InBroadcast
The internet won’t buckle, even as major SVODs dial back their bitrates, but the last months have seen every industry disrupted, and the world is likely never to be quite the same again. What are CDNs doing to keep business communications and streamed entertainment going?
If the pandemic had occurred in two to three years’ time perhaps some of its detrimental effects on the economy would have been alleviated by the capability of 5G networks to ensure a world with faster data, ultra-low latency ultra-reliable high video resolution connections.
As it stands today, that infrastructure is still being built out. The biggest increases in recent traffic recorded by Nokia have come from the videoconferencing sector, especially Zoom, which has grown 700% from February 1 in select networks in the US. “We’ve seen a significant uptake in additional CDN domains for multi-CDN delivery of Zoom services (adding Amazon – in addition to Zoom’s network),” noted Craig Labovitz, head of Nokia’s Deepfield portfolio of products, in a blog.
Other Nokia data revealed newly launched SVOD Disney+ relies on as many as six CDN providers for its video content distribution in Europe. These include Akamai, Level 3, Limelight, Edgecast, CloudFront and Fastly. “Disney+ use of multiple CDNs has the potential to cause traffic shifts (as CDN providers balance their traffic)," wrote Labovitz.
He highlighted that SVOD content delivered from the internet is further testing network peering capacities; Nokia has seen the growth of Netflix cache-based streaming by 20%, and growth of OTT-based streaming by over 100% in some networks. Labovitz also noticed that a large portion of Netflix content now originates outside of on-net CDN caches (located within service providers’ networks).
Most internet engineers seem to agree that any network carrying applications to the end user - mobile and fixed line networks, WiFi, cable or ISPs - needs to shift to the Edge.
As Wowza puts it, “the power of edge computing comes down to proximity. For live streaming, this delivers greater scalability and lightning-fast delivery — not to mention advanced AI/ML capabilities.”
In a nutshell, edge computing involves decentralizing data storage and computation. By bringing real-time processing and decision-making closer to the user, edge computing helps reduce latency, enable advanced analytics, and improve security (among other capabilities).
“Edge environments promise to also amplify automation by reducing the volume of data moving through networks,” Wowza says. “This will become increasingly important as 5G is rolled out, and the IoT takes over.”
Wowza offers organisations the ability to deploy Wowza Streaming Engine and Amazon Web Services giving “a highly elastic and scalable way” to deploy software powering high-quality video and audio streams to any device, anywhere.
Architecture that is able to process, compute and store various types of requests from end users in this distributed fashion is termed Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) by Vimmi.
“There is no doubt that MEC is a powerful future-proof tool for network providers who are dealing with diminishing ARPU and increasing traffic loads today, and presents a unique opportunity for long-term growth,” says Eitan Koter, Co-founder & Co-CEO. “Telcos are embracing edge computing as it aligns well with their growth plans for the future. MEC will serve as the ultra-network infrastructure of the future.”
MEC is also in use by Web giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Each has their own initiative for MEC. Google, for instance is deploying YouTube servers while Facebook is promoting TIP (Telecom Infra Project), an initiative about virtualizing the Edge and processing all video and VR at the Edge of the network. Amazon is deploying Green Grass application at the edge of telcos, though large scale 5G deployments, delayed now but expected from 2020-22.
Just as caching content at the edge enhances delivery, moving the applicable logic to the edge can help improve the performance of applications. Akamai's EdgeWorkers does this by putting computation and logic as close as possible to users for fast development and implementation of modifications to digital experiences.
“With EdgeWorkers, serverless functions run directly on the edge,” Akamai explains. “Simple services have full access to the request and delivery insights; more complex microservices can leverage data embedded in the function or remote data solutions. Services can access all of the data from the HTTP request, including cookies, headers, URL, and query parameters.”
Last month Limelight Networks announced the launch of its own distributed serverless computing capabilities. Branded EdgeFunctions, the new capability means developers don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure such as provisioning and managing servers or runtimes which can be costly and time consuming. Instead, they’re able to concentrate on writing and deploying code to create or enhance user application experiences.
“Functions are globally available and run in the same locations as the CDN - closest to where content requests are received - which ensures the lowest possible latency for code execution and delivers optimal user experiences,” Limelight explains. “An API-first approach to serverless computing with support for Node.js, Python and Go frees developers to focus on innovation and integration with their content workflows.”
It’s ideally suited to streaming video and content delivery use cases such as personalized streaming, access control, dynamic ad insertion, content protection, A/B testing, and image manipulation, Limelight says.
Since the start of the year, Arqiva has been managing the content processing, packaging and delivery of A+E Networks EMEA for the channel’s Amazon Prime on demand service in Germany and UK. Specifically, Arqiva is managing A+E’s archive content in both UK and Germany, from where it is currently stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier, to Amazon Prime.
A key requirement was for the solution to be able to process all of A+E’s VoD requests as close to its cloud-based archive as possible to minimise content movement and therefore avoid costly cloud egress into on-premise data centres.
Based on its latest hybrid on-premise/cloud offering, Arqiva’s solution is the first to feature a completely ‘cloud-contained’ journey, where content is taken from the online archive, processed packaged and delivered to Amazon Prime. Transcoding in the cloud using AWS Elemental MediaConvert also enables Arqiva to process more simultaneous jobs at a far quicker pace.
With businesses and consumers demanding more data at faster speeds, hybrid cloud architecture is becoming a necessity in the data centre too. Cloud computing, however, requires a fundamental shift in network design, argues Commscope. How do enterprises, service providers and multitenant data centres design infrastructure with agility and scalability?
Commscope’s answer is to switch to a leaf-spine architecture. “Leaf-spine supports the high volume of data that is constantly being generated within the data centre as many servers collaborate to serve applications,” says Global Enterprise Data Center lead, James Young. “While moving to a hybrid cloud architecture is undeniably challenging, integrating the public cloud with the private cloud and on-premise computing can help your data centre scale up with speed and reliability. CommScope’s high-speed migration platform makes the transition to leaf-spine more manageable.
“Clearly, the need for speed isn’t slowing down. We’re here to help customers keep up with the demand, while getting ahead of the trends that most affect data center design and cloud computing.”
The wholesale postponement or cancellation of live events makes ‘business as usual’ an unprecedented challenge. But live press conferences, product launches, corporate announcements, investor briefings, campaign kick-offs and other face-to-face B2B communications cannot wait indefinitely.
“When it comes to remote and virtual events, a webinar with a basic set-up won’t have the desired impact or help organisations stand out from the crowd,” says Robert Szabo-Rowe is SVP of Product Management at The Switch. “It is crucial to find fresh approaches that enable companies to raise their game and produce ‘TV like’ experiences for their audiences by using a professional studio or creating a remote production environment supported by the technology necessary to reach enterprise audiences.”
The Switch is working with enterprises to ‘broadcast’ to their audiences in a way that elevates the virtual event beyond talking heads in a poorly lit meeting room. They can do this “by leaning on our two decades of live production experience and, in many instances, employing our studios in Burbank, LA, New York or London, to communicate to markets across the world,” he explains. “Or linking via Skype into the professional production environment of these facilities and their global connectivity.”
Szabo-Rowe adds, “The one thing no company should do at this point is to go dark and stop activity out of fear until the crisis passes. In fact, businesses have to take the view that they are not simply making the best of a bad situation but must communicate more effectively than ever in order to create new opportunities. Those are the businesses that will emerge from the current crisis as strong as or stronger than before.”
Other important developments are also aimed at optimizing the network. Edgeware has added automated QoE optimisation to its multi-CDN control platform StreamPilot. Referred to as AutoPilot, the feature identifies and automatically presents a unified view of problems that could affect users’ quality of experience, independent of which CDN is delivering the TV service to the viewer. The issues can be related to the device, delivery CDN, ISP or the content itself. The data is processed, grouped and presented with a classification on severity level.
“Automation has grown to become a highly desired component within content delivery workflows as more media companies seek new ways to accelerate processes and gain actionable insight into their TV delivery,” explains Kalle Henriksson, founder, and product manager for StreamPilot. “This has been a key insight from the last six months of customer discussions and has significantly shaped our recent development work. AutoPilot addresses our customers’ need to be informed about performance issues in real time, as well as foresee the trends that can cause them, so they can put prevention methods in place earlier on.”
Pay-TV group Liberty Global has introduced peer to peer (P2P) video delivery to augment its CDN in Europe. It has partnered with Teltoo, a software-only video delivery technology company, in which Liberty Global has an investment stake. Beginning in The Netherlands, the plan is to rollout Teltoo across Liberty Global’s territories.
“Even multi-CDN networks are not flexible,” explains Pablo Hesse, Founder / CEO, Teltoo. “Most people are looking for elasticity in video delivery service especially if they own the infrastructure. Having a P2P technology give you the flexibility to see how a service evolves and to add more capacity for services as required.”
Teltoo uses WebRTC and its own protocols and back end services to establish browser-P2P connections. It claims to instantly offloads up to 85% of CDN usage which reduces both CDN spend and Capex investments.
“When you push traffic out of our CDN, the overall network performs better since it is less stressed. By introducing Teltoo the bit rate and the overall stability of the CDN improves.”
Broadpeak claims to have completed the world's first unified packaging and encryption of DASH and HLS formats, reducing CDN storage costs for OTT.
Using the latest version of its BkS350 origin packager, the company said it successfully delivered DASH and HLS video fragments using the same chunks (encrypted with CBCS) and container (CMAF) for both protocols. The vendor says the solution will optimise storage costs for OTT service providers once deployed commercially, which is not yet the case.
Using the same amount of CDN storage, service providers can cache twice the amount of content, according to the company. In addition, the cache hit ratio mechanically improves, allowing service providers to reduce the pressure on the output of the origin packager. The new solution also simplifying the headend and requiring fewer packaging resources.
It does this by creating only one chunk for both HLS and DASH streams. CMAF is used as the packaging container format and CBCS as the encryption scheme.
“Today, OTT delivery can be costly in terms of network bandwidth and storage due to the multiplication of streaming formats," said Jacques Le Mancq, CEO. “Service providers need to deliver video content in two entirely different packaging formats and two different encryption schemes in order to reach all devices. We're excited to share this innovation with our customers and support them in the optimisation of their overall video streaming costs.”
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