CDN Strategy Blog

As a CDN, we have access to detailed statistics that give us a great insight in trends in streaming media. But the stats aren’t ours, they are our customers’. So we can’t share them.

Therefore, traditionally, StreamZilla publishes a fireplace stream during the winter months on www.fireplacetv.nl. These streams are watched by ten thousands international viewers and generate many terabytes traffic.

Every year we publish a small report to update our relations on the trends in streaming media:

Fireplace TV stream trends: HD, Silverlight, Eastern Europe, Snow and Christmas.

The fireplace videos are made available as true streams in Flash (RTMP) and Silverlight (MMS/RTSP) at 800Kbps, 1500Kbps and in 720p HD quality at 4Mbps. This year something interesting happened:

HD most popular
For the first time in 4 years, the 4Mbps High Definition streams were the most popular streams: 42% of all the streams were watched in true streaming HD quality. The 1500Kbps and 800Kbps respectively streams accounted for 30% and 28%

Silverlight gaining ground
Flash is still the most popular format: 56% of the streams were watched in Flash (H.264) format, but a surprising 39% were watched in Silverlight. Silverlight is more popular in Europe than in the USA

iPhone streams
The iPhone streams take 5% market share, but over 60% of these views were from Windows PC’s. We guess these viewers just wanted to check out the video quality for an iPhone. The market share of actual iPhones is about 2%.

International
The streams were watched from over 60 countries around the world. Due to popularity of the fireplace streams on various portals, the Netherlands lead with 44%. The USA is #2 with 27%. Besides the Netherlands, Europe is led by Italy with 10%. Western Europe further dominates the streams, but it is interesting to see how fast Eastern European countries are getting into the charts: Poland, Russia, Croatia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary for instance.

Snow and Christmas cause peaks
On Thursday December 17, heavy snowfall covered parts of Western Europe. This resulted in an almost 300% increase on the number of streamed fireplaces. Historically, the most popular day is still December 25.

I wish you a great 2010: stream on!