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MillimeterStreaming to the Apple iPhone, Part 1
Nov 17, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Figure 1. The playoffs were a real hit on the Apple iPhone, with 10 percent of viewers watching on that platform.
A funny thing happened on the way to the World Series this year. Specifically, in the first round of the playoffs, Major League Baseball Advanced Media served an average of 350,000 streams per game, with 36,000 streamed to the Apple iPhone. At $10 a shot, that's a noticeable number. Not surprisingly, the NBA is also offering live games to the iPhone for the 2009-2010 season.
In terms of the iPhone market as whole, in April 2009, Nielsen estimated that there were 6.4 million active iPhone users in the United States, up from 2.1 million a year prior. According to the survey, 37 percent of iPhone users watch video on their phone, which is six times more than the typical cellular subscriber.
Whether you're a B2B or B2C operation, if distributing streaming media is mission-critical to your organization, streaming to the iPhone needs to be on your radar screen. In this edition of Final Cut Pro Insider, I'll provide a technology overview of streaming to the iPhone and your implementation options. In the next issue, I'll pull together some case studies for iPhone usage large and small to help illustrate how streaming to the iPhone could be useful to you.
Figure 2. Architecture overview from the Akamai white paper "Akamai HD for iPhone Encoding Best Practices."
Why the fuss?
Let's take a step back. Video on the iPhone isn't new, but at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2009, Apple introduced a new technology called HTTP Live Streaming. It's important for many reasons at multiple levels.
First, it lets potential video producers and distributors access the iPhone without creating a special branded application; instead, videos play directly in the Safari browser. Transmissions can occur via wireless or Wi-Fi, with seamless switching between the two in midstream.
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Delivery via HTTP makes it cheaper to distribute the video streams, since no special server is required to stream the data to the client—any old web server will do. Data transmitted via HTTP can also be stored in cache servers located in the premises of Internet service providers, cellular providers, and other organizations, which should improve video quality for viewers served from these caches. HTTP content is also firewall-friendly, an issue for those watching behind tightly controlled firewalls.
In addition, HTTP and the segmenting techniques deployed by Apple make it easier to implement adaptive-bit-rate streaming, which distributes multiple files to the iPhone to optimize quality at any connection speed. As an example, if you were connecting indoors via Wi-Fi, you might receive the highest-quality stream. Walk outside, and the connection would shift to cellular, and the iPhone will likely transition to a lower-quality, lower-bandwidth stream, but playback should continue without interruption.
On another level, Apple's selection of HTTP provided a compelling technology endorsement for Microsoft's HTTP-based Smooth Streaming (talk about strange bedfellows). This pretty much forced Adobe to implement HTTP-based streaming, announced in October 2009, in addition to its current RTMP-based technology.
To summarize, HTTP Live Streaming is cheaper to implement and distribute, offers higher quality than previous techniques, and helped consolidate the streaming video market around a single transmission standard. To be fair, the significance of this announcement was more about the announcer and the iPhone platform than the technology itself.
Adaptive-bit-rate streaming has been around since the last century, and Apple's implementation is very similar to Smooth Streaming (which is similar to Move Networks' Move Adaptive Stream). In addition, on the desktop, you can currently play back Apple's HTTP Live Streaming video only via QuickTime X, which is available only with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and not at all on Windows.
So HTTP Live Streaming isn't an Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight killer. On the other hand, Apple did release the specification as a proposed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard that should work with any player designed to play the stream (see a draft here). And as mentioned before, the iPhone/iPod touch platform, in itself, is big enough to put streaming to these devices on the short-term technology agenda for all but the most casual streamers.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
