DENVER—Providing a buffering-free stream to an ever-expanding universe of streaming viewers can feel like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie. But on the upside, resolution beyond 4K UHD seems to have fallen off the menu.
At a panel at the StreamTV Show here Tuesday, two industry executives related how far the industry has come in the last decade and how their companies now face customer demand for more features — for example, watch-together co-viewing options — instead of more pixels.
“In the early days, some things were difficult,” Paddy Rao, senior vice president of technology and strategy at Dish Network, told panel moderator Brian Mahony, CEO of Trender Research. “There were no solutions, and we had to invent them.”
Dish’s launch of Sling TV in 2015 brought live linear TV to the over-the-top market, but that development came two years after Time Warner Cable debuted a streaming platform on Roku devices.
Rao’s fellow panelist Vipul Patel, vice president for video engineering at Charter Communications, said Charter's predecessor TWC saw that “more as an auxiliary service” at the time, but the firm’s appreciation of streaming and the tools available have both advanced greatly.
“We've got a lot of data now,” he said. “We don't want to wait for the customer to call” if something goes wrong with the stream.
(Back when Sling TV suffered its first major streaming hiccup in 2015 — its stream of TNT’s coverage of a semifinal game in the NCAA men’s basketball championship melted down under demand — that network didn’t know until hours later.)
Rao said the chief challenge now is ensuring that streaming video doesn’t lag behind what viewers see on Dish’s satellite service or another traditional pay-TV service.
“It’s my bear,” he said, adding that at Sling’s debut it was probably 30-35 seconds behind live and that satellite remains ahead “by a significant measure.”
How significant can vary with individual programs: During the 2023 Super Bowl, The Streamable found that while Fox Sports’s app was only a second behind over-the-air broadcast TV — far better than the 16-second lag of cable —Sling tied YouTube TV at 56 seconds behind.
Patel said sports and news continue to generate the most demand, nodding to the record 32 million people who streamed the Indian Premier League’s cricket final in May.
And while cable and satellite continue to serve up an HD stream, that’s no longer good enough for streaming viewers.
“People are routinely expecting 4K video,” Rao said. “It's very different from what you were doing with HD a few years ago.”
8K video, however, has yet to get the same interest from customers.
“There's talk about 8K in the future,” Patel said — a statement somebody could have made in 2015.
Rao suggested that even 4K didn’t make a meaningful difference on screens as seen from couches in many living rooms.
“You could say that a 4K TV in most homes is not really distinguishable from HD,” he said. “At some point it's diminishing returns.”
Instead, Mahony noted, viewers are looking for add-on features like multiple camera angles and watch-together viewing. Rao and Patel concurred that the latter poses a particular challenge in assuring that every viewer’s picture stays in sync despite variations in connectivity. Said Rao: “There's so many hops on the way for each of them.”
Shrinking the distance from server to screen is one way to remedy that. “We're also looking at edge computing, the distributed cloud,” Patel said.
Rao voiced optimism in the ability of AI-based compression to improve on such current codecs as HEVC.
“It's like squeezing the turnip,” he said of iterative improvements to current compression standards. “AI compression, I think, is going to take us to the next level. It won't be a 1x improvement, it will be a 10x improvement.”
Patel shared a buzzword-packed slide listing AI and machine-learning compression as future innovations in video delivery, among a great many other possibilities; he also suggested that AI and ML could improve content discoverability by helping Spectrum build “an extended metadata set.”
But all the work a streaming service puts into network architecture and codec development can still be defeated by subpar residential bandwidth or an erratic home wireless network, Rao admitted in a conversation after the panel.
“Up to the CDN, everything is great,” he said. “The flakiest part of the network is the last mile, and then the last feet if you will.”