2019 Global Internet Phenomena Report: more than 60 percent is Video Streaming

Source: Sandvine, Sep 10, 2019.

The 2019 Global Internet Phenomena Report has been published on September 10, 2019 and is available here.  I've previously posted about this in 2015, 2018, and Feb 2019 (related to mobile). Thus, it's also interesting to compare this report with what has been posted previously, specifically with respect to the 2018 report...

The 2019 global report reveals that video streaming now covers more than 60% of the internet traffic (see figure on the right) but only a small increase compared to last year (+2.9). We may question whether the 80% (or more) will be reached by 2022 as predicted by some reports (note: I assume this one here is meant).  The question is whether 4K or 8K will help to make the predictions become reality; we will see pretty soon.

Interestingly, Netflix' application traffic share decreased by 2.3 percentage points and is now about 12.6% while other HTTP media streaming traffic reached 12.8%. "Operator IPTV" increased to 7.2% with +2.8 compared to last year. For example, in Americas "Operator IPTV" has even a higher downstream application traffic share (15%) than Netflix (12.87%).

From a European perspective, we see QUIC among the top 10 of "EMEA: Downstream Application Traffic Share" with 3.1% but, unfortunately, the report does not provide further details about what that actually means.

The "Spotlight: Streaming Video Traffic Share" is shown in the figure below and reveals that both Netflix and YouTube have a higher traffic share in EMEA than Americas and "Operator IPTV" is only mentioned in Americas and not at all in EMEA or APAC.

Source: Sandvine, Sep 10, 2019.

As mentioned in the beginning, the full report is available here -- covering also other aspects -- but it confirms that global video traffic share increases but probably with smaller steps than anticipated some years ago.

Video Developer Report 2019

... and Bitmovin did it again; published the 2019 Video Developer Report last week. I've briefly reported about it last year here. Interestingly, this year 542 people from 108 countries participated (vs. 456 from over 67 countries last year).

The biggest challenges seem to be latency (54%) and playback on all devices (41%). Other challenges (>20%) are related to DRM, CDN, user engagement with video, and ads in general.

Last year I've also shared the codec usage and it's probably interesting to compare these numbers with this year's results as shown below. Interestingly, the numbers (for 'planning to implement') are a bit lower compared to last year which could be explained by a more conservative approach from developers or simply by the fact that more people responded to the survey with a greater diversity in terms of different countries.

Current Video Codec Usage and Plans to Implement in next 12 Months.

The actual video codec usage compares to last year's report as follows: AVC (-1), HEVC (+1), VP9 (+/- 0), AV1 (+1).

Another interesting aspect is the usage of streaming formats and plans to implement them within the next 12 months as shown below. Comparing with last year's report (available here), we can observe the following major changes: HLS (-3), MPEG-DASH (-3), RTMP (-2), Smooth Streaming (+2), Progressive Streaming (-1), MPEG-CMAF (+2), HDS (-4).

Current Streaming Formats and Plans to Implement in next 12 Months.

In general, one can observe that the adoption of new formats are happening at a slower pace than expected and I am wondering what this means for the new video coding formats coming up like VVC et al. (note: these are results from a public survey with different participants compared to last years which need to be taken into account when comparing results over years).

For more details, the full report can be downloaded for free from here.

ACMMM'19: Docker-Based Evaluation Framework for Video Streaming QoE in Broadband Networks

Docker-Based Evaluation Framework for Video Streaming QoE in Broadband Networks

(Demo Paper)

https://www.acmmm.org/2019/

[PDF]

Cise Midoglu (Simula), Anatoliy Zabrovskiy (AAU), Özgü Alay (Simula), Daniel Hölbling-Inzko (Bitmovin), Carsten Griwodz (Univ. of Oslo), Christian Timmerer (AAU/Bitmovin)

Abstract: Video streaming is one of the top traffic contributors in the Internet and a frequent research subject. It is expected that streaming traffic will grow 4-fold for video globally and 9-fold for mobile video between 2017 and 2022. In this paper, we present an automatized measurement framework for evaluating video streaming QoE in operational broadband networks, using headless streaming with a Docker-based client, and a server-side implementation allowing for the use of multiple video players and adaptation algorithms. Our framework allows for integration with the MONROE testbed and Bitmovin Analytics, which bring on the possibility to conduct large-scale measurements in different networks, including mobility scenarios, and monitor different parameters in the application, transport, network, and physical layers in real-time.

Keywords: adaptive streaming, network measurements, OTT video analytics, QoE

Docker-Based Evaluation Framework for Video Streaming QoE in Broadband Networks from Christian Timmerer