With lockdowns and people staying at home during 2020 and still in 2021, positive impact on the increase of OTT consumption is no surprise. However, another element arose which was not as explored before. It was a need for the social interaction while consuming content. Some providers enabled “watch parties” which enabled people to interact while watching same content. What does that mean for the OTT platform providers? Well, definitely, this requirement for even greater interactivity means adding yet another complex feature to the numerous platforms currently offered as a standard package. Communication, interaction and exchange of data between video player and the streaming service around it will have to be much faster and efficient.
With ultra-low latency streaming protocol we are much closer to not needing cable and antennas any more. Here video is split into smaller chunks (just a few MB in size) which allows encoder to push small video chunks rather than large video segments, making the delivery of content in almost real time over networks a possibility. CDN companies are adapting their network with innovative caching methods to handle the ultra-low latency delivery of content to their customers all around the world. It is now possible to cache as small as byte ranges of an object to make sure that the content is delivered with the least possible latency. Scalable HTTP Adaptive streaming based protocol remains cheap in scale, efficient in bandwidth usage and opens a door to an exciting future for the online streaming industry! (Negar Hajihoseini, Theo Technologies). We at AVIION keep adding new features and continue to enhance everything „under the hood“ to make sure that our OTT platform keeps getting better and up to date with the development of related technologies. It is a process we started 12 years ago and we keep getting stronger.