The State of High-Definition Streaming

After closing a deal with Microsoft to optimize delivery of XBox LIVE content in August, Limelight Networks introduced LimelightHD on Oct. 23. "Our offering is very straightforward. It leverages our basic approach to the media delivery game of storing entire libraries of HD content in our network so we can delivery every object at every time," says Mike Gordon, COO and co-founder of Limelight Networks. "We’re supporting Windows Media, Flash, and QuickTime, and with Flash we’re doing both Flash streaming and Flash progressive download. The only thing I don’t know if we’re supporting is live streaming, but I see no technical reason we couldn’t do that." (For more on the different ways Akamai and Limelight deliver HD content, see the sidebar "Akamai vs. Limelight: What's teh Difference?")

But the HD revolution is not limited just to the big kids of content delivery. Sandwiched in between Akamai and Limelight’s announcements was the unveiling of support for 720p HD on Vimeo. "We consider it to be the first real public HD video platform on the web," says Justin Ouellette, senior developer of Vimeo. "A place where a regular person can go upload true, real HD and have a robust platform to play it back."

For Vimeo it was simply a matter of trying to better serve its customers. "What we saw was that we had a lot of content creators on Vimeo shooting in HD and then having to rez it way down," says Jakob Lodwick, Vimeo’s founder. "We were just looking at that and thinking, what is the real technical limitation? Why does it have to be this way? Then we realized we could do this in Flash using technologies that are already ubiquitous and available."

Another Vimeo innovation is that now when users click to watch full-screen on Vimeo's site it doesn't just stretch the smaller video bigger; it will actually start delivering at a higher bitrate. "Our users can embed their videos at a smaller size and then have a full-screen button in the player. It’s nice to encourage people to push the full-screen a little more. Most users aren’t expecting to get more information when they go full-screen. They think it’ll just stretch," says Lodwick.

Another noteworthy player in this space is Move Networks. They help major content owners like ABC and Fox to deliver their increasingly higher-definition content. "The reason we’re using Move’s technology is because of the way they optimize the number of bits that are served," says Ron Berryman, SVP and GM for Fox Stations Group and Fox Interactive Media. "Because of their technology we’re able to deliver bits in 2-second chunks and adjust the number of bits to optimize quality from 250Kbps on up." Most of Fox’s users are still streaming around the 750Kbps range, though Berryman says that "we’re encoding up to 3 to 4Mbps, but the available bandwidth users have coming in is averaging less than the rate we can deliver video."

While they didn’t make any big product announcements in the second half of ’07, CEO John Edwards says that in the month of October alone, viewers watched more than 15 million hours of Move-enabled "near-HD" or HD premium content.

And these are only some of the highlights from 2007, with even more on the horizon for an industry rapidly gearing up to support the delivery of HD video online.

Everyone Loves Me, but Does Anyone Want Me?
By and large, initial efforts to introduce full-screen online video have proven successful. "It seems like every time we post a new episode on Fox on Demand we get positive comments in from people," says Berryman. "If we were having lots of buffering, we would get a ton of email complaints, but we don’t get those. I think if you talked to ABC they’d say the same thing." And the proof is really in the pudding when Berryman shares that Fox has been realizing an average viewing time of 19 minutes per episode, and that number might actually be higher as users are able to pause shows and come back to them at a later date.

"Certainly the feedback we’ve gotten has been very positive," says Johnson about Akamai’s HDWeb promotion. "People were really amazed at the quality. [HD] will absolutely be a driver for more people to get on FiOS, and as more people have higher-bandwidth connections to enjoy this kind of content, it’s going to become the norm instead of the exception."

And enabling a better user experience should drive adoption and demand for this content. "We believe that consumers respond favorably to fidelity," says Gordon. "They reward better fidelity with more time and attention, and fundamentally that’s what media companies are monetizing."