How to ensure the internet will support the switch to streaming

Not so long-ago streaming video was low resolution, unreliable and hard to use. But due to advances in technology, today’s viewers are expecting more than ever. When they press the play button, they want to watch their show right now – on whichever device they are using, in the highest quality available, without even a hint of buffering.

This presents broadcasters and content providers with a significant technological challenge: How can streaming video be delivered reliably, at scale? As more viewing moves from traditional broadcast to digital platforms, how can we ensure that as the final penalty kick is taken, or the final knock-out punch is thrown, that the action won’t freeze as streaming viewers overwhelm the infrastructure?

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Challenges and innovations?

For historic events, like the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, watched on YouTube by over 72 million viewers, ensuring smooth and reliable delivery of content is a massive challenge that also requires significant investment. So as demand for seamless, high-quality content grows, we as an industry need to find more efficient, cost-effective ways of delivering this to customers. We know this is where demand is heading, so it’s important for broadcasters and CDN service providers to build their streaming capability to meet surges in demand by scaling dynamically and working more efficiently.

This is perhaps easier said than done, but there are new innovations emerging to meet these needs. New formats for packaging video are available – with new, more efficient codecs making it possible to squeeze more streams into the same bandwidth.

In addition to more efficient encoding of content, the emerging use of advanced multicast technologies, like BT’s Multicast Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD), can help. This technology can transparently convert unicast delivery to multicast delivery through an ISP's network and on to the consumer. This makes delivery much more efficient and cost effective. Without this kind of innovation, it's quite possible that future peak viewing live events could cause network congestion and a poor customer experience in some places.

However, these new innovations will only be successful if the industry collaborates. Only with the agreement of new standards up and down the entire broadcast technology stack can new innovations be truly embraced.

Take the development of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). It only became the de-facto standard today because several of the largest players in the industry worked together to define how it works and how video data is transmitted up the chain. And, as a result, it’s delivered a step change in efficiency - enabling the delivery of Ultra-High Definition video at lower bit-rates than ever.

As viewers mount up by the million, what may seem like only an incremental efficiency gain for one stream quickly adds up to significant savings in bandwidth and physical infrastructure when scaled up for a major event, like Wimbledon and the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

But perhaps the hardest hurdle for streaming sport is latency. Because when you’re watching an event live, even falling a few minutes behind can completely ruin the viewing experience.

The good news is that this is something the industry is getting better at.

Today, as an industry, we have achieved relatively low-latency HD broadcasts. But the same cannot be said for the gold standard of 4K High Dynamic Range (HDR), which owing to the complexity of the pipeline is still relatively rare for live content today, even years after the capability on the user side was introduced.

The most recent FIFA World Cup is a great example of this challenge. Though matches were available in 4K HDR via streaming, the action on the pitch lagged traditional broadcast by between 45 seconds and a minute. This is a gap that will need to be closed if we want our viewers to stream, without wondering why their neighbours are clapping and cheering before the penalty has even been taken. Low latency technology is emerging that will close the latency gap, but these low latency capabilities mustn’t come with a significantly worse impact on network capacity and delivery efficiency.

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Making the business work

Technical innovation and collaboration are only one half of the equation. Equally important as the fundamental transmission technology is the business model to support it. If broadcasters and their ISP partners are to build out infrastructure capable of supporting tens of millions of viewers, they need to be confident that they can generate returns on the investment.

That’s why ad-tech matters. If advertising can be more closely tailored to viewers' tastes, it will be more relevant. And there’s a huge opportunity here to offer advertisers a product that is more effective than traditional broadcast.

And finally, there’s the challenge of piracy.

We know that pirate streams are a direct loss of revenue for our broadcast partners. And in an all-IP world counter measures such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), content watermarking, CDN end point security, and faster process to shut down the sources of illegal streaming are all essential for tackling this.?

Ultimately though, what’s clear is that the streaming opportunity is huge. And the technology now exists that can deliver TV via digital infrastructure at a scale to rival traditional broadcast. The priority for broadcasters to prepare themselves for the streaming future is to invest – and scale up.

Get in touch with BT’s Media & Broadcast team today, to learn more about how we can help you scale your streaming for millions of viewers.