下一代内容交付:转变正在进行中

Our industry’s holy grail has always been to simultaneously livestream an event to hundreds of millions of online video viewers. 在过去20年的流媒体中，这并没有完全实现, 尽管有些工具一直都在使用.

例如, 最近的全球性事件, 2018年韩国平昌冬奥会, 看到了在线观看人数的上升. 发现号的声明, 谁拥有欧洲体育电视网, noted that “a record breaking 76 million users enjoyed the Games online” across Eurosport’s pan-European footprint, 其中1500万人使用了该公司集成的欧洲体育应用程序.

But even though that meant “daily video views up 166 percent compared to January 2018” for the over-the-top (OTT) Eurosport app, it still paled in comparison to the 386 million overall viewers of Eurosport’s Olympic coverage, which in some countries like Norway reached a 90 percent household penetration for TV viewing.

这并不是说OTT服务正在衰落. 事实上，事实恰恰相反. But having the 76 million online viewers is a key to understanding why the industry—in its shift toward online viewing, fragmented across various platforms—is also shifting toward multiple types of delivery models for online content.

理解这种转变

当我们看到在线媒体传播的新方法时, it’s first helpful to remember just how different media consumption is today compared to even 5 years ago. 最近的一项调查有助于说明这一点.

2017年底，Qualtrics在美国各地进行了一项调查.S.看电视的习惯, with on-demand services such as Netflix and Hulu as options alongside traditional over-the-air (OTA) and cable television. The findings of the survey are fairly in line with our own, Unisphere-based surveys of 流媒体 readers when respondents are asked to compare media consumption choices offered through OTA live-linear television or OTT’s double offering of live and on-demand content viewing.

而qualics方法使用的调查规模相当小，只有500人, its results emphasized just how radically our collective viewing habits have changed over the past 5 years. 在qualics的调查回复中，近三分之一的人倾向于观看Netflix, 而四分之一的受访者更喜欢电视直播, followed by prerecorded or time-shifted digital video recorder (DVR) content (16 percent), 其次是亚马逊Prime和Hulu等其他服务(分别占15%和11%), 分别).

Qualtrics指出，三分之二的受访者表示他们更喜欢刷剧, so it’s surprising that Amazon Prime and Hulu video offerings fell lower on the preference spectrum than did live- and time-shifted television. 质量调查并没有提供Hulu和亚马逊Prime排名如此之低的原因.

这是我们在疯狂追剧趋势中走了多远的一个例子, 以及直播电视如何在吸引大规模观众方面面临挑战, consider the fact that Qualtrics showed a whopping 75 percent binge-watching rate for those survey respondents who admitted to viewing the entire first season of 陌生的东西近一半(43%)的人在1-3天内看完了整季, 另外三分之一(32%)的人在4-7天内结束了赛季. 换句话说，间隔数周或数月的情节是死的.

雷米Beaudouin, 他是Ateme公司的营销副总裁, 该公司总部位于巴黎，为广播运营商和OTT提供商提供技术服务, 简单地说一下这种转变, 就这篇文章将要介绍的内容而言.

“With an increase in these linear and on-demand OTT services from both new and traditional broadcasters, 竞争很激烈,博杜安在《 广播桥. “The biggest selling point for such operators is primarily the content catalogue they can offer to consumers, 但他们也必须考虑到服务质量至关重要.”

以免有人认为内容军备竞赛在未来几年将以某种方式放缓, 值得注意的是，Netflix, 至少, 不打算放慢对原创内容的推动. 最近一次是在2018年4月, CEO Reed Hastings declared that his announcement in 2017 that Netflix planned to spend $8 billion on original content was not enough.

“(这80亿美元)分布在全球，所以并不像听起来那么多。” 黑斯廷斯对听众说 2018年4月中旬在温哥华的TED演讲上, 注意的是,, 当涉及到在原创内容上花钱的选择时, Netflix looks both at what other studios are creating (Amazon Prime Video will spend about $4.5 billion in 2018 on original content) as well as its own internal viewership data about what people already watch.

“我们对质量有元认知，”黑斯廷斯说. “这就是我们理想中的自我. It works out much better, to please people, to look at the actual choices that they make.”

防止换挡撞到风扇

随着这种非常现实的转变正在进行, 在接下来的18个月里，媒体传播的关键要素是什么?

在今天的媒体行业中有很多流行语, 涵盖相互关联的主题-从格式, 决议, and standards-based names to basic delivery protocols—and we’ve only got a few thousand words in which to tackle the topic.

So let’s spend the rest of this article highlighting important next-generation delivery approaches that we’re going to cover in more detail in future 文章.

从编码到解码

目前编解码器的主导地位似乎是一个长期的讨论. 几乎就像威斯康辛州每年冬天都会下雪一样确定, annual advancements in encoding technologies will make for significant uncertainties for content creators and content publishers.

我们将不再讨论该选择哪种编解码器，因为fellow 流媒体writers such as Jan Ozer and Dom Robinson have covered key components (no pun) of the codec debates. Ozer has done several 文章 (as well as a few interviews at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas earlier in 2018) that delve into details around the Alliance for Open Media AV1 codec as well as the newest licensing issues around High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265).

鲁宾逊和我, 另一方面, 有没有写过或说过关于摆脱对单一编解码器的依赖的话题. 我最近在Wowza Media Systems博客上写了一篇题为编解码器真的很重要吗?” (简短的回答是否定的, 如果您有一个健壮的媒体服务器解决方案), and I remain a firm believer in the power of innovation around perceptual quality optimization, content-aware编码, 甚至是最近的上下文感知编码, which centers on dynamically encoding streams for the given device-network combination(s) that a particular on-demand video asset or live video stream will be played back on.

考虑到一篇典型杂志文章的前置时间, 有一件事是肯定的:不管我们在这里写什么, the fluidity of the new codec-of-the-month approach to the market will render our pontifications about codecs 至少 partially obsolete by the time you read this, 所以一定要跟上流媒体的步伐.Com获取有关授权的最新信息, 编解码器的优化, 甚至是一直存在的高级视频编码(AVC或H.264) continuing to improve its baseline optimization for high frame rate (HFR) and high dynamic range (HDR) delivery of 1080p60 10-bit streams as a way for AVC to stay relevant in the marketplace.

我该往哪里看?

沉浸式视频的世界, 无论是VR还是360°视频, 有几种新一代的方法似乎越来越受欢迎.

One of these is outlined in a January 2018 article published by the IEEE called “Gaze-Aware Streaming Solutions for the Next Generation of Mobile VR Experiences,，它主张根据预期的凝视来衡量下一代流传输. If video optimization to date has focused on one to five frames of referential detail to enhance video clarity while keeping latencies low, 以人类视觉系统为基础, the idea around gaze-aware encoding is to move beyond content- or 上下文感知编码 and toward anticipatory viewing based on neuroscience. 本文作者, 其中几位在斯德哥尔摩皇家理工学院工作, 外加一个为爱立信工作的作家, 将新解决方案设定为“旨在提供高视觉质量”, 实时地, 围绕用户的关注点，同时降低其他地方的质量.”

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