CenturyLink has European business on its radar. Why else would the US service provider commission a whitepaper on viewing habits in Europe?
Drumming up the rise of IP video viewing among traditional cable and satellite TV subscribers, CenturyLink is aiming to boost IP-based business from operators via assets including the Level 3 CDN and edge delivery mechanisms. Unfortunately, CenturyLink and the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA) appear to have tied their shoelaces together. Allow us to untangle them.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of the survey, comprising 6,022 respondents from 8 European countries, the whitepaper’s main message is that operators must switch to IP (that’s a no-brainer) and therefore invest in bandwidth-maximizing technologies (i.e. those from CenturyLink and SVA members).
So, to kick off, an overwhelming 89% of respondents agreed with the statement ‘TV is delivered over the internet’, of which 46% completely agreed and a further 43% somewhat agreed. However, then 67.5% of the exact same set of respondents agree that TV is only offered by a cable or satellite provider. Which is it then?
Clearly, a confusing set of questions has produced a confusing set of answers from a sample of consumers who are already confused by the definition of TV. Organizations such as CenturyLink and the Streaming Video Alliance are inadvertently contributing to this global sense of confusion through reports like this.
So, given the report’s vested interests, it was bizarre that one conclusion read: “It can be exciting to invent new experiences using innovative technologies but, at this point in the transforming definition of television, doing so at the expense of a basic level of service that allows viewers to consume content is probably detrimental to long-term success.” This sounds totally counterintuitive to be playing down investments in new technologies.
Furthermore, responses to the statement ‘TV is only displayed on a television set’ were virtually split 3 ways. Of the 33.6% who completely agreed with this statement, 93% agreed with TV being delivered over the internet, while 75.7% of these traditional TV set advocates also agreed with the statement ‘TV is only offered by a cable or satellite provider.’
Another strange choice of question revealing an interesting set of results was ‘I am OK with streaming video quality being worse than broadcast (i.e. through a cable or satellite provider) so long as I get to watch on whatever device I am using wherever I am.’ A surprising 68% of respondents agreed with this statement (15.9 strongly agreed; 32% agreed; 20.2% somewhat agreed) compared to 17.7% who disagreed (4% strongly disagreed; 5.8% disagreed; 7.9% somewhat disagreed), while 14.2% were on the fence.
Firing another shot to the foot, the report implies that quality has to be sacrificed when shifting from QAM to IP delivery, despite the majority of consumers clearly not having an issue with this. Of course, most people are aware of the tradeoff, but the job of CenturyLink and the SVA alike is to convince service providers that the tides are turning, and that streaming video quality is closing the gap with broadcast quality content.
Such technical advancements in mechanisms for IP-delivered video were actually hidden away later in the report, perhaps too late for many service providers reading the findings.
“For example, codec advancements can have profound impacts on storage and CDN costs by radically reducing the number of bits needed. What’s more, advancements in encoding (like content-aware), can shave off even more by reducing the number of bits needed to deliver an HD viewing experience. Finally, new video packages like CMAF can provide operational efficiencies by reducing the number of video variants required to meet device diversity to one (which, again, impacts storage but also reduces the amount of additional transcoding that needs to happen). There are a myriad of technologies such as new delivery protocols like SRT and WebRTC that deliver comparable quality video for less bandwidth or cost,” it states.
Ad tolerance was also surveyed. The average score for preference (with 0 being free with ads and 100 being higher cost with no ads) was 52 – a result which is largely redundant except for highlighting a growing trend that consumers are willing to pay for streaming services that include some ads.
Of course, most respondents are inclined to answer somewhere in the middle. But most will still rather pay more for a service without ads.