Video streaming services will achieve 585 million subscriptions in 2019, according to new analysis from ABI Research.
Mobile broadband penetration together with consumers’ demand for TV anytime, anywhere are the driving factors of video consumption on mobile devices.
Khin Sandi Lynn, Industry Analyst at ABI Research, said, “5G network deployments will be a catalyst in the mobile video consumption driving the requirement of efficient video delivery solutions. Higher resolution video content such as ultra-HD 4K, and latency-sensitive services such as augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) video applications are also expected to drive the deployment of edge computing platforms for content delivery.”
Telecoms companies account for a substantial and growing share of the traditional pay-TV market, with several occupying leadership positions in their respective countries. According to Ovum, around half of the world’s largest domestic pay-TV operations (in terms of subscriber base) are currently owned or controlled by telcos.
User experience
As pay-TV services proliferate, user experience will increasingly be the competitive advantage.
ABI Research pinpoints edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) as key technologies to deliver the required quality of service (QoS).
Edge computing can help to solve the problem of buffering, which can put people off streaming content. The technology dramatically reduces latency by moving the data source closer to end users.
AI and machine learning can also be deployed to optimise video content delivery.
ABI Research explains, “AI-assisted Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming and encoding systems significantly improve video delivery efficiency. Pay-TV and video streaming service providers can deploy AI for optimisation of content summarisation, personalisation, and content recommendation, all of which are essential for revenue generation.”
Service providers can also improve customer engagement and user experience by integrating AI into set-top boxes and video streaming devices to enable voice control and voice searches.