Moving images are playing an ever-greater role on the Web. According to estimates from Cisco, the share of videos in Internet data traffic is expected to increase to 80% by 2018. Companies wanting to communicate through the use of videos therefore need to provide fast loading times, high performance and easy scalability – for both stationary and mobile devices.
The global service provider Akamai explains the most important measures for successful online videos as follows: Users wanting to watch videos from the Web expect to get optimal video quality on whatever terminal device they are using – long loading times are perceived as frustrating and users do not accept annoying judder. That is why companies that provide videos online require a very powerful infrastructure for the storage and delivery of content.
Scalability is especially critical for online media, which generate enormous demand peaks overnight or at the weekend. If a company has in-house video servers in its own data centres, the hardware must be designed for peak capacities that will only be maxed out later.
Many users watch online videos on smartphones or tablets on the go. This already accounts for about half of today’s mobile traffic. Image quality depends greatly on the video and streaming format. MPEG-DASH (Motion Picture Experts Group – Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) and HDS (HTTP Dynamic Streaming) are ideal. (Source: Cisco/Akamai/bs)