Deep Sound Original · The author | Ear East Chen
In the digital age, the role of audio and video has changed. It is not only the most important information carrier, but also an important link between people and people, people and society, reflecting value in all aspects of life and work.
We pick up the mobile phone, turn on the camera, you can shoot, edit video, share ideas; TV sets and mobile devices have a variety of audio and video content, live event, Vlog, film and television dramas have everything, enriching entertainment life; remote work, online activities, off-site teaching and other scenes in the video greatly improves the efficiency of information transmission and communication. Because of this, both audio and video consumers and the supply side are putting forward more extreme requirements for the experience.
Technology products and scenarios always work out for each other. Video is becoming a new productivity, and the video cloud is an important productivity tool to increase that productivity.
With the blessing of 5G and the change of user habits by the epidemic, the video cloud product capabilities and market scale are growing rapidly, and the application scenarios extend from live broadcast, on-demand and other audio-visual entertainment products to the pan-mutual and education industries, and the video cloud solution has injected new momentum into traditional industries such as finance, medical care, and automobiles that are actively embracing the digital wave.
On February 25, IDC released the "Video Cloud Evolution Trend in the Ultra-Video Era" white paper at the "V-Tech Volcano Engine Technology Force Summit" hosted by Volcano Engine. According to the data, the size of China's video cloud market has grown from US$3.06 billion in 2018 to US$6.96 billion in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 50.9%.
Video has become the next growth point anchored by cloud vendors. What is the development of the video cloud market? What are the pain points of multi-dimensional growth in demand between user and enterprise? Market players "cloud" set, how to find a differentiated route, open the gap?
Enter the era of ultra-video
The growth of the video cloud market is based on the judgment that the Internet has entered the era of ultra-video.
The most significant phenomenon is the industry-wide video. In terms of entertainment and social networking, short video applications such as Douyin and Kuaishou have occupied the minds of users, according to the latest data of QuestMobile, as of December 2021, the entire network has 1.174 billion users, and short video is the industry that occupies the longest online time of people, accounting for 25.7%, and the annual growth rate is still higher than other industries.
Other innovative needs and scenarios in the form of video are emerging, such as live streaming applications, covering scenes such as shows, online education, live performances, and shopping.
Not only auxiliary tools, video is also gradually deepening into the business links, reducing costs and increasing efficiency for enterprises, such as telemedicine, security monitoring, industrial manufacturing and other vertical fields, benefiting from ultra-high-definition video technology, the application side can complete the operation faster, more accurately and more efficiently.
According to IDC, by 2025, unstructured data will account for more than 80% of the global data space, of which entertainment data and entertainment image data mainly based on video, graphics and frequency will account for more than 70%.
The reason is that advances in AI, 5G, cloud computing and other technologies have brought imagination, making it possible to have a smoother, more immersive, and more interactive video experience, and the special circumstances of the epidemic period have made people's demand for video grow rapidly.
This is also related to the attributes of audio and video itself, which as an information carrier, is a common ability of multiple scenes and industries at the bottom. This means that video cloud technologies and solutions have the potential to be integrated into cloud services that precisely cover vertical industries and scale horizontally.
What kind of video content and services do people want? What can video clouds do about this?
From the perspective of video content consumers, the pursuit of extremes is a progressive process. Looking back at the history of the video industry, from black and white to color, from silent to sound, from blur to high definition, from recording to live broadcasting, from audience one-way "watching" to two-way interaction, from "short video" like "Langde Hai Garden Scene" to Douyin short video to establish a new order..... People in every era are using technology as a horse, placing higher demands on experiences in multiple dimensions.
The video cloud is the "horse" of the hyper-video era.
Video cloud refers to cloud solutions tailored to meet the specific needs of video and audio production, storage, processing, distribution, and analysis, review, retrieval, recommendation, understanding, and more. The complete market includes public clouds, private clouds, hybrid cloud infrastructures, Video Delivery Networks (CDNs), and cloud solutions for video application scenarios that provide APIs/development cloud support services for enterprises.
To put it simply, video cloud is based on the concept of cloud computing technology, using video as a solution for "cloud" to deliver to "terminal", with the underlying support of cloud infrastructure and various solutions for different needs of customers.
Cloud Services Market Structure Source: IDC
Video demand has exploded, and the supply side is struggling to keep up.
From the demand side analysis, borrowing a point of view put forward in the IDC white paper, the current fragmentation trend of video cloud application scenarios is obvious. As video applications expand from the content industry and pan-interactive entertainment to all the Internet and a large number of traditional industries, different industries present diversified application scenarios, such as radio and television media is more used for video production and manufacturing scenarios, interactive industries are more used for distribution and communication and connection scenarios, retail focuses on distribution and communication, and medical care focuses on connection.
The existing customers in the video cloud industry focus on elements such as solution cost, stability, and service response speed, and with the fierce competition in the video content industry, higher requirements are put forward for video cloud products.
For customers in the new traditional industry, their IT development capabilities are relatively weaker than the Internet industry, the accumulation of video technology is not deep, the cost of self-construction is high, and they need more complete video cloud solutions. However, the need for diversification and fragmentation is also a great challenge for cloud service providers.
At present, the video cloud industry is expanding at a high speed, and IDC expects the size of China's video cloud market to reach $31.4 billion by 2025. Players in the market include Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, HUAWEI CLOUD, Kingsoft Cloud, Volcano Engine, and so on.
In the multi-cloud game market, the volcano engine that has grown up relying on byte's applications such as Douyin and Watermelon Video has become an emerging force that cannot be ignored.
Experience-oriented
Recently, Volcano Engine held the "V-Tech Volcano Engine Technology Force Summit", with the theme of "Riding the Clouds and Overlooking the World", revealing the whole picture of Volcano Engine's video cloud products.
Tan Zhu, general manager of Volcano Engine, delivered a speech at the conference
Judging from the product matrix updated by the volcano engine video cloud, it includes pan-Internet, games, finance, radio and television and other scenarios and solutions, core products such as video on demand, veImageX, real-time audio and video, and middle office support services such as transmission networks, intelligent production, and intelligent processing.
Product capabilities run through the full link of video life and have high industry coverage. For example, for the domestic sports vertical community to understand the ball emperor to provide live broadcasting, beauty, broadcasting and other SDKs, as well as a full set of cloud computing infrastructure and CDN services, so that the original graphic community quickly enriched the video and live broadcast capabilities. As one of the earliest media organizations to actively transform video, Caixin accelerated the production and distribution of its live broadcast and video news content with the help of the service of volcano engine, breaking through the limitations of graphic media.
The scenario of high concurrency and large traffic is a testing ground for the comprehensive capabilities of video cloud service providers. With more than 1.3 billion viewers, the Spring Festival Gala is undoubtedly one such scene. Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Tiger, Jingdong as the Spring Festival Gala interactive platform to the audience to send red packets, a number of video websites to provide a smooth live broadcast of the SPRING Festival Gala of tv stations, behind this, Volcano Engine, as one of the core cloud service providers, provides integrated CDN product services for red packet interaction and video website live broadcast, and provides stable quality, safe and reliable and global services in distribution.
Practice after practice has proved that volcano engine video cloud service is extremely versatile and can meet the diverse needs of customers in multiple scenarios.
Volcano Engine Video Cloud Product Architecture
In terms of product capabilities, the core of its grasp is "experience-oriented", which is subdivided into: playback experience, picture quality experience, interactive experience, and performance experience.
Douyin's short video playback experience is smooth, the next brush playback is almost seamless, and the volcano engine video cloud product opens the same technology of Douyin to external customers - "zero first frame" optimization.
The first frame time, which refers to the time when the user starts to play from the click to the time when the first frame of the video is displayed, is an important core indicator of video applications, and it is also one of the core factors affecting the user's viewing experience, after all, Caton loading is the thing that drives the Internet natives crazy. Zero first frame technology provides the ultimate first frame optimization method, when the conditions allow, the first frame time can be compressed to less than 100ms, the user perceives is completely smooth playback, there is no first screen of the sense of abruptness. It turns out that this will greatly increase the playback rate of the video, and a better playback experience will allow users to stay.
Similarly, the picture quality experience also directly affects business growth. According to the volcano engine experimental data, for users with limited network in specific environments, the user's picture quality experience is improved by super score, and this optimization increases the playback time of large-scale video by 0.23%.
For the picture quality experience, the image quality intelligent processing of volcano engine has the ability to enhance the needs of different audience groups and different original film quality. Audiences who love classic content can see the effect of the restoration of the old film, and the audience with high requirements for clarity can open the picture quality enhancement. In the top event MSU for video codec, the Volcano Engine BVC series encoders won the first place in multiple scoring standards, which not only provides a guarantee of ultra-high image quality, but also saves storage and bandwidth costs in performance.
To say that today's video experience is the biggest difference from what it used to be, strong interactivity must be included. New interactive gameplay and low-latency real-time interactions play an important role in scenarios such as live shopping, lianmai, and online courses.
Douyin has been updating interactive gameplay, such as the "Watch Douyin Together" function that has been online for nearly a year, allowing many users to watch short videos synchronously, and at the same time chat, increasing the fun and companionship of the entire experience. Based on byte's internal polishing of products, Volcano Engine can be said to be the real-time audio and video technology service provider that understands business scenarios best.
Through the polishing and experience precipitation of internal and external video products, Volcano Engine Video Cloud products can build a complete set of user experience indicators, quantify and evaluate the video experience, further optimize the user experience from the four dimensions of playback, image quality, interaction and performance, and help customers achieve data-driven growth.
In some emerging fields, there are also volcano engine video clouds as the underlying supporter of technology. For example, A-SOUL, the hottest virtual idol group in China, 5 members have conducted many live broadcasts and performance activities. In the virtual idol live broadcast, in order to solve the interaction and synchronization of the virtual image and the real environment, it is necessary to solve a lot of technical problems, such as ultra-low delay transmission of audio and video, high definition and so on. The Volcano Engine Real-Time Audio and Video (RTC) team has provided technical support for many activities of A-SOUL, formulated a weak network confrontation plan for the offline performance scene of virtual idols, and ensured the smooth progress of the activities through the optimization of each link.
Virtual idol group A-SOUL
It can be seen that from the experience-oriented point of view, the volcano engine video cloud product has formed a comprehensive product matrix, with solid infrastructure and technical reserves, as well as solutions that have been verified by actual scenarios.
Volcano Engine is not an early entrant to the domestic cloud market, but since its official launch, the idea has been very clear, starting from "empowering intelligent growth" to "experience-oriented video cloud", all of which are based on their own advantages to release technology and business capabilities.
Byte's business has cultivated a video cloud, and the video cloud has witnessed and helped byte's growth in this process. The volcano engine's ability on the video side is the result of Byte's continuous exploration in the big scenes of vibrato and watermelon, polishing technology, continuous iteration in user experience, and building a complete indicator system. The technology and methodology that have been precipitated are integrated into cloud services and products and then introduced to the market.
Volcano Engine joins the video cloud industry as an "innovator", on the one hand, broadening the choices of enterprise customers, on the other hand, it can contribute energy to the common progress of the industry. At this conference, Volcano Engine, together with Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, released the signaling standard of ultra-low latency live broadcast protocol, which is the first time in the industry to formally define the "client-server" signaling interaction process of live broadcasting, shortening the delay of 3 to 6 seconds of traditional live broadcast technology to 1 second, and bringing users a smoother live broadcast experience.
As a result, the video has a "new perspective".
Volcano Engine's video cloud products not only continue to innovate to provide video consumers with a more extreme "new view", but also unlock a "new view" of cloud services for enterprise customers who embrace video, and also provide the industry with a "new view" based on their own experience.