by Jay Hinman, VP
of Operator Solutions, Opera Software
So much attention has rightly been paid by industry
influencers—from media to analysts and vendors themselves—to the topic of
over-the-top (OTT) video streaming and its effects on overall traffic and the
end-user experience. While many solutions exist to address this very real need,
nearly all in-network solutions overlook one of the fastest growing segments of
OTT data consumption: audio streaming services.
According to Mary
Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends Report, streaming music consumption is up 32% year-over-year compared
to 2013, and subscribers have never had so many music streaming service
options. And while OTT video may pose the biggest threat on the surface, the
volume of 18-64 year olds streaming audio is a much greater and immediate force
to be reckoned with, bandwidth pressure aside.
Ask any person born during or after Bill Clinton’s presidency
how and where they listen to music, and you’ll likely not hear too many answers
focused on LPs, CDs, phonographs and compact disc players—the remnant
popularity of these formats in some sectors notwithstanding. It’s self-evident
that young people today freely stream their music from OTT music services like
Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora, Rhapsody and Beats Audio, often with zero
interest in “old media” like CDs and even downloadable mp3s. With the fading of
stand-alone mp3 players like the iPod, their music is typically enjoyed while
mobile and even when stationary, on devices connected to either a cellular or a
Wi-Fi network. Those with auto, train or bus commutes often listen for hours at a time each day, and more often
than not do so on their mobile carrier’s network – which extracts a heavy toll
on both the network and on each consumer’s data plan.
Mobile operators have begun to recognize how valuable streaming
audio (music in particular) might end up being to their ability to attract and
retain customers. Witness T-Mobile USA and their recent “Music Freedom”
bundling of multiple streaming music services in with data plans. By
zero-rating these services within the context of an overall data plan, T-Mobile
provides a powerful lure (music streaming
won’t count against my minutes) to the music-crazy demographic they’re
courting. T-Mobile’s move is probably a prescient one. A recent study by
research firm Strategy Analytics into consumers’ mobile music habits in the
United States, China, France, Germany, Spain and the UK found that 77% of
mobile users are already listening to music on their phones—with 70% claiming
to do so at least once per week or more. 72% also said that they use their mobile
phones to listen to music at least once a week when the service is bundled into
their operator data plan—which is exactly why T-Mobile USA saw this as a
terrific opportunity to grab new music-loving users from their competitors.
It makes one wonder what the network operations teams at
T-Mobile and other global operators who are experimenting with streaming audio
data bundling are currently thinking. Here they were, focused on optimizing the
explosion of OTT video, and it turns
out that a fundamental and network-taxing shift has also been rapidly taking
place in the consumption of audio
services. Most optimization solutions to date have focused their efforts on
one-size-fits-all optimization of all
data, inspecting each image, video or audio stream that comes through the
network and adjusting every last bit of it to fit the pre-determined size of
the available pipe—whether an individual user really needed it or not.
In fact, I’d surmise that most users don’t want their audio steam to be unnecessarily “optimized” —i.e. run
through network hardware to have its bitrate lowered haphazardly—if the cost
they’ll pay is lowered sound quality, even if their own particular stream of
Pandora might have played perfectly without
intervention. Rather, users just want their music to play—free from buffering, stalling and long start times. They’d
like it to sound great, too. Prescient operators know that music is very
personal, and that it’s all about individual quality of experience.
These mobile operators, knowing how important and personal the
modern mobile media experience is to legions of individuals, have been looking
to surgical optimization solutions to
help manage their burgeoning network traffic. Surgical optimization, typically
using a cloud-based infrastructure, only looks at individual streaming sessions—say, you and that Bob Seger album
you’re about to listen to on Spotify, or perhaps more relevant, the 16-year-old
and her Katy Perry stream that’s just about to kick off. When the size of her
stream doesn’t match the available network bandwidth, surgical optimization
determines in milliseconds that this is indeed the case, and then turns that
square peg into a round one, letting it easily fill the available pipe and
thereby delivering a wonderful streaming experience to her. Moreover, if
everyone around her happens to have more than enough “pipe” to stream their own music, surgical optimization
stays out of the way, letting them stream their music of choice without the
slightest intervention.
Networks, and network optimization solutions, have by necessity
been forced to be reactive in response to the proliferation of smartphones and
the OTT services that run beautifully on them. It’s comforting to know that
operators are recognizing not simply that there’s a buck or two to be made or a
point or two of churn rate to shed on packaging streaming audio services in
with data plans, but that the clunky, everybody-shares-the-pain methods of
dealing with network bottlenecks in the past are becoming a relic of just that—the
past.
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