By Manik Bambha
The price of success in OTT is new challenges. When a platform is in its growth phase, the struggle for its owners is to accumulate a critical mass of content that will appeal to its audience. In a day and age when creators of quality content are sought after, creating a viable content library is not an easy task. But, once an OTT brand succeeds and finds itself with a sizeable viewer base, its owners now have to face another daunting prospect– making its content library deliver consistent profits.
Content delivery constitutes a major chunk of the variable costs of running a streaming platform. Not only does the content have to stream without lag or pixilation, but it has to do so on a variety of devices and platforms that are ever-increasing which doesn’t come cheap, even when a larger platform can leverage its traffic numbers to get deeper discounts from Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and storage service providers. As a platform begins to reach a global audience, the number of regions it has to service begins to rise which again entails a corresponding increase in costs, as most CDNs charge per region.
Video shouldn’t be so slow that viewers get annoyed, but not so fast that the incremental delivery cost is wasted. While CDNs play a large role here, there are a couple of things every OTT platform can do to make the process even more cost-effective.
Get smart with adaptive bitrates
Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) optimizes how files stream over HTTP networks by offering multiple files of the same content, encoded in different size files. The user’s video player then chooses the most suitable file to playback, based on the device’s CPU, memory capacity, and network condition allowing video players to choose the best available video segment to play based on the available bitrate and device capability.
ABR isn’t new – Apple’s ten-step fixed bitrate encoding ladder first came out in 2010. As time passed, further refinements have made ABR streaming more effective. Recognising that different types of video – a sit-down interview versus, say, a fast-paced basketball game – need different effective bitrate ranges, Netflix switched to per-title encoding. Each video is analysed and encoded in different ladders to deliver the best quality for its relevant data range. Context-Aware encoding takes into account the device – from smartphones and desktops to home theatres, offering the same quality as a fixed bitrate ladder with half as many variants making for lesser storage costs with no compromise on the end-user experience.
Different types of content, their lengths, devices and display sizes popular with core audiences, whether the content is live or VOD, and the network conditions in their markets, all play a role in deciding on an encoding ladder. Storage costs also play a role, as more variants would obviously need more storage space. A platform needs to track the lowest and highest bitrates its audience views content giving it a hard stop at the top and bottom ends of the ladder. The platform then needs to decide on how many intermediate bitrates it offers which is a trade-off. Smaller jumps produce more rungs, increasing encoding and storage costs but increasing the end-user experience. Larger jumps, on the other hand, make for lower encoding and storage costs but could cause a drop in the quality of experience.
What makes platforms’ lives easier when determining an ideal bitrate ladder is the increasing sophistication of the analytics tools that they have at their disposal. As AI-based ABR gains popularity, marrying analytics with such ABR tools can enable platforms to create accurate encoding ladders on the fly, which in turn, eliminates wastage in encoding and storage, resulting in a leaner content delivery process and lower costs.
Make downloads work for you and your viewers
Another user insight that platforms can use to their benefit is the tendency of viewers to choose a lower bitrate when downloading a file than when streaming it. Interestingly, network speeds have little to do with this – it takes the same time and the same amount of data to download a file as to stream it. Downloading a file takes up storage space on users’ devices. And, despite lower hardware costs, users aren’t eager to clog up their hard drives, especially with large video files. So, should a viewer want to save a file for repeated use or download a movie or game show to watch later, he or she is likely to opt for a lower bitrate and, consequentially, a smaller file.
By offering a download option, therefore, OTT platforms actually incentivise customers to opt for lower bitrates. Most CDN services charge on a pay-as-you-go basis, and costs can be high for high-quality streams. Encouraging downloads and, therefore, lower bitrates reduces platforms’ costs of streaming data through the CDN pipelines. The cost reduction is profit, without generating any user dissatisfaction – the feature would be welcomed as additional functionality.
The author is the co-founder at ViewLift
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