More than two-thirds of U.S. video consumers say the ability to binge-watch TV shows or movies is somewhat- to very important to them.1
Half of U.S video consumers say that seeing new TV shows or movies added daily is somewhat- to very important to them.1
What was infant to impossible eight years ago2 are now consumers' expectations and minimum requirements.
Five years ago, media and out-of-media companies faced a very different set of content delivery challenges than they do now. Internal expertise in building video content delivery systems was lacking. Connectivity options to deliver content were limited.
Now, media companies have engineers and developers skilled in video recording and delivery. There are more connectivity choices, including Video CDNs3 and the coming 5G4. But organizations are invested in the third-party relationships they formed to meet earlier challenges to processing and delivering content.
Unwieldy Costs
Third-parties are costly, adding expenses for storage, bandwidth and know-how. Media companies would rather rid costs for what they can do or acquire themselves. Third-parties are unwieldy, creating delays. Organizations need to respond to marketplace disruptions such as the pandemic and satisfy dynamic viewing and sharing appetites quickly.
In Q2 2020, as the pandemic became all too real, streaming video accounted for 25% of total television viewing minutes among all over-the-top (OTT) capable homes, up from 19%, Q2 2019.5 The cumulative weekly time spent with streaming video in the second quarter was 142.5 billion minutes, increasing nearly 75% from the 81.7 billion minutes spent the same quarter the previous year.5
Forty percent of U.S. video consumers now say the ability to share (online) what they're watching with friends and family is somewhat- to very important to them.1
Media organizations need to control video recording and delivery workflows and apply hard-earned insights to align with shifting video consumption habits. They have access to connectivity. But their independence from third parties creates new challenges.
New Challenges
Media companies need to scale their workflows to meet audience demand. Organizations must provide a precise amount of video streams. But solutions providers offer only throughput numbers to guide them in their purchasing decisions. Media organizations need practical solutions metrics that they can right-size to their content delivery investments. Suppose they can't confirm that they will receive a set, robust number of streams from each node they purchase. In that case, they could buy too many and overspend on equipment or too few and underserve their market.
Scalability and streams aren't the only concerns. Challenges exist in video processing, management and delivery. Media assets and content delivery workflows are spread across multiple storage silos for cDVR, live video, and video on demand that don't easily integrate or talk to each other. Workflows that transform, replicate, distribute and protect video content are convoluted.
When, for example, a consumer records a program to cDVR, the system must create and store a private copy that belongs to the user. That's where the video copy process in legacy workflows becomes bloated. It can take thousands of encoders to encode recordings to storage to make private copies for cDVR and its consumers. With the global cDVR market reaching USD 6.35 Billion by 2024,6 the increasing use of cDVR could strain video copy workflows all the more.
Take Control of Content Delivery Pipelines
Media companies can now take more control of content delivery pipelines. For Telcos, this means owning the data path anywhere they record or deliver public- or private-copy cDVR, live video or video on demand. For content providers, this means owning more of the path from the originating source to CDN/service providers. This control will provide insights for increasing efficiency and optimization based on utilization data. These insights will enable organizations to be more selective when choosing CDN providers to reach specific end customers.
Broader data pipes are available for those pipelines so that organizations can scale in response to global marketplace demands. Media companies can use any protocol for their workflows, such as NFS, SMB and S3.
Workload capacity is scaling, so media companies can support rigorous file workloads. Organizations can deliver up to 15.8 million IOPS and 945GB/s aggregate throughput on a single cluster. Organizations can enjoy robust object storage with capacity for any size or number of objects. Organizations can streamline storage infrastructure and management, consolidating video assets and delivery workflows to a single, homogenous platform.
Count on concurrent streams. Media companies can deliver a specified number of simultaneous streams per node and right-size their investments in storage platform solutions for any workflow size or service.
Say a media company needs to support 15,000 origin streams delivering to a CDN. If a node consistently supports 5,000 concurrent streams, the organization knows they need to acquire three nodes. It's simple math. Dell EMC storage platforms for video content and delivery reduce TCO through a precise, efficient purchasing model with complete transparency into video stream counts.
Solve for cDVR, Live Video and video on demand Workloads
Organizations have choices for their content processing workflows. Dell EMC ECS eases private copy for cDVR, replacing thousands of encoders and recordings with a single video recording. ECS can create unique versions of that video asset at the segment level. Organizations can deliver private copy while reducing network compute requirements for recording and see real savings.
ECS has a feature that creates a fanout number of objects for cDVR. Organizations can read and delete a specific customer version, keep a list of copies or a bucket list of fanout objects, and delete all copies.
Dell EMC PowerScale leverages exceptionally high throughput with minuscule latency utilizing nodes running flash drives perfect for live video and catch-up workflows. Hybrid nodes with disk and flash offer higher capacity to serve vast video on demand libraries that require very high stream counts.
With Dell Technologies, media companies guide their journey while partnering with a team of global CTOs and media entertainment specialists with expertise in content creation, storage and streaming. For example, Dell Technologies experts identify stream counts and relevant considerations when applying video recording and delivery solutions. Dell Technologies brings 10 years of experience in the space and a vast partner ecosystem. Dell Technologies validates and tests all products with firms such as Telestream, Broadpeak and Wowza.
Media organizations want to own and optimize video recording and delivery workflows. Organizations that gain control of their workflows increase agility and competitive advantage, meet consumer demand and reduce costs.
To know more, explore Dell EMC's thought leadership in content delivery challenges and solutions:
Infographic: "Can Your Streaming Platform Solve The Top 5 Content Delivery Challenges?"
White paper: "How to Elevate Your Content Delivery Workflows With Dell EMC PowerScale."
Webinar: “Planning for next-gen. content delivery workflows.”
Footnotes
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1125486/evaluate-streaming-service-features-us/
[3] https://whatis.techtarget.com/search/query?q=video+CDN
[4] https://whatis.techtarget.com/search/query?q=5g
[5]https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2020/the-nielsen-total-audience-report-hub/