Video should not be seen as a separate industry, just as cloud computing should not be seen as a separate industry, which will permeate every industry and every scenario. At the Imagine Ali Cloud Video Panoramic Innovation Summit on July 10, 2021.Xu Fanlei, deputy General Manager of IResearch Institute, brought the keynote speech “Insight into New Scenes of Video on cloud”. He started from the supply and demand of video cloud industry chain, went deep into the industry and market, explored the imagination space of new scenes and emerging fields on cloud, and put his eyes far. Look at the future of video cloud technology and new experience. The following is a summary of the speech.
Big Video industry
What exactly is the concept of video that we mentioned at this stage?
Let’s start with a set of numbers. In the past few years, rich media represented by video has shown a very rapid development process in all areas of Internet or new technological development.
Numerically, it’s growing faster than you might think. The value of Internet as a whole is the value of traffic. Traffic from mobile is how many devices it covers each month, each week.
And the overall device coverage, from 1.1 billion in January 2018 to 1.394 billion in January this year, nearly 1.4 billion, the growth is relatively moderate, but from the time of use, in just three years, People went from spending 1.6 trillion minutes on video segmentation products to 4.8 trillion minutes.
Value assessment of Internet at present stage have no longer to use equipment for evaluation, but use, users spend time to assess, the Internet in various fields of dividend seems to dry up or during the process of reducing, we there is no denying the fact that in the past year in the related fields of the whole video is still very large bonuses, and the dividend will continue to continue.
In April 2021, the proportion of total monthly effective use time of video service apps shows some characteristics. At the present stage, short videos account for more than 50% of the total use time of video apps. The high proportion of short videos reflects that video consumption on the demand side tends to fragment time and use with high frequency.
In addition, we need to pay attention to man-to-many communication. In the original video distribution was centralized, and professional content producers may be few, and the produced content needs to be distributed to all users. However, with the emergence of short videos and new media, video creators are more generalized, and video production has shifted from PGC to UGC. PUGC mode will be further developed in the future, which is a point that the video industry needs to pay special attention to at this stage and in the next stage of development.
Another point: in the whole process of video development, at present and in the future, what is driving the rapid development of video industry?
In order to improve the sense of interaction, immersion and realism of video, HD is the inevitable point. Whether it is industry or policy, future HD 4K and 8K video applications can be a greater driving force for the development of the industry.
In addition, all video applications are now based on real-time audio and video technology, requiring real-time, low latency. Only in this case can we see video in education, social networking, information and other fields. In the future, video will gradually enter our financial services, medical care, public utilities and so on. Real-time audio and video is a necessary option for video application in various industries.
Video from the point of view of communication, it is the carrier of information dissemination, information dissemination classification is divided into multiple classes, point-to-point transmission, or point to more, or many-to-many, in another dimension is divided into time delay and real-time, and delay are blogs, email, etc, to the audience in the form of information recorded by rearranging information.
Let’s look briefly at the spread of information throughout human history.
At the beginning, when there was no writing or language, the information interaction was just a gesture of the body to describe the information needed to be expressed. Such interaction has many disadvantages. First, it is easy to generate ambiguity in communication and consume physical energy. At that time, the requirements for physical labor were very high, so it took a lot of time and energy to communicate. Therefore, after the birth of human language, we could communicate with each other without occupying the hands and feet of the body.
Although language has solved a lot of problems, it is still bound by time and space, and the summary degree is not enough. Word of mouth cannot solve the core problem of civilization inheritance. When a tribe or civilization disappears due to accidental events, its entire accumulation, inheritance and information containing civilization value will disappear. We all know that civilization needs to be inherited and continued, so each civilization has invented its own characters.
Later came Chinese characters, which solved the problem of inheritance. Both the East and the West would produce different characters from different perspectives, such as hieroglyphics and letters. In the thousands of years of human history, writing has solved the problems of human inheritance and information exchange. It is the greatest and most important invention in human history.
However, there are still some disadvantages of writing, all kinds of words are not common, need to learn the cost. In ancient history, writing only belonged to a part of people, because illiterates or people without learning could not use writing, and the information transmission speed of writing was relatively slow, and the richness of information carried by it was not enough. Therefore, in the development of human civilization, the value brought to human beings by characters can not be ignored, but with the development of human productivity, the limitation of characters is getting bigger and bigger.
We talked about watching TV in the 80s and 90s. In the PC era, we could watch video in the browser with the player. Now we are exposed to video scenes more and more frequently and more deeply.
The development of video in the whole process from the demand side and the supply side and other aspects of the promotion. The first point on the demand side we think is traffic sinking. Traffic sinking on the demand side is a topic often mentioned in recent years, because our users do not like text so much. In many cases, the proportion of video and audio on the demand side is very high, that is, only audio and video can capture the majority of users’ preferences.
In addition, the popularity of mobile terminals allows us to communicate with each other in different places. Instead of being confined to typing slowly in THE PC, the scenarios and functions we can use will become richer and more specific. In addition, the outbreak of the epidemic makes people unable to work and study passively, which also promotes the use of videos.
On the supply side, such as increasing speed and reducing cost, the continuous evolution of transmission, decoding and other technologies is also the underlying power to promote the development of the video industry.
Based on these points, video still has its problems. Compared with text and other forms of communication, there are two typical problems. First: The video is linear and can only be viewed linearly. Although the video can be fast-forward to a place, its information cannot be seen globally. Second, the modification of the content information of the video is slower than that of the text, but I believe that with the development of technology, these difficulties will not be a problem.
Based on the current situation of the industry, video should not be regarded as a separate industry, just like cloud computing should not be regarded as a separate industry, they are the underlying basic capabilities of the industry, continuous innovation, comprehensive cloud, cloud innovation, they will penetrate into each industry, each scene. Video will become a fundamental capability for the industry and applications.
The base of big video industry in the new era
Jump open cloud computing specific classification, first put the cloud computing in more categories to see inside, cloud computing itself is a reflection of a social division of labor, long time there are some production capacity of the division of labor, human food division of labor, began to barter, radius is very small, then the train, ocean-going freighter larger transport radius of the logistics, As a result, human social division of labor will become more and more specific.
But at the time service division of labor is difficult, in the early years moving around, domestic service is the localization of company, the service because it is difficult to realize globalization, productivity constraints in addition to high value of high-end services, service is hard to globalization, but after the birth of the Internet, based on the division of bits (value/digital) online services and the emergence of cloud services, Helped the Internet quickly penetrate into many industries and solved many problems of many industries.
Cloud computing needs to be discussed from the perspective of social division of labor.
I want to discuss a few points based on the general premise of social division of labor.
First, in history, the social division of labor of major projects is irreversible after they are started. Therefore, cloud services have rapidly developed and penetrated into various industries in the past period of time, and will basically maintain the status quo in the future, and there will be relatively high growth.
Second, all the social division of labor have similarities, cloud computing is, the early you more of the cost of the solution is, the demand for cloud computing, cloud services, mostly is the foundation of cloud computing service capability, such as basic resources, storage, network, CDN, but slowly with the increase of demand, more social division of labor demand is outsourcing, Move from cost concerns to features or overall capabilities.
Dinner for everybody is the social division of labor, not for eating outside at present stage is much cheaper than you cook and eat, you pay more attention to is that he can bring you more and more delicious dishes to choose, I can choose to casually today, I want to eat the food, the analogy is also said that what we call cloud service ability, is now a cloud service blessing give users more additional functions, The same is true for the video industry.
Another point on the demand side is whether the video cloud can video users’ video capabilities or users’ products. Users can use cloud services for transmission and production. For many industries with profound video transformation, we believe that the addition of video capabilities has profoundly changed the industry pattern.
In the live streaming e-commerce industry, the whole e-commerce subject is changing. In the past, there were only a few large live streaming e-commerce providers in the industry, but now many content platforms and even start-up companies use live streaming video to occupy the central traffic position. Anchors can be the center of e-commerce, which did not exist in the past.
In addition, in the field of online education, there is no way to realize the entire online education for many years. Previously, different apps such as recording, broadcasting and learning have not gained a large market share due to the problem of learning immersion. The emergence of live broadcasting has solved the problem of immersion, and students can have more interaction with teachers, thus solving the problem of online learning efficiency. The emergence of live video makes online education in the past few years finally find its cash logic.
Therefore, in the process of the evolution and penetration of video in various industries, the product is definitely not the only change.
What are the demands of the video capabilities of the industry?
The first is that capabilities are easy to integrate, easy to invoke, and easy to measure.
The second is lower cost, more flexible expansion, more agile trial and error, faster production.
Based on these premises, video cloud has different solutions and supports for different processes in video production, consumption, transmission and processing.
The video itself has been deeply served by cloud services, and a lot of social division can be handed over to others rather than done by ourselves.
And it greatly reduces the to create high quality and valuable video that threshold, embodies the cloud services for video blessing is very important, more vertical company can put the main focus on the main business, need not spend too much energy to deal with video, the threshold of the production of high quality video has been greatly reduced.
From the penetration logic of cloud computing to video itself, the purpose of video enterprises to use cloud services is to solve the problem of transmission, which requires a lot of CDN nodes to ensure the transmission of video.
Caches are the main hallmark of CDN2.0, and there is now a lot of deep learning to improve its efficiency and reduce its cost. In addition, distributed cloud and edge cloud put a lot of video transcoding including computing into the resources of edge computing, which further improves the efficiency of the whole transmission process and reduces the entire transmission cost.
In the video processing link, the earliest combination of video and cloud service is the earliest transmission. Because the demand of users, it is necessary to lowest cost, lowest bandwidth.
With the same bandwidth, the highest resolution image quality is transmitted, while with the same quality, the lowest bandwidth is used. In the process here, the problem of loading HD video needs to be solved, and more video processing needs to be carried out. Who should handle this processing?
Cloud computing plays a great role in the process, but in the process, the present stage is definitely not limited to solving its overall bandwidth and cost problems, including packaging format, overall coding, video processing and other functions and multiple modules to choose, so that the production of video more quickly.
In the whole process, the production link seems to be the most difficult to penetrate, but the emergence of AI solves the problems in the three links of material collection, production and audit. The production speed and quality of video are greatly improved, and the penetration of production links is the embodiment of greater value of video cloud in the next stage.
In terms of consumers, there was still a gap between cloud computing and consumers in the past, that is, after 2C Internet companies purchased cloud computing, they distributed its bandwidth to 2C consumers.
However, at the present stage, cloud computing can provide more functions in the consumer process, such as beauty, weight loss, etc. In the consumption process, cloud computing is not a single assistant or software, but more intelligent processing. The video interaction and the improvement of intelligent mutual immersion in this process will create greater value.
In the consumption link, another is precision marketing. When we have massive data and massive content, the first one is to distribute the content. The second one is to do marketing realization while distributing the content, and use various algorithms to depict the user’s portrait so that the video can find the user better and more accurately.
New trend of video on cloud
The video cloud itself is based on the Internet pan-entertainment, and will penetrate into a wider range of industries in the future, because these overall industries have a greater use of transmission or processing. As the video cloud continues to have different environmental capabilities, it will evolve in various industries.
Service scenario of different video cloud solution can go to choose, can be divided into two large categories, one is the platform level ability of companies and service providers, is an application level ability of companies and service providers, according to your own development ability and the strength of the industry attribute to choose, in fact you can choose in the middle of the process industry, common platform of this kind of company.
For cloud computing, we may regard it as relatively high technology, very soft so a domain, then actually video cloud at the technical level in the future will still go to the pursuit of technical perfection, although can see it has a lot of value, but the advance technology, we think that is not to mature stage, it also is the need to address both its Gao Qinghua, real-time and interactive, This process is definitely not a single link of software can be solved, we often refer to such as software-defined network, software-defined storage, software-defined hardware, etc.
How to make software define everything basically requires us to cooperate with our hardware, no matter routers, storage, more computing capacity and other links. We believe that the future cooperation between cloud companies and hardware companies will be more frequent.
Finally, low-code development is now mentioned, so that many people who are doing video cloud or video can call our functions more quickly and more quickly.
We all know that innovation develops rapidly sometimes based on two characteristics, one is more links, and the second is less costly trial and error.
This is why in the big data campus, such as Silicon Valley or coffee shops, there will be a lot of weak links. You can do trial and error, but how can you improve the possibility of weak links and trial and error in the process?
We believe that the form of cloud can do this well in various industries. We also look forward to the video cloud itself to better play the function of its big base for the whole video industry or the whole big video industry.
The above is the full text of his speech.
“Video cloud technology” your most noteworthy audio and video technology public account, weekly push from Ali Cloud front-line practice technology articles, here with the audio and video field first-class engineers exchange exchange. You can join ali Cloud video cloud product technology exchange group, and the industry together to discuss audio and video technology, get more industry latest information.