Eric Klein

Video: Distribution in a Covid-19 World

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

A look at the impacts of Covid-19 from the perspective of Disney+ and ESPN+. In this talk Eric Klein from Disney Streaming Services gives his view on the changes and learnings he saw as Covid hit and as it continues. He first comments on the increase in ‘initial streams’ as the lockdowns hit with Austria topping the list with a 44% increase of time spent streaming within a just a 48-hour period and in the US, Comcast has reported an uptick of 38% in general streaming and web video consumption. Overall fixed broadband networks tended to do better with the peaks than mobile broadband, whereas mobile internet which is quite common in Italy was observed to be suffering.

Distribution in a Covid-19 World from Streaming Video Alliance on Vimeo.

Content providers played their part to help with the congestion in adjusting to the situation by altering video profiles and changing starting bitrates as part of an industry-wide response. And it’s this element of everybody playing their part which seems to be the secret sauce behind Eric’s statement that “the internet is more resilient than everybody thought”. Eric goes on to point out that such networks are designed to deal with these situations as the first question is always “what’s your peak traffic going to be”. Whilst someone’s estimates may be off, the point is that networks are provisioned for peaks so when many peak forecasts come to pass, their average is usually within the network’s capabilities. The exceptions come on last-mile links which are much more fixed than provisioning of uplink ports and router backplane bandwidth within datacentres.

Eric points out the benefits of open caching, a specification in development within the Streaming Video Alliance. Open caching allows for an interoperable way of delivering files into ISP, modelled around popular data, so that services can cache data much closer to customers. By doing this, Eric points to data which has shown an ability to deliver an up to 15% increase in bandwidth as well as a 30% decrease in ‘customer-impacting events.

This session ends with a short Q&A

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Speakers

Eric Klein Eric Klein
Co-Chair, Open Caching Workgroup, Streaming Video Alliance,
Director, Content Distribution, Disney Streaming Services
Jason Thibeault Moderator: Jason Thibeault
Executive Director,
Streaming Video Alliance

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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Free registration required

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: Layer 4 in the CDN

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Caching is a critical element of the streaming video delivery infrastructure, but with the proliferation of streaming services, managing caching is complex and problematic. Open Caching is an initiative by the Streaming Video Alliance to bring this under control allowing ISPs and service providers a standard way to operate.

By caching objects as close to the viewer as possible, you can reduce round-trip times which helps reduce latency and can improve playback but, more importantly, moving the point at which content is distributed closer to the customer allows you to reduce your bandwidth costs, and create a more efficient delivery chain.

This video sees Disney Streaming Services, ViaSat and Stackpath discussing Open Caching with Jason Thibeault, Executive Director of the Streaming Video Alliance. Eric Klein from Disney explains that one driver for Open Caching is from content producers which find it hard to scale, to deliver content in a consistent manner across many different networks. Standardising the interfaces will help remove this barrier of scale. Alongside a drive from content producers, are the needs of the network operators who are interested in moving caching on to their network which reduces the back and forth traffic and can help cope with peaks.

Dan Newman from Viasat builds on these points looking at the edge storage project. This is a project to move caching to the edge of the networks which is an extension of the original open caching concept. The idea stretches to putting caching directly into the home. One use of this, he explains, can be used to cache UHD content which otherwise would be too big to be downloaded down lower bandwidth links.

Josh Chesarek from StackPath says that their interest in being involved in the Open Caching initiative is to get consistency and interoperability between CDNs. The Open Caching group is looking at creating these standard APIs for capacity, configuration etc. Also, Eric underlines the interest in interoperability by the close work they are doing with the IETF to find better standards on which to base their work.

Looking at the test results, the average bitrate increases by 10% when using open caching, but also a 20-40% improvement in connection use rebuffer ratio which shows viewers are seeing an improved experience. Viasat have used multicast ABR plus open caching. This shows there’s certainly promise behind the work that’s ongoing. The panel finishes by looking towards what’s next in terms of the project and CDN optimisation.

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Speakers

Eric Klein Eric Klein
Director, CDN Technology,
Disney+
Dan Newman Dan Newman
Product Manager,
Viasat
Josh Chesarek Josh Chesarek
VP, Sales Engineering & Support
Stackpath.com
Jason Thibeault Jason Thibeault
Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance