"Though none of the service providers we interviewed for our latest multiscreen study support virtualized multiscreen video infrastructure in an NFV environment today, this grows to 42% by 2016". This is how Jeff Heynen, a principal analyst at Infonetics Research, a leading research firm, described the adoption of virtualization by multiscreen video providers in the release of Infonetics' latest report on Multiscreen TV.
Infonetics via its 2014 Multiscreen TV Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey report highlighted that more than half (58%) of the pay-TV operators surveyed are at present, offering multiscreen service which sees the same content being accesible across tablets, PCs/laptops, and mobile phones with nearly half offering live streaming. The report also points out that transcoding is becoming more distributed with the percentage of providers transcoding video content in their headend falling to 16% in 2015. The study also showed that Ericsson and Harmonic are the most familiar multiscreen vendors within the service provider circles.
Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research
Service providers want flexibility in the processing platforms they use to encode and play out video content. Network functions virtualization (NFV) moves functions usually embedded in network hardware -- such as encoders and video on demand (VoD) playout servers -- into software that can run in a virtual machine on standard servers, giving operators more flexibility in how they process and distribute video content.
