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Enablers of today’s OTT video streaming The video streaming market is expected to continue to achieve over 18% Compound
issues such as slow start-up times, rebuffering, resolution switches and frame rate degradation. Mobile access also enables the ubiquity of OTT video streaming applications. Therefore, not only do OTT video streaming applications represent most of the mobile data traffic, but their consumption by users is omnipresent. The sophistication of smartphones . Today’s smart mobile devices benefit greatly from sophisticated display technologies such as high density of pixels that make up the screen, high contrast ratios that create brighter whites and deeper blacks, as well as in-plane switching technology that improves the angles from which the screen can be viewed; all embedded for example in retina technologies used in iPhones. Video resolutions of up to 4K at 60fps have therefore become the new norm for OTT video streaming applications. The complexity of video streaming technologies . As with the network and device technology evolutions, video streaming technology and its delivery protocols have gone through significant transformation. Video codecs using smart compression algorithms to support high-resolution video without increasing bandwidth or sacrificing speed, such as the new H. 266 VVC and AV1 codecs, can cut bitrates in half, making 4K and even 8K resolutions feasible. ML/AI-based OTT video clients which can sense the network performance conditions and know the device’s capabilities can increase the size of the video buffer and use optimized buffer pre-filling (initial buffering) to significantly reduce or eliminate rebuffering events at video start.
Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) 1 from 2021 to 2030. Major Content Delivery Network (CDN) players (broadcast, cable, streaming) contributing to this include Netflix (223 million paid subscribers), Disney+ (164 million), Amazon Prime Video (117 million), HBO Max (48 million), Hulu (47 million). YouTube chose to no longer be a CDN, but rather to focus on funding existing YouTubers who post exclusively to the platform. When it comes to OTT video streaming over mobile networks, Netflix and YouTube represent almost 50% of the viewership, split approximately equally between them. Such growth is expected considering the user demand for OTT video streaming. However, this could not have been achieved without three key enablers: the evolution of mobile network technologies, the sophistication of smartphones and the complexity of video streaming technologies. All three significantly rely on ML/AI techniques. The evolution of mobile network technologies . 5G NSA deployments, and lately 5G SA, have enabled mobile networks to deliver high bandwidths (100Mbits/s on average), enabling download speeds up to 20 times faster than 4G, and higher resolutions such as 4K (about 50Mb/s at low frame rates less than 30fps, or about 80Mb/s at high frame rates more than 60fps) and 8K (about 250Mbits/s), while helping to reduce video quality
1. Precedence Research: Video Streaming Market Size, Trends, and Growth Report, 2030
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