Next-Generation Video Coding and Streaming

CHAPTER 1DIGITAL VIDEO DELIVERY

Television has in many ways promoted understanding and cooperation among people all over the world. About 600 million people saw the first person walk on the moon and a billion people watched the 20th Summer Olympic Games. By 2012, there were over 3.6 billion viewers for the 30th Summer Olympic Games. TV watching used to be confined primarily to the living room. This has changed. The ubiquity of HD-capable smartphones and tablets equipped with powerful video decoders enables TV view time on mobile devices to surpass view time on the TV. The Internet has become a key media distribution platform that has opened up new ways for discovering, sharing, and consuming TV content anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Online Internet TV providers are trumping cable and satellite pay-TV providers with a dramatic increase in subscription and advertising revenue in recent years. Ala-carte-style Internet TV has now started to break the traditional pay-TV distribution model that is based on channel bundling. Although pay-TV providers are making TV content available online for their subscribers, they may now have to migrate to online streaming boxes and ditch the venerable set-top. Cable is now a broadband business. Among the top cable providers, broadband Internet service accounted for more subscribers than cable TV. Ultimately, pay-TV providers may have to rely on broadband to grow profits. Currently, over 10 million US households are broadband-only. In this ...