CDN

Video: Workflow Evolution Within the CDN

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The pandemic has shone a light on CDNs as they are the backbone of much of what we do with video for streaming and broadcast. CDNs aim to scale up in a fast, sophisticated way so you don’t have to put in the research to achieve this yourself. This panel from the Content Delivery Summit sees Dom Robinson bringing together Jim Hall from Fastly with Akamai’s Peter Chave, Ted Middleton from Amazon and Paul Tweedy from BBC Design + Engineering.

The panel discusses the fact that although much video conferencing traffic being WebRTC isn’t supported, there are a lot of API calls that are handled by the CDN. In fact, over 300 trillion API calls were made to Amazon last year. Zoom and other solutions do have an HLS streaming option that has been used and can benefit from CDN scaling. Dom asks whether people’s expectations have changed during the pandemic and then we hear from Paul as he talks a little about the BBC’s response to Covid.

 

 

THE CTA’s Common Media Client Data standard, also known as CTA 5004, is a way for a video player to pass info back to the CDN. In fact, this is so powerful that it can provide highly granular real-time reports for customers but also enables hints to be handed back from the players so the CDNs can pre-fetch content that is likely to be needed. Furthermore, having a standard for logging will be great for customers who are multi-CDN and need a way to match logs and analyse their system in its entirety. This work is also being extended, under a separate specification to be able to look upstream in a CDN workflow to understand the status of other systems like edge servers.

The panel touches on custom-made analytics, low latency streaming such as Apples LL-HLS and why it’s not yet been adopted, current attempts in the wild to bring HLS latency down, Edge computing and piracy.

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Speakers

Peter Chave Peter Chave
Principal Architect,
Akamai Technologies
Paul Tweedy Paul Tweedy
Lead Architect, Online Technology Group,
BBC Design + Engineering
Ted Middleton Ted Middleton
Global Leader – Specialized Solution Architects, Edge Services
Amazon
Jim Hall Jim Hall
Principal Sales Engineer,
Fastly
Dom Robinson Moderator: Dom Robinson
Director and Creative Firestarter, id3as
Contributing Editor, StreamingMedia.com, UK

Video: Disney Streaming Fireside Chat

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Disney Streaming encompasses ESPN+, Hulu, Star as well as the much discussed Disney+. The latter was launched just a month before the initial detection of Covid-19 but all the services have been seeing continual roll-outs globally ever since. And it’s because of this global perspective, and one of perpetually dealing with growth, that today’s conversation with Disney as part of Streaming Media Connect is so interesting.

Eric Klein, Pankaj Chaudharim and Robert Colantuoni join moderators Tim Siglin and Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen to explain their approach to growing their streaming business. We’ve heard from Disney Streaming Services (DSS) before on The Broadcast Knowledge so we know that they have a strong interest in pushing forward Open Caching but also building their own solutions. Today’s video only reinforces that view.

 

 

When asked about DSS’s route to market, Eric points out that they have a ‘mesh’ that takes in to account that a single route to market for every location isn’t going to work. There are different limitations and constraints for every geography so whether it’s using multi-tenanting or Open Caching, for example, the mix needs to be tuned for each launch. Eric says that launching into a territory is a difficult time as they never know where exactly their customers will be and how much bandwidth will be needed.

Rob explains that Disney has a ‘Decision Science’ department which has helped them build models of new territories partly based on new data and partly based on finding similar locales already served by Disney Streaming Service. Talking about Open Cache, Rob says this is a big part of the mesh they run but sending out instructions is only one part of the challenge. The other is getting back data quickly enough and in the right format so that DSS can quickly understand it and use it for business decisions. You need to have a control plane that can handle all of these data sources and track performance relative to the options in those regions.

Pankaj adds that they constantly work with providers to ensure a base level of functionality like TLS 1.3, as an example, as well as helping them implement APIs from the Streaming Video Alliance to understand capacity. It’s critical for them to be able to understand the CDN’s capabilities as they wax and wain thanks to ‘internet weather’ as Rob puts it.

Eric talks further about how they work with their partners helping them to deal with the traffic which is coming their way and encouraging them to be part of the CTA or SVA so they can keep on top of the latest developments and also have a voice in what happens. Eric then talks about environmental work and discusses how PVoD, i.e. the latest Mulan film changes the way they deliver.

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Speakers

Eric Klein Eric Klein
Director of Media Distribution & Technology, CDN
Disney Streaming
Robert Colantuoni Robert Colantuoni
CDN Performance Architect,
Disney Streaming Services
Pankaj Chaudhari Pankaj Chaudhari
Architect – Video Delivery,
Hulu
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen Moderator: Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Editor in Chief,
Streaming Media Magazine
Tim Siglin Moderator: Tim Siglin
Contributing Editor,
Streaming Media Magazine

Video: CDNs: Delivering a Seamless and Engaging Viewing Experience

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

This video brings together broadcasters, telcos and CDNs to talk about the challenges of delivering a perfect streaming experience to large audiences. Eric Klein from Disney+ addresses the issues along with Fastly’s Gonzalo de la Vega, Jorge Hernandez from Telefonica, Adriaan Bloem with Shahid moderated by Robert Ambrose.

Eric starts by talking from the perspective of Disney+. Robert asked if scaling up quickly enough to meet Disney+’s extreme growth has been a challenge. Eric replies that scale is built by having multiple routes to markets using multiple CDNs so the main challenge is making sure they can quickly move to the next new market as they are announced. Before launching, they do a lot of research to work out which bitrates are likely to be streamed and on what devices for the market and will consider offering ABR ladders to match. They work with ISPs and CDNs using Open Caching. Eric has spoken previously about open caching which is a specification from the Streaming Video Alliance to standardise the API between for CDNs and ISPs. Disney+ uses 7-8 different provers currently and never rely on only one method to get content to the CDN. Eric and his team have built their own equipment to manage cache fill.

Adriaan serves the MENA market and whilst the gulf is fairly easy to address, north Africa is very difficult as internet bandwidths are low and telcos don’t peer except in Marseille. Adriaan feels that streaming in Europe and North America as ‘a commodity’ as, relatively, it’s so much easier compared to north Africa. They have had to build their own CDN to reach their markets but because they are not in competition with the telcos, unlike CDNs, they find it relatively easy to strike the deals needed for the CDN. Shahid has a very large library so getting assets in the right place can be difficult. They see an irony that their AVOD services are very popular and get many hits for a lot of the popular content meaning it is well cached. Their SVOD content has a very long tail meaning that despite viewers paying for the service, they risk getting a worse service because most of the content isn’t being cached.

Jorge presents his view as both a streaming provider, Movistar, and a telco, Telefonica which services Spain and South America. With over 100 POPs, Telefonica provides a lot of IPTV infrastructure for streaming but also over the internet. They have their own CDN, TCDN, which delivers most of their traffic, bursting to commercial CDNs when necessary. Telefonica also supports Open Caching.

Eric explains that the benefit of Open Caching is that, because certain markets are hard to reach, you’re going to need a variety of approaches to get to these markets. This means you’ll have a lot of different companies involved but to have stability in your platform you need to be interfacing with them in the same way. With Open Caching, one command for purge can be sent to everyone at once. For Adriaan, this is “almost like a dream” as he has 6 different dashboards and is living through the antithesis of Open Caching. He says it can be very difficult to track the different failovers on the CDNs and react.

Gonzalo points out how far CDNs like Fastly have come. Recently they had 48 hours’ notice to enable resources for 1-million concurrent views which is the same size as the whole of the Fastly CDN some years go. Fastly are happy to be part of customers’ multi-CDN solutions and when their customers do live video, Fastly recommend that they have more than one simply for protection against major problems. Thinking about live video, Eric says that everything at Disney+ is designed ‘live first’ because if it works for live, it will work for VoD.

The panel finishes by answering questions from the audience.

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Speakers

Eric Klein Eric Klein
Director, Media Distribution, CDN Technology,
Disney+
Jorge Hernandez Jorge Hernandez
Head of CDN Development and Deployment,
Telefonica/Movistar
Adriaan Bloem Adriaan Bloem
Head of Infrastructure,
Shahid
Gonzalo de la Vega Gonzalo de la Vega
VP Strategic Projects,
Fastly
Robert Ambrose Robert Ambrose
Co-Founder and Research Director,
Caretta Research

Video: Transforming the Distribution and Economics of Internet Video

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Replacing CDNs in streaming would need a fundamental change in the way we store and access video on the internet, but this is just what Eluvio’s technology offers along with in-built authentication, authorisation and DRM. There’s a lot to unpack about this distributed ‘content fabric’ built on an Ethereum-protocol blockchain.

Fortunately, Eluvio co-founder Michelle Munson is here to explain how this de-centralised technology improves on the status quo and show us what it’s being used for. We know that today’s streaming technology is based on the idea of preparing, packaging, transcoding and pushing data out through CDNs to views at home and whilst this works, it doesn’t necessarily consistent, low delay and, as we saw from Netflix and Facebook reducing their streaming bitrates at the beginning of the pandemic, it can be quite a burden on networks.

This content fabric, Michelle explains, is a different approach to the topic where video is stored natively over the internet creating a ‘software substrate’. The result doesn’t use traditional transcoding services, CDNs and databased. Rather we end up w ith a decentralised data distribution and storage protocol delivering just-in time packaging. The content fabric is split into four layers, one of which deals with metadata, another contains code which controls the transformation and delivery of media. The third layer is the ‘contract’ layer which controls access and proves content with finally a layer for the media itself. This contract layer is based on the Ethereum technology which runs the cryptocurrency of the same name. The fabric is a ledger with the content being versioned within the ledger history.

Michelle points out that with blockchain contracts baked in to all the media data, there is inherently access control at all parts of the network which has the property that viewers only need to have an ethereum-style ‘ticket’ to watch content directly. Their access is view-only and whilst this passes through the data and code layers, there is no extra infrastructure to build on top of your streaming infrastructure and each person can have their own individually-watermarked version as delivered with Eluvio’s work with MGM’s online premier of the recent Bill and Ted film.

Eluvium currently have a group of globally-deployed hubs in internet exchange sites which operate the fabric and contain media shards and blobs of code which can operate on the media to provide just-in-time delvery as necessary with the ability to create slices and overlays inherent in the delivery mechanism. When a player wants access to video, it issues the request with its authorisation information. This meets the fabric which responds to drive the output. Because of the layer of code, the inputs and outputs of the system are industry standard with manipulation done internally.

Before finishing by talking about the technology’s use within MGM and other customers, Michelle summarises the capabilities by saying that it simplifies workflows and can deliver a consistently low, global time to first byte with VoD and Live workflows interchangable. Whilst Michelle asserts that previous distribution protocols have failed at scale, Eluvio’s fabric can scale without the significant burdens of file IO.

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Speaker

Michelle Munson Michelle Munson
CEO and Founder,
Eluvio