This great post from the guys at Streaming Media takes a look at a serious problem facing content owners – the cost of streaming 4K video.
Read the full post here Click here to view original web page at blog.streamingmedia.com
To put some real numbers behind it, for a content owner delivering video today at 3Mbps, one hour of video is going to consume about 1.4GB. If content owners are paying $0.02 (two cents) per GB, which is a low price, it’s currently costing them about $0.03 (three cents) to deliver one hour of video. If they then want to deliver that same content at 4K quality, it’s going to cost them between $0.11 (eleven cents) and $0.18 (eighteen cents), depending on the bitrate used, for one hour of video. Anyone see a problem with this? Content owners won’t be able to sell enough additional ad inventory to be able to justify the costs associated with moving to 4K and that’s just for the delivery part. That does not take into account all the extra costs they will have for encoding the content, storing it and additional costs associated with changes that will be required in their video workflow.
For all the talk of 4K streaming, there will be very little content available in that kind of quality for years to come. That’s the reality when it comes to 4K streaming. I know some will want to argue this point with me and will comment about how compression improves each year and how we’re producing better quality video at lower bitrates. But those are all technical arguments, not business ones. And CDN pricing is not declining enough each year to offset the costs of all the additional bits that are required due to 4K. I’ve spoken to multiple content owners about 4K and they all say that they can’t make the business rationale of offering content in 4K quality, unless it’s just a few pieces of their content to use as a test so they can get familiar with the technology.
Can Content Owners Can’t Afford To Stream 4K?
No comments:
Post a Comment