Market research firm Infonetics Research has released excerpts from its 2014 Multiscreen TV Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey, which provides insight into pay-TV operator plans for multiscreen video services and delivering live and file-based video content to subscribers over multiple devices.

“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 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,” notes Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.

“Though none of the service providers we interviewed for our latest multiscreen study support virtualised multiscreen video infrastructure in an NFV environment today, this grows to 42 per cent by 2016,” adds Heynen.

Survey highlights include:
– 58 per cent of respondent service providers currently support all three primary multiscreen devices in the home: tablets, PCs/laptops, and mobile phones
– Nearly half of operators surveyed offer live streaming today
– Transcoding is becoming more distributed: Only 16 per cent of respondents plan to transcode video content in their headend in 2015
– Respondents rank Ericsson and Harmonic as the most familiar multiscreen vendors

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