Analyzing the technology behind short videos and reopening the battle against CDN

If the live streaming industry was booming in 2016, 2017 is a great opportunity for short videos to catch up.

According to the statistics of the "2016 Short Video Content Ecosystem White Paper", more than 30 financings have taken place in short video content startups in 2016, and the financing scale of related entrepreneurial projects has reached 5.37 billion yuan. The short video industry has gradually risen, and a group of high-quality UGC content producers have emerged. One particularly notable point is that short videos have become the focus of traffic support for video platforms and information terminals since 2017. From Tencent's investment of US$350 million in Kuaishou, Alibaba's focus on supporting Miaopai and UC Short Video, and Toutiao's spin-off of Huoshan Short Video, we can see that the competition is getting fierce.

For short video platforms, the core of operation is how to seize the fragmented time of users. On the one hand, they need to quickly occupy a place in the vertical field through their own business model, and on the other hand, they need to complete the technical foundation of the platform. In the current short video market dominated by content competition, top self-media teams such as Papi Jiang, Yitiao, Chen Xiang Liu Dian Ban, etc. have received huge market attention, and content producers also tend to operate professionally. "Professionalization" means that a series of integrated technical systems involved in short videos, such as file uploading, video storage, transcoding processing, distribution and playback, are facing greater challenges.

As a provider of acceleration services for the Internet, CDN became the biggest winner behind the live streaming boom in 2016, and its technical advantages were fully unleashed. It is foreseeable that technical solutions to meet the needs of short videos will also bring a new wave of market growth for CDN.

As we all know, short videos refer to small video files that are generally between 10 seconds and 5 minutes long. They are short, flat, and fast. They need to be played immediately after uploading. Compared with traditional long videos, users have a very low tolerance for lag. Because long videos will be pre-fetched and refreshed, and the files will be distributed to CDN nodes in advance, but short video content is UGC, and often cannot be pre-fetched to various CDN nodes for preheating like long videos, which puts great demands on the distribution capabilities within the video platform.

From this point of view alone, CDN technology used in short videos may be more fully utilized:

First, short video platforms with massive resources tend to focus more on "user-generated content" in terms of content production. Since the content is produced by users, there is a situation that the video platform must publish the content quickly after the user uploads it. This involves video transcoding and CDN distribution.

Secondly, due to the diversity of current mobile terminals, their different performances and playback capabilities, complex network environments, massive video content, and diverse video file formats, various video content sources cannot be played directly on mobile terminals due to encoding format compatibility issues. Content operation websites need to invest high costs in manpower, storage space, bandwidth, etc. to transcode.

Third, for short video companies using CDN services, after their speed experience is guaranteed, they will focus on a more comprehensive perspective, mainly covering the following six points: stable architecture, complete functions, excellent performance, customer needs, rapid response capabilities of services, and reasonable prices. However, few companies on the market can fully meet these needs.

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As the first domestic company to develop CDN and P2P technologies independently and support 400 million daily active users, how did Yunfan Accelerator deeply understand the pain points of the short video industry and solve them?

The links involved in short videos mainly include complex processes such as shooting, transmission, transcoding, storage, distribution, and playback, and each link is crucial.

Deeply cultivating short video usage scenarios and highlighting the differentiated value beyond the standard configuration

From the perspective of shooting, functions such as horizontal and vertical screen shooting, multi-segment recording, clip re-deletion, beauty filters, and AR animation (faceU) basically meet the current market gameplay series. According to a recent evaluation report, among several video solutions on the market, Alibaba Cloud is slightly insufficient in AR animation and audio and video editing and processing, Tencent Cloud and NetEase Cloud lack horizontal and vertical screen shooting functions, soft editing, and H.265 codec functions, while Kingsoft Cloud cannot support the video playback speed setting and the function of splicing shot videos with local files. In terms of completeness, Yunfan Accelerator currently supports almost all functions of the shooting module. It is worth noting that the usage scenarios of short videos and long videos are very different. Platforms such as Miaopai and Meipai, where many users gather, originated in second- and third-tier cities. Users who produce content mainly need soft coding functions, and most mainstream platforms do not support them except Yunfan Accelerator and Kingsoft Cloud.

The most technically complex links in short videos are editing and uploading. Judging from the evolution trend of the current main short video apps, the threshold for spontaneous users to make videos is constantly decreasing, and the diversified functions are indirectly attracting traffic to the platform and enhancing stickiness. According to statistics, special effects, editing, mixing, splicing, synthesis and other functions are subdivided into 23 small functions. Watermarks, beauty, filters, and AR animations are basically standard features, and Yunfan Accelerator has them all. Standard features cannot reflect the differentiated value of short video solutions. Yunfan Accelerator leads the market in special features such as short video generation speed, generation of GIF animations, and support for H.264/H.265 transcoding.

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Self-developed CDN scheduling system with leading video encoding and decoding solutions helps the platform reduce bandwidth costs

Because of the instability and large fluctuations of mobile networks, how to make the product overcome these factors and make short video shooting and uploading smoother has become a problem. Yunfan Acceleration supports intelligent planning of upload links, fragmented uploads, and breakpoint resumption, which is basically at the same level as the release modules of major short video solution providers. What is more distinctive is that Yunfan’s self-developed CDN scheduling system supports city-level regionalized precise scheduling, adopts an active discovery mechanism from users to target nodes, and plans not the shortest distance, but the fastest upload route. Especially for weak network environments, it improves upload speed and upload success rate.

Many CDN vendors on the market have expressed their support for H.265 in their publicity, but few have complete solutions. In the current network environment, many high-quality videos have to lower their quality standards and use various methods to reduce the bit rate, sacrificing quality for smooth playback. Yunfan Acceleration fully considers the current equipment network conditions of short video creators and the future expansion capabilities of the system. It is the first in China to launch a video live broadcast encoding and decoding and transmission acceleration solution that combines H.265 with the existing H.264. It only requires half the bandwidth to play videos of the same quality, greatly reducing bandwidth costs, and enabling networks below 1.5Mbps to transmit 1080P high-definition video.

According to official data from Gomez, a global third-party speed measurement company, when the page loading time exceeds 7 seconds, 50% of users will choose to give up, and every additional 1 second of delay will lead to a 7% decrease in conversion rate. For short videos, stability and large concurrent access are a headache. Accurately locate the location of the user end, optimize the IO process, and quickly send video data to the playback end. The playback technology inherits and optimizes the core decoding technology of Qvod, with high performance and high fault tolerance, multiple patented technology inventions, and multi-terminal adaptation. It is customized for customers such as Xinlan.com, Zhanqi, and Lang LIVE Live, achieving a second-opening effect. This is exactly the best way for short video platforms to retain users with leading technology.

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Help short videos expand their value-added space and lead the video industry in exploration

In the future, short video platforms will face more demands for value-added services, and the operation of video content sections needs to expand larger space. As short videos will enter more vertical and more segmented fields, the maturity and stability of related technologies have been raised to new standards. Yunfan Acceleration has signed service agreements with more than 50 industry top-level customers, including multiple licensees, local TV new media, and multiple interactive live broadcast platforms (Zhanqi, Longzhu, etc.). As for the streaming media field it is familiar with, it has launched a variety of video-related functional components and functional modules, which can save a lot of energy and cost for market research and R&D investment for short video platforms, and realize the rapid construction of platforms and the rapid launch of functions. After all, in the face of increasingly fierce market competition, companies need to consider not only cost investment, but also time cost-this is an era where the fast fish eat the slow fish. Professional service providers doing professional things may achieve better results.

Conclusion : 2017 is already halfway through, and everyone has different thoughts on where the short video industry will go in the second half. There is reason to believe that the technical confrontation and overall solution confrontation behind short videos will be absolutely important factors in the second half of the battle.