In today’s video environment, multi-screen delivery and over-the-top programming are the catalysts which are leading to fresh thinking by vendors and broadcasters alike. Content providers must deliver content not only over legacy broadcast networks but also to a growing number of devices, including: smart phones, tablets, set-top boxes, Internet televisions and laptops. Sending content to this amalgam of electronic devices is known as multi-screen delivery.
The uptake of smart phones is noteworthy and appears to be an important business driver in the video delivery market. Apple leapfrogged RIM’s Blackberry in popularity in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. In January, Apple announced that the company sold 16.24 million iPhones during the fourth quarter of 2011. While clearly the market leader in this genre, the iPhone faces growing competition from Adobe, Microsoft and Google. Each company fields a competing operating system with a proprietary data protocol for receiving video content. And like the iPhone, Apple’s iPad ushered in a new generation of tablets and consumers flocked to buy it. While a host of competitors scrambled to field competitive tablets, Apple sold 14.8 million iPads in 2010 and sales are estimated by a number of stock analysts to range between 5 million to 7 million unites per quarter for the first part 2011. Electronics manufacturers are flocking to this market even though Apple has a decided first-to-market advantage, because the personal computer market is mature, and margins are much thinner than they used to be. HP, Toshiba, and Samsung are just a few of the companies hoping to tap into a new, more profitable line of business.
All of this means the demand for high-quality video is expanding. Matthew Goldman, vice president of technology, Solution Area TV, at Ericsson, says, “Consumers want more HDTV and more on-demand video in HD. Over time, it will become a competitive necessity for service providers to offer all popular channels in HD, often broadcasting the same content in SD simultaneously. In recent years the focus of the mature digital TV market has switched from expanding the bouquet of channels to differentiating services with better looking TV. Consumers want to have more choice along with the ability to view content when and where they want to watch it with the best picture quality possible. To support this, service providers are clearly adding video platforms to their lineup rather than replacing them. Consumers today have an insatiable appetite for not only content, but also choice and quality,” he says.
Boris Felts, vice president of marketing at Envivio, credits part of this to the increase in power of handheld devices. “There has been a dramatic shift in the way video is supported today compared to earlier generations of portable electronic devices. The landscape has changed quite a bit. There are better chipsets today which produce far superior results. The capacity is there to even decode HD video,” he says. “There are three limiting factors in handheld devices you must deal with: battery life, processing power of the CPU and network connectivity. Specific chipsets now are lowering power consumption so you can watch an entire movie without running out of battery. Plus, network connectivity is getting better. Smart phones are catching up to the capabilities of a laptop computer. In addition, there are televisions which connect directly to the Internet that did not exist a year ago. Broadcasters are being challenged to cope with the speed that these developments are coming to market.”
Jean-Christophe Morizur, senior director of digital video product marketing at Harmonic, is among those that cite the rise of the tablet computer as the key factor in the changing market. “The iPad, and now other devices such as [Motorola’s] Xoom and [Samsung’s] Galaxy, offer HD resolution on high-quality display technology, making them catalysts for content and service providers to provide video services to devices other than traditional TV. Over-the-top streaming services, such as Netflix and Hulu, have gained tremendous traction establishing a new type of consumption. These services offer very good video quality and are setting consumers’ expectations. Service providers have an opportunity by offering similar services to their subscriber base, but they must offer a very compelling experience and great video quality. Consumers are embracing tablets in a big way, but they will truly embrace video on these devices if the video quality is as good as it is at home.”
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