Meta in Europe have been embarking on a bold new option to enhance the user experience for their Instagram Reels content in Europe for Mobile Data customers of Vodafone and Telefonica. As part of the group labelled as Large Content Generators in Europe – accounting for over 50% of network traffic, the move to cooperation with large telecom organizations is welcome.

The proposals as outlined by Telefonica ^[1][2] and Vodafone^[3] focus on improving user experience with Instagram Reels short-form videos. In the case of Telefonica this is further detailed as interfacing to Meta via a new API/protocol initiative called SconePro^[4]  which enables the network to communicate a cap (ceiling) on the media rate for video per app. The principle behind this is both to provide proactive limit initially and a more reactive self-imposed limits based on the API on an on-going basis. The results are positive and welcome, showing how APIs and the user data experience can be improved without detriment to either content provider and communication service provider.

There is a direct correlation of video stream resolution to bandwidth required for delivery with high-definition video streams requiring 3-4X the bandwidth of standard definition streams for the same small screen mobile devices. The increasing demand for video streaming in the last couple of years has increased tension between the big 6 content generators (Google/Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft) and the large European telecom organizations, with repeated calls for regulator intervention, this has been labelled the ‘fair share’ debate.

It should also be highlighted that in the US market Netflix have continued with their Netflix basic offer^[5] to limit the resolution of their content for users subscribing to this plan to 720p, subsequently re-packaged into mobile data plans by large US Telcos. This a popular option in the US as users have realised they don’t need / can’t use premium access on all of their different device types. Such an option was available in Europe during the pandemic but no longer.

The Enea data shows that the same stream delivered at a lower resolution level is indistinguishable, on smaller screen sizes e.g. smart phones by the end user between HD and SD video – in our testing just under half the users (43%) thought standard level was high definition. Instagram Reels content is gaining traction in the market for end user attention against TikTok, for example. In mobile data consumption terms however it is variable by location, with Instagram accounting for an average of 7.6% of data compared to 27% for Facebook and TikTok 13%*.

As adaptive bit rate & QUIC protocol is predominate among the large streaming content providers a more common approach to limiting, with user consent or when the network is experiencing the practical limits of transmission (e.g. transient congestion), should be considered; this is the Enea approach handling the of all the mobile data traffic (70% of which is streaming) with quality of experience sensitive communication management – matching network capacity to video resolution to quality of service.

An additional point to note is that CSPs and large content generators would have to come to individual agreements favors large content providers at the expense of smaller market entrants. In this model the potential is that CSP’s cede more network control to these players – something which may not on the Network Ops Centre (NOC) team’s bucket-list.

Coming up a level, thinking about the problem of capacity versus content bandwidth demand, why handle less than 10% of the traffic for one part of Meta, when you can handle 10X that volume across all of the large traffic generators for the category of content that is streaming video.

If you want to know how to do that then check out the Enea traffic management capabilities @ Click Here

[1] https://www.telefonica.com/es/sala-comunicacion/prensa/telefonica-meta-mejoran-experiencia-video-corto-eficiencia-red/

[2] https://www.telefonica.com/en/communication-room/press-room/telefonica-meta-boost-short-video-experience-network-efficiency/

[3] https://www.vodafone.com/news/technology/vodafone-and-meta-optimise-short-form-videos-to-improve-network-efficiency

[4] IETF SconePro https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/sconepro/about/

[5] Netflix basic plan https://about.netflix.com/en/news/announcing-basic-with-ads-us.

*Data from Enea deployments in 25 countries, 2024.