How to Stream Premium Video to All Android Devices

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.

PRESENTATION: Overcoming the Challenge of Getting Premium Video to Android Devices

While one may think it’s easy to take a single video clip and simply repurpose it for playback on multiple devices, the fact is, delivering video to so many different Android platforms and screen sizes is extremely challenging. This presentation shows you how the Hook media player enables publishers to deliver live, linear, and premium VOD content not possible on current mobile web platforms without the significant cost and lengthy time to market that is required to build custom video-centric apps.

Speaker: Ryan Holmes, Director, Digital Media Group, BYU
Speaker: Andrew Spaulding, Director, Sales Engineering, Ooyala