CDN服务现状调查:供需不匹配?

上个月, Akamai 和流媒体，与 Unisp在这里研究, published a study highlighting media consumption behaviors by professionals in the streaming media industry.

一个结果引起了我的注意, having crafted the survey questions and performed subsequent analysis for Akamai’s State of CDN Services, was a potential mismatch of supply and demand within the industry. 更具体地说, it seems that the types of content that media professionals consume is quite different from the content their companies deliver.

I’ve received some questions about this finding, based on a quote I provided for the article 发布CDN服务现状报告. 基于这些问题, and the fact that Akamai has released an infographic highlighting that and other findings from the survey, 我想详细说明潜在差距存在的地方. (See the infographic at the end of this article; click on the image to display full size and to download in PDF format.)

The survey revealed that premium content accounted for 59% of all media consumption by survey respondents, which itself isn’t a surprise and is in line with general consumption trends. 这无疑是媒体消费的主要类型, premium content consumption trounced social media (23%) and enterprise media (13%) consumption.

Yet the content delivered by the majority of companies represented in the survey doesn't seem to follow the same trend. 例如, while a larger number of companies focus on delivering premium content than other areas, a focus on premium content delivery still only accounts for one-third of the total number of companies w在这里 survey respondents self-identified as working for a company that delivers streaming content.

更令人惊讶的是, it seems that over a quarter of streaming media delivery companies focus on delivering enterprise content (28%), 而只有不到十分之一的人关注社交媒体传播(8%).

换句话说, social media accounted for 8 percent of content delivered from respondent’s companies—almost three times lower than those same respondents' media consumption habits for social media video content, 23%.

有三种可能的模型可以解释这种不匹配.

First, it’s possible that premium content delivery mimics the "80-20 rule.换句话说, the actual amount of discrete premium content is actual fairly low, 而是被大多数消费者所消费. 这种模式意味着内容创造的力量, 以及随后的交付, 合并到几家公司手中, and that any more companies attempting to deliver premium content would push the delivery balance past a saturation point.

其次，这些问题可能是错误的. 这总是有可能的, but with over two decades of crafting and analyzing market research surveys, most recently as co-founder and principal analyst of go-to-market strategy firm, 转换, 公司.，这是最不可能发生的情况. 除了, several questions surrounding the key questions were designed to filter out possible false positives, and the responses appear consistent across disparate respondents in the United States and Europe.

The third model is more intriguing: Companies find social media content less attractive. This could be true for one of two reasons: Either t在这里 are so few social media clients to service, or serving social media content is plagued by the same issues faced by early user-generated content delivery.

探索这两个原因, it’s certainly true that Facebook and a few other large social media clients dominate the market. But for every Facebook t在这里 are hundreds of upstart competitors that are gaining traction in specific geographies or markets of interest. 我认识的几乎所有人都在使用Facebook，无论是在美国还是在中国.S., Europe, or India, uses at least three other social media platforms. So it doesn’t appear that t在这里’s a lack of potential market share for streaming companies interested in delivering social media content.

That leaves us with the other potential reason: It’s hard to deliver social media content. User-generated content has never really fit the encode-once-cache-everyw在这里 model of premium content, and we only have to look back at YouTube’s early days to discover just how hard it was to put viral or trending content into the hands of everyone interested in viewing that content.

Yet just because it’s a hard technical challenge—and probably will require tweaks to delivery models to handle low-latency content delivery—doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be an attractive proposition for streaming media delivery companies looking to service a growing market.

Desktops and laptops still dominate personal online media viewing, 占总消费的46%, 根据调查结果, 但我强烈的预感是，这只适用于优质内容. 分割社交媒体内容浏览, and one suspects that the tablet and smartphone are the dominant content creation and media consumption devices of choice.

通过注册可以获得完整的调查报告 在这里. Click the infographic below to display full-size and download as a PDF.

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