Auriga, number-one engineering services provider worldwide (as rated by Datamonitor), shares its opinion on the 2011-2012 multimedia mobile development market trends.
To be on the roll in the fast-paced world of software R&D, vendors have to keep a sharp eye on the most promising technologies and market trends. Mobile development—the area that has significantly contributed to Auriga’s client list in recent years—is one such “hot” area.
Though it still makes sense to discuss the competition among various hardware platforms and operating systems,* the main focus of the industry is drifting towards the increasingly growing role of mobile content and apps over mobile platforms in defining user behavior, the overwhelming growth of mobile audio and video traffic, and the efforts manufacturers and developers have to make to meet user expectations.
* At the Mobile World Congress, Android was the leader, accounting for 55.6% of the represented operating systems; iOS followed at 20.5%. The other players included Windows Phone 7 (18.8%), Symbian (3.7%), and Palm (1.5%).
Issues that are even more important are the increased audio and video traffic load and the user demand for high-quality online audio and HD video content. Social networks and mobile apps for business and entertainment generate truly huge mobile data traffic. One of the most evident trends is the expected flood of mobile data** that could hit the mobile-carrier networks within two years. A forecast by Cisco Systems predicts that mobile video traffic will more than double every year from 2010 until 2015, when it will constitute two-thirds of all mobile data.
** For example, recent data from Bytemobile reveals that video generated 40% of all data traffic in 2010 and that 9% of subscribers generate 38% of that video traffic, which demonstrates that the potential for growth is huge.
To deal with this, companies need solutions and platforms designed to optimize mobile video traffic and support the growing video-streaming volume on all types of mobile carrier networks. Moreover, these mobile video solutions must support all popular mobile platforms and be easily integrated with existing legacy backend services such as content-management and e-commerce systems. Auriga’s recent experience fully confirms this trend—among the latest Auriga projects are cloud-based media-sharing solutions for a large multinational companyand anew-generation videoconferencing platform for a highly innovative and ambitious start-up.
One of the solutions delivered by Auriga is a multipoint videoconferencing service that allows PC and mobile-device users to take part in the same conference. To provide a significantly better user experience, the solution transcodes the video-streams on the fly to ensure that higher quality video is enjoyed by PC users with thick network connections, while for mobile users participating in the same conference, it automatically degrades to the level that can be handled by a mobile connection channel. Auriga was responsible for the research, best-solution selection, algorithm selection/optimization, and testing/software development of the server side as well as the Android SIP client for the customer’s proprietary solution. This innovative service has all the advantages necessary to win users across the world and is extremely appealing to corporate users.
Another project involves the development of an Android/iPhone/iPad mobile-media file manager for dealing with pictures, video/audio clips, and PDF documents. The best user experience and highest application performance are achieved through modular server architecture enabling features such as automatic decoding, content streaming with the HTTP progressive download, and media searching. Similar to the multipoint videoconferencing service, this solution has a unique feature crucial for mobile users: While only a single copy of a multimedia file is stored in a cloud-based repository, the quality of the media stream is automatically adapted to match the end-device and channel capabilities. This is achieved by using Amazon Auto Scaling, Amazon Cloud Watch, and Elastic Balancer technologies. The solution helps Auriga’s Customer to deliver a high-quality consumer experience to users.
To gain insight into Auriga’s mobile-development expertise, get in touch with our experts or visit our website.
