Currently, 27% of US web traffic is on a low bandwidth connection, 72% on high bandwidth, and 1% on very high bandwidth (but growing). Within each of these bandwidth categories is a range of connections that accommodate end user viewing of different levels of video quality.

If a content provider offers only one quality level of its videos, the content provider reduces its audience reach, diminishes its user experience, and loses revenue opportunities.

If a content provider offers different quality levels of its videos, the content provider must store, maintain and manage multiple copies of each video, increasing costs by 2-3X.

The content provider must decide whether to limit its reach, user experience and revenue opportunities, or incur 2-3X extra costs.

About 75% of the content providers offer only medium quality videos that diminish the user experience for high bandwidth visitors and that cannot be viewed by low bandwidth visitors (or viewable with frequent buffering interruptions). About 25% offer both high and low bandwidth quality levels.

The Solution: Realtime Video Conversion™(RVC)

Vercury's Realtime Video Conversion™ enables an online content provider to store just the highest quality video stream, but to deliver different quality videos over different bandwidths on the fly.

RVC saves the content provider the cost and complexity of storing, maintaining and managing multiple copies of videos for various bandwidth levels, improves the user experience, and extends the reach of the content provider to users with both high and low bandwidth connections, with minimal affect on the systems CPU load or performance.

RVC stores the highest quality video stream on the content providers servers. When a user visits the site through a high bandwidth connection and views or downloads the video, RVC delivers a copy of the highest quality video stream to the end user. When a user visits the site through a slower bandwidth connection, RVC generates the video on the fly from the server with a pixel resolution, frame rate and bit rate that accommodates the users data connection.

The Benefits

Greater Audience Reach and Optimized Viewing Experience

Since RVC enables delivery of different quality videos to users visiting on various bandwidth connections, RVC extends the reach of the content provider to a greater size audience, and enables the content provider to optimize each users experience.

In short, by using RVC, video content providers and e-marketers can touch more users with a better viewing experience, which generates additional revenue opportunities.

Cost Savings

The cost to store a video at the current $0.50/gigabyte depends on the quality of video:

Video Quality	Bit Rate (kbps)	Pixel Resolution (W x H)	Frame Rate (fps)	Megabytes of Storage per Minute of Video	Storage Cost per Minute of Video
High	900	480 X 360	30	7	0.35¢
Medium	600	320 X 240	15	5	0.25¢
Low	400	240 X 200	10	3	0.15¢

The average video is about 4 minutes long. To offer low, medium and high quality copies of the video would cost 0.75 ¢ / video minute, or 3 ¢/ video to store (plus the power, A/C, space and human costs).

Lets say a content provider has over 100 million videos, adding 100,000 videos every day, on 25 content delivery network server locations (points) around the world, and offers videos at medium quality only. Low bandwidth users cannot view the videos and high bandwidth users lose quality. With RVC, however, the content provider could expand its reach and improve its user experience without incurring the additional $1.6 million (100 million videos x 4 minutes x 0.4 ¢/ video) in storage costs on its existing library plus $1,600 (100,000 videos x 4 minutes x 0.4 ¢/ video) for each day of new videos ($584,000 / year).

In addition to the memory costs, there are the environmental costs to store, maintain and manage multiple copies of a video, such as power, A/C, space and human costs, which are even greater than the storage costs.

In addition, there are environmental costs to store, maintain and manage multiple copies of a video, such as power, A/C, space and human costs.

And, as bandwidth connections and video quality improve, the costs savings will grow even greater. With HD and DVD quality (video on demand), the cost of storage 2- 10 times greater:

Video Quality	Bit Rate (kbps)	Pixel Resolution (W x H)	Frame Rate (fps)	Megabytes of Storage per Minute of Video	Storage Cost per Minute of Video
HD 1080p	8000	1920 X 1080	30	63	2.7¢
HD 720p	3500	1280 X 720	30	28	1.2¢
DVD 480p	1400	720 X 480	30	11	0.5¢

Format Flexibility

If standards or video player formats change (the addition of new formats for wireless devices for example), then RVC can be modified to accommodate the new standard or format, instead of requiring the content provider to create and store a whole new set of multiple copies that meet the new standard or player formats.

In summary, RVC enables content providers to:

• Extend audience reach
• Improve user experience
• Increase revenue opportunities
• Eliminate the cost of storing multiple copies

RVC is turn-key, production ready software available today that takes less than an hour to install and begin using, and requires very low maintenance.

More Information

If you would like to learn more about Vercurys Realtime Video Conversion™ technology, please see a presentation here

Please also visit our FAQ page for RVC™