YouTube, Netflix, and Why Carriers Need to Support Adaptive Streaming NOW!

Ram Rajagopalan, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Despite all the cool gaming apps out there and a growing e-book market, in my opinion nothing compares to good old fashioned TV watching. As the viewing experience improves across mobile devices, I predict that that more people will be assuming the lean-back position with their handhelds. I know, not a very bold prediction, but pertinent in light of a recent trip I took that underscored the importance of HTTP adaptive streaming support on mobile networks.

While visiting San Diego over Thanksgiving, I found myself with some time to kill. For me, that means TV time. Not the nonsense they broadcast on the hotel room television, I’m talking about nonsense I get to pick myself on my mobile device: silly ads from around the world, courtesy of my YouTube app. Since the hotel charges an arm and leg for WiFi connectivity in the room, I used my SpeedTest iPhone App to check the cell network speed and it suggested that I was clocking in about 1.36 mbps on the 3G network -- strong enough to watch all the swimming kitten videos I needed. Or so I thought.

The YouTube video quality was so pixilated on every single video I pulled up. At first I thought that my connection was bad, and I did the usual dance across my hotel room to get a better signal. But the connection was solid (which explains why I wasn't experiencing any of the buffering or stalling associated with low-speed networks). This was purely a problem of video picture quality. It was so poor that I quit the YouTube app.

Thankfully, I also have the Netflix app, and when I queued up an episode of 24, the video quality was remarkably better than YouTube. And this got me thinking…

Netflix provides a better viewing experience because they use HTTP adaptive streaming as opposed to YouTube, which uses HTTP progressive download (a.k.a file download). Adaptive streaming of video can appear dramatically better on 3G networks because it automatically decides the appropriate video quality that fits my bandwidth.

My comparison is not to point the finger at YouTube for delivering a poor experience, which may or may not have also been impacted by the carrier. Plus it would not make business sense for YouTube to use adaptive streaming for a variety of reasons, including the sheer amount of content they provide, shorter duration of videos and of course, their pricing model allows users to watch clips for free.

The point is this: in their efforts to fight network congestion, operators have deployed video optimization solutions that help them maximize available bandwidth. Just about all of these solutions can handle HTTP progressive download but not adaptive streaming. I expect this to change and to change quickly. Netflix streaming is one of the hottest emerging mobile services. Imagine watching 2 hours of Netflix video at 1 Mbps (7200 seconds x 1 Mbps = 900 MB). That’s roughly double the amount of traffic of two hours of YouTube browsing (my record is three hours, thank you very much).

As Netflix and Netflix-like services continue to grow their subscriber numbers, the simple fact that their technologies deliver a clearer TV experience is going to start pulling in even the casual viewer. That's a lot of potential traffic heading over the 3G airwaves. Operators will need to expand their optimization tactics to include adaptive streams. I hope they are preparing their networks now. In the meantime, I've got a few more episodes of 24 to watch on my mobile.