A seemingly inconspicuous but important resident
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “ brain pole body” (ID: unity007), author I am a panda.
If the cloud is likened to a town, the residents who have moved in are all kinds of people: IT companies are the first to discover that this fertile soil has begun to be built, and then companies in the fields of finance, marketing consulting, retail, medical, etc. have begun to flock. After relocation, it will soon be seen that the town has a prosperous and convenient life, and some enterprises with “big family” have begun to migrate, such as industry, manufacturing, transportation and so on.
In this process, there is a seemingly inconspicuous but important resident, that is, streaming media.
Streaming, including but not limited to gaming, live streaming, VR, video, and much more. Compared with large-scale industries or manufacturing industries, industries in these fields tend to be lighter in scale, and most of these industries are built on a complete digital foundation. This leads to the industry upgrades in these industries, which are likely to require data transmission technology support. When cloud computing really begins to transform the field of streaming media, the energy emitted by it often exceeds people’s imagination.
Year of the game industry: how cloud computing works for streaming media
This is a good example of cloud games. In recent years, Google, Microsoft, Sony and other vendors have gradually revealed the news of the launch of cloud gaming services. Among them, Google’s Stadia cloud gaming platform claims to allow players to play games just like watching videos on YouTube. Sony and Microsoft as the hostile world, even put aside the contradiction, Sony will build a cloud service solution in Microsoft Azure to support its games and content streaming services.
Many people believe that the emergence of cloud games in recent years has emerged from the rise of 5G. The faster data transmission speed means lower latency between the terminal and the cloud, which means that it can transmit a larger amount of data. So to support the high quality picture of the game, and the response to the player’s instructions. The actual statement is a bit sloppy, because the process of game development itself is the process of cloudization. From PC games to downloading clients, you can play online games, and then go to the “Blue Moon”-style page tour. Even the concept of cloud games was first proposed in 2009. Reducing hardware requirements and playing games anytime, anywhere is a path for game development. However, due to the limitations of network technology, the game has to give up the advantages such as image quality and instant response in the process of cloudization.
But with the improvement of virtual machine technology and container technology in recent years,Cloud computing vendors continue to improve their GPU virtualization capabilities, giving cloud games better computing resources. At the same time, cloud computing vendors’ network coverage capabilities combined with ever-increasing edge computing capabilities can solve network latency problems. Combined with audio and video codec technology, client-server-side synchronization algorithms, network transmission optimization, etc., today’s cloud game platform can already run like the “Witcher” series, “Wolf” and so on. Highly demanding masterpieces.
Although today’s cloud games often run up with unstable image quality and delayed stagnation, it has to be said that the game industry is changing as cloud computing vendors improve their capabilities.
Similarly, the live broadcast, video, and VR industries are also affected by the development of cloud computing in the same way. The distribution of video content, real-time security audits in live broadcasts, etc., are actually improved with the capabilities of cloud computing technology.
Four levels of streaming upgrades
But what we should pay more attention to is the next scene. What can cloud computing do on the road to the future of streaming media?
In a nutshell, we can divide the streaming media industry into four levels.
The first layer is content coverage.
In the streaming media industry, improving the coverage and coverage of content is clearly the most basic. In fact, cloud computing transforms the game so that the game can cover more terminals, which is essentially improving the coverage of the content. In particular, Huawei, a company that also serves as a 5G operator, cloud computing, and terminal manufacturer, has begun to promote the output of audio and video, games, and other content on its own terminal platform. It is believed that the cooperation between future content producers and cloud computing vendors will also become a trend.
The second layer is the transformation of the operational efficiency of the enterprise.
As with all industries, an important role that cloud computing can bring is to reduce the operating costs of the enterprise by virtualizing the hardware. Especially for the streaming media industry, there is a higher demand for data storage and distribution. Like Netflix, after several IT failures, the local data center was shut down in 2017, and all of the business was moved to AWS.
The third layer is the technical output of the streaming media industry.
The most common situation in the streaming media industry is that for these “literary industries”, the learning of IT technologyThis is very high. At this time, the cloud computing industry is often required to provide more active and integrated services. A typical case is live broadcast. The problems of fast video decoding, media asset storage, and slice transcoding involved in live broadcast are very complicated, but the live cloud solution provided by cloud computing vendors helps them solve the problems. . With this kind of cloud-on-demand solution, all kinds of live broadcast platforms will appear like a mushroom. In particular, cloud computing vendors are also packaging and exporting technologies such as face recognition beauty and live broadcast, to empower the entire industry.
The last layer is the possibility of transforming the future of the streaming media industry.
From the development of cloud games, we have seen the huge energy of cloud computing for industrial transformation: when the game is clouded as a whole, the game vendors, especially the stand-alone game makers, can change their physical sales model for decades. It can be more convenient to patch and launch DLC, or it can completely change its own charging mode, from entity sales to manufacturer membership charging system or time charging system. At the same time, the limitations of the hardware foundation are removed, and game makers can pursue better rendering effects and a larger world view when they are making. The resulting changes will undoubtedly be revolutionary.
The next question is, when we have witnessed the first three levels of the streaming media industry upgrade, what should cloud computing do to better promote the fourth-tier industry upgrade?
What is the cloud computing vendor doing for the fertile soil?
Under the current fierce competition in the global cloud computing industry, manufacturers will naturally not let go of the fertile soil. The actual cloud computing vendors have already started the competition.
First, cloud computing vendors are gathering more power. In addition to working directly with streaming media companies like Microsoft and Sony, they are also gathering more and more relevant forces in the upstream and downstream of the industry chain. For example, Huawei, Tencent, and Amazon have launched their own streaming media content platforms, and have worked more closely with chip vendors such as Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD to launch products that are more suitable for vertical areas.
Next, cloud computing is trying to innovate in industries that are far from technology. Especially in the sports industry, in addition to the rising clarity of live broadcasts, cloud computing vendors are also changing the way people watch sports in the joint industry. For example, Verizon, the operator of the Super Bowl in 2018, has joined Ericsson in the transformation of the helmet of rugby players, addingThe camera, so that the audience can see the live broadcast of the first perspective of the sport in the first time.
Of course, the most important thing is to enter the most advanced technology into the industry at any time. From Netflix’s use of Amazon’s AI algorithm to improve the efficiency of data analysis, and now cloud games are looking forward to 5G. The cloud has clearly become the most important technology porter in the streaming media industry. This also means that cloud computing vendors will have to invest more energy in mining technology suitable for the streaming media industry.
In fact, this is also the biggest charm of the cloud computing industry. It is enough to be widely used, but the correlation is wide enough to transform the details of the whole world, and it is the same in the field of streaming media.
In short, seeing the future blueprint of streaming media under cloud computing, I believe we are all ready to “entertain to death.”