Cloud computing promises to become the dominant implementation approach for new computing infrastructure, overtaking traditional approaches to constructing enterprise datacenters and web server farms.
Video is inevitably moving online. Though online video currently represents only 1-2% of overall video consumption, online video consumption continues to increase, and is far from saturation. Because video started moving online prior to the emergence of cloud computing, online video largely uses pre-cloud infrastructure technologies. Increased video consumption will require new infrastructure. Thus, we can look to create the next generation of video infrastructure technologies using cloud technologies, which we call video in the cloud.
Current cloud computing technologies are not particularly video capable. Any modern server whether in the cloud or not can run a video application and even deliver a few video streams. However, video in the aggregate, especially at the scale required for significant video handling and delivery, is a much larger problem that stresses the underpinnings of any computing infrastructure. The continual evolution of computing technology may eventually solve the video problem. Nonetheless, focusing on and addressing the problems of supporting video sooner offers insight in supporting other large scale problems. Video is big data and big bandwidth and big session counts. Thus, directly addressing video will benefit other application areas that also put pressure on storage, bandwidth, and/or distributed processing.
Here, we explore (a) the relationship of cloud computing and video services, (b) the various business and technical considerations, and (c) what would be required to support fully video in the cloud.