M+E Daily

By Jeff Berman

The market for 4K video content and hardware continues to grow, but latency remains one of the challenges facing companies who want to deliver live 4K content over the Internet, Jonathan Divincenzo, director-product management at Verizon Digital Media Services, said at the Content Delivery Summit on Monday.

The 4K market was “pretty much non-existent” in 2013 and just “a few people spent $10,000” for 4K TVs in 2014, he said. But the price of 4K TVs “probably dropped 90%” in 2015, driving a huge uptick in sales, he said, projecting continued growth in the sale of 4K devices.

But while Netflix is successfully streaming 4K movies to subscribers via its service, delivering live 4K content is challenging, due largely to latency issues. The advantage that Verizon has over rivals in delivering live 4K online is that the company owns its own network to do it, said Divincenzo. It’s been able to overcome latency challenges through such solutions as multi-location caching for global scalability, said Karthik Sathyanarayana, senior software engineer-streaming at Verizon Digital Media Services.

Verizon has been able to reduce latency on live 4K online delivery to four milliseconds and the company is happy with that because, at that rate, it’s hard to notice, said Divincenzo.

Although we’re getting closer to the industry streaming live 4K content, “probably it’s going to be a few years” before live 4K becomes “the norm for the Internet,” he told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) in an interview after his presentation. In part, that’s because 1080p is not even the industry norm for live HD streaming today, he said, pointing out that most streaming of HD content is still only 720p. As anybody who tried to stream the Super Bowl in HD found out in February, latency was wildly inconsistent across multiple devices.

Other challenges facing the delivery of 4K online include limited device support beyond TVs and the amount of storage required for it, said Sathyanarayana. Although the number of 4K devices is growing, including Ultra HD Blu-ray players, hardware support remains “kind of slow,” he said.

Latency is also a major challenge for the delivery of virtual reality video online, Avni Rambhia, industry principal-digital media at market research company Frost & Sullivan, said earlier at the Summit.

In the first of two Summit keynotes, Barry Tishgart, Comcast Wholesale VP and GM, said the SVOD and OTT spaces are “rapidly evolving,” with SVOD views up about 56% year over year and live TV viewing online up more than 120% year over year. “As consumers are demanding content everywhere, it presents a challenge for the content creators, the broadcasters and the programmers to meet the demand,” he said. Tishgart pointed to his company’s multi-content delivery network (CDN) strategy that’s built on open-source technology as a key solution that will enable the video industry to grow to meet viewer demand as consumers view TV content across multiple screens and consume more IP content than ever before.

In the second keynote, Level 3 CTO Jack Waters predicted there will be “some consolidation” among CDN companies over the next few years. “The market is probably not big enough to support” the 47 CDNs operating now, he said.