I’ve Seen The Future of The Streaming Video Tech Stack
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: streaming is an evolutionary step in the television experience. Some of that has to do with how viewers can watch TV content now: from anywhere at any time, 跨越不同的设备和屏幕尺寸. The same content that was once shackled to the EPG by the cable operator is now free to be mashed up, 聚合, 并以不同的令人兴奋的方式组织起来.
But what that evolution really deals with is the technology underlying that experience.
在广播电视的世界里, it’s always been about hardware (although that is changing with many pieces of technology moving into the cloud). Conversely, in the world of streaming, it’s all about software. Any hardware components needed for the streaming workflow, 比如编码器, 早就被虚拟化了. The entire streaming video stack exists as software which can be broken apart and reconstituted in any process flow to suit the needs of the streaming platform or operator (it’s not that easy just yet, 但我马上就要讲到这一点了).
当然，流媒体是关于IP的. 随着广播继续接受IP而不是SDI, streaming and broadcast will continue to head on a collision course in the future where each will be based on the same technology and will just be seen as different ways to distribute content.
What that means is that the process for creating and ingesting content all the way to playback will be an entirely software-based workflow. And when the streaming tech stack software completely aligns with modern software practices, 比如微服务和无服务器功能, 运营商将真正实现模块化, 灵活的, and entirely customizable way to build and deliver their service to users. 个性化不会停留在内容上，而是可以, 在这个模型中, continue through to the very user experience itself: the entire interface and way in which users interact with the streaming service can be customized on the fly.
The trick in this new world, though, is enabling that kind of modularity and flexibility. Despite agile software development methods and improvements in development languages (such as 生锈), it still requires a lot of software engineers to cobble things together. 这就是解 挪威人的,从 id3as—于5月在流媒体东部推出-将扮演如此重要的角色. 参加NAB 2023的演示, I quickly realized that I was seeing the future of how streaming services would be built.
未来是一个简化的抽象层. Sure, abstractions have existed for a while in the world of SaaS. 看看服务，比如 段. They provide a visual tool which takes the place of writing code to develop the integrations between different components within a specific process flow (in the case of 段, 数据管道). 最终, these visual representations simply handle what would otherwise be a manual coding process for connecting things together via API (as well as automatically update connections when APIs change).
But until now, nothing has existed like that for streaming. That’s because abstracting the video tech stack isn’t as easy as connecting sources and destinations when moving data around: components within broadcast and streaming often support APIs differently, there are elements of interoperability which require more than just programmatic connection, 服务本身也需要提供.
这就是挪威人的如此吸引人的地方. Although the abstraction layer is code-based (engineers could use a variety of languages), 代码基本上是关于实例化的, I want this player to pull in this video and provide this interactivity. What might have been thousands of lines of code were reduced to just a few. It’s not even hard to imagine another layer of abstraction like ChatGPT. How much more 灵活的 would a streaming service be if an engineer could simply say, “I’d like an HTML5 player to pull in the source from URL XYZ with a bitrate ladder of ABC based on the user’s history”?
The evolution of the evolution of TV is coming soon, hinted at by services like 挪威人的. 我已经等不及了.
相关文章
随着生成式人工智能的进步, just-intime代码转换, SSAI缝合, 以及其他流媒体视频技术栈组件, companies like Infuse Video are demonstrating that the true vision of video personalization—changing the video content itself—is finally at hand.
2023年10月4日
The popularity and growth of FAST show us that viewing behavior, 尽管流媒体正在兴起, 并没有太大的变化. People want choice, but they want it in a way that meets their needs. FAST doesn't scrap the broadcast experience with which so many are familiar; it is evolving it in a way that broadcast could never do to improve upon the viewer experience.
2023年2月9日
你可能会觉得我疯了, as the executive director of the world's largest streaming technical association, 问这个专栏标题中的问题. But I think it's actually important that we do a gut check every once in a while.
11月14日
The future of streaming is about unification built on top of a single open standard of content metadata. Right now, it's a matter of seeing the forest for the trees.
2022年10月4日
提及的公司及供应商