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4K 1080p 720p 480p 720p | 38% 480p | 6% 4K | 8% 1080p | 48% Widevine Classic | 63% Flash Access | 8% Widevine Modular | 11% PlayReady | 18% HE-AAC | 41% MP3 | 5% AAC | 23% EAC3 | 2% AC3 | 29% Global Media Format Report 2016 2015 was another year of explosive growth in the world of cloud media processing. This year’s data set reflects the usage of over 3000 leading broadcasters and content publishers. Our aim is to provide the critical data, trends, and insights that will help shape your media processing strategy. Static Image Formats JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG Screen Resolutions 4K, 1080p, 720p, 480p Adaptive Bitrate Standards HLS, MSS, DASH Digital Rights Management Google Widevine, Adobe Flash Access, Microsoft PlayReady Closed Caption Formats SRT, DXFP, WEBVTT, SCC Video Codecs & Containers H.264, WEBM, FLV, HEVC, ProRes, DNXFHD 2015 by the Numbers Encoding.com’s total encoding volume grew 52% from 2014, providing an even broader snapshot of the state of online video. Global Processing Centers We’ve expanded our global footprint with the addition of cloud resources in Frankfurt Germany, giving us 9 points of presence, in addition to our private cloud in Oakland, CA. All of these resources now fully support Reserved Cloud Instances, Hybrid Cloud, and our Public Beta Live Transcoding. Source Content Ingested One of the biggest trends driving growth is the adoption of cloud resources by the world’s largest media and entertainment companies. A few critical elements have made these companies more comfortable in the cloud. First, transit speeds in and out of the cloud are faster than ever because of UDP technologies, making the processing of massive files a reality. Second, the stringent security requirements placed on cloud providers by industry and government agencies often exceed the requirements for in-house data centers. Third, cloud storage has been an entry point for large companies adopting the cloud. Once content is stored in the cloud, processing the content is much more attractive option. Peak Processing Cores Our proprietary Encoding Intelligence™ is at the heart of the software providing automated and dynamic scale of compute resources based on real-time workflow volume. Our infrastructure continues to easily meet customer demands, even at peak capacity. We maxed out on 11/12/2015 at 4:37 PM PST running 15,900 simultaneous processing cores or 994 16-core instances, representing a 16 percent increase over 2014’s peak. Average Formats per Source Average number of target output continues to steadily grow year over year. During our first full year of operation Q1 300 350 400 Q2 Q3 TB INGESTED Q4 340 395 401 315 Cloud Storage S3, Akamai, Cloud Files, Azure, Aspera, OpenStack, Google Cloud Audio Formats MP3, AAC, HE-AAC, AC3, EAC3 1.45 PETABYTES 10 15 , 9 00 in 2008 the average output formats per source video was 2. Cloud Storage Amazon Maintains Dominance It’s no surprise that Amazon’s grip on the world of Cloud Storage was unwavering in 2015. Representing 63% of the source and destination of the content we processed this year. Akamai remained a favorite of larger media and entertainment companies. Their NetStorage solutions accounted for 19% of the input and output storage we saw. OpenStack’s object based storage known as SWIFT made a strong debut at about 6%. Google Cloud storage saw meager growth from 0% to 1% this year. Perhaps with Amazon’s acquisition of Elemental, Google will start to take this space more seriously. Amazon S3’s Dominance Amazons dominance continues as almost 2/3 of all Encoding.com source locations processed from commercial cloud storage providers comes from an Amazon S3 location. OpenStack OpenStack's object based storage protocol, SWIFT made a strong appearance in 2015's job statistics. The SWIFT source locations are most commonly seen with OpenStack private deployments although the Oracle Cloud adopted the SWIFT storage system within it's commercial offering. Big Media Loves Akamai Akamai's dominance of the media and entertainment sector is no secret and their penetration of this market was demonstrated by a large percentage of our M&E customers using Akamai NetStorage as a destination for cloud media processing. Google Cloud Struggles Despite 100% growth from 2014 to 2015 (0 to 1%) the Google Cloud does not represent a significant source or destination location for media companies doing cloud media processing. We wonder if Google Cloud read the press release that Amazon invested heavily in media processing and acquired a company for 300M in 2014. Maybe they will take the space more seriously in 2016? 1% Google Cloud 2% Cloud Files 6% OpenStack 9% Azure 19% Akamai NetStorage 63% S3 UDP (Aspera) | 38% SFTP | 29% HTTP | 10% FTP | 23% Transit How content is delivered to the cloud New this year, we evaluated how people are getting content to and from the cloud. Despite being less efficient and less secure, FTP/SFTP accounted for over half the transit in 2015 because of its legacy ubiquity. However, UDP, particularly Aspera, makes up a significant portion of the transit and continues to grow because it’s speed and security make it perfect for delivering high volume broadcast content. Video Codecs & Containers While we support virtually unlimited codec and container combinations processed by over 20 commercial and open source encoding engines, very few of those formats make up a significant percentage of usage. We saw the leading formats (not including the ‘other’ category) drop from 7 to 5 as WMV and 3GP both fell below a percentage point. FTP Remains Despite the speed and security flaws inherent in the TCP/IP protocol, FTP remains a popular transit protocol for getting files to the cloud primarily due to its ubiquity on on premise media servers. H.264 Holds Steady H.264 grew slightly this year, reflecting dominance as the go to format for every device imaginable, fueled by the continued adoption of adaptive packaging formats. Apple continues its use of this technology, and Google solidified their execution as we saw Android 5.0 Lollipop go mainstream, and the debut of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. WebM Secures Foothold Fueled by the demand for securing HTML5 video content in the browser, WebM grew by roughly a third this year and is emerging as a leading method for delivering HTML5 video to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. HEVC Almost Mainstream As more and more devices are released that support 4k content, video publishers are starting to publish these dimensions using HEVC to ensure delivery with decreased bandwidth. However, the codec will continue to see limited growth until a major tech player gets behind the technology. Apple already uses HEVC for FaceTime on newer iOS devices, so we expect to see more use of the technology in the near future. Broadcasters Expand in the Cloud Betting on the cloud in 2014 seems to have paid off for the world’s largest media and entertainment companies as we saw over 50% growth of broadcast and edit codecs in 2015. Enterprise platforms ensure rapid delivery and storage of massive broadcast files. Storage has become an entry point for enterprise media & entertainment companies getting into the cloud. Once content is stored online, cloud processing solutions become far more attractive. Flash Video On Life Support While Flash is still being used for specific uses and edge cases such as banner ads and legacy browsers, it’s days are numbered. Flash outputs decreased from 21% to 6% in 2015. We expect to see the Flash video codec disappear completely from our report with 24 months. UDP Takes Off Customers utilizing UDP technologies like Aspera showed huge growth in 2015 over 2014. The inherent speed and security design make UDP a perfect protocol for delivering high value mezzanine assets from on premise locations to cloud processing centers and back. H.264 | 72% FLV | 6% Other | 2% HEVC | 6% OGG | 2% WebM | 12% Adaptive Bitrate Standards As companies try to do more with less, adaptive packaging formats continue to lead the way when it comes to delivering optimized content to the broadest range of devices. While the device landscape remains increasingly scattered, leading video publishers are targeting HLS on all major devices (iOS, Android), Browsers, and OTT players (Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast). HLS the Industry Standard 2015 saw Apple strengthen their lead position utilizing HLS as THE delivery format for mobile. In addition, Android 5.0 Lollipop and 6.0 Marshmallow finally delivered mature support for HLS. Big moves by major broadcasters offering OTT subscriptions has ushered in the a la carte content era. In turn, this has increased demand to deliver HLS streams to the TV, whether connected TV or OTT device. These factors combined to make HLS the de facto standard for video delivery in an increasingly chaotic device and content landscape. MPEG-Dash Strengthens in the Browser Both HLS and MPEG-DASH are supported in nearly every major browser with a JavaScript extension. However, MPEG-DASH is a part of the HTML5 architecture, because of that we are starting to see delivery of MPEG-DASH to the browser as well as limited reach with mobile browsers. Smooth Streaming Holding in Second Again this year Microsoft Smooth Streaming is the second most popular adaptive format along with PlayReady DRM. This is in support of the XBOX One which has evolved beyond a game console to become a leading means of delivering content, including OTT subscriptions to the Television. 10% DASH 19% Smooth Streaming 71% HLS Devices iOS Android Desktop HLS HLS HLS FairPlay Access Access Streaming Format DRM Apple TV Native App Airplay “Cast” HLS HLS FairPlay FairPlay TVOS Roku Android/FireTV HLS HLS HLS FairPlay Access Access Chromecast HLS Widevine Screen Resolutions Despite the bigger is better mantra in the realm of screen sizes, we are just now seeing 1080p make up about half the resolutions. 4k saw nearly 50% growth, but it remains far from the pole position. 720p remains a leading format for most mobile devices. Mobile Devices While most current smartphones support 1080p, 720p remains the leading format, because it's easier to ensure optimized playback over varied connection speeds. Digital Rights Management As the biggest studios and broadcasters start to deliver their content to every device, secure encryption has become a vital component of the online video ecosystem. Audio Formats New this year, we’ve introduced the audio formats category. Audio compression plays a critical role in the delivery of optimized video. Tech innovators like Dolby & Apple continue to lead the charge by creating high quality low bitrate audio codecs that ensure that the highest quality content is delivered to every device. Improve quality and efficiency while saving money by optimizing your media workflow in the cloud. Contact us [email protected] +1 800 513 1740 546 Bryant Street San Francisco, CA 94107 Google WideVine We launched support for Widevine Modular in 2015. This is an update to Google’s DRM standards offering improved support for the encryption of MPEG-DASH streams. AAC and HE-AAC Offer Broad Device Compatibility The AAC and Dolby HE-AAC codecs remain popular audio codecs with broad compatibility across desktop and mobile devices. The HE-AAC codec is especially popular within the HLS adaptive bitrate standard as it performs exceptionally well at the low 64k audio only bitrate required in Apple's HLS spec. Apple FairPlay We will be offering support for Apple’s FairPlay encryption in Q2 2016 which will have a significant impact on the DRM schemes being used. Closed Caption Formats While the FCC did make some updates to their requirements in 2015, none of these impacted output formats. We continued to see an even distribution amongst leading formats with a slight increase in WebVTT and a slight decrease in DXFP and SCC. However we did see 15% more outputs containing caption tracks in 2015. 16% DXFP 18% WebVTT 23% SCC 43% SRT Static Image Formats While video may have killed the radio star, it has not killed the demand for static image processing. Our image2image feature remains popular for image processing at scale and creating poster images for VTT to generate thumbnail previews is on the rise. Overall, the data remained virtually the same. Dolby Surround Sound Grows The Dolby Digital (AC3) and Dolby Digital Plus (EAC3) grew significantly over 2014 aggregate data. The 5.1 and 7.1 codecs are gaining mobile device compatibility in the market, and the codecs are often used within the premium audio channel of the HLS spec which allows 192kbps 5.1 streams to be paired with 1080p high bitrate video streams. This audio video combination offers a premium experience for connected televisions like the Apple TV and Roku that are connected to home theatre receivers. 6% TIFF 5% GIF 11% PNG 78% JPEG
