Hosted Video Services Survey and Analysis

Sponsored By: Brightcove

Streaming Media magazine and Unisphere Research, along with along with key sponsor and research partner Brightcove, surveyed a wide cross-section of media professionals on the challenges and benefits of using a hosted video service (HVS).

Titled "Hosted Video Services Survey and Analysis," the report is sponsored by Brightcove, produced by Unisphere Research, and crafted by Transitions Inc. The report analyzes responses from 992 Streaming Media magazine and 3588612.com readers on their use of HVS.

Key findings include continued growth in mobile consumption, especially from Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad. This move to mobile has presented challenges for some respondents.

“Mobile devices (tablets, smartphones) require different video formats than PCs, so that creates more complexity in both encoding and delivery and storage,” one respondent stated.

In addition, Transitions noted that respondents tend to work for companies that either deliver less than 100,000 or more than 1 million unique streams of online content per month, meaning a wide gap exists in the use of HVS solutions, although those above 1 million streams tend to use multiple HVS partners to cover redundancy and scalability.

Finally, respondents rated multi-device delivery capability as their top need when it comes to using HVS, followed by a “need for speed” when it came to player load times, as well as a need for detailed analytics. The report is available at no charge.