Audience-Aware Streaming

(Based on the Article: Improving On-scale Video Streaming with Audience-Aware Streaming)

              Streaming quality can vary depending on internet connection, devices, and location. Content providers and technologists have long sought to streamline the process to produce the best-quality streams for audiences everywhere. Researchers believe the solution could be audience-aware streaming, a strategy focusing on content popularity, amongst several other factors.

              Through a collaboration between Ateme and Akamai, audience-aware streaming has already undergone several real-world trials with promising results. Player viewing sessions were collected by Akamai using the Common Media Client Data (CMCD) standard and fed in a real-time data feed to an Ateme stream optimizer. The optimizer gathers viewership count, geodiversity, device diversity, and capability data. It then dynamically adjusts the cloud compute resources allocated to the stream, providing the best quality to the popular streams while minimizing delivery costs and power consumption.

              In other words, most resources are allocated toward popular content to allow for the best quality streams. Content that isn’t as popular requires less resources to produce a quality stream, so no content will ever be lacking. This system is a simple way to increase streaming quality for audiences anywhere in the world. While this strategy can’t be used for all aspects of streaming architecture, it will help with encoding optimization.

              While audience-aware architecture has few downsides, most streaming platforms have yet to adopt it simply because it is so new. Once this technology becomes more prevalent, it will surely take the industry by storm. It is cost-efficient and better for both the provider and the consumer. Audience-aware streaming will likely become the future, but it needs more advocates and user tests for that to happen.