Introduction
Although there is no official qualification for what ‘Streaming Media’ exactly is, Axello refers to this as audio and video content delivery from content acquisition up to actual content delivery and everything that is in between (so-called ‘glass-to-glass’ principle). Axello really focuses on the actual journey that content travels through workflows up to actual delivery on the end-device. The line between workflows and actual delivery is blurring and therefore often simple adaptations as part of a workflow can have a serious impact on how content is delivered.
CDN technologies and CDN services are commonly used for video and audio delivery, it is not just about CDN alone. Due to the diversification in the market, the approaches for audio streaming and video streaming are often quite different. The same counts for instance for low-latency streaming in comparison to regular streaming or when content from which originates from multi-way communication into a single-way of distribution.
Axello also believes that the audio and video streaming market will diversify even more and ‘distribution mixes‘ using multiple delivery and streaming technologies and methods will become a common practice. There are already more and more methods where hybrids are taking place, such as multicast+unicast, unicast+p2p and broadcast+unicast.
Having knowledge on a single place for this is extremely important for media companies to keep up with developments.