Cut costs of long-tail channels with Just-In-Time streaming technology

When it comes to media consumption, today’s attention economy is usually defined by the 80/20 rule: 80% of the time we collectively pay attention to just 20% of the available content. In the case of broadcast TV, the unbalance is even more pronounced. Synamedia’s field studies have found that in a typical broadcast lineup in North American markets, 90% of viewing is dedicated to fewer than 10% of channels.
For broadcast TV, this disparity in demand is offered as a value-add. This is because broadcast TV channel lineups are designed to be all-inclusive, featuring mainstream popular content, complemented by niche content for a specific viewership segment, and a set of must-carry education and government channels (e.g. known in the US as PEG channels). These lesser-watched channels are often referred to as long-tail. Here lies the 90% of the channels watched by only 10% of the viewer-base.

The game change in streaming

Streaming long-tail channels tends to be an expensive and wasteful proposition. The system resources required to process and stream long-tail channels are identical to the resources required by the most popular channel. This is because the long-tail content is processed and delivered in multiple combinations of resolutions, bitrates, packaging, and encryption schemes “just-in-case” somebody will watch it.

On a typical channel lineup with around 150 channels, 70 of which are long-tail channels this static approach generates anywhere from 500,000 to one million video segments* daily that will never be viewed. This waste rate of video processing resources is alarming. But thanks to Synamedia’s Quortex Play, a just-in-time-everything (JIT-E) multi-tenant SaaS solution, we can now process only the segments requested by viewers in real-time.

(*) Video Segments: a few seconds video slices around 5 seconds that are encoded, processed, and packaged in multiple formats)

Dynamically stream, waste not

With Quortex Play, the encoding and processing of a given segment is triggered on-the-fly only when it is requested by a viewer. This means that segments will only be processed when a viewer watches them, dropping the typical total segments created down to fewer than 50,000 segments daily, for example. This 95% reduction in segment generation means that long-tail content is transformed from a wasteful proposition to a value-add to the operator.

Quortex Play’s infrastructure scales “just-in-time” the instant there is demand, ensuring that only the functions required for each individual request are provisioned. Its automated approach increases efficiency, simplifies operations, and reduces energy consumption. Offered as a pay-as-you-use business model, Quortex Play offers savings in infrastructure, operations, and energy.

To learn more about Quortex Play just-in-time-everything technology, download our case study or get in touch with us at Contact | Synamedia. You may also visit our website at www.quortex.io for details on JIT video workflows implementation, book a demo, or create your account and try Quortex for FREE