Video technology has demonstrated remarkable versatility, with the potential to transmit real-time, interactive experiences. Video can be used to encode social, entertainment, information, or software-based experience and deliver them to ubiquitous devices like PCs, TVs, and smartphones. Achieving more fluid collaborative and interactive experiences requires higher resolutions and framerates at lower latency. For services aspiring to scale, challenges have included cost, quality of service, visual quality, and motion-to-photon latency.

New cloud architectures promise to resolve user experience gaps. These architectures distribute compute to the network edge, lowering latency, decreasing backhaul traffic, and enabling new forms of data/sensor/display edge processing. Unfortunately, the cost of deployment and operations increases sharply at the edge of the network. The combination of smaller scale, expensive space and enclosures, remote management and maintenance, multi-site security, dedicated power system, and other factors make base stations and their server capacity expensive relative to large data centers.