58% of service providers currently support all three primary multiscreen devices in the home: tablets, PCs/laptops, and mobile phones, according to Infonetics.
The research company surveyed global service providers about their multiscreen strategies.
Nearly half of operators surveyed offer live streaming today. Transcoding is becoming more distributed: Only 16% of respondents plan to transcode video content in their headend in 2015.
Respondents rank Ericsson and Harmonic as the most familiar multiscreen vendors.
“Service providers want flexibility in the processing platforms they use to encode and play out video content,” commented Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.
“Network functions virtualization (NFV) moves functions usually embedded in network hardware—such as encoders and video on demand (VoD) playout servers—into software that can run in a virtual machine on standard servers, giving operators more flexibility in how they process and distribute video content.
“Though none of the service providers we interviewed for our latest multiscreen study support virtualized multiscreen video infrastructure in an NFV environment today, this grows to 42% by 2016.”