the American Bar Association with Chief Justice Rehnquist, Launch of Discovery.com, and variety of associations. The funny thing was back in 2002 with the DotCom Busts and the economic downturn a lot of VC’s decided to get out of video. I worked for a company where our investors told our company Video Wasn’t Sexy anymore and pulled out.
Jump forward 20+ years. The industry has experienced major advancements in broadband, video resolutions, and streaming. But with more resolution and more bandwidth there are new challenges. With larger resolutions you experience the bandwidth crunch. It’s very common for a 720p video to be at 2.5-5Mbps or 1080p at 5-10Mbps. When you start reaching 4K resolutions and beyond that ratio just doesn’t scale. You would need roughly 40Mbps if using h.264 AVC. This is why the newer codecs of HEVC, VP9 or AV1 are so important. They will be able to compress to half of what h.264 AVC can do. With the newer codecs being released allowing higher quality content will be created and delivered.
There is an old saying that Content is King. Truth is Good Content is King. Niche content can help drive traffic and will usually have a following. The last thing you want is overly generic and low-quality produced videos. With so much content to watch or view why would the audience want to see something everyone else produced. This goes into the discussion about cord cutting.
traditional pay-tv providers lost around 6 million pay-tv subscribers each year from 2019 to 2021. major US cable TV and satellite TV have lost 25 million subscribers since 2012 and are projected to lose another 25 million by 2025. This is not saying people aren’t watching TV. They are just watching content in new ways. Netflix, Disney, and others will spend Billions of dollars in creating new content. Like the traditional television programming a few years ago the major content production companies and syndicators will still be producing the major shows we all love. They are just delivering a new way. You will see more media conglomerates and media companies make this pivot to host traditional TV and have an online presence. For example AMC networks, CBS and ABC have been streaming content while it’s also broadcasting content to its audience. There are also cable companies offering online versions of the same channel (TVE – TV Everywhere). This was big during the world cup and other sporting events.
Today more devices are connecting to the internet and allow streaming video. A few years ago, there was a Convergence theme going on at a few tradeshows. Now it’s becoming a reality. Being able to watch video at home on a 8k 85-inch TV to watching on a smart phone and every other device in between is where the future is going. All devices all the time with more information.
What will the future hold in the next 3 to 5 years? What will the streaming landscape be like? There will be more Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality streaming. The industry will really be moved by Machine Learning and Cognitive AI advancements. Being with IBM and seeing Watson in action is really impressive and thought provoking.
The Watson speech to text is a tool if you need to create transcripts, and closed captioning on the fly. You can train the engine to get very high results in the transcription process. From here you can also do translations and some users are already experimenting with text to speech.
Some of the other impressive AI movements will be content enrichment. This is really impressive when the AI can scan through a video and create massive amounts of searchable data. It’s beyond just header and meta data but the creation of scenes, transcripts, related content and searchable storylines. It can actually pull-out scenes for highlight reels and send to a producer, or pull sentiment of the audience watching and gather all of that information. With the Scene detection it is even possible to facilitate simple editing.
With all of the data created and personalized recommendations will be the powerful future. What if an AI can determine your mood and be able to make recommendations of content. This is going to be a bit out in the future and not here yet. But with all of the information being gathered and social media posts it is possible to get information on moods and make the recommendations. Pulling sentiment and looking for opposite or corresponding clips, files and content.
From the beginning of online video to today and the future there are incremental steps and progression. It started off as an experiment and now it’s a massive industry and changing the way we watch things and share content. Very few thought about watching videos on anything besides computer screens back in the late 90’s. Only a few were experimenting with streaming on PDA’s then tablets. Things have changed with newer compressions and delivery mechanisms. Now you can watch the same 1080p video on your TV and on your phone. A lot of content is being created from mobile along with the studios. With the massive amount of data and content being created it’s going to require massive amounts of computing power to catalog, search and make overall useable.
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