Android Video Fragmentation: Standing Up to the Challenge

Devices running the Android operating system are growing in popularity, but unlike iOS devices they often have different requirements for streaming video. It takes some effort to make sure you're streaming video they can all see.

Android fragmentation is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. At the recent Streaming Media West conference in sunny Huntington Beach, California, Andrew Spaulding, Ooyala's director for sales engineering, explained why Android is a special challenge for online video broadcasters.

"The fragmentation of what we're looking at around Android really stems from not only the different versions of the operating system, but also the different screen sizes, the different GPU capabilities, the different graphics cards that they have in each of these devices," Spaulding said. "Luckily, right now we have over half the pie running on Android 4.x and above. This is where we start to see an introduction of Apple's streaming protocol -- Apple HTTP live streaming, or Apple HLS."

With the latest Android OS, things get easier for broadcasters, but market penetration is still around half.

"Jellybean, which is what the 4.x branch was named, has got about 54 percent of the market share, but it's that other 50 percent of the Android environment that is still running different delivery protocols," Spaulding noted. "You have to do progressive download of an MP4 file, so you're not going to get that adaptive bitrate playback experience. You're not going to have the ability to integrate your advertising strategies and run mid-rolls or pre-rolls or post-rolls across some of these MP4 streams without having to stitch it in or burn it into that video streaming file."

To learn what brands can do to serve videos to all Android users, watch the full video below and download the presentation.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net