The increased uptake of subscription services has led to video taking a commensurately enlarged proportion of CDN traffic and this is going to see a boom in low latency protocols according to a study from Rethink Research.
The analyst noted that the great attraction of secure reliable transport (SRT) and associated protocol reliable internet stream transport (RIST) is because of their ability to shave latencies much closer to the ultimate limits imposed by the laws of physics.
Rethink regards live streaming as emerging from the shadow of Netflix-driven SVOD which even though it believes has plenty of room for growth, even in the relatively saturated markets of Europe and North America, live streaming traffic will rise much more steeply and overtake non-live video traffic between 202 and 2024. So while live video accounted for 11 Exabytes (EB) compared with total CDN video traffic of 58 EB in 2018, by 2024 it will be 238 EB against 453 EB.
Moreover, Rethink notes that the SRT protocol is not confined to live video and will be used extensively for distribution of on-demand video as well. It added that in the absence of live video and associated demand for low latency streaming, SRT would not have been developed and the world would have continued with predecessor real time messaging protocol (RTMP) which it said served the era of Adobe Flash well enough but suffers from too much latency with TCP retransmissions of dropped or corrupted IP packets and is con- founded by long distances, rendering it unfit for contemporary CDNs.
As a result leading CDN vendors are dropping RTMP most notably Akamai which is ceasing support for the protocol in January 2020. This says Rethink clears the ground for rapid advance of SRT, which it expects to account for an even greater proportion of IP and CDN traffic growth than live video. Some of that SRT traffic it says will go through CDNs and some over unmanaged Internet links as part of online video platforms (OVP).
The bottom line calculates the analyst is that revenues associated with SRT traffic with the total for all video CDN traffic will soar from just over 2% in 2018 to 43.5% in 2024. That would mean SRT traffic revenue generated will have grown from 2018’s $236 million, compared with $4.46 billion for CDNs in total, to $9.66 billion in 2024 and $22.2 billion for CDNs respectively.
The research also revealed strong regional differences in rates of growth in CDN video traffic and particularly live streaming, with Asia Pacific set for an especially rapid increase in traffic, which will account for 51% of the world’s total in 2024 compared with 29% in 2018. There were also considerable regional differences in the proportion of total CDN video traffic accounted for by private CDNs owned by larger streaming providers such as Amazon and Netflix. These said Rethink Research in its report will account for a rising proportion of total CDN traffic in all regions but with the trend strongest in North America where they will likely account for three-quarters of traffic by 2024.
Rethink regards live streaming as emerging from the shadow of Netflix-driven SVOD which even though it believes has plenty of room for growth, even in the relatively saturated markets of Europe and North America, live streaming traffic will rise much more steeply and overtake non-live video traffic between 202 and 2024. So while live video accounted for 11 Exabytes (EB) compared with total CDN video traffic of 58 EB in 2018, by 2024 it will be 238 EB against 453 EB.
Moreover, Rethink notes that the SRT protocol is not confined to live video and will be used extensively for distribution of on-demand video as well. It added that in the absence of live video and associated demand for low latency streaming, SRT would not have been developed and the world would have continued with predecessor real time messaging protocol (RTMP) which it said served the era of Adobe Flash well enough but suffers from too much latency with TCP retransmissions of dropped or corrupted IP packets and is con- founded by long distances, rendering it unfit for contemporary CDNs.
As a result leading CDN vendors are dropping RTMP most notably Akamai which is ceasing support for the protocol in January 2020. This says Rethink clears the ground for rapid advance of SRT, which it expects to account for an even greater proportion of IP and CDN traffic growth than live video. Some of that SRT traffic it says will go through CDNs and some over unmanaged Internet links as part of online video platforms (OVP).
The bottom line calculates the analyst is that revenues associated with SRT traffic with the total for all video CDN traffic will soar from just over 2% in 2018 to 43.5% in 2024. That would mean SRT traffic revenue generated will have grown from 2018’s $236 million, compared with $4.46 billion for CDNs in total, to $9.66 billion in 2024 and $22.2 billion for CDNs respectively.
The research also revealed strong regional differences in rates of growth in CDN video traffic and particularly live streaming, with Asia Pacific set for an especially rapid increase in traffic, which will account for 51% of the world’s total in 2024 compared with 29% in 2018. There were also considerable regional differences in the proportion of total CDN video traffic accounted for by private CDNs owned by larger streaming providers such as Amazon and Netflix. These said Rethink Research in its report will account for a rising proportion of total CDN traffic in all regions but with the trend strongest in North America where they will likely account for three-quarters of traffic by 2024.
