The next 20 years are likely to be a golden age for video, which is rapidly becoming a basic information carrier for the intelligent world.
Indeed, continuous innovation in technologies such as 4K/8K, VR and media AI, along with the increasing demands of consumers, will result in it eventually accounting for 90% of network traffic.
The drivers for this growth are the changing needs of people, both in the workplace and in their day-to-day lives. Video is also gradually becoming an enabler for industries and promoting business development.
Take, for instance, the ‘video and medical’ mode. Here patients can enjoy professional health guidance and disease diagnosis anytime and anywhere. Meanwhile, the ‘video and education’ mode allows traditional classroom education to be moved to the internet to achieve face-to-face communication between teachers and students irrespective of their location. The ‘video and shopping’ mode, on the other hand, allows customers to shop anytime and anywhere, thereby increasing their desire to purchase.
It’s interesting to note that authoritative companies like Ovum, Gartner and F&S are all predicting industries such as smart home, video call and online education or shopping will all eclipse traditional pay-TV services in the next five years.
Building on accumulated experience, Huawei has set out it stall in this rapidly changing environment by launching a new video solution named Envision. Its aim is to communicate with everything by video, thereby transforming industries and enabling industrial upgrades.
The solution also allows operators to leverage the advantages of their networks, channels, brands and operational capabilities to tap the high potential of the industry-based video business.
In addition, operators can use media AI to help companies improve their operational efficiency and gain advantages through their experience. They can also help them use their B2B capabilities to launch OTT services.
Media companies can be classified as those that either (a) focus on content production and processing based on the requirements of service providers or (b) provide video services directly to end users. The traditional pain point for the former is that a large amount of content production and processing, including the identification of illegal content, is undertaken manually. This is both inefficient and costly.
Huawei media AI can achieve smart operation through automatic content metadata supplementation, duplicate content removal and the automatic generation of personalised posters based on the intelligent analysis of content. It can also provide voice natural interaction capability to identify illegal content in videos, thereby reducing labour costs and improving operational efficiency.
Furthermore, Huawei’s fast transcoding capability greatly improves content transcoding efficiency. It implements one-hour content transcoding in only 10 minutes.
At the same time, Huawei’s unique service quality management (SQM) and player software development kit (SDK) provide a number of services to ensure optimal user experience. These include visualised agile O&M and end-to-end and device-cloud collaboration.
Another advantage offered by Huawei is that its Envision CDN opens APIs to meet the CP/SP interconnection requirements and implement optimised scheduling for a large number of CP/SP access users.
Huawei’s unique media A1 capabilities, including image quality rebirth and intelligent encoding, provide an optimal video experience for users.
Furthermore, Huawei provides an end-to-end security protection system that supports multi-centre content ingestion and storage based on geographical disaster recovery architecture. This comes with the help of end-to-end security protection capabilities such as anti-leeching and anti-tampering to ensure security services.
Large operators rent video service platforms to small and medium-sized operators to launch wholesale services and expand the coverage of video services. In this instance Huawei Envision supports the platform multi-tenant function and opens API/SDK to third party system interconnection, content aggregation and client development. DSV partners are responsible for user device UI/app site adaptation, and small and medium-sized operators for finding content and purchasing equipment such as headends and STBs. The efforts made by these three strong parties ultimately accelerate service rollout.
Operators also expand to specific industries by introducing videos to them. For instance, in the hotel sector they introduce live TV, VOD and related service management functions such as registration, deregistration and TV message. At the same time, they implement hotel system interconnection and personalised EPG customisation with DSV partners in order to launch such services.
A similar process is used to quickly launch video services in such locations as bars.
Operators, in addition, provide service such as VOD, live TV, media processing and transcoding to a number of industries. If we take online education as an example, Huawei implements an end-to-end process walk-through. In addition to basic capabilities including live TV, VOD and interactive TV, it provides related media A1 and fast transcoding capabilities. This quickly generates courseware and builds a differentiated experience for online classes.
Similar modes can be used in online finance, shopping, medical care and video surveillance. In each instance, operators should focus on service convenience, user experience enhancement and the improvement of operational efficiency in order to meet the requirements of vertical industries for video-driven service upgrades.
We are now in an age where video is everything. In it, Huawei’s new video solution Envision will enable the transformation of industries, improve user experience and O&M efficiency for customers and accelerate video business success for operators. This will allow them to build a new smart video world that connects everything with video.
