• by Jason Thibeault , February 4, 2015

There’s no doubt that online video is exploding in popularity. With the recent announcements by HBO, CBS, and Dish to bring traditional linear content directly to consumers with new streaming services, it’s clear that consumer behavior about consuming video content has shifted to anytime, anywhere, on any device and away from the family room. OTT is finally mainstream.

But the meteoric rise of OTT strains an already burdened Internet. For example, it’s projected that Netflix accounts for almost 40% of Internet traffic during prime time in the United States. As the “television experience” migrates online, as more people watch more video from more connected devices like phones, tablets, TVs and set-top boxes, infrastructure may begin to buckle under the load. Sure, there’s plenty of bandwidth in the fibre and the WiFi signals but decades-old routers, switches, and servers won’t be able to handle the traffic as their ports get flooded. Eventually, the combination of OTT, increasing demand for digital downloads (i.e., games), and exploding web traffic could prove to be the perfect storm.

Only “eventually” may come sooner than expected with the rise of 4K, especially if the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was any indicator. With UHD TVs costing only a fraction more than standard HD TVs, many OEMs at CES rolled out multiple models.  Samsung, LG and Sony were just some of the electronics manufacturers who debuted devices specifically designed for streaming and 4k. Consumers will begin to eagerly snatch them up as they upgrade equipment.

Sensing the future pent-up demand for 4K content, publishers even now are frantically scrambling to meet the appetite for a video format that is, in most cases, triple the size of a standard 1080p stream. It’s hard to tell whether the manufacturers displaying new models at CES are driving the demand or vice-versa. But the result is the same—in 18 months or so, when a huge chunk of the content that those users are streaming is 4K, if that decades-old infrastructure hasn’t been upgraded, it’s lights out. Video won’t load. Websites won’t be available. Traffic on the Internet, quite frankly, may come to a grinding halt.

Of course, the demand for quality won’t stop at 4K either. It will continue to progress as long as we can make devices to support denser pixel displays – 8K, 16K and so on.

But this doesn’t mean that content creators should hide their head in the sand or avoid producing high-quality online video content. On the contrary, there are things that can be done today to ensure that video remains playable at the highest level of quality the Internet can support even when the perfect storm hits:

• Compress your video. Whether it’s using HEVC (h.265, the high-efficiency successor to the popular h.264 codec) or third-party software like BeamR that can compress videos significantly saving bandwidth without losing quality, you need to reduce the bandwidth of your high-quality video.
• Multiple bitrates. By encoding your content into multiple bitrates, you can take advantage of adaptive bitrate streaming, ensuring that users get the best possible version for the bandwidth or computing conditions in which they are consuming your content.
• Distribution network. There is no getting around the fact that the Internet is getting busier and trying to deliver your own video content is like pushing a rock uphill; by using a distribution network (CDN) you can ensure that high-bandwidth video content is delivered as close to the end user as possible.