How to Overcome Common Video Streaming App Development Challenges

How to Overcome Common Video Streaming App Development Challenges? 

As the worldwide demand for online video continues to expand, businesses must discover innovative media streaming solutions to meet the expectations of this rising online audience. 

Despite enormous developments in streaming technology over the last two decades, the sector continues to confront distinct challenges. Viewers cannot enjoy smooth video streaming because of bandwidth restrictions, latency difficulties, and device compatibility concerns. In this article, we'll go through common video streaming issues and how to overcome them to provide the greatest possible end-user experience.

Solving Video Streaming App Development Services Challenges

User expectations are rising daily: viewers want to watch high-quality video on any device, in any place — without having to wait.

Streaming service providers need solutions that allow them to:

• reach viewers where they are consistently
• scale rapidly as needed because they never know when a certain piece of video content will become viral;
• adapt effectively to changeable network settings and give the finest possible viewing quality in any format

What Can Cause Video Streaming To Slow Down?

Websites that stream video must maintain a high level of performance in order to keep consumers pleased. However, video streaming frequently slows down, resulting in a poor user experience.

The following factors can hinder the performance of video or audio streaming on an OTT platform:
 

• Latency and congestion in the network. The user's device takes too long to get data from the streaming server, or some network segments are clogged.
   
• Video streaming is impossible without a CDN that supports streaming. If there's breaking news or a live event, you'll probably want to watch it live-streamed.
   
• Outages, sluggish clouds servers, and CDN difficulties, which appear to viewers as buffering or halted displays will irritate users, and will probably result in user attrition and revenue loss.

Content distributors need a mechanism to assure smooth, high-quality distribution as their audiences increase. You need a solution to intelligently optimize traffic management with user-by-user, second-by-second granularity to grow internationally while boosting customer satisfaction.

Also Read: Leveraging Blockchain For Video Streaming App Development

OTT application development is made possible through a wide range of technologies:

HTTP progressive download- This is perfect for watching on-demand content. End-users can watch a video before the download is finished, with the stream continuing in the background, thanks to HTTP progressive download. 

Adaptive bitrate- This enables the bitrate of mobile video to be dynamically adjusted based on the device and connection speed. These protocols disassemble the video into little bits, transfer them to the end user's device, and then reassemble it. Some of the most popular protocols used today are:
 

• MPEG-DASH- It recognizes changes in internet connection speed and selects the best video quality for the situation, hence eliminating buffering.
   
• Microsoft Smooth Streaming (MSS)-  Pioneer in ABR protocol. MSS supports the H.264 and VC-1 video codecs and AAC and WMA audio codecs. 
   
• HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)- HLS supports multiple alternate streams at different bitrates, media encryption, and user authentication.
   
• HTTP Dynamic Flash Streaming (HDS)- An evolution of RTMP. This ABR protocol enables content caching on browsers and CDNs to minimize server load.

Video format-  Ensure playback support for multiple file types, including high definition media, H.264/AAC, MP4, MOV, MKV, WMV and many more.

P2P network- This technique facilitates the delivery of video files between end users’ computers, bypassing server and network bottlenecks whilst further improving download speeds. This makes various processing nodes, individual bandwidths, and storage more available.

Understanding a complex app architecture

A specific set of tech is used for video-based OTT application development. Let's talk about the most popular solutions used for developing video streaming platforms.
 

1. Microservices architecture makes development easier

An app is a set of autonomous services that communicate with one another seamlessly via application programming interfaces (APIs). The microservices model allows you to expand simply, iterate quickly, and liberate developers from worrying about dependencies.

2. Cloud storage allows apps to scale 

The most pressing issue is how to properly store and handle data from online TV broadcasting systems and VOD in one place. You have the option of hosting material on your own servers or in the cloud, such as on AWS. While the newest technologies can safeguard both local and cloud-based servers, cloud storage offers more scalability.

3. Content delivery networks (CDNs) eliminate delays

CDN is a network of servers that are connected to each other. A CDN's goal is to distribute material as rapidly and securely as possible.

CDN working mechanism in a nutshell: A CDN keeps a cached version of the content on numerous caching servers in various geographical regions, besides storing media elements on the origin server. When a user requests this material, the CDN locates the server that is nearest to the user and provides the data from that server.

Our Expertise In Developing OTT Video Solutions 

As an OTT app development company, we devote a significant amount of time preparing your streaming app. We carefully build an application interface, designs, and user experience based so that it is reliable and bug-free. Drop us a line today!