Green Streams, Varnish Software Partner on Video Streaming CDN for ISPs

Varnish
(Image credit: Varnish Software)

DÜSSELDORFGreen 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."

George Winslow

George Winslow is the senior content producer for TV Tech. He has written about the television, media and technology industries for nearly 30 years for such publications as Broadcasting & Cable, Multichannel News and TV Tech. Over the years, he has edited a number of magazines, including Multichannel News International and World Screen, and moderated panels at such major industry events as NAB and MIP TV. He has published two books and dozens of encyclopedia articles on such subjects as the media, New York City history and economics.