Cloud Encoding: By the Numbers

THE BROADCAST BRIDGE, March 20, 2017, Author Brad Dick

Cloud video encoding and workflows is growing by almost every measure. To quantify such changes, Encoding.com, completed and just released a survey, which provides a snapshot of the media's use of cloud processing.

The data set was based on responses from more than 3000 broadcasters and content publishers, all Encoding.com customers. While this represents only one cloud provider, the results provide insights that may help media managers develop their own media processing strategy.

2016 by the numbers

Measured against 2015, encoding volume grew by 63%. With 14 processing centers located across the world, the survey data represents virtually all markets. The following report is based on those markets' responses.

Key cloud metrics

HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) is an adaptive streaming communications protocol created by Apple and works with iOS and Apple TV devices and Macs running OSX in Snow Leopard or later. HLS can distribute both live and on-demand files. Because it is the sole technology available for adaptively streaming to Apple devices, HLS is an increasingly important market segment for streaming publishers.

For the first time since 2008, the average number output formats decreased from 12 to 10. At the same time, content publishers are mapping the HLS output to a broader set of consumer devices.

One of the biggest trends driving cloud 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 using the cloud.

Transit speeds in and out of the cloud are faster than ever because of UDP technologies, making the processing of massive files a reality.

The stringent security requirements placed on cloud providers by industry and government agencies often exceed the requirements typical for in-house data centers.

Cloud storage has been an entry point for large companies adopting the cloud. Once a media's content is stored in the cloud, processing the content while in the cloud becomes a much more attractive option.

Cloud storage

Amazon remains the large storage gorilla, representing 68% of the total source location volume ingested in 2016 up from 63% in 2015. Large media and entertainment companies increasingly move mezzanine storage to Amazon's S3, which further fuels the adoption of cloud media processing in the corresponding AWS availability zone.

Figure 1. Key cloud providers and their market shares based on this survey.

OpenStack's object based storage, known as SWIFT, appears to have stumbled last year, dropping from 6% to 3% of cloud usage.

Big media loves Akamai. The company's dominance of the media and entertainment sector is no secret and their penetration of this market was confirmed by a large percentage of Encoding.com's M&E customers using Akamai NetStorage as a destination for cloud media processing.

A surprise to many will be that Google Cloud storage continues to struggle and has yet to break the 1% mark in the media processing market. This survey's statistics show that Google Cloud storage does not represent a significant source or destination location for media companies who have migrated to cloud media processing. From a technical capability perspective, the Google cloud compute and storage offerings are quite competitive, but they continue to struggle to penetrate the media processing segment.

How content is delivered to the cloud

Let's look at how companies get their content to and from the cloud. Despite being less efficient, FTP/SFTP accounts for more than half the media transit in 2016 because of its legacy ubiquity. However UDP, particularly Aspera's FASP (Fast, Adaptive, Secure, Protocol), represents a significant and growing portion of the transit data. Because of its speed and security, media managers see it as a good solution to delivering high volume broadcast content.

SFTP/FTP Remains Steady

Despite that the TCP/IP protocol was never designed for moving large files around the internet, FTP remains a popular transit protocol for getting files to the cloud, primarily due to its ease and prevalence on local media servers.

UDP Continues Growth

Customers utilizing UDP technologies, like Aspera, saw steady growth over the last two years. The inherent speed and security of UDP make it a perfect protocol for the ingest and egress of high-value mezzanine assets to and from cloud processing centers.

Video Codecs & Containers

While there are more than 30 commercial open source encoding engines, let's focus on the top six used at Encoding.com and each technology's market share.

H.264 Holds Steady

H.264 grew slightly this year reflecting its ubiquitous device and browser support. H.264 is the underlying codec within the most dominate adaptive bitrate standard HLS.

VP9 Makes a Strong Debut

Support for the VP9 codec in 2016 was followed by strong adoption and market interest as an alternative to H.264. This is especially true for high volume customers who benefit from the nearly 50% savings in data rate for the same quality when compared with H.264.

VP9/DASH implementations sparked the most interest due to strong VP9 browser compatibility ( 90%). However some markets remain hesitate to embrace the format because the significantly longer encoding times seen with Google's libvpx encoding engine.

Netflix ran a series of encoder tests in late 2016. From a Netflix blog post, x265 and libvpx demonstrate superior compression performance compared to x264, with bitrate savings reaching up to 50%. This is especially the case at the higher resolutions. While x265 outperforms libvpx for most all resolutions and quality metrics, the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p.

Figure 2. Popular video codecs an

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