Current Situation
Many of today’s video players and apps are one size fits all, standardized with turnkey OVPs. While this may be okay or good enough for basic video applications, it doesn’t address modern requirements for unique branding, live OTT sports, interactive services, social integration, and data services for statistics and betting. This has developed in-house and custom-built solutions that in many cases require extensive support and updates as technology advances. Therefore, specialty vendors have focused on addressing these requirements.
Goals and Objectives
Advanced streaming application requirements for live sports, interactive engagement, multiviewing (synchronized multisource/multiangle viewing), real-time data analytics and stats, and sports betting are introducing new requisites for latency, redundancy, and reliability with the introduction of low-latency HLS (LL-HLS) and low-latency DASH (LL-DASH) in addition to high-efficiency streaming protocol (HESP). The enriched media streaming solution (EMSS) standardizes the interaction between a server-side ad insertion (SSAI) server and the video player.
Technology Deployed
Support for streaming protocols HLS, LL-HLS, DASH, LL-DASH, HESP, Smooth Streaming, progressive MP4, HTML5
Desktop browsers including IE, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari,
Mobile browsers including Chrome for Android, Firefox for Android, Safari for iOS, Chrome for iOS
Connected TV and Smart TV – Tizen, WebOS, HbbTV, Hisense, RDK, XBOX, PlayStation, Fire TV, ROKU, Android TV, and TVOS.
Use Case Summary
Just like OVPs, video player and apps use cases include live event streaming for sports, news, concerts, and other applications. Video-on-demand use cases include services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and HULU. For enterprise use cases, CDNs provide video and media distribution services for training, distance learning, corporate communications, public or legislative events, telehealth, and many other applications. The use case for CTV apps adds real estate for search, recommendations, personalization, and discovery through content metadata.