Google Needs a Strategy for Video on 安卓 Devices

Many content owners who want to get their live event-based streaming content on mobile phones and tablets quickly find out that getting it to 安卓设备是极具挑战性的. 不像苹果的iOS平台, Google has yet to provide an easy way to get live video to 安卓 devices, 到目前为止, it hasn’t detailed any strategy for fixing the situation. 我与许多内容所有者交谈过, as well as those who help these content owners encode and distribute their video, are now questioning why they should even continue to go through all the trouble of trying to support 安卓-based devices at all.

While media companies can always build an app for their event series, most do one-off events and are faced with streaming to the mobile web and reaching their audience using browsers on 安卓 and iOS devices. 当安卓手机开始流行, live video was supported in the mobile browser via Adobe Flash, so digital video professionals with live content to distribute were able to keep doing what they were doing on the desktop. That’s not to say that Flash was perfect; in many cases these desktop players were heavy, containing ad overlays and metadata interaction that had a major impact on the playback quality. To get better quality video playback, some people turned to RTSP delivery. 安卓 touted RTSP as its native live video format until 安卓 2.3.4 came out, after which that feature no longer worked.

The most effective way to get live video to 安卓 browsers was to make a stripped-down Flash player that didn’t demand much from the phones. Video was decoded in the software, but it would drain batteries quickly. It was imperfect, but it functioned well enough. 随着安卓 3的推出.0, it looked like HLS support was going to be built-in for all future devices, 这在某种程度上是正确的. HLS support doesn’t match the specification, and buffering is common. Industry-leading HLS implementations such as those from Cisco and Akamai Technologies will not load on 安卓 devices, 所以在大多数情况下, 内容所有者又回到了Flash. But now Flash isn’t available for new 安卓 phones.

现在, content owners are left in an awkward state if they want to deliver live video to 安卓 browsers. If Flash is present, you can deliver a basic Flash video player. 如果不是的话, 你可以试着提供HLS, but the HLS manifests must either be hand-coded or created using 安卓-specific tools. 如果HLS视频可以播放没有缓冲, you’ll find that there is no way to specify the aspect ratio, 竖屏模式下它看起来坏了. The aspect ratio problem seems to have been fixed in 安卓 4.1, but it will often crash if you enter video playback in landscape mode and leave in portrait. You can allow the HLS video to open and play in a separate application, but you lose the ability to communicate with the page, and exiting the video dumps users back on their home screens.

Content owners can still send the same live video to iOS devices that they could in 2009, and it will play smoothly with little buffering. Live video support for browser-based streaming within 安卓 tablets and phones is a significant challenge with little help available from Google. And with Google still talking about removing H.264 video support in 安卓, many content owners are wondering why they should even try to support 安卓 any longer. What’s clear is that Google doesn’t have a strategy to fix the problem, and many content owners and video ecosystem vendors are frustrated. Content owners want to get their live video on as many devices and platforms as possible, 而现在, getting it to 安卓 devices is very difficult and costly. 除非谷歌介入解决这个问题, don’t expect content owners to continue to try to support 安卓 devices for live video streaming.

This article appeared in the December 2012/January 2013 issue of 流媒体杂志.