The 10 Year View: What Will Online Video Look Like in 2026?
The Future of Delivery
With streaming video increasingly taking over for cable and satellite, we’re going to see a lot more bits pushed over a lot more pipes. To see how that will play out, we turn to John Bishop, chief technology officer for media business at Akamai.
From a consumer perspective, online video is in the early days of traditional TV service replacement, with screens simply serving as end points for whatever the viewer chooses to watch. Today, we are already seeing that connected TVs and set-top boxes (STB) have richer engagement, longer viewing times, and higher fidelity experiences than legacy TV services. In the near future, there will be no second-class screens, as content will be easily accessible at broadcast or higher quality across all devices and locations. The many business rules will continue to be worked out, and the technology is already proving to be more than capable.
We’ll also start to see more live 4K and HDR content become available on a broader scale, driven largely by high-profile events. To date, we’ve already enjoyed some early examples of this in sports, where viewer reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. Much like we saw with the evolution of HD, sports will play a big role in helping to drive 4K and HDR innovation and adoption.
From a technology standpoint, the amount of innovation in online video that has occurred over a relatively short amount of time is staggering—and often overlooked. We’re already approaching the point where online video quality is as good as, if not better than, what cable and satellite are delivering. We’re also tackling challenges such as latency, with a goal of sub-10-second delivery and even better so consumers are enjoying live events at the same time, no matter how they’re watching.
Most importantly, we’re working on scaling our systems to more efficiently reach rapidly growing audiences at higher levels of quality. These efficiencies are coming not through simply adding more servers to content delivery networks, but introducing hybrid HTTP/ UDP streaming, multicast capabilities, and the extension of the edge onto consumer devices.
As viewing habits evolve and born-digital consumers mature, we’ll continue to innovate and deliver the types of services and technology that meet the demands and expectations of bigger and bigger audiences around the world.
The Future of Advertising
To wrap up, let’s take a peek at how we’re going to pay for all this. Here are some thoughts from Eleni Marouli, principal analyst and manager for advertising research with IHS Markit.
Video content production will be dominated by traditional broadcasters, who have decades of experience in this. Whether it will be vertical video, VR, AR, and/or all of the above, it will still require the creative skill sets of content producers—something that is currently lacking in the leading technology companies who [are] becoming video-first.
As digital becomes an increasingly difficult landscape to navigate for large advertisers, we will see the rise of branded content. Advertisers will commission content from producers and/or invest in their own production capabilities (e.g., see GoPro and Red Bull).
Algorithms will dictate standardized format advertising decisions. We already see programmatic buying as a mainstream mechanism for display advertising revenue, and we forecast this will become the majority for video advertising revenue by 2020.
And that is how our robust, protean, fascinating online video world will shape up in 10 years. Now store this article for a decade to see how accurate our digital prophets were.
[This article appears in the November/December 2016 issue of Streaming Media magazine as "Online Video 2026: Millennials Grow Up."]
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