• Will video services in the future become as basic as IaaS for the whole industry?

  • Can all video services be carried by a single network, making application development more efficient, lower cost and better experience?

Video feast stage, the curtain has opened

At the beginning of 2020, a global epidemic completely disrupted and changed people’s existing lifestyles and rhythms. As social distancing drives digitization in the office, healthcare, education and more, our need for real-time audio and video is growing fast.

In fact, no matter what era, video/visual needs have always existed. After the epidemic, real-time video demand is pushed to the center of the historical stage, demand determines service, service determines technology, technology determines change, change will feed demand.

In this arena, each video service competes for the C position to attract more attention. Meanwhile, each person being served has a choice, the Pick’s favorite.

And for video service providers, business ability is good, video experience is good, it has become their winning bottom card!

How do you play a good hand?

As video becomes a daily requirement, will video services in the future become as basic as IaaS for the entire industry? The so-called basic services are just like electricity, water and network that we need daily. The top end users don’t care about how to realize the bottom layer of basic services at all. They only care about the most intuitive feelings such as fluency, high definition, no delay and low cost.

Every video service provider is trying to explore and practice how to realize these more and more refined video extreme experience.

From the horizontal point of view, domestic cloud video service providers competition is fierce. The first group of participants were SaaS vendors developed from Internet video vendors, followed by mainstream public cloud vendors and traditional CDN vendors, and the integration of video and all walks of life gradually became normal.

In 2020, as a rising star huawei cloud jumped up fierce, jumped to the second cloud market share. From a vertical perspective, what kind of good card does Huawei hold?

There is no doubt that Huawei has a sound infrastructure ecosystem.

It has the industry’s most complete hardware industry system, including veneer design, complete machine, interconnection, devices, processes, etc. In the field of global operators, Huawei router products have ranked first in market share for many times, leading the whole and segment market in all dimensions. In terms of software, Hongmeng OS is a “future-oriented”, microkerl-based distributed operating system for all scenarios, comparable to iOS. It also has deployments of cloud native and edge computing platform KubeEdge. All this gives the ecosystem the advantage of a closed loop that is not yet fully exploited.

In the aspect of audio and video research, also fruitful.

In 2017 liveVideo PackCon, Professor Wang Tian, then the chief scientist of Huawei Multimedia Lab, delivered a speech on the standardization of immersive media. The Encoder Competition organized by MSU (Moscow State University) is the world’s top competition and enjoys a high reputation in the field of video coding. Huawei won the top honor of the competition in 2018 and 2019. In 2020, Huawei became the patent licensor and user of HEVC Advance. Previously, Huawei was the company with the most HEVC-related patents among patent holders not in any patent pool. Whether it is audio and video standards, coding contests, or joining the patent pool, huawei is laying out the layout for the right to speak in the future.

At the same time, we also need to face huawei has some not so good cards. The biggest advantage of Huawei is the practical infrastructure, which also exposes the biggest problem, that is, Huawei’s weak service capability in the direction of PaaS and SaaS, its lack of understanding of the upper-layer user ecosystem, and its relatively slow response to user needs.

To maximize its advantages and narrow the gap brought by its disadvantages, Huawei must make changes as a matter of urgency.

Redefining real-time audio and video technology and expanding the map of the future

Let’s take a higher perspective. If the video service stays in a small scope, when the industry demands and then fills in the blanks, the defects of this service will become more and more prominent soon.

For a long time, the CDN and RTC services of traditional cloud vendors have been separated, and many video services have presented a fragmented situation. Some only offer video conferencing, some only offer live streaming, some only offer AR, some only offer real-time education, etc. Every service is an application. When people need different scenes, they need to switch back and forth, with strong sense of fragmentation, serious delay and poor experience.

So, is there a service in the future that can provide all kinds of video services in all industries to make app development more efficient, cheaper and better? Let the user use more convenient, more concise, more humanized?

Now, video services have to go to the next level, to see the panorama of the future. Holding a good hand, how to play it, this is very strategic and timing.

Therefore, Huawei took advantage of its cloud native infrastructure and years of deep cultivation of audio and video technology to put forward the concept of cloud native video and cloud native video era. This concept is not born out of nowhere, but based on and embodies huawei’s solid and steady development of technological strength and forward-looking over 30 years. This is a natural and inevitable move for Huawei.

Let’s take a look at the original words released by Xue Hao, director of Huawei Cloud Connection and Collaboration Product Department: “Cloud native video service is born in the cloud, grows in the cloud and benefits from the cloud. From video production, video processing, video distribution to video consumption, the whole video business flow is carried on the cloud. Its features include four aspects: industry-wide process support, extreme resource efficiency, high SLA, and natural integration of AI intelligence. “It will bring extreme experience, rapid innovation, cost savings and efficiency to the video business and change the way video is produced and distributed.”

Behind this unusual product introduction, Huawei has created CloudRTC service for real-time audio and video with real strength, redefined real-time audio and video technology, and reconstructed a unified media network for the whole industry.

For example, if the delay is less than 200 milliseconds, the user will not feel the delay if the interval between the instruction being sent and completed is less than 20 milliseconds. Even when the network is very bad, users can still make smooth video and phone calls. The next generation of real-time audio and video network can become a unified network, eliminating the separation between enterprises and internal and external interconnection. No matter whether it is live broadcasting or interactive, there is no need to switch and experience is not divided, it is consistent.

Technological innovation is changing the existing application experience, and with so many innovations on display, it may inspire more world-class innovations. Soon, video services you might have thought, or even never imagined, could be supported by this cloud native media network.

This is the future panorama of Huawei for the whole industry, which is also the direction huawei is most sure of.

conclusion

Human beings are never satisfied with the present situation, there are always countless imagination and expectation for the future. With the rapid development of science and technology today, the scenes imagined in the past have been realized. No matter the accumulation of technology or the demand of users, we have the richest and largest resources in the world. Everyone is expecting that in the ERA of AI, we can overtake in the corner of science and technology and become a scientific and technological power, or even ahead of the whole world.

Solid and steady is the DNA of Huawei. Today, What Huawei needs more is to break free from constraint and have the courage to make breakthroughs. In today’s era of video priority, Huawei will surely bring about different changes if it makes efforts to advance and help the whole industry enter the era of cloud native video.