A plain and simple rundown.
How can you forget the thrill of renting a video cassette and playing it on a VCR with a bowl of popcorn in your hands? The journey of watching movies usually began with walking into a rental store that was nothing less than a treasure trove and then exploring the shelves filled with colorful cassettes covered with exciting designs (the miniature form of movie posters). You used to pick your selected movie cassettes unpredictably without watching trailers like you do nowadays and finally, back at home, the stage was set with family members and loved ones to watch it with excitement and immense pleasure.
With the arrival of YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, and other platforms in the rapidly growing Internet era, the phenomenon of renting cassettes became a thing of the past. You can now watch movies and videos online either free of cost or by subscribing to various plans available on multiple platforms. All you need now is a device connected to a good Internet speed to access a digital library with a huge number of watching options. With the ease of traveling with the Internet in your pocket, you can watch your desired video whenever and wherever you wish to. Moreover, with data-driven insights, these platforms make your viewing experience more personalized by recommending content that suits your mood, behavior, and other preferences.
Consider watching a video sitting at your home. Point ‘A’ is the origin source where your video is located and you’re at point ‘B’. The physical distance between ‘A’ and ‘B’ could be anything, say multiple thousands of miles. Once a request is generated from ‘B’, ‘A’ starts acting smartly. Rather than sending the whole file at once which can take a long time to download at the receiver’s end or may cause latency, buffering, and other playback issues; ‘A’ breaks down the original file into multiple segments (chunks) and starts transferring to ‘B’ in a sequential order.
The content is still being transferred and the viewer can start watching smoothly. With the help of streaming technology, ‘A’ can easily convert the files into supportable formats for the device of ‘B’ along with adjusting the audio-video quality at the user’s end through Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR).
The process of sending a file from ‘A’ to ‘B’ involves many steps such as compression, transcoding, using a protocol for sending data to the server, and transferring it from the server to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) before it reaches the final destination for immediate playback.
With live streaming being a subset of streaming, one can easily watch the content in real time as it happens. Gaming, Vlog, Interview/Q&A, Webinars, Events, etc. are some popular categories where streamers love to create live stream content. On the other hand, platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, Spotify, etc., offer on-demand streaming where users can consume preferred content whenever they wish, as opposed to traditional broadcast schedules.
As the habit of content consumption has dynamically evolved, the streaming industry is also witnessing transformative changes with technology marvels. Original Content (OC) is dominating whereas live streaming has enabled content creators across the globe to create more interactive and immersive content. The overall impact of independent users is now overshadowing the impact of the mainstream media bringing down their monopoly in the industry. The global streaming market, which was worth USD 454.33 billion in 2022, is expected to reach USD 1902.68 billion by the end of 2030. You can’t unsee the unrivaled supremacy of just a single sector - gaming, which was valued at USD 249.55 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 665.77 billion by 2030.