OTT: Changing the future of Television

OTT stands for “over-the-top,” the term used for the delivery of film and TV content via the internet, without requiring users to subscribe to a traditional cable or satellite pay-tv service. OTT is basically a unicast model with three types of revenue models that it can provide.

SVOD (subscription-based services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu)

 AVOD (free and ad-supported services such as Crackle)

 TVOD (transactional services such as iTunes, Vimeo on Demand and Amazon Instant Video that allow users to pay for individual pieces of content).

So now we are going to talk about the technology that brought revolution in the internet TV platform that is Adaptive bitrate streaming over HTTP.

Adaptive Streaming over HTTP

The traditional IPTV is just a multicast packets sent through a pipe to the customer. But with OTT, we have seen many technological advancement. Adaptive streaming is one such technology which helps for the best viewer experience. The key features of it are:

Download and Stream:

Imitation of Streaming via Short Downloads.

Downloads desired portion in small chunks to minimize bandwidth waste.

Enables monitoring consumption and tracking clients.

Adaptation to Dynamic Conditions and Device Capabilities

Adapts to dynamic conditions anywhere on the path through the Internet and/or home network

Adapts to display resolution, CPU and memory resources of the client

Facilitates “any device, anywhere, anytime” paradigm

Improved Quality of Experience

Enables faster start-up and seeking (compared to progressive download), and quicker buffer fills

Reduces skips, freezes and stutters.

Use of HTTP

Well-understood naming/addressing approach, and authentication/authorization infrastructure

Provides easy traversal for all kinds of middleboxes (e.g., NATs, firewalls)

Enables cloud access, leverages existing HTTP caching infrastructure (Cheaper CDN costs)

The above image depicts the Adaptive streaming OTT service currently being used by most of the OTT service providers.

Any content which is being pushed or pulled is shown in the production part above in the image.

Once the content is available, the OTT provider generally uses a multi bitrate encoding platform which converts the content to the desired resolution as and when required.

The content is protected by the encapsulation engine, well known as DRM (Digital rights management) system. There are many vendors which provides their DRM solution.

When it comes to the distribution network, the OTT providers uses content delivery network. We will discuss about CDN in my other publication as CDN itself is a huge topic. Basically it will get video, data, from many locations and maintain the high availability so that user doesn’t have to compromise if one of the production location is down.

The next stage is the consumption which is a user interface. Be it a TV, desktop, laptop, tablets or smartphones, The OTT provider has one solution for it. With the ABR streaming, customer will have a seamless experience with all his devices without compromising the screen resolution or worrying about the internet bandwidth.

So to summarize, the next gen customers are looking for a revolution in TV industry and the OTT is the best bet for the service providers.