The State of High-Definition Streaming

Already today on even an average broadband connection, when watching a video on a site like YouTube, the video is loading much faster than real time, highlighting the fact that there’s more capacity to be filled. And increasingly content companies are rediscovering the fact that the higher the quality of the video they deliver, the more willing users are to watch for longer and longer periods of time, eventually leading to more and higher-quality ad impressions. And companies like Akamai, Limelight, and Vimeo are pushing forward with exciting new technology platforms that are enabling the delivery of this higher-def content.

But at the same time content owners wanting to step into this brave new world must face some uncertain realities: One, of more promise than reality in terms of advertisers’ willingness to pay more for higher-def impressions. Two, of unavoidably higher delivery costs no matter how accommodating the CDNs may be. And three, of the chance that in trying to trailblaze they risk pushing too far out on the bleeding edge and ending up sacrificing user experience rather than enhancing it.

These potential pitfalls aside, the day of HD web video is well on its way to dawning. And any company with HD content has to be thinking about how it can build its business to get in the game so as to position itself to best take advantage of the rapidly oncoming HD future. Everyone interviewed for this article agreed that the push to ever-higher bitrates has hit a plateau of sorts over the last couple of years as publishers focus on more fundamental issues.

For MTV it was a matter of striving for more but realizing it could get away with less. "We felt we had to come out on the high end of what people were doing and thought that was a good and important thing to do, but in trying to do so we did have some difficulty with delivery," says MTV’s Nick Rockwell. "And then YouTube came along with very low bitrate video and tore up the market. We concluded that maybe quality isn’t as important to people. I think a lot of people had that reaction and so people stopped pushing up bitrates for a while."

But YouTube also had a positive impact on the perception of online video. "It definitely threw a little bit of a wrinkle in, and caused content owners to say, ‘I don’t want my content on YouTube, so I’d better build up a business around my content,'" says Akamai’s Suzanne Johnson.

The heart of the slowdown, though, arguably had nothing to do with external forces. "From say mid-2006 on, content companies got really focused on, ‘What’s my overall web strategy? How am I going to integrate that into my broadcast strategy?’" says Limelight’s Mike Gordon. "When you’ve only got four titles on the internet, it makes sense to focus more on what you encode them at. When you’re going to be systematic in integrating the web into your strategy your focus shifts to much more fundamental, basic business strategy questions, and this has caused them to focus less on the last 100Kbps of their encoding rates."

This sentiment is shared by Fox’s Ron Berryman: "I don’t know if it was a slowdown. People were just trying to understand this new space and find the right type of partners to work with, both from a technology and distribution perspective. So less of a slowdown and more of trying to get a handle on the process."

"I would interpret that as maturing the ecosystem," says Adobe’s Kevin Towes. "When you look at the business of putting video online, you’ve got a whole bunch of factors: encoding, publishing, advertising, tracking, managing, and distributing video. 2007 was a great year for maturing that part of the business and getting ready for the delivery of high-value content. That lull is really just everyone trying to figure out all the bits and pieces."

And now that everyone’s having a chance to figure these things out, the industry is poised to explode in its adoption of ever-higher bitrate video.The Eye of the Beholder:
What Exactly Is HD?
As soon as we start talking about online HD video, a very important question is raised: What in the heck do we mean by "HD"? It’s a slippery question without any one well-defined answer. Broadcast standards alone have the three-sided HD coin of 720p, 1080i, and 1080p.

Combine this lack of a hard definition with the sex appeal of calling something "high definition," and it’s not surprising the term "HD" can mean many things to many people.

"We don’t really think in terms of HD," says MTV’s Nick Rockwell. "CDNs are marketing the push to higher bitrates as ‘HD online’ because it has a nice ring to it. HD is a firm specification on TV, but online there is no such thing. There’s a whole continuum of bitrates. So instead we say that we’re looking at higher-quality delivery."

"There’s definitely a lot of ambiguity out there," says Akamai’s Suzanne Johnson. "We’re seeing a lot of people calling streams at 1.5Mbps HD. And while they certainly are much higher def, they’re not HD in the strictest sense. We believe trying to be as close to the broadcast definition as possible makes the most sense."

"We’re defining HD however our customers want to, all the way up to 1080p, and we’ve got the ability to go to 1366p all ready," says Limelight’s Mike Gordon. "We aren’t ideologues about how HD has to be the following, and there’s no limitation on what we can deliver from an HD standards standpoint. The question is what do our customers want to consider it. Frankly, I’d say the highest aspiration today is 720p, but that’s just a function of the graphics performance of PCs, the encoding rates, and the amount of bits that need to be moved."

"We see HD as video that is 1280x720 without stipulating a bitrate or frame rate," says Vimeo’s Lodwick.

And what does Adobe say? "When you look at what HD is when encoded in H.264, 480p video looks good between 1.5—3Mbps, 720p between 3—7Mbps, and 1080 between 8—15Mbps," says Adobe’s Towes. "Being able to sustain a stream above 15Mbps is just not a reality right now, but it’s only blocked by consumer bandwidth to the home."

Whatever your definition of HD, there’s little doubt streaming has come a long way since the postage stamp, and to think we live in a world where people are seriously considering delivering video at 10Mbps-plus would have been pretty much inconceivable even just a few short years ago.Akamai Versus Limelight:
What’s the Difference?
Trying to detail specific differences between CDNs can be a treacherous endeavor. But in the case of HD delivery it’s good to understand a fundamental distinction between how the two biggest CDNs make online HD possible.

Akamai leverages servers that are located way out on the edge in the hubs of broadband providers. "Because of the global distribution we have we’re able to get close enough to the end user of the maximum bandwidth connection to get the maximum throughput to fill that pipe," says Akamai senior product manager Suzanne Johnson. "What we’ve seen is that, on average, our servers are within 100 miles of the end user."

Limelight, on the other hand, focuses on establishing peering relationships into last-mile networks. "We store the entire library of objects in our network and deliver them from our edge servers dir