Entertainment and Media

Traditionally, server-side ad insertion has been aimed at tackling the problems of ad blocking and device fragmentation. Advances in technology are now emphasising the importance of ad stitching for live and catch up TV. Client-side ad SDKs have grown in sophistication while the platforms they run have become more capable, and the transition to nat...

Comcast launched its own commercial CDN offering in 2015 and added a new live linear streaming service that it announced at IBC 2015. The new platform provides customers the ability to easily turn-up, manage, and enable ad or subscription-supported live, over-the-top, full-time channel experiences. While a lot of vendors in the market offer platfor...

HEVC has been gaining traction through 2015 and is well poised for further adoption in 2016. Natively integrated shipment numbers are up – notably for smart TVs, tablets, and mobile phones. The most egregious of royalty terms imposed by HEVC Advance have been rolled back. The chasm has been crossed, and an upswing is underway. AVC remains the com...

The North American Residential Multichannel Video Tracker has been reformatted to reflect feedback received from Stratecast's clients. The new format provides detailed information for several companies in the consumer communication services market for US and Canada. The aggregated data—delivered by country, technology, and company—includes subs...

Over-the-top (OTT) video services is considered a complementary entertainment option and is already widespread in Latin America; however, this industry still has growth opportunities, driven by the desire for a cheap service that is available anytime, anywhere, and on any device such as notebooks, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, and gaming console...

The North American Residential Multichannel Video Tracker has been reformatted to reflect feedback received from Stratecast's clients. The new format provides detailed information for several companies in the consumer communication services market for US and Canada. The aggregated data—delivered by country, technology, and company—includes subs...

Since their launch, content owners have raised concerns over how the iPhone 6 and 6+ have made it harder for some CDNs to deliver their content to these devices with good quality. Apple’s new phones challenge CDNs by creating a perfect storm of significantly larger images and a non-negotiable requirement to deliver images generated on the fly eve...

In recent years, the spotlight on video has burned so bright that next-gen audio has been covered to a much lesser extent. This relative obscurity is unwarranted, however, given both the complementarity of these two next-gen technologies and the imminence of important standards-based decisions. There have been dramatic technological improvements in...

Cisco and Ericsson formed a partnership in 2015 as a decisive countermeasure to the significant threat posed by the merger of services giant Alcatel-Lucent with equipment vendor Nokia. Through this unique partnership, the two companies also aim to capture the immense revenue potential offered by service providers aggressively modernizing their bro...