Trends in Video Streaming 2020

TV and Cybersports

Let’s start with cybersports in general. Cybersports is what takes the time and attention of more than 400 million viewers worldwide, according to Newzoo.

We can compare cybersports to sports on TV. Both industries prepare high-quality content without second takes, everything is recorded and translated in real-time. Now no one is reviewing the matches, moreover, ten minutes after the end of the game, spectators lose interest in what happened, so that’s why the aspect of it happening in real time is so important. The major difference between cybersports and TV sports programs is that TV companies do that extremely expensive. In order to shoot the World Cup, we need to invest billions of dollars, crowd stadiums with hundreds of thousands of people, attract major sponsors, and teams must train for years, which requires lots of money.

Cybersport has a major difference from regular sport: it is much, radically cheaper. In order to shoot the world championship on cybersport, you just need several powerful computers at the price of 10 thousand dollars each, and the people who will sit at these computers. This is what disruption is, a breakthrough in technology. With lower costs for the production of content, this area is developing rapidly. Contracts with cyber sportsmen are approaching the value of football players: recently, Mixer, a streaming platform owned by Microsoft, signed a $932 deal with cyber sportsman Tyler Blevins for 6 years.

The important thing is that large studios for generating content began to appear; it’s important that this is gaining momentum and more and more people are engaged in this, and there are more opportunities to sell advertising time.

Vlogging and Streaming

Non-gaming streaming and vlogging are developing rapidly as well.

With the growth and development of the vlogging industry, competition increases, and in order to survive this competition, individual content makers more and more often actually turn into television studios. Such professional video bloggers are certainly no longer people who are sitting at home in curlers and talking about something on the camera. Each video has a script, good directing and is recorded on equipment that costs millions of dollars and at the same time easily pays off.

Video streamers are a bit different from vloggers: they do streaming in real time, they focus on more interactive content, communicate more closely with their viewers. At the same time, their equipment is much cheaper, and their content is not staged.

Streaming has given us variability. There was a time when there were 20 channels on television, each program thoroughly planned and had a very high quality, but at the same time, some “hype” things were less often covered. Now, with the steaming, this has become more possible. People can react to some things instantly broadcasting live, and they don’t need expensive equipment to make it happen.

Optimizing Streaming

As for our company, we do not stand aside and actively cooperate with streaming services. For example, we cooperate with the game streaming service that is now gaining popularity. They use our software to transcode video.

We also have projects with non-gaming streaming, for example, with crowdsourcing, when people can collect money for different purposes while creating various live content on camera. There are also projects where a person can create live content with his viewers (for example, they can get the instructions for what to do or what to say from the viewers). Such projects are a real technological challenge because where the television studios use expensive equipment, our end-user uses a smartphone or a regular web camera, and here we are faced with the task of optimizing the video stream in such a way that the final video product is obtained with the highest possible quality.

Conclusion

We expect that in 2020 video streaming will develop in all directions, and first of all, it will concern game streaming and e-sports, which will continue to attract more and more audiences than TV broadcasts. Non-gaming streaming will also continue to evolve, and the quality of content will be improving gradually.