Media streaming technology refers to the continuous transmission of multi-media content like audio, video, text, etc., over a wired or wireless network and delivering to media streaming devices like computers, televisions, network players, mobile devices, etc., for real-time consumption. Alliances such as the RIST forum, Streaming Video Technology Alliance, Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) Alliance, etc., related to media streaming technologies where multiple experts work to solve critical challenges and provide standard solutions.
How does Media Streaming Work?
Media Streaming technology enables multimedia content streaming, where content is transmitted by a server application and received and played back at the client device/ application. The process of media streaming depends on three factors: processing tools, media streaming devices (such as set-top boxes, IPTV, gaming consoles, etc.), and media streaming platforms.
The media streaming process consists of two phases, pre-delivery and post-delivery streaming. Here, pre-delivery starts by capturing the stream to be ingested into the online platform, and post-delivery is the real-time modification at the user end. The below figure shows the process flow of media streaming.
Figure 1: Media Streaming Process Flow
Media Streaming Protocol
Streaming media protocols can be defined as techniques used for transmitting media content over the internet. Additionally, they break down data into smaller parts to ensure efficient delivery over various internet connections. The table below highlights several significant protocols that are essential for media streaming:
Table: Media Streaming Protocol
Media Streaming Technology: Challenges
Media streaming technology suffers from various challenges during pre and post-processing delivery. Below are some of the challenges
- Power consumption while media streaming: High-resolution media content requires intensive computation for the decompression process, resulting in high power consumption at the mobile streaming device’s end.
- Retrieval of lost data packets: For media streaming, multicast transmission is used, which prevents traffic overload by bypassing the acknowledgments for reception of data packets at media streaming devices. This causes problems such as difficulty in knowing whether data packets are correctly received or lost due to collisions or interference.
- Lacking Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE): Slow start times, buffering, poor-quality videos, decreased viewing time, latency issues at the user end, player crashes, etc., diminish the QoE and QoS.
- Managing meta-data according to user requirement: To improve viewer experience, proper meta-data management is needed for ad optimization, content promotion results relevancy, analyzing fake content, and hiding unsuitable scenes from children.
Innovations Related to Media Streaming
Media streaming has become extremely popular in recent years, with no signs of slowing growth. Moreover, the growth of media streaming mainly depends on the relentless innovations in multiple technology fields related to streaming devices, telecom, data compression, and others. Some of the recent innovations are listed below:
- Immersive Video Streaming: This kind of streaming provides viewers with the illusion that they are actually in the video. Virtual reality and 360-degree video streaming are two examples of immersive streaming.
- 360-degree video streaming: It uses a filmmaking technique that records video from the perspective of the viewers, where cinematic features help to enhance user experience.
- Usage of AI: Artificial intelligence increases the performance of the media streaming process at the time of content delivery to deliver superior network performance at an affordable cost. The power of AI and ML algorithms helps in innovating media streaming processes such as:
- Decision-making: It helps select between multicast and unicast content delivery.
- Viewer Interest: It assists in targeting the viewers with the advertisements according to the type of content consumed.
- Traffic Pattern: It proactively identifies network traffic patterns
- Scene Detection: It detects the types of scenes that are played in media streaming and hides unsuitable scenes from children
- Blockchain-based Video Streaming: Video streaming becomes more effective on a decentralized platform utilizing a peer-to-peer structure.
- On-demand content: Content curators can offer videos based on audience preferences, allowing the public to pay only for the content they are genuinely interested in watching.
- Optimize advertisement: It assists in connecting advertisers with the right audience with more precise and relevant advertising.
- Analyse Fake Content: It helps prevent illegal file sharing and detect fake content and copyright infringements with traceability blockchain-based identities of content creators and consumers and micro-transactions.
Key Alliances of Media Streaming
Media Streaming Alliances are a collaborative group of industry experts. They bring together different players from the media streaming universe to solve critical challenges. Hence, it improves the quality of the viewers’ experience, tests if the media streaming standards are implemented correctly, and provides cost-efficient interactivity at a scale. Below are some of the key media streaming alliances:
The SRT Alliance, founded by Haivision, is focused on solving problems with low-latency video streaming using the SRT protocol
- It ensures comprehensive security, resilience, and dynamic endpoint adjustment in response to real-time network conditions. Thus ensuring optimal video quality on all networks at all times.
RIST, founded by Video Services Forum, works to provide an open, interoperable, and technically robust solution for low-latency live video over unmanaged networks
- It allows automatic AVR adjustment and transport of Scalable Video Coding (H.264 annex G) to better adapt video quality to available network bandwidth
HESP Alliance, founded by Synamedia, is made up of multiple vendors building an ecosystem around the High-Efficiency Stream (HESP) protocol.
- It enables sub-second end-to-end latency as low as 400ms while zapping, start-up, and seeking times well under 100ms, and achieves a better experience.
Streaming Video Technology Alliance was developed to solve online video’s critical challenges
- It consists of various working groups such as ad-supported streaming services, Measurement/ QoE, Open Caching, Security and protection of video content, etc.
- It uses AI, ML, and edge computing, to improve operations, resiliency, scalability, delivery consistency, reliability of OTT services, etc.
Media Streaming: Market Insights
The following section includes key market trends, some of the prominent commercialized solutions, and recent acquisitions and collaborations in the media streaming domain.
Key Market Trends
The figure below indicates the global market forecast for media streaming devices for 2021-2028.
Figure 2: Market forecast for media streaming devices
Key Insights by Stellarix:
- The global market for Streaming Media Devices is expected to reach over US$ 45 billion by 2028 with a CAGR of 17.35%.
- The market value of Video-type Streaming Media Devices is US$ 9.69 billion (2021).
- The constant increase in global disposable incomes is a major factor in the promising growth of the Streaming Media Devices market.
Product Developments
The market players continue developing products that provide innovative solutions to overcome the challenges of streaming technology. Some of the products are given below:
Figure 3: Key product developments in streaming devices
Recent Acquisition and Collaboration
Below are a few collaborations and acquisitions impacting the media streaming industry :
- Novacap acquired Cadent, a leading expert in converged TV advertising solutions. Also, this strategic move aligns with the growing consumer demand for integrated platforms that seamlessly combine live TV, streaming services, and on-demand content.
- Roku partnered with Unity, a vendor providing advertising tools for mobile game apps, to deliver interactive streaming TV ads aimed at mobile app marketers seeking to boost app installations. Additionally, this collaboration linked Roku’s premium TV streaming inventory with Unity’s Luna app marketing platform.
- Amazon and Cochlear collaborated to innovate a solution enhancing the global TV-watching experience for individuals with hearing implants. Also, this collaboration enabled direct streaming of audio from Amazon smart TVs to Cochlear hearing implants, catering to those with hearing loss.
- Amazon collaborated with Xiaomi to release the Redmi Smart Fire TV, which features Fire OS 7. The television includes an Amazon Alexa-powered voice remote and supports Apple Airplay and Miracast for seamless content mirroring from both Apple and Android smartphones.
Conclusion
The demand for media streaming technology is gradually increasing. This is due to the growing number of connected streaming devices at every home, such as televisions, gaming consoles, etc. Factors such as the desire for high-quality audio-video content, innovations, and advancements in wireless technology largely contribute to this ongoing growth. The growth of media streaming technology further helped content creators connect with a more consumer base. Thus creating an entirely new ecosystem to generate revenue and business opportunities for content creators and streaming platforms.
Various players are continuously working on technologies related to optimization algorithms based on AI for content compression. This is done so that content can be sent to other sides efficiently. Moreover, custom recommendations help users receive content tailored to their preferences, which benefits latency management. Also, robust content delivery network infrastructure, streaming platforms, etc., get an edge.
Soon, ongoing technological progress will further evolve media streaming, taking it to new heights to meet the rising demand for high-quality media content. Also, this evolution will involve integrating emerging technologies like AR/VR, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and others.