The maturation of the streaming market is making success—and how we measure it—much more complex.

This means the streaming market requires a thoughtful approach to delivering a great experience to every user regardless of the device they are viewing. Consumers now expect nothing less than a high resolution and smooth playback experience at all times. Detection and root-cause identification of any barriers to an excellent experience is more challenging than ever due to the complexity of today’s streaming technology ecosystem. Diverse mobile-connected TV devices and associated video/app tech stacks, sophisticated cloud-based media preparation, content distribution, and advertising tech stacks all can contribute to more microscopic and subtle failure modes. Additionally, experience goes beyond just the quality of the stream. It’s also the ads that are served and the content published on social media. A strategic streaming TV publisher needs to consider every consumer touchpoint to content. Without a solution that allows them to measure and act upon problems occurring in real time, it’s hard to execute a thoughtful strategy.

This report analyzes the state of streaming in the second quarter of 2022, including a closer look at what’s happening in streaming viewership, device segments, ads and more. It’s based on data primarily collected using Conviva’s proprietary sensor technology, which covers a global footprint of more than 500 million unique viewers watching 200 billion streams per year across nearly four billion device applications. Embedded directly within streaming video applications, Conviva’s sensor measures content and ads to analyze nearly three trillion real-time transactions per day.

This State of Streaming report compares Q2 2022 data against Q2 2021 on a carefully cleaned, normalized, and aggregated basis. Common themes that emerged in this period include: Bitrates are rising. Average bitrate increased universally across all regions, screen types, and top devices. Publishers are responding to customer demand for higher quality by releasing more of their content with all of the bells and whistles such as 4K, HDR and spatial audio. This increasingly includes prestige serial content, which has historically sat out the quality arms race. These trends continue to push up bitrates, sometimes at the expense of other Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics such as video start time. To balance the competing demands of providing high quality, feature-rich content while supporting a TV-like quality of experience for all viewers (not to mention containing delivery costs), publishers are adopting ever-more-sophisticated encoding and delivery optimization strategies.