InBroadcast
As online video viewing surges, so have consumer
expectations for a high-quality viewing experience. CDN vendors play a key role
in enabling you to bypass internet congestion.
Content delivery network (CDNs) will play a central role in
the transformation of TV. As we watch more content on more devices, spend on
CDN services to deliver video over the open internet will near US$16 billion by
2023, according to Ovum. CDNs will be critical to ensuring streams start fast,
play buffer-free and generally meet consumers’ increasingly high standards as
demand scales.
The problem is that with the increasing number of new
streaming services, there will be even more video traffic originating from a
handful of sources. In the end, the quality of the user experience will depend
on aspects such as how crowded the CDN caches and streaming servers are, how
and where the streams got into the ISP, the capacity of the core network, what
kind of access network is used and how many users are sharing the same
connection? Since all the big streaming services are relying on the same, to a
large extent shared best-effort infrastructure, they will impact each other.
“The question is do you have the tools in place to know if
your users are suffering from availability or rebuffing issues, or are you
waiting until you learn about your problems in social media?” asks Johan Bolin,
CTO at Edgeware. “If you have the tools, do you know if the problem is
the CDN caches melting down, crowded peering interfaces or over loaded ISP
networks? Do you have visibility to see if there are better routes for your
streams to avoid the most crowded spots? Would moving to another CDN help out?
If you can see this, do you have the means and skills to move?”
Limelight says its video delivery offers the
lowest rebuffer rates in the industry. It also has one of the world’s largest
networks boasting 70+ Tbps egress capacity and a 100GbE private fibre backbone
connected to more than 1000 ISP and last-mile networks. It has 130 PoPs “unlike
other cloud solutions that may restrict your presence to a handful of
datacentres.”
Limelight’s CDN service continually monitors and optimises
video delivery based on realtime conditions. Limelight MMD-OD and MMD-Live
provide on-the fly packaging of on-demand and live video content that makes it
easy to reach viewers on any device.
Charlie Kraus, Senior Product Marketing Manager, says
“To maintain consumer expectations for multi-device viewing, it’s important to
have a CDN with the capability to do device detection and automatically
optimise picture quality for each viewer’s device, available bandwidth and
network conditions.”
Origin failures occur when a server is overwhelmed with
requests, due to congested networks or other unexpected events. These
failures can keep origin responses from getting back to the client; hence, the
need for redundant server architectures.
Akamai's solution is Origin Failover for its Adaptive
Media Delivery product to make it easier to detect and recover quickly from
such failures. Origin Failover offers a self-service solution for maintaining
continuity of playback in the event of an origin failure.
It is designed to identify origin and network issues before
they extend to the client, helping to reduce the likelihood of a rebuffer event
during a failure. By detecting issues as close to the origin as possible,
this reduces the time to recovery by failing over before the client-side player
detects an issue. In turn, this minimises impact to playback performance
in terms of rebuffering during failures.
According to Ovum, the ability to analyse and manage
multiple CDNs to deliver the best quality experiences for the best possible
cost will be an important strategy for OTT providers. The big question is: how
can they take back control of their TV delivery without going down the client
integration route?
StreamPilot is Edgeware’s solution. This cloud-based
session SaaS control platform, offered as part of the Edgeware Cloud Service,
is agnostic to both CDN and client. Avoiding any vendor lock-in, Edgeware says
this makes it ideal for multi-CDN environments and allows users to
“pro-actively and in-session” switch or modify the delivery of every single
segment from the CDNs to whatever client device viewers might use. Furthermore,
it enforces distribution policies and can block illegal streaming.
StreamPilot measures every segment request made by the
client and redirects it to the most optimised CDN. This provides important
information such as bitrate, device type and delivering CDN, and essential data
on which to base any actions needed in order to optimise the QoE in real time. Information
is presented in an open API-based dashboard for integration with other systems.
Supporting DASH, HLS and MSS this means all content assets can be watched on
any Android, Apple or Microsoft client.
“Many technology providers claim to provide low-latency
video streaming solutions, by reducing the player buffer size without optimising
the network - Yet, the performance of these solutions is in a lab setting, so
they don’t account for jitter on real-world networks or the succession of
rebufferings that can occur, which impacts QoE,” says Jacques Le Mancq, CEO at Broadpeak.
Broadpeak has joined forces with encoding expert ATEME
to resolve the issue. The solution combines ATEME’s content adaptive
encoding tools with Broadpeak’s BkS350 Origin Server and Packager, BkE200
transcaster server, and nanoCDN. While Akamai, Synamedia and Velocix also have
their own Multicast ABR solutions, the nanoCDN is claimed as the only
technology around that combines multicast delivery with CMAF and HTTP CTE,
allowing continuous (on-the-fly) video delivery. The solution supports the
emerging DVB-I standard.
Briefly summarised, MABR allows for the distribution of one
physical copy of video content to all users in an ABR format (DASH and HLS) via
multicast rather than HTTP individual connections. “The fact is that MABR does
actually save bandwidth compared with unicast,” declare Broadpeak.
Broadpeak also offers the umbrellaCDN, a concept allowing
content providers to create CDN selection rules based on parameters such as
user location, content requested and time of the day. A CDN
Diversity feature takes advantage of the capacities of several CDNs at the
same time. This not only has the benefit of in-built redundancy but delivers a
video quality claimed to exceed that of a single best effort CDN.
Vualto Control Hub (VCH) (from Vualto) also uses
event-based scheduling to organise live streams, to automate the provisioning
of infrastructure according to user-defined parameters. The origins, encoders
and other infrastructure components can be built, installed and configured
automatically before an event is scheduled to start, all tied into the
monitoring already available in the orchestration and delivery tool.
The latest feature allows for the configuration of a live
stream for use by multiple end users, on multiple devices, with multiple
subscriber conditions. “The VCH enables you to be in complete control of
the tracks you select,” Vualto explains. “You select the tracks that you want
to present from a publishing point, under different playout manifests.”
While StreamGuys may be best known for helping radio
broadcasters and podcasters deliver premium audio, the company has been
expanding its video streaming tools and services. “We are essentially a
one-stop shop for live video streaming at enterprise scale,” explains Eduardo
Martinez, director of technology. “Customers can send us a high-quality,
single-bitrate feed, and we can repurpose it as necessary and act as an origin
for efficient delivery to many destinations. By offering this as a managed
service, we spare customers from having to manage and maintain a multitude of
encoders and servers, as well as reducing their bandwidth requirements to just
a single stream out of their facility.”
StreamGuys’ supports SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) for
both ingest and output with current or upcoming support for ultra-low-latency
technologies including WebRTC, low-latency CMAF and Softvelum’s SLDP. The
latter is directly supported in StreamGuys’ embeddable, consumer-facing
SGplayer HTML5 multimedia player.
Although most social media platforms can ingest streams via
the RTMP protocol, they often have slightly different requirements for
resolutions, bitrates and other parameters. StreamGuys explains that it can
transcode, transrate or transmux source streams as needed to optimise delivery
for each outlet.
“Unlike many other streaming solution providers, we don’t
take a ‘cookie cutter’ approach,” says Martinez. “All of our technologies are
highly interoperable and can be deployed in combination or à la carte, giving
us the flexibility to match any broadcaster or media enterprise’s desired
workflow. Combining that with our renowned ‘white-glove’ customer service
enables us to provide customers with exactly the right video streaming solution
for their requirements.”
Last September, MediaKind launched a range of
cloud-based solutions: Aquila Streaming, Cygnus 360° Events, Cygnus Contribution and
Cygnus Distribution. The latter enables secure, reliable ingress and egress of
live video and audio from public cloud instances as well as reliable transport
within the cloud itself. When paired with MediaKind’s modular receivers and MK
Director, its control and conditional access management software product,
Cygnus Distribution “provides a flexible and futureproof offering that secures
high value, premium content across all distribution networks,” says Mark
Russell, Chief Strategy Officer. “As well as enabling regional and local ad
insertion, this new packaged solution opens the path towards low risk migration
from satellite to IP network distribution.”
Anevia’s video CDN solution promises to deliver low
latency and broadcast-quality content, even during high viewing periods. NEA-CDN
does this by using video-caching algorithms, such as content awareness, to
improve efficiency and hit-ratio. Coupled with a “chunk-sharing technology”
between live and cloud DVR services, it also claims to enhance content delivery
performance and optimise network usage by up to 30%.
NEA-CDN can also run on an elastic cloud infrastructure
“that can match any viewing demand” by temporarily scaling up during
peaks. Alternatively, for managed mobile and IPTV networks, it can also
use MABR technology so that high audience streams can be played back
immediately by an unlimited number of viewers, simultaneously. For unmanaged
networks, it can also use peer-to-peer acceleration to overcome network
capacity limitations.
Brightcove’s biggest recent release was Brightcove
Beacon. It’s a SaaS-based OTT platform, comprising a Content Management System
(CMS), an admin portal, and an application generator. In the CMS, users can
designate how you want your content to be displayed to users—creating content
playlists and the content publishing structure (using easy-to-change metadata
tags). The admin portal permits design of the UEX and also set up of any
advertising.
With this done, the application generator will create native
code for the specific devices on which you want to launch the OTT experience.
The whole process makes it a lot quicker to package your app and submit it to
the appropriate app stores—making it easier than ever to get to market.
Ends
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