Let’s face it: with so (so) many streaming platforms now available for us to binge a trendy show or revisit a favorite movie on, technology and entertainment have become inexorably linked. When you really think about it, the technology that makes these streaming services possible is truly impressive. Let’s go over this technology together.
Quelle surprise, right? It’s a safe bet that the average subscriber assumes that the provider streams the media they are requesting over the Internet. After all, you need an Internet connection in order for it to work, so it must be using that network connection to deliver it, right?
Actually, about 85 percent of internet bandwidth is streaming video. That’s a lot of data to send across the internet, to the point where it would be wildly expensive to host these services in the traditional sense and expect it to work effectively for millions of users every day.
These capabilities are actually the result of lots of time and money invested by these streaming services in order to create a functioning infrastructure. Consider how these streaming services function. You log in, go through the catalog the service has made available, and select a title, and your content starts playing on the device of your choosing. The process responsible for this capability is known as over-the-top (OTT) streaming.
OTT streaming delivers content to the device the user wishes, using five steps:
These streaming services are businesses, and so the security of their subscribers’ information is of paramount importance… especially now that 70 percent of businesses are making investments into video and audio streaming. This popularity makes it so that a hacker could make excellent money by finding vulnerabilities in the content distribution process. Combine that with the frequency of shared passwords, and cybersecurity professionals have a lot on their plate concerning cybersecurity.
Furthermore, these companies are also subject to many cybersecurity attempts, with the iffy security practices of their customers not helping matters much. Streaming services regularly have to deal with things like:
Considering that streaming is one of the most utilized, and fastest-growing, services in existence today, the technology behind it is clearly important to consider. What are your thoughts? Leave them (along with any recommendations for things to stream next) in the comments.
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