A history of media streaming and the future of connected TV

On 5 September 1995, ESPN SportsZone streamed a live radio broadcast of a baseball game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees to thousands of its subscribers worldwide using cutting-edge technology developed by a Seattle-based startup company named Progressive Networks. It was the world's first livestreaming event. A few years later the company would change its name to RealNetworks and before long it would find itself embroiled in a bitter technological and legal war with Microsoft for domination of a brand new technology market – streaming media.Though the prospect of streaming media over the internet had always excited technology nerds and CEOs alike, streaming media's childhood years were primarily marred by pragmatic problems such as how to successfully stream watchable video over 56k modem lines. Microsoft emerged from the war with RealNetworks as a winner (thanks to its Windows Media technologies), but soon found itself unable to capitalise on the victory. While the Redmond-based US company frittered away its advantage, Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe Systems) slowly but surely eroded Windows Media's market share in the mid-2000s in favour of its increasingly popular Flash Player. Flash shook up the streaming media industry by seamlessly marrying interactivity, Web 2.0 and streaming media for the first time. A new era in streaming media had arrived, but the old problems still remained – bandwidth, scalability and reach.

By the mid-2000s the vast majority of the Internet traffic was HTTP-based and content delivery networks (CDNs) were increasingly being used to ensure delivery of popular content to large audiences. Streaming media, with its hodgepodge of proprietary protocols – all mostly based on the far less popular UDP – suddenly found itself struggling to keep up with demand. In 2007 a company named Move Networks introduced a technology and service that once again would change the industry: HTTP-based adaptive streaming.

Instead of relying on proprietary streaming protocols and leaving users at the mercy of the internet bandwidth gods, Move Networks used the dominant HTTP protocol to deliver media in small file chunks while utilising the player application to monitor download speeds and request chunks of varying quality (size) in response to changing network conditions. The technology had a huge impact because it allowed streaming media to be distributed far and wide using CDNs (over standard HTTP) and cached for efficiency, while at the same time eliminating annoying buffering and connectivity issues for customers. Other HTTP-based adaptive streaming solutions soon followed: Microsoft launched its Smooth Streaming technology in 2008, the same year Netflix developed its own technology to power its pioneering Watch Instantly streaming service. Apple followed suit in 2009 with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) designed for delivery to iOS devices, and Adobe joined the party in 2010 with HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS). HTTP-based adaptive streaming quickly became the weapon of choice for high-profile live streaming events (Vancouver and London Olympics, Wimbledon, Roland Garros, Felix Baumgartner's Stratos jump, etc.) and premium on-demand services (Netflix, LoveFilm, Amazon Instant Video, etc.). It was a time of adolescence for streaming media – bursting with potential, but also confusing and a bit awkward.

It was evident early on that another clash of proprietary streaming technologies would do more damage than good to an industry that was on the verge of maturing into mainstream, so in 2009 efforts began in 3GPP to establish an industry standard for adaptive streaming. Early 3GPP standardisation work shifted to ISO/IEC MPEG working groups in 2010, where it moved quickly from proposals to draft status to ratification in less than two years. More than 50 companies were involved – Microsoft, Netflix and Apple included – and the effort was co-ordinated with other industry organisations such as 3GPP, DECE, OIPF and W3C. By April 2012 a new standard was born – Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, colloquially known as MPEG-DASH.

Many companies were quick to announce MPEG-DASH support in their products as early as 2011, but as it often happens with standards the adoption process didn't immediately begin at ratification. MPEG-DASH in its original specification tried to be everything to everyone and consequently suffered from excessive ambiguity (a story surely familiar to anyone acquainted with HTML5 Video). The bulk of the companies involved in MPEG-DASH quickly formed a DASH Industry Forum with the goal of promoting DASH adoption and establishing a well-defined set of interoperability constraints. Earlier this year the DASH-IF published a draft (version 0.9) of its DASH264 Implementation Guidelines and opened them up for community review (feedback is due on 15 March 15 2013). As the name suggests, the DASH264 guidelines provide important interoperability requirements such as support for the H.264 video codec which has been an industry standard for the better part of the past decade. DASH264 defines other essential interoperability requirements such as support for HE-AAC v2 audio codec, ISO base media file format, SMPTE-TT subtitle format, and MPEG Common Encryption for content protection (DRM). The Common Encryption element is particularly interesting because it enables competing DRM technologies such as Microsoft PlayReady, Adobe Access and Widevine to be used inclusively without locking customers into a particular digital store. DASH264 provides the details desperately needed by the industry to adopt MPEG-DASH and is expected to gain significant traction over the next one to two years.

Besides interoperability the other major hurdle facing streaming media and over-the-top (OTT) delivery is the quality gap. In just a handful of years streaming media technology has leapfrogged from less-than-standard definition video to rather solid 720p HD video, but the quality of even the best video-on-demand OTT services still falls short of broadcast television and Blu-ray audio-video quality. While most HD video delivered over satellite (DVB-S2), for example, is 1080i video H.264-compressed at 17-37 Mbps, most HD streamed video is only 720p encoded at a meager 3-4 Mbps. Broadcast television is always delivered at 50Hz in Europe, whereas streaming video is nearly always delivered at half the frame rate – 25Hz in Europe, 30Hz in North America. Finally, broadcast audio is typically mixed and delivered in 5.1 surround these days, whereas streaming audio is still largely a stereo affair (or even mono on occasion).

That is a significant quality gap that needs to be overcome before OTT can truly challenge traditional media delivery, but fortunately there is hope on the horizon. As digital media quality is primarily dependent on bandwidth, there are two certain ways to increase the quality: by either increasing the bandwidth or by improving the compression efficiency at existing bit rates. The former can only accelerate as fast as general Internet bandwidth can, but the latter can be improved with new codec technologies. Such a codec technology is H.265 – the latest evolution of the highly successful joint collaboration between ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU that brought us H.264 a decade ago. Earlier this year the ITU announced the ratification of H.265 which promises to bring 40-45% increase in compression efficiency (or bandwidth reduction) compared to existing H.264 technology. Such a boost could effectively help streaming media providers deliver 1080p (Full HD) video at the same 3-4 Mbps currently used for 720p video delivery, or increase the frame rate to 50/60Hz without requiring a proportional increase in bandwidth. In fact, many have hailed the news of H.265 as the beginning of the 4K video era where streaming video quality might finally outpace the slow-moving broadcast standards.

It certainly doesn't hurt to dream big.

Alex Zambelli is a principal video specialist at iStreamPlanet.

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