PARIS AND LONDON—At IBC2025, Orange and Synamedia have announced a new integration of their CDN solutions that they are billing as a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” between a telco CDN (content delivery network) and a multi-CDN platform switching provider.

During the show, Sept. 12 to 15 in Amsterdam, the two companies will showcase how international content providers can expand their coverage and reach new markets with the combined solution.

More specifically, the partnership will see Orange’s CDN integrated with Synamedia’s Quortex Switch multi-CDN platform. This will provide customers with broader reach – especially in the Middle East and Africa region, where Orange has an extensive footprint.

“This alliance showcases how any CDN customer can now easily benefit from Orange’s strengths in CDN, particularly across the Middle East and Africa, by taking advantage of this partnership to create an eco-system with Synamedia’s multi-CDN management system,” explained Cédric Hardouin, vice president of CDN and edge at Orange Wholesale. “Orange’s CDN stands out for its ability to extend content providers’ reach while ensuring optimal quality of service. It offers a powerful way to scale global content delivery, backed by a trusted European partner.”

“This is our first partnership with a telecom-grade CDN provider, and it breaks new ground by extending the reach of reliable, scalable CDNs to emerging markets thanks to Orange’s CDN proof of performance in the Middle East and Africa,” added Ed Allfrey, executive vice president and general manager of Video Network, Synamedia. “Orange has demonstrated the importance of its services’ low latency, compliance and privacy and now it has another string to its bow with seamless CDN switching.”

Launched in March 2025, Quortex Switch’s API-based integration and advanced configuration capabilities offer unparalleled flexibility, enabling customers to expand distribution without altering existing infrastructure or disrupting current CDN partnerships. It allows them to streamline delivery based on Quality of Experience metrics and features the ability to segment viewers based on their geo-location.

Based on the latest industry standards, the Quortex Switch SaaS-based tool simplifies the design of multi-CDN systems while supporting low latency streaming at high quality and disaster recovery as required. It uses traffic balancing and intelligent content delivery to dynamically route end-users to the best content sources and enables mid-stream switching across multiple CDNs for uninterrupted viewing experiences, the companies said.

Orange operates one of the most extensive and trusted CDN footprints in the Middle East and Africa, enabling international content providers to scale securely, cost-effectively, and in full compliance with local regulations. This infrastructure gives them a clear advantage in reaching high-growth, underserved markets across the region. The partnership also aligns with Orange’s strategic vision to support the growing demand for content across the Middle East and Africa and foster new collaborative opportunities within the CDN ecosystem.

Synamedia will be showcasing the collaboration during IBC2025 at Hall 1, B49.

Winning the streaming wars will hinge on a number of factors, but the quality of the subscriber experience delivered by content providers is rapidly becoming one of the most important. Streaming platforms continuously measure a wide variety of quantitative metrics allowing them to better understand, and improve, subscriber quality of experience (QoE).

For consumers with multiple streaming options, QoE is a significant factor in their decisions to subscribe to—and stick with—streaming platforms. However, delivering sterling QoE to subscribers depends on partnerships with third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) over which content providers have limited control.

CDNs are strategic partners to streaming platforms; they perform the vital role of delivering a valuable and expensive product (video entertainment) to end viewers. The challenge is that the CDN industry is going through a period of rapid change and turmoil. Established players have exited the space, and prevailing economics make it difficult for remaining participants to innovate in ways that materially benefit streaming platforms.

Content providers are embracing live streaming, especially tier-one sports, as a way to reduce customer churn and expand their subscriber bases. But the increased prevalence of large-scale, live streaming requires CDNs with a laser focus on video quality and an approach designed to drive sustained economic value. Such partnerships can be game-changers for streaming platforms looking to attract new subscribers and keep the ones they have.

The Content Delivery Requirements of Streaming Platforms
As content providers continue to scale and adopt more bandwidth-intensive content, such as 4K video and immersive live events, the role of the CDN must evolve. The right partner can ensure that video quality remains high while keeping costs in check. When evaluating CDN partners, streaming executives should consider the following:

Purpose-Built for Video: Not all CDNs are optimized for video streaming. Many legacy CDNs were designed primarily for general web content delivery and have struggled to keep pace with the demands of high-quality, low-latency video at scale. Streaming platforms should seek out CDNs engineered specifically for video delivery, with architectures that prioritize optimization of common QoE metrics such as time-to-first-frame (TTFF), while maximizing delivered bit rate and minimizing rebuffer events.

Deep Network Visibility and Last-Mile Optimization: One of the biggest challenges for streaming platforms is the unpredictability of last-mile network conditions. CDNs that have deeper integration with internet service providers (ISPs) and maintain real-time visibility into network congestion can make smarter delivery decisions, reducing buffering and improving playback stability. Additionally, CDNs that extend their footprint into last-mile ISP networks can pre-position content closer to end users, further enhancing QoE. This is especially crucial for live events, where sudden spikes in viewership can strain traditional CDN architectures.

Scalability to Handle Traffic Surges: Live sports and major content releases generate massive, unpredictable spikes in traffic. Traditional CDN infrastructure can struggle to scale up rapidly enough to handle these peaks, leading to degraded video quality. Content providers should look for CDN partners that offer dynamic, on-demand scaling, allowing capacity to expand in real-time to meet surges in demand while efficiently scaling down during off-peak hours.

Flexible and Cost-Effective Delivery Models: The economics of content delivery are under pressure, challenging streaming platforms to simultaneously achieve quality and cost-efficiency. CDNs that provide flexible pricing models, such as capacity reservations and pre-positioned content, can help streaming platforms optimize their spending.

Now that streaming has become the go-to way people watch video—including a growing percentage of live sports and major events—the pressure to deliver seamless, high-quality experiences has never been higher.

Content providers that get it right will keep viewers watching and subscribers sticking around. The key isn’t just speed—it’s having the right delivery strategy in place to scale smartly, control costs, and ensure a great experience every time.

LONDON—Synamedia has launched the Quortex Switch SaaS-based multi-CDN management tool designed to optimize streaming costs, quality and reliability. It will make its debut during the 2025 NAB Show, April 5-9, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The latest addition to the Quortex portfolio, Quortex Switch makes it easy to design multi-CDN systems to route end users dynamically to the best available sources. It eliminates the need for proprietary client-side code and enables seamless standards-based communication between the player and the content steering server to enable benefits like mid-stream switching across multiple CDNs for uninterrupted viewing, the company said.

A standalone solution, Quortex Switch supports any CDN from any provider, including Synamedia’s Fluid Edge private CDN. It puts an end to traditional CDN switching inefficiencies by enabling dynamic traffic balancing and intelligent content delivery, it said.

The tool enables configurable balancing rules for each audience segment, improving efficient traffic management and service reliability. Using it, content providers can streamline their delivery based on quality of experience (QoE) metrics by segmenting viewers based on factors like geographic location and assigning dedicated CDNs to certain audiences. This approach allows balancing decisions to be based on data and enables uninterrupted streaming and rapid disaster recovery when needed, it said.

Quortex Switch helps content providers reduce costs by using balancing decisions to manage CDN usage commitments and pricing differences. This prevents payment for unused capacity and unnecessary fees, it said.

The solution also makes streaming more sustainable and cost effective by allowing users to prioritize decisions based on energy usage, it said.

“Content providers tell us that scaling video delivery is the single biggest challenge they face, yet they still rely on inefficient proprietary software and complex custom integrations, as well as the use of inadequate protocols, such as DNS redirection,” said Julien Signes, executive vice president of video network at Synamedia. “By combining intelligent traffic management, real-time QoE insights provided by Mux, and sustainability-focused cost control, Quortex Switch delivers a more resilient, scalable streaming experience.”

See Synamedia at 2025 NAB Show booth W2243.

More information is available on the company’s website.

There is a storm brewing that is helping content pirates. The budget cutbacks many consumers are considering due to economic challenges in many countries are accelerating the number of people turning to piracy. This is accentuated further by a growth in users who are increasingly more digitally adept. The Nordic market has always been one of the most advanced leaders of online and mobile consumption; for that reason, companies like HBO have chosen this region to launch in first.

One lesser-known detail is the rate of piracy has always been matching the market’s growth. More than one in four streams in Sweden is now pirated. This number is high across the region and that will accelerate elsewhere, too, unless the streaming companies fail to improve the way they manage their content. This in effect is increasing the cost of content and that in turn is fueling piracy. It's a negative spiral but it can be turned around.

TV piracy is nothing new and has been an industry problem since the establishment of the first pay-TV services. Initial growth in cable and satellite TV was mirrored by equal and opposite growth in an illegal content industry, with pirates looking to undermine the smart card-based Conditional Access Systems employed at the time to encrypt the broadcast signal.

As the industry has moved to digital, the piracy problem has increased each step of the way. The widespread penetration of the internet and broadband services led to a growth in peer-to-peer networks and the introduction of piracy to the mainstream via technology such as BitTorrent. The introduction of streaming options from broadcasters, and especially the presence of sports on live streaming services, made a move to live streaming piracy possible and extremely profitable.

Organized crime got involved, and it is now possible for consumers to access incredibly sophisticated pirate services via special devices or widely accessible websites. For all intents and purposes, these offer the same features and functions as legitimate broadcasters. Indeed, it is possible that some consumers might not even realize they are hooked up to illegal services.

The figures involved are deeply concerning for an industry that needs to protect its revenues and investment in content at all costs. TV piracy is by far the most popular form of digital theft, representing 48% of all access to infringing sites, according to the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). Movies and music, the latter long the unwanted poster boy for pirated content, only account for 11% and 6%, respectively.

Putting some real-world implications on these numbers, analyst Kearney says that online video-content piracy is estimated to lose the global media sector $75 billion per year. Even worse, this figure is projected to reach $125 billion by 2028, representing an annual growth rate of nearly 11%. The U.S. is the worst infringer, accounting for 11% of all video piracy demand thanks to what Kearney says is a potent combination of high penetration of superfast broadband, widespread access to computers and devices, a large population culturally focused on Hollywood and less-effective enforcement legislation.

So what can streaming companies do? How can they shore up the gaps in their chain to make sure there are no egress points where pirates can inveigle their way in and steal valuable content? After all, once it’s gone, it’s too late. After all, once it’s gone it’s too late. Too many are focusing on the golden bullet coming from AI and the way pirated content can be found while and once it has been consumed. This hype is driving a focus that misses alternative approaches to prevent piracy before distribution happens.

One of the key ways content rights owners can fight back is by taking control earlier in the chain. This is, of course, far more complex than before. Even niche broadcasters are delivering content to multiple different content platforms simultaneously. That means it is important to invest in a safe Content Delivery Network (CDN) architecture, as the CDN is the common touchpoint between the broadcaster and the end consumer.

An optimized CDN architecture splits the CDN into a session-control layer and a delivery layer. Following this, the control plane can be enhanced with additional features such as in-stream switching of HTTP ABR segments and a built-in server-side QoE monitoring function to adjust quality in real time via the routing of fragments. This is the approach we have taken with our CDN Director, which provides users with an enhanced visibility of every request hitting the CDN at any given time, making it easier to deny access.

This feature includes the use of common access tokens, which show that customer requests are coming from the rights owner’s own authorized back-end layer and not from outside agents (i.e., pirates).

As an interesting data point on what can be achieved with this approach, Telenor Sweden says that utilizing this system enables it to stop from 150,000 to 200,000 invalid requests to access its streaming-server resources every day. This is a significant roadblock to pirate activities, especially as pirates look to become more technically sophisticated and insert hooks into the CDN infrastructure itself.

Securing the CDN is, of course, not the only action that broadcasters can take, nor the only one they should do. Effective antipiracy action requires a holistic approach that permeates everything a company does. But one of the advantages being able to more closely interrogate the CDN confers is that the QoE monitoring required to rebuff pirate attempts also enables operators to boost peak performance, adjust streaming capacity and keep services running smoothly even during high demand.

That saves them money and gives a boost to the company-wide ROI on its antipiracy investment. This is a key point. Despite all the evidence that points to antipiracy efforts being extremely effective in protecting revenues, C-level buy-in can sometimes prove to be elusive in times of economic uncertainty. To be able to present an effective antipiracy action that looks to reverse some of the trends identified by EUIPO, Kearny and others—and, at the same time, drives further efficiencies in the costs of operating a CDN—makes a compelling argument.

PHILADELPHIA—Comcast says it is leveraging Qwilt’s Open Edge platform to put more computing power closer to consumers to deliver a better Internet experience for applications like streaming and gaming and to develop a standardized platform for providers to distribute their content across Comcast’s network. The company says the result will create “the most distributed content delivery network (CDN) in the U.S.”

“By deploying distributed access architecture and virtualization, we are putting the brains of our network closer to customers and paving the way for opportunities like this deployment with Qwilt,” said Elad Nafshi, Chief Network Officer, Comcast. “We’re tapping into the incredible power of edge compute to build a leading content delivery network that provides incredible benefits to our customers and to the providers who distribute content across our network.”

An optimized CDN is foundational to supporting the best user experience that is faster, more responsive and in the highest quality possible. Earlier this summer, Comcast launched enhanced 4K from Xfinity, a first-of-its-kind viewing experience for X1 customers that combines 4K video delivered over Comcast’s network at its highest bitrate, Dolby Vision HDR, Dolby Atmos spatial audio, and ultra-low latency only seconds behind live action. Additionally, for content providers, Comcast’s implementation of a standardized delivery platform increases efficiency, reliability and security of content delivery, all at scale.

"We're incredibly excited to collaborate with Comcast, a pioneer of technology innovation in the industry. By leveraging Open Caching, Comcast utilizes its strengths as a major network operator, actively shaping efficient content delivery and broadening avenues for new opportunities within this value chain," said Alon Maor, CEO, Qwilt. “This initiative enhances our expansive global edge network, a pivotal stride toward our aim of delivering top-notch digital experiences to every corner of the world, meeting the high expectations of consumers.”

This first-of-its-kind deployment, comprised of Qwilt’s Open Edge platform software and services, provides Quality-as-a-Service content delivery by performing content caching and delivery functions in edge compute and caching clusters deep within Comcast’s network. Qwilt’s solution is based on Open Caching, a set of open specifications developed by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) through an extensive, nine-year collaboration across the entire streaming value chain enabling the best quality of content delivery seamlessly.

Qwilt has partnered with nearly 200 service providers and content providers on its Open Edge platform and the company says that by adding Comcast, the global coverage of the Open Edge will “now uniquely enable local delivery to the majority of US broadband subscribers.”

In a notable leap forward for broadcasters planning to monetize their NextGen TV broadcasts, Sinclair has announced the launch of its “Broadspan” datacasting platform. 

The platform enables data distribution in all the current markets where Sinclair stations are offering NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0, broadcasts. 

In making the announcement, Sinclair’s president and CEO Chris Riply said that the platform would be open to all other broadcasters and that they had signed up their first user, Edgio, a leading content delivery network. 

During last year’s NAB, Sinclair had promised to build "the NextGen TV infrastructure" that would open up new "datacasting opportunities for broadcasters," Ripley said. “Today, I'm here to tell you what we've done just that."

“This infrastructure will provide the means to intelligently use all available ATSC 3.0 spectrum from multiple stations to deliver the customer's data quickly, efficiency efficiently and securely,” Ripley said. 

He stressed capabilities of ATSC 3.0 for efficient data distribution and monetization opportunities and highlighted the infrastructure's ability to allocate spectrum intelligently, deliver data quickly, and provide a cost-effective solution for data recovery. 

Ripley and Eric Black, CTO and GM of media at Edgio also emphasized the platform's potential to offload significant video data from the internet, reduce congestion, and enhance the user experience.

Edgio’s CDN works with many companies, including broadcasters, to provide OTT delivery of content. 

Black said that the Broadspan platform “takes advantage of the unique capability of ATSC 3.0. to converge broadcast and broadband capability seamlessly. It is a game changer as you will be able to offload significant video data from the internet to reducing congestion and enhancing the user experience while allowing increased bit rates without the loss of any service.”

Black said that “by leveraging ATSC 3.0’s convergence of broadcast and broadband, we are delivering a true 4K experience. Broadspan isn’t just a game changer; it is a paradigm shift in defining immersive entertainment.”

Black also said that the bandwidth provided by NextGen TV broadcasts will dramatically expand the ability of streamers to provide 4K content. “This provides a path to the deliver of 4K content to 100 million, 150 million viewers,” he said. 

In announcing the platform launch, Ripley also discussed some of the upcoming developments and opportunities for 3.0 services. He noted that BIA advisors has issued a forecast of $10 billion in potential datacasting ATSC 3.0 revenue for broadcasters and said that the launch of their service “will put the industry on the path to achieving those projections.” 

Ripley said that the excess bandwidth available for datacasting on the Sinclair stations is about 9Mbps, which would be sufficient for many services, including the delivery of 4K content by CDNs like Edgio. 

However, the capacity is limited by the current system of using a lighthouse station to deliver the 3.0 signals from the local network affiliates, who continue to deliver ATSC signals. 

To expand that capacity, Ripley said that broadcasters and the NAB are working with the FCC to come up with a sunset date for ATSC broadcasts. 

“One of the main topics in collaborating with the FCC is how do we get out of the lighthouse model when we sunset ATSC 1.0” he said. “As an industry, that is a major objective for just about every broadcaster that I know. It's a major objective for the NAB. It is something that we're going to be pushing forward with the FCC to figure out when that date be and when we can turn off the lighthouses and convert the rest of the stations.”

DENVER—IBCAP has announced that one of its members, Dish Network L.L.C., has received a settlement payment of $3 million from an IBCAP-coordinated lawsuit. The settlement resolves Dish’s lawsuit against Datacamp Limited, a U.K.-based company providing global content delivery network (CDN) services under the name CDN77 and dedicated servers and network services under the name Datapacket. 

The lawsuit, filed in February 2022 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, asserted claims against Datacamp for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement for allowing continued use of the Datacamp services by 11 different pirate services.

The complaint alleged that Datacamp received nearly 400 notices of infringement from IBCAP but did little to stop the pirate services from continuing to use the Datacamp CDN. The complaint further alleged that Datacamp had no right to any safe harbor under the DMCA due to Datacamp’s failure to designate a DMCA agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement, failure to act expeditiously to remove or disable access to infringing material, and failure to implement a repeat infringer policy.

The settlement agreement follows substantial discovery and briefing on Datacamp’s motion to dismiss, which the court denied on July 14, 2023, rejecting Datacamp’s argument that the lawsuit should be dismissed because Datacamp could not be liable for infringement by its customers. 

In denying Datacamp’s motion, the court found that Datacamp knew of specific infringing uses of its services. The court also rejected Datacamp’s argument that it lacked the ability to stop the infringement, and found that Datacamp obtained a direct financial benefit from the infringement.   

In addition to Datacamp’s payment of $3,000,000, which has already been received, the settlement agreement requires Datacamp to implement a takedown policy and a repeat infringer policy, the IBCAP reported. 

These policies will promote the expeditious removal of infringing material and permanently shut down client accounts of repeat infringers. Datacamp further agreed to provide the identity and contact information of its clients that are repeat infringers or those that had their accounts permanently shut down for failure to remove allegedly infringing material. Datacamp agreed to future damages of up to $250,000 per month if it fails to fulfill removal and termination provisions of the settlement agreement.

“This lawsuit and resulting settlement agreement against Datacamp sends a direct message to yet another category of infringers — companies who support pirate services, such as CDNs and hosting companies — that their willingness to deliver infringing content over their networks will not be tolerated,” said Chris Kuelling, executive director of IBCAP. “Datacamp’s payment of $3 million conveys a strong message that CDNs and hosting companies should not take the risk of permitting infringing content to stream across their networks. The takedown and repeat infringer policies that Datacamp has agreed to serve as examples of policies other CDNs and hosting companies should adopt to help minimize infringements on their networks and minimize their exposure to sizeable damage awards.”

The lawsuit was coordinated by IBCAP, and evidence for the case was obtained and provided by the IBCAP lab. Prosecution of the case and settlement negotiations were executed by Dish’s outside litigation counsel, Hagan Noll & Boyle, LLC.

For more information about IBCAP visit https://www.ibcap.org/membership. 

DÜSSELDORF—Green Streams has announced a new collaboration with Varnish Software to build a powerful CDN for its end-to-end IPTV & OTT platform.

Integrating Varnish Enterprise will ensure fast, reliable and secure video distribution for Green Stream’s platform, which helps ISPs rapidly roll out new TV and Entertainment offerings that they can bundle with broadband to retain and attract customers, the companies said. 

"Customers of TV and entertainment services worldwide have extremely high demands on the stability and quality of streaming. They expect smooth streams with the highest resolution, as they know it from Netflix, Amazon and Co.," explains Gernot Jaeger, CEO and co-founder of Green Streams. "Varnish Enterprise enables such high-quality user experiences in interaction with our own technology platform and is therefore an important addition to our platform."

To ensure fast, reliable and secure video distribution for Green Streams’ platform, the two organizations have collaborated to offer a self-operated Content Delivery Network (CDN) based on Varnish Enterprise’s powerful caching capabilities.

The partnership is designed to help ISPs overcome the complexities and costs of creating bundles of broadband and entertainment offerings. 

Green Streams’ robust Platform as a Service (PaaS) simplifies this process, enabling content providers to easily introduce outstanding streaming-based TV and entertainment products without great risk or upfront costs. To bolster the core of its platform, which was developed 100% in-house, Green Streams has integrated industry-leading third-party solutions, including Varnish Enterprise  Private CDN  for caching, as well as other modules including analytics, personalized video recommendations and more, the companies said. 

Varnish Software was chosen because Green Streams needed a solution that was not only powerful, but also flexible and easy to manage. With its central management and numerous modules, Varnish Enterprise meets these requirements perfectly, enabling Green Streams to effortlessly implement necessary functions like geoblocking, URL signing and the ability to define very granular rules for content distribution. Additionally, Varnish Enterprise is deployable on-premises – a must for ISPs who often need to seamlessly integrate Green Stream’s solution with their own infrastructure.

Varnish Enterprise can be deployed easily via a remote agent that does not require physical access to servers. Therefore, the private CDN can be quickly extended into customer environments and scaled effortlessly and dynamically to enable Green Streams to easily expand its CDN infrastructure in the future.

Since implementing Varnish Enterprise, Green Streams now requires only about half as many servers as originally calculated, which has massively reduced costs and administrative efforts. The performance capacities are used so efficiently that the company can serve more users with the same hardware - at the highest streaming quality. In addition, Varnish Software distributes the content intelligently within the CDN so that the cache hit rate is very high and the load on the content providers' original servers remains extremely low.

"It is impressive how efficiently Varnish Enterprise uses server resources and with how few systems we can serve high performance requirements," adds Ivo Stock, CTO and co-founder of Green Streams. "We haven't been able to get close to maxing out the performance so far, and we haven't been able to push our platform to its performance limit even with various load tests."

PARIS—Ateme has launched Audience-Aware Streaming, an end-to-end solution that allows service providers to deliver more sustainable streaming while optimizing Quality of Experience (QoE).

The solution combines audience-aware encoding and audience-aware elastic Content Delivery Network (CDN) results, making it possible to optimize resources to reduce energy consumption, thereby minimizing carbon emissions from video streaming while optimizing QoE, the company said.

With an end-to-end view of the streaming workflow, the solution creates a virtuous feedback loop between the CDN and encoders. Rather than wasting power by creating the same set of streaming profiles for every type of content, the new solution dynamically connects CDN data with the encoder to adapt to viewing requirements and optimize profiles, it said.

While delivering on the service expectations of viewers regarding video quality, Audience-Aware Streaming also makes it possible for operators to reduce their overall environmental impact, it said.

“In a competitive and fragmented market, service providers need to optimize viewers’ QoE, while also addressing the need to reduce power consumption to meet CSR policies,” said Ateme vice president of content delivery Dan Patton. “Going beyond optimizing single steps in the video workflow, Audience-Aware Streaming brings a new, end-to-end approach to making video delivery more efficient, so service providers can meet all these needs.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

CESSON SEVIGNE, France—Broadpeak will showcase new features for its content-aware Advanced CDN that offers an open, dynamic and elastic architecture at the 2023 NAB Show, April 15-19, in Las Vegas.

New features support high performance and energy efficiency while delivering a compelling quality of experience (QoE), the company said.

Broadpeak also will showcase new analytics features, including trending and anomaly detection, to optimize capacity planning, troubleshooting and video consumption analysis, it said.

The company will showcase its new BkS450 video streaming software, which brings cost savings and energy efficiency to video streaming infrastructure, enabling the delivery of video services at 725 Gbps in HTTP on servers consuming 900 W of power, it said.

Other NAB highlights include:

• Broadpeak's nanoCDN multicast ABR (mABR) solution bringing scalability and low latency to the live multiscreen video delivery environment.
• The BkS350 Origin Packager that enables video delivery to any player or device for live and on-demand applications.
• broadpeak.io software-as-a-service, which makes video streaming easy for video service and content providers.
• Server-side ad insertion software and service for monetizing video services.
• peakVU.TV, a high-quality, reliable IPTV managed service that enables U.S. broadband, cable, telco, utilities and wireless operators to launch full-featured video streaming services.
• A demo of SKYflow, a native IP-over-satellite ecosystem that delivers a massive number of OTT streams anywhere.

See Broadpeak at 2023 NAB Show booth W1913.

More information is available on the company’s website.

CAMBRIDGE, U.K.—Strong consumer interest in the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 is driving what Velocix is calling “unprecedented” traffic demand on pay TV networks in various parts of the world. 

Velocix supplies managed services for video service provider based content delivery networks (CDNs) and it has used that infrastructure to track the video traffic peaks in countries around the world as fans watch the football tournament in Qatar.

Velocix’s managed services team has recorded the largest viewing increases in Latin America, with pay TV operators’ peak traffic levels rising by as much as 140% in some countries. 

In Europe, the peak traffic increases have also been impressive, with video service providers experiencing surges of up to 82%. 

In North America, where soccer has a much lower profile, modest increases in peak traffic have been recorded of around 20%, Velocix reported. 

“Velocix has been working closely with many of the world’s largest pay TV providers over several months to prepare their content delivery networks for the upswell in viewership caused by the FIFA World Cup,” explained Marco Rico, vice president of maintenance and managed services at Velocix said. "This detailed capacity planning and network optimization ensures consumers are able to enjoy the highest quality viewing experience, even as network traffic reaches record levels.”

“As the competition progresses through to the final, we are expecting even higher streaming traffic peaks,” he added. “Over the coming days, we will be monitoring video networks as they come under greater pressure and will fine tune the CDNs as needed to deliver the best performance to sports fans around the world.” 

BARCELONA—A new white paper from NPAW, a worldwide provider of end-to-end video intelligence solutions, identifies using multiple content delivery networks as the key to unlocking the experience viewers demand when streaming live sports.

The paper, “Multi-CDN: The Key To Superior Live Sports Streaming,” examines how providers can leverage a smart Multi-CDN strategy to overcome possible latency and video quality issues that might otherwise turn viewers off to streaming, especially when they have alternatives like cable TV where they can find the game coverage they desire.

The 14-page white paper examines: 

• Live sports as an engagement powerhouse
• Best-in-class streaming experiences: a must for live sports
• What is Multi-CDN?
• The benefits of adopting a Multi-CDN strategy for live sports streaming
• How to implement a smart Multi-CDN strategy
• Multi-CDN switching methods

The paper can be downloaded online.

BARCELONA—NPAW, a provider of video business intelligence and predictive analytics for streaming services, has joined the CDN Alliance as a founding member. 

The CDN Alliance aims to promote the development of the global CDN space by addressing industry challenges in relation to bit, dynamic, and media delivery, security, and edge. It launched in September 2021 without any members to ensure its complete independence. 

“With the support of NPAW and the rest of our newly announced founding members, we can now officially start working on our agenda of activities and establish the first working groups,” said Mark de Jong, chairman of the CDN Alliance. “We can’t wait to start tackling the CDN industry’s most pressing challenges and keep growing as a collective.”

As a provider of smart multi-CDN balancing solutions for the video streaming industry, NPAW will bring to the table its expertise in optimizing the delivery of dynamic video data based on the end user’s quality of experience.

“We are honored to be joining the CDN Alliance as a founding member and can’t wait to start working with the organization and the other member companies to bolster CDN capabilities at a global scale,” says Ferran G. Vilaró, CEO and co-founder of NPAW. “We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned through the building of our CDN Balancer and contributing to the industry’s growth.”

NPAW announced earlier this month its new CDN Balancer, an AI-powered system to automatically balance loads between CDNs. The solution relies on the company’s extensive quality of experience data.

More information the CDN Alliance is available here. 

DENVER—Disney Streaming and Lumen Technologies have announced that they are leading an effort to produce standardized CDN configuration metadata and application programming interfaces (APIs) for the streaming video industry. 

The multi-year effort is being done through the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA), a consortium of 100+ businesses in the video industry that work together to improve the streaming experience for consumers.

Standardized metadata will allow content providers to use a common metadata model and a single API to publish CDN configurations to vendors.

Without this standardization, organizations must separately model and publish metadata within each CDN vendor’s proprietary API or management portal. For large organizations with multiple brands, proprietary APIs are inefficient, error-prone, and costly – issues that negatively affect the customer experience, the companies said.

With contributions and leadership from Disney Streaming and Lumen, the SVA recently published the first version of the Configuration Interface Specifications – the technical specifications document that will serve as the streaming industry’s guide for standardization. Version two is underway, and work is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

“We believe all streaming providers will benefit from standardization across commercial CDN providers and the Open Cache industry, which is why we’ve led the charge, working alongside companies like Lumen, on evangelizing this important work,” said Michael Fay, vice president, software engineering, Disney Streaming. “Hundreds of millions of subscribers already engage with Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+, and as demand increases for our direct-to-consumer platforms, we believe standardization will be a key driver in maintaining our reputation in delivering a high-quality viewing experience for subscribers at scale.”

“Lumen operates one of the largest CDNs in the world via the Lumen Edge Platform, which provides unmatched performance and speed for latency-sensitive, data-intensive applications and content,” said Pierre-louis Theron, Lumen vice president of product management for content delivery services. “Developing standards that reduce complexity for our media customers is key to our shared success, now and in the future. We will continue to contribute significant work and insight to the standardization effort, relying on the deep expertise we have gained from years of experience building and operating our own CDN.”

“Commercial CDNs and open caching systems have many common requirements when it comes to defining and publishing configuration metadata,” said Glenn Goldstein, Lumen CDN product strategist and lead editor of the SVA’s Configuration Interface Specifications. “We knew we could help the industry leverage those commonalities while still helping every company achieve its own interests. We started by agreeing upon a set of drivers that benefited all industry participants. These included standardizing feature definitions, providing for DevOps-friendly automation, and allowing technology vendors to differentiate.”

HICKORY, N.C.—CommScope has announced that ViacomCBS has migrated from satellite content delivery technologies to Content Delivery Network (CDN) IP for ViacomCBS' FAVE, DABL and select Showtime linear channels using the CommScope DigiCipher Streaming system. 

The companies said that the migration represents the first ViacomCBS services to be fully transitioned from satellite to CDN IP. They are now leveraging existing CDN IP infrastructure for service distribution to CBS broadcast stations, DABL affiliates, and Showtime MVPDs throughout the U.S. instead of traditional satellite delivery. 

The move is part of a larger digital transformation at ViacomCBS. 

“Satellite bandwidth in the US will diminish by 60% in 2023 as a result of the successful 2020 FCC C-Band satellite auction,” said Ric Johnsen, senior vice president and segment leader, Broadband Networks at CommScope. “This creates an imperative for programmers to plan their eventual migration from satellite to CDN content distribution. Our DigiCipher Streaming system offers programmers like ViacomCBS a low-risk migration path that leverages their existing Integrated Receiver Decoders (IRDs) in the migration from satellite to CDN IP input, enables new distribution efficiencies, and eliminates service interruption.”

“The key to our decision was having the flexibility to choose a migration path and timeline that worked best for our unique business goals with the guarantee of zero service interruption,” added Hardys Eggum, senior vice president, Media Technology & Engineering, ViacomCBS. “CommScope’s solution provided a redundant design that avoided transport loss when we experienced a primary CDN outage in migrating the DABL service. This is an incredible milestone as we continue to accelerate our technology transformation.”

By partnering with CommScope throughout the decision-making process and investing in the DigiCipher Streaming system across the CBS, Showtime, and Viacom international services, the companies said that was ViacomCBS was able to achieve greater efficiencies and cost savings, eliminate geographic dependencies, and expand its footprint to connect with larger audiences worldwide. 

The CommScope DigiCipher Streaming distribution system includes the following components: ME-7000 HEVC encoding, TME-2020 multiplexing/encryption, VDP-1000 packaging, BNC network management, and DSR-4470 IRDs. 

The DigiCipher Streaming system allows consistent, unified control of the latest IRD platforms with both satellite and IP input, CommScope said. 

The CommScope Broadcast Network Manager (BNC) control system and business system interface API can be used for securely provisioning services across an entire IRD footprint. Additionally, the CommScope DigiCipher Streaming redundant CDN design allows for uninterrupted service in the event of major primary CDN outages, CommScope said. 

CESSON-SEVIGNE, France—Broadpeak will showcase how its advanced CDN is future-proofed for video delivery and leverages an open, dynamic and elastic architecture at IBC 2021, Dec. 3-6, at IBC 2021 in Amsterdam.

Broadpeak’s CDN allows delivery of third-party content, such as HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Disney + and DAZN. The CDN allows service providers to optimize traffic and quality of experience (QoE) dynamically via powerful analytics and a new centralized steering center, which enables service providers to make constant adaptations to the streaming context.

The CDN’s video distribution capability is elastic. All features and components on Broadpeak's CDN are available as containers orchestrated via Kubernetes to adapt the topology to the actual consumption.

The company will conduct live demos of its CDN to show context awareness with the steering center; open caching based on SVA APIs for streaming Disney + content; and video analytics to maximize quality of service and establish better control over the video system with A/B testing.

The company will also highlight its nanoCDN solution, which brings scalability and low latency to the live multiscreen video delivery environment. Broadpeak will discuss how nanoCDN benefits video service delivery and supports the latest trends in live sports rights acquisition and streaming.

Broadpeak will feature its ad insertion solution for monetizing live, cloud DVR and VOD content on every screen. Broadpeak's BkYou ad insertion solution includes fast offline ad transcoding, robust security and anti-fraud as well as server-side ad insertion capabilities with detailed client-side reporting.

See Broadpeak at IBC 2021 Stand 1.B79.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LENEXA, Kan. and REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—The National Cable Television Cooperative, Inc. and Qwilt have announced a joint initiative to upgrade NCTC member networks across the United States with Qwilt’s CDN technology and services based on Open Caching.

“In an ever-changing business climate, it’s important for NCTC to bring cutting edge supplier partners to our members and Qwilt is just that," said Lou Borrelli, CEO NCTC. "Qwilt’s unique Edge Cloud Platform and Open Caching software will help our members address the dramatic growth of streaming media on their networks and position them for their current and future customer needs.” 

NCTC and Qwilt are offering this CDN upgrade to qualifying NCTC members. The upgrade includes Qwilt-provided CDN hardware installed in NCTC member networks as well as Qwilt software and cloud services. 

Qwilt’s CDN service offers open APIs to content publishers so every NCTC member that deploys this solution will be federated together by Qwilt’s cloud service into a unified CDN, making onboarding for content providers simple. 

Major content providers have already expressed their support for Open Caching as an attractive model for content delivery and a solution they will use to meet their content delivery requirements in NCTC member networks, the companies said. 

Qwilt’s innovative model for content delivery, taking hold with service providers around the world, is based on Open Caching which was developed by the Streaming Video Alliance through a multi-year collaboration across the streaming ecosystem. 

Qwilt’s solution has already been deployed by major service providers around the world and has been operational for many years, providing high quality delivery of content for some of the world’s largest streaming platforms.

“NCTC’s goal is to bring the most impactful technology solutions and offers to our membership,” said Jared Baumann, vice president technology innovation at NCTC. “Our strategic partnership with Qwilt will not only help our members to deliver content in the most efficient mannor, but it also turns the tables by allowing our operators to now monetize the traffic that their networks are carrying.”

“The way we consume video has changed, and content delivery must change with it,” added Alon Maor, CEO and co-founder of Qwilt. “Our shared vision is to help NCTC members enable Open Caching in their networks as a core component of their broadband infrastructure. Together with NCTC, we will help their members establish a content delivery platform that will serve as a foundation for today’s applications and new experiences coming in the future.”

The National Cable Television Cooperative, Inc. (NCTC) is a Kansas-based, not-for-profit corporation that operates as a programming, broadband solutions and hardware purchasing organization for its member companies serving 40 million broadband and video customers throughout the U.S. and its territories. It represents more than 700 independent cable and broadband operators across the U.S., in programming and technology acquisition.

Velocix plans to feature its new ultra-high density CDN edge caching software that provides up to four times the streaming output over prior generations of servers as part of its spring product lineup.

The software is optimized to run on commercial-off-the-shelf platforms with AMD chips and NVMe solid state hard drives, reducing how much hardware is needed to scale IPTV and OTT video service delivered via wireline and 5G wireless networks, the company said.

“With traditional video subscribers increasingly transitioning to new multiscreen IP video services, network operators are facing complex scaling challenges that will continue to intensify as stream demand and mobile viewership over 5G networks flourishes,” said Craig Sinasac, vice president, Development and Technology at Velocix. “Our software is carefully tuned to supercharge the capabilities of the foundational hardware platform to maximize stream density and CDN efficiency, resulting in a richer return on investment for our customers.”

The company also will feature its programmatic TV advertising solution and managed services offering.

More information is available on the Velocix website.

Live video streaming is gaining momentum, especially for live sports. Recent industry research shows that sports fans are willing to pay for all-sports OTT channels. A study by Verizon found that 63% of consumers already paying for live sports streaming services would be willing to pay more for a more personalized user experience.

Yet, to have a successful live streaming channel, OTT service providers need to deliver a high quality of experience (QoE) to viewers, with a latency comparable to broadcast. Overcoming scalability issues that may occur during peaks in viewership is also critical. 

There are two main types of live events that are popular for video streaming. One type of live content that viewers demand is premium live sports events, such as NFL games. Pop-up channels are also becoming trendy for special events that only last a couple of hours or weeks.   

Let’s look at some of the key challenges of delivering live OTT services and solutions.

 EFFECTIVELY MANAGING TRAFFIC 

The traffic pattern for live video streaming is very specific. Unlike SVOD, which has regular daily peaks with higher values on weekends, it’s harder to predict how many viewers will watch a live event. Peaks can jump to multiple times the average traffic during a weekend football game. 

Public CDNs (content delivery networks) are the only solution up to the task of scaling on-demand for the duration of a high-demand live event. When a CDN is used during high audience peaks, it drives a peak of traffic from the origin server. In this situation, it’s advantageous to have an origin server in the cloud to sustain super high peak of traffic.

 KEEPING BITRATES LOW 

During a live event, video bitrate is key. Using advanced encoding technology such as artificial intelligence and content-aware encoding algorithms service providers can reduce the bitrate for live video streaming by up to 50%. This results in 50% less egress traffic at the output of the CDN. Encoding solutions are central to service providers reducing the overall traffic and cost of distribution. 

 INCREASING SCALABILITY 

Today, premium live events are generally watched on the TV screen as opposed to a mobile handheld device. As fiber high-speed broadband access grows, and core network upgrades are completed, the average bandwidth used by consumers is continuously increasing. A number of HD OTT services require at least 5 Mbps—with UHD on the distant horizon, scaling issues are only going to intensify. Adopting a multi-CDN strategy is one way to increase scalability.

Using a live streaming platform with a multitiered, multi-CDN approach to delivery, operators can achieve real-time scalability for mission-critical, high-demand live video streaming services. This type of capability has successfully been deployed by leading mobile network operators to deliver live sports content.

 IMPROVING VIDEO QUALITY 

Live sports video has to be extremely high quality. Sports fans won’t settle for a low QoE. A number of premium events are now produced in UHD, and in many cases OTT is the only practical way to distribute UHD signals to UHD screens to the home. Delivering live UHD streams requires a bit of media processing and using a cloud-based live streaming platform is a cost-efficient approach for short-term events.

Another important consideration is that live video streaming requires low latency. Viewers expect the same latency as broadcast. Using a live streaming platform that supports MPEG DASH CMAF for Android and LL HLS for iOS, OTT service providers can deliver low latency for OTT.

 PREPARING FOR A DISASTER 

A premium live event can’t fail. If service providers are investing a significant amount of money in acquiring the content rights they don’t want to experience a black screen or even glitches in the middle of the event. 

Cloud infrastructure is a cost-efficient way to duplicate the video workflow infrastructure for the duration of a live event. Having a live streaming platform that can run on a datacenter and in the cloud, in parallel, is not only cost-effective, it’s convenient and flexible. Under this type of deployment, it’s critical to ensure seamless failover in case something goes wrong in the datacenter. For example, service providers can deploy one workflow on Microsoft Azure and the redundant workflow on Google Cloud or AWS. If anything happens to the Microsoft Azure datacenter, TV viewers will not see any impact.

 MONETIZING LIVE OTT EVENTS 

Monetization is essential for live events. In particular, live sports events tend to attract a large audience. Not taking advantage of ad insertion opportunities can result in lost revenue. 

In the OTT world, the trend is to deploy dynamic ad insertion (DAI) with a server-side architecture, where service providers replace the national ad with a targeted ad for each user by manipulating the OTT manifest. This operation requires strong scalability because one manifest needs to be processed and served for each user. Only cloud-based solutions can effectively scale without restraint.

 LAUNCHING ON THE FLY 

Pop-up channels are another use case that benefits greatly from cloud deployments. When service providers are launching an OTT channel for a short-term event, they don’t want to invest in an entirely new infrastructure. 

A cloud-based solution is a fraction of the cost and won’t incur any cost for streaming video in between events. As an added advantage, cloud-based live streaming platforms speed up the time to market for new offerings, enabling service providers to launch pop-up channels in minutes.

 CONCLUSION 

There is a growing industry trend toward more on-demand content. Consumers today want more choice, content on mobile devices, personalized advertising and the ability to view live sports events on OTT channels. As consumer viewing habits evolve, the complexity of media workflows is increasing. The challenge of scaling OTT unicast distribution and keeping costs low is likely to get worse.

Relying on a cloud-based live streaming platform with multi-CDN capabilities, OTT service providers can rapidly scale during live events, reduce costs and deliver exceptional video quality on every screen.

 Alain Pellen is the senior market manager, OTT & IPTV at Harmonic 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Akamai is feeling the need for speed right now as it announced that its global content delivery network hit an all-time high of 106 Tbps (terabits per second) in its delivery of digital content. This is the first time the company’s CDN has surpassed the 100 Tbps mark.

“Delivering 106 terabits per second is roughly the same as downloading 3,300 two-hour HD movies every second, or nearly 12 million an hour,” said Adam Karon, Akamai executive vice president and general manager, media & carrier. The traffic peak was driven by content and data delivered at the same time, largely contributed to by a popular video game update, according to Karon.

It was in 2018 that Akamai surpassed 70 Tbps with its delivery combination of live sports, gaming releases and software updates. Today, it averages more than 50 Tbps on a daily basis.

CAMBRIDGE, MA.—Akamai says it has integrated its content delivery network capabilities with Microsoft Azure Media Services and Blob Storage. The collaboration will make it easier and more cost effective for media organizations to combine cloud-based video processing with edge delivery, from content preparation to playback, according to Akamai.

Going forward, Akamai will directly connect its edge network to Azure using a high-speed Azure ExpressRoute connection. This will result in significant efficiencies when storing and delivering content and provide mutual customers with lower, more predictable cost structures between Azure and Akamai's CDN, the companies said.

Akamai will enhance the delivery of live and on-demand streaming workflows through Azure Media Services, Microsoft's cloud video workflow platform for encoding, packaging, DRM and Video AI video metadata indexing. Together, Akamai and Microsoft will work to offer customers higher quality streaming delivery, lower latencies and more choices for their integrated media workflows through mutual partners such as Harmonic, Telestream and more.

As part of the agreement, Akamai will enable select strategic customer solutions to run on Azure and enter into a co-sell relationship with Microsoft, wherein its products will be available in the Azure Marketplace.

Akamai and Microsoft are exhibiting at the 2019 NAB Show in booths SL3324 and SL6717, respectively, April 8th-11th in Las Vegas. 

Netflix is the company that helped popularize the story of “Breaking Bad.” Like Walter White, the anti-hero of this tragic morality tale, Netflix has changed the way its product is made and delivered.

In the last four years, Netflix and other digital pioneers like Apple, Spotify and HBO have radically redesigned the backbone of the networks used by the largest movie studios and TV networks to feed content to their subscribers. Netflix has found a new way to cook up media and deliver it to the punters in a pure and powerful form. To paraphrase Tuco Salamanca, one of the distributors of Walter White’s content, Netflix’s product and delivery is loved by consumers because it’s “tight tight tight.”

Netflix has achieved this revolution by replacing their traditional Content Delivery Network (CDN) system that was leased as a service from traditional providers with their own, more powerful self-built system that’s closer to the customer. In IT terms it’s a network computer “at the edge.” The key technology that powers this CDN edge device is a specialized ConnectX 100 Gigabit Ethernet adapter. The upshot is they operate at hyperscale to allow whole neighborhoods and towns to watch video in High Definition with stunning clarity.

Key Trends to Watch

In the entertainment industry, so called Over The Top streaming services that send video over the internet are creating new ways for consumers to access video content. This allows “cord cutters” to cancel their traditional cable and satellite TV subscriptions and instead get their video streamed over their high bandwidth internet connection. Consumers still need to subscribe to content, which is where the new players in this sector—such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu—that will stream movies and TV programs directly to their customers’ homes come in. Even traditional broadcasters, like the BBC, are adopting streaming. The format of the streaming content is evolving too: with advanced 4K video and other ultra-high definition forms becoming the norm.

These new digital streaming services offer on-demand video to millions of homes, with each consumer needing slightly different formats, data rates and of course ability to watch whenever they want. Thus, unlike the broadcasters who stream their programs to millions of viewers all at once, these OTT services need to customize their content and unicast video to each and every customer. Thus the digital video content needs to be tuned in quality and streaming rate for tens of thousands of home network connections and playback devices, thus creating a massive scalability challenge for the content providers. So live and recorded movies, sports, news and TV content can be streamed out in undreamt of quantities—however this requires infrastructure that can operate at hyperscale.

Streaming infrastructures are built out like giant power grids today. Their capacity to service tens of millions of people at once with individualized content takes them well beyond traditional broadcast TV networks, who only send the same content, at the same time, to all of their customers all at once.

This change in how entertainment is consumed has been catalysed by the IP, which gives streaming networks an advantage over traditional broadcast, cable and satellite TV networks, because it is so much better at delivering individualized content, monitoring consumers viewing habits and allowing customized digital advertising content targeting individual viewers.

Streaming platforms will eventually be the best way to deliver live and on-demand video content. This is a practical response to a change in the way we access entertainment, which mainly comes via smart phones, iPads and smart TVs owned by millennials (18-35 year-olds). This is their preferred window on the world, even when they want to watch TV and movies.

The subscriber numbers of live and on-demand streaming services tell the story succinctly enough. Netflix today has more than 60 million subscribers worldwide and represents more than 37 percent of all the internet traffic in North America.

The MLB baseball streaming app is the only sports league in the top 10 streaming services. MLB has estimated 5 million streaming subscribers today and generates $2-$3 billion of revenue each year. That’s almost one-third of its $10 billion in total revenue.

Third party fantasy platforms like FanDuel and Yahoo have more 50 million subscribers and are at the center of a casual betting market, valued at more than $10 billion. All of these streaming platforms are built on over-the-top IP infrastructures, with superfast infrastructures that instantly serve tens of millions of mobile and smart TV users.

The Internet is the Next Mass Medium

In 1997, when commercial audio and video streaming platforms were first introduced, media servers could deliver about 100-500 concurrent streams. It was obvious they could be the next mass medium once they could overcome their compute, storage and network limitations, and scale to thousands of streams. It took 20 years to reach full maturity.

Today a single server can manage as many 100,000 concurrent consumer of video streams. How? By adapting the distribution model from centralized data center servers to powerful CDN machines placed in co-location facilities right next to the consumers “last mile” internet connections.

But these CDN boxes need lots of bandwidth and require the key enabling technology of 25 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet network adapters. These CDN appliances are in fact powerful network computers that use the most advanced network adapter features to precisely stream content at exactly the right quality and exactly the right rate to thousand of consumers each of whom have slightly different requirements. These unique scalability challenges required Netflix and others to build their own modern CDN networks and make them more responsive by being placed exactly where demand is highest.

CDNs: Then and Now

Today’s online businesses want to give each customer personalized and dynamic content, because it creates a meaningful relationship between them. This requires the creation of content that is infrequently accessed but has a long internet shelf life.

Traditional CDN infrastructure was built for a previous generation of material, which was static. However, Facebook, Netflix and others have created user experiences based on content discovery and recommendation engines. Netflix’s movie recommendations, for example, provide instant interaction available to 60 million subscribers. Facebook Live allows millions of users to watch a live stream without any interruptions.

This type of dynamic content requires an interactive infrastructure that traditional CDNs cannot offer. To cater for millions of users and billions of interactions in a short time and on a planetary scale, you need local network computers.

Why can’t CDNs cope? Because their modus operandum—storing content in cache memory and feeding it out on request—is a stop gap method that is not designed for two way exchanges.

It cannot cope when end-users begin interacting with applications, posting non-stop user generated feeds, comments, pictures and updates.

Yes, newer CDN architecture like Open Connect, pioneered by Netflix, are designed with the goal to get more and more bandwidth out of single box. However, video streaming in this newer architecture is particularly sensitive to network delays. Throwing more processing power at the problem provides temporary relief, but a network redesign is the only practical solution.

Tinkering with the software at content library servers produces incremental boosts to performance. But these are far surpassed by the introduction of new customer built edge servers such as Open Connect.

In the CDN designed for Facebook Live, for example, 98 percent of user requests are handled by the edge servers, drastically reducing the load on the origin servers.

Conclusion

Traditional CDNs can’t handle dynamic workloads. The demands of modern consumer applications are beyond them because their architectures are outdated and their software-caching platforms bloated.

With next-gen applications, bandwidth alone is not enough. Networks must be predictable to deliver movie and TV reliably to millions of concurrent users without so much as a hiccup. That calls for reinforcements at the edge in the form of mega powerful network computers, placed locally, with network adapters specialized to support streaming connections.

As a result, Hollywood and other content providers can scale from hundreds of thousands to millions of concurrent subscribers with a total bandwidth of up to 100 Gbps out of a single box. The 100 Gigabit Ethernet Network adapter is a key enabler for such a beast and it keeps the network “tight, tight, tight.”

That broadcasting has become more complex with the advent of OTT services is an understatement. Playout is no longer the final point of quality control. Going further down the content delivery chain, CDN edge points, targeted ad-insertion, multi-language support, and event-based channels require the expert scrutiny of broadcast engineers. The need to manage a more complex ecosystem with an ever-growing list of logging and compliance requirements has become a priority for content owners and regulators alike.

Yet the sheer scale of the problem defeats most customers. This is compounded by the fact that there is almost no point in trying to monitor those streams back in the facility.

It's a challenge that requires a fresh approach to monitoring.

OUTMODED MODEL

While traditional detection methods such as time and date searches and predefined metadata remain valid and are used widely, newer and more sophisticated software-based techniques such as digital watermarking and fingerprinting, combined with the increasing use of computer-based automation have to be considered viable alternatives.

When it comes to monitoring live channels over multiple OTT streams and ABR profiles, it is no longer practical for display panels to mirror all the possible video outlets. There is a wide choice of devices and delivery outlets that need to be supported and viewers expect the same level of service, no matter how they are accessing content. The days of tracking one channel in one format and resolution are long gone. Today, each mezzanine file could be processed into HLS, MPEG-DASH and SmoothStreaming protocols, each carrying various bitrates and resolutions. Humans will struggle to visually monitor so many different profiles simultaneously.

This is exacerbated by an outmoded model in which monitoring is done on signals leaving the central broadcast center or facility from equipment housed in local servers and storage. This remains the norm for many operations but there is an increasing shift towards off-premises, cloud-based working, with storage and data management overseen by a third-party provider.

Some are using tablets and phones in MCR, thinking they are monitoring their CDN originating streams, where they are actually so far down the chain that it’s more an exercise of monitoring the in-house internet connection. Sarcasm aside, the number of hops between the origin and where they are monitoring assumes a perfect connection and no disruption anywhere in the path. This does of course not reflect the truth of the situation and one has to look at another, better, approach.

MONITORING THE RIGHT CONTENT

Considering the CDN provider operates at packet level only and does not alter the image payload, pictures will be the same once reaching edge locations and on to the final viewing device. Though content may be correctly streaming from the playout encoder, an edge location may experience its own issues, which could be local or originating from within the CDN. Issues such as local blackouts, bandwidth discrepancies and re-buffering may not be immediately apparent to OTT streams downstream of the CDN.

Also, what happens if national and regional feeds deviate? Or when the wrong program, or an incorrect version, is played out? What happens if the wrong graphics or tickers are mistakenly overlaid on a live broadcast? These issues are becoming increasingly critical for comparing traditional linear services with OTT representations and are very difficult to pinpoint by only looking at OTT playout.

The key is to monitor the right content in the right place at the right time.

As a new approach, a software-based solution is placed nearest to the CDN, in the cloud or data center, where ingress is free, fast and reliable and only a short hop from the origin. The software performs packet level analysis and real-time monitoring, then sends the detected events back to the MCR or the facility via a very low bandwidth path for operators to visualize the status of all streams in great detail.

It means ABR streams are monitored and logged not only from playout, but also from various edge locations. It means on-premises monitoring of outgoing playout streams is linked to cloud-based instances monitoring and analyzing CDN edge streams for unified visibility of all activity.

Engineers are provided with analysis data for all streams without having to backhaul streams from the remote sites. Operators can reconcile and compare originating transcoder outputs to CDN edge points using both traditional broadcast and data-centric panels. Customers greatly reduce bandwidth consumption and therefore costs, by not having to send payloads back to master control.

By having cloud and on-premises facilities working in tandem, the monitoring and detection of stored media assets and live broadcasts can both improve the efficiency of modern broadcast workflows and reduce operating costs. In short, this model rethinks OTT workflows, makes it more meaningful whilst enabling reliable, large scale and real-time monitoring at low cost.

Keeping up with so many OTT streams can be daunting, which is why having a unified system for monitoring compliance and identifying issues across all traditional and OTT playouts is critical. To address the complexity, Mediaproxy LogServer enables operators to log and monitor outgoing ABR streams as well as Transport Stream and OTT stream metadata including event triggers, closed captions, and audio information, all from one place.

It is the key to surviving the multiformat game of the future.

Erik Otto is the CEO of Mediaproxy. 

As OTT (Over-The-Top) technology has gotten more mature and established robust standards over the years, the concept of OTT monitoring is gaining popularity. With customer expectations soaring, it’s vital for OTT providers to deliver superior-quality content. To deliver Quality of Experience (QoE) on par with linear TV broadcast, the entire system, starting from ingest to multi-bitrate encoding to delivery to CDN must be monitored continuously.

Streaming service providers and broadcasters understand the complexities involved in OTT delivery and the media distribution chain—from content acquisition to actual transmission. OTT monitoring primarily involves monitoring the status of all key elements in the pipeline starting with the media source, encoders, decoders, output of Content Distribution Network (CDN), etc. The amount of media consumed over OTT is growing at a staggering pace, and people’s viewing habits are rapidly moving towards a unified multiscreen experience. These rapid changes demand a strong comprehensive monitoring solution that takes care of all the aspects in the OTT chain and makes it easy for people at various levels in broadcast operations to monitor and control the entire system.

The primary goals of monitoring OTT are to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE) and compliance monitoring. These quality metrics include media quality for confidence monitoring and delivery of captions, both for primary and secondary languages, to increase user engagement. In addition to QoS and QoE monitoring, broadcasters have another challenge to track viewership using ID3 Tag technology.

A comprehensive monitoring system includes the following:

• Encoder status, start/stop streaming, alarms, etc. It is essential to ensure proper encoding of content that comes in from multiple sources. As opposed to traditional broadcasts, live cloud OTT workflows are much more complex as it involves delivery to individual devices with multiple profiles. It is critical to monitor for all possible issues like frame misalignment, syntax errors, over-compression, absence of markers & metadata, dropped packets, and compliance slips as these issues can negatively impact a positive viewer experience. A monitoring system should be able to monitor end-to-end workflow, raise alarms, report streaming status, and notify issues that occur anywhere in the end-to-end system. This helps to quickly resolve issues before the end customers get affected.

• CDN status (concurrent connections, origin, visitors’ statistics, etc.) The CDN plays a crucial part in delivering content to end customers. It is critical to monitor the origin of the content, viewers’ statistics, and CDN edge.

• RTMP Surveillance and analysis of local encoders' output

• External report on streaming services availability at CDN outputs, ping, etc.

• Monitoring of website accessibility, CDN status, network status, etc.

• Video-on-Demand accessibility and Quality Control Analysis. In addition to live streaming, VOD clips must be monitored for quality.

• End-user experience status report

• End-user experience report for developers

• Server-Side Ad Insertion

• Captions

OTT Monitoring Advances

OTT monitoring is evolving at a rapid pace. Early on, OTT monitoring had largely been limited to IT infrastructure monitoring, and to some extent, monitoring streams at edge locations as a proof of delivery.

With the market growing, more and more OTT broadcasters are starting to see the value of monitoring. Efforts are on to converge OTT platforms and optimize streaming protocols.

OTT providers use various streaming protocols for media delivery, including Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Real-time Transport Protocol, Smoothing Streaming, etc. Often, the receiving devices support only one or two protocols requiring service providers to stream their content in multiple protocols. Nowadays, the media streaming process is largely being performed in the cloud, making use of the CDN. The data that goes in and is delivered out from the CDN needs to be monitored to guarantee QoE.

Also, transmission errors can occur while transporting media data using the IP network; errors could pertain to packet latency, jitter, packet loss, etc. This makes it important for service providers to introduce complete quality monitoring solutions, including video monitoring at the CDN data centers and at the edge locations.

Cloud-based monitoring is extremely efficient as it works like a virtual machine (VM) that can be moved to any place within a particular network. This makes it easier to store, manage and process data, thereby saving a lot of time, effort, and money. Cloud-based monitoring allows monitoring in geo-restricted streams and regions as well as scaling up monitoring, particularly with server-side ad insertions.

The State of Logging and Compliance

Logging and compliance of traditional broadcasts are being done by a lot of companies. However, these types of loggings neither cover OTT content nor do they cover content that has advertisements inserted at the MSO. Relying on logs to understand what happens to the content could turn out to be wrong.

OTT operations have changed the way that advertisements are delivered; they can specify ads for a specific market or a community. However, these broadcasts generally are poorly monitored, or at times not monitored at all compared to traditional broadcasts.

Thus far, there has been no major push from the industry to monitor OTT due to minimal FCC compliance requirements and a lack of an industry standard on OTT. Rapid innovations are being made in OTT and broadcast video delivery. Content owners are under constant pressure to respond to the surge in OTT content consumption.

OTT video service delivery technique is making use of dynamic adaptive video streaming over HTTP (DASH). Over the past year, MPEG-DASH has seen rapid growth and has also gained strong ground in OTT technologies.

The ATSC 3.0 specification is making use of DASH for Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband TV. ATSC 3.0 offers broadcasters the opportunity to deliver broadcast and broadband services to provide better a television experience.

Statistical multiplexing (Statmux) helps in providing high-quality ATSC 3.0 streams and facilitates efficient use of available bandwidth and supports to optimize bitrates and video quality of channels that share the same physical layer pipes. OTT content travels via a broadband connection in the receiver and DASH acts as the enabler in this scenario.

OTT Monitoring Best Practices

According to the image above, the entire OTT video delivery process is carried out in three different layers. The three OTT Layers: Operations Layer, Media Layer, and Distribution Layer are monitored by three groups of API Integration. These API integrations monitor content throughout the workflow right from content acquisition to content consumption to content delivery. Monitoring includes minute observations for all touch points of the workflow and provides all the technical error data, which works as an alarm, and helps provide users uninterrupted video.

The key to improving operational efficiency is to create a fault-tolerant OTT streaming infrastructure. In case of an eventual fault, reducing the resolution time to minimum is fundamental. As highlighted in the diagram above, a comprehensive and easy- to-use dashboard that captures and controls the health of the entire infrastructure real-time can add value to the overall operation.

Current Cloud-based Challenges

• Multiple protocols being used to support a wide range of devices OTT providers use multiple streaming protocols for media delivery, and the receiving devices support only one or two protocols, which prompts OTT service providers to stream their content in multiple protocols. The data that goes in and comes out from the CDN needs to be monitored to guarantee the quality of experience (QoE).

• Last mile monitoring cloud-based OTT monitoring must handle the problem of last mile monitoring. Cloud-based applications must be monitored at various levels including user experience. Physically, there is a considerable distance between where the application is running and where the users are. Conventional monitoring, being part of the application environment, makes it technically difficult to monitor how an application behaves at the user’s end—be it a mobile app or a web browser. Internet issues specific to each region are to be monitored. Bad internet connectivity could impact user experience. 

Multiple multi-bitrate results in an increased resource requirement. Another major challenge of OTT content streaming is that the devices and networks are far more diverse than those assembled in controlled environments like satellite, cable, etc. An adaptable architecture is necessary to address the varied needs of network conditions and device requirements.

Streaming videos are being delivered to a range of devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets, making the monitoring process more complex. Bitrates and profiles with which each variant is encoded are different. So, from a monitoring and quality control perspective, operators need to put in more efforts as they have many versions for each piece of content.

Networks used by some of the devices need to tolerate dynamically fluctuating characteristics. Also, the underlying technology used in adaptive bitrate streaming is not standardized.

The aforementioned are not specific to all cloud-based applications, but to OTT monitoring in general.

Future OTT Monitoring Fixes:

• Simulating last mile bandwidth variations
• Convergence of protocols
• Limiting the number of manifests and reducing error rates while switching from one manifest to another

Future Advances in Cloud-based Monitoring of OTT Content

• Converging of streaming protocols, a widely adapted industry standard; MPEG-DASH for instance
• A protocol based on segmented delivery with near zero latency
• Advances in video compression, partly promised by H265 and efficient utilization of available bandwidth for best QoS

Hiren Hindocha is the CEO of Digital Nirvana. 

LUXEMBOURG—A different kind of test will be held on the campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey as SES, in association with Rutgers University’s School of Engineering, is measuring the capability of its content delivery network (CDN) overlay for streaming OTT video.

The initial tests, which were conducted at Rutgers’ Wireless Information Network Lab (WINLAB), will involve satellite for linear and on-demand OTT content delivery to multiple devices and platforms within the Open-Access Research Testbed for Next-Generation Wireless Networks (ORBIT) and Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI).

“The demonstrations at Rutgers University’s WINLAB are designed to compare the scalability and reliability of a satellite-based CDN with terrestrial networks,” explained Steve Corda, vice president of business development North America for SES. “The activity with WINLAB will explore intelligent content caching and routing to determine when it makes sense to deliver over-the-top video via satellite or terrestrially, and when to cache that content at the network edge.”

Rutgers researches will also be looking at applying satellite’s strengths into support for future networks, including the development of 5G.

The second phase of the testing will reportedly cover a national demonstration of the satellite-based CDN that will involve additional universities and their network test beds.