Online Video Must Improve Streaming Quality to Compete With TV

我们都听过彼得·帕克叔叔的建议, “权力越大，责任越大。,” but t在这里 might be a corollary in the streaming media and online video industries: With TV-quality scale comes a demand for TV-quality quality.

一开始, 观众们原谅了网络视频的低质量, as it was never intended to compete with or even be shown on a television set -- or even full-screen on a computer in the early days. Yet today viewers are just as prone to see a YouTube or Vimeo video show up on the nightly news, given how major broadcasters continue to morph their show-closing human-interest segments into something more akin to a segment on what video is popular on Facebook today.

Beyond the tendency for old media to display trending -- and trendy -- new media, 虽然, 还有更大的游戏在等着你. From the FIFA World Cup to the latest live breaking news, television sports and news are expanding their alternate programming to include live streams of alternative camera angles (World Cup) or secondary-language coverage (such as press conferences covered by Univision or other major broadcasters).

So now that we’ve got the fair trade winds of popularity behind over-the-top (OTT) and TV Everyw在这里 delivery, what are the key quality issues the industry needs to address?

I see seven key quality inflection points at the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015. I’ll present the first three challenges 在这里, and the remaining four will be 透露了我11月份的专栏.

工件. One of the easiest ways to snap a viewer out of “the moment” in a show, the one w在这里 they’re so engrossed that reality fades away, is to have the key scene so poorly encoded that all sorts of blocks and rectangles of various sizes and colors begin appearing on the screen. 你知道我指的是哪种藏物, and it continues to plague online and OTT video playback, 从Hulu到Netflix再到YouTube.

The average viewer might not understand the why of what’s happened, but it breaks the story line paradigm in a way that runs counter to the director’s or storyteller’s vision. The above-average techie might chalk it up to network congestion, in which a lower bitrate version is substituted for a higher bitrate version on the fly -- in other words, the essence of adaptive bitrate delivery working well -- but digging under the hood of artifacting tells a different story.

It turns out the majority of high-resolution content is just poorly encoded, with limited quality control to check those high-action or complexly composited scenes. 真正的, HEVC will add a level of in在这里nt quality control for lower-bitrate 720p or 1080p content encoded at the equivalent bitrate to AVC versions, but the status quo just means that we’re all going to be subjected to lousy 4K and UHD encodes. 让它停止!

AV同步. We shouldn’t even have to discuss this issue at the beginning of 2015, but one of the differentiating criteria in a recent Transitions desktop and mobile player research report found that almost a third of the popular online media players still have audio and video synchronization issues. 如果伪造能让观者脱离当时的情境, AV同步 issues keep the viewer frustrated for minutes on end.

缓冲. The final quality issue we will discuss 在这里 is buffering, also known as latency and start-up time. 不要太怪异, another set of measurements in our recent Transitions online media player testing was the load time for the Flash Player-based SWF player -- the type of player the majority of desktop players, 还有一些移动播放器, rely on -- from a user’s URL link click to the first frame of video.

在那个时候, 发生三件事:SWF播放器加载, pre-roll advertisements are authenticated and sorted, and either DRM or encryption -- or both -- are confirmed and decrypted, 允许播放第一帧视频. What happens next is one of the most frustrating experiences in online video viewing. 我们会讲到的下个月.

本文发表于2014年10月刊 流媒体杂志 被称为“网络视频的蜘蛛侠规则”.“点击在这里阅读第二部分.