Limelight Networks Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: The Future of Online Video

Posted on 27th January 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are few people who should build their own CDN, contends Steve Miller-Jones from Limelight Networks. If you want to send a parcel, you use a parcel delivery service. So if you want to stream video, use a content delivery network tuned for video. This video looks at the benefits of using CDNs.

John Porterfield welcomes Steve to YouTube channel JP’sChalkTalks and starting with a basic outline of CDNs. Steve explains that the aim of the CDN is to re-deliver the same content as many times as possible by itself without having to go back to a central store, or even back to the publisher to get the video chunk that’s been requested. If your player is a few seconds behind someone else’s who lives in the same geography, then the CDN should be able to deliver you those same chunks almost instantly from somewhere geographically close to you.

Steve explains that in the Limelight State of Online Video 2020 Annual Report rebuffering remains the main frustration with streaming services and, remaining at approx 44% for the last 3 years when taken as a global average. Contrary to popular belief, the older generation is more tolerant of rebuffering than younger viewers.

As well as maintaining a steady feed, low-latency is remaining important. Limelight is able to deliver CMAF down to around a 3-second latency or WebRTC with sub-second latency. To go along with this sub-second video streaming, Limelight also offer sub-second data sharing between players which Steve explains is a important feature allowing services to develop interactivity, quizzes, community engagement and many other business cases.

Lastly Steve outlines the importance of Edge computing as a future growth area for CDNs. The first iteration of cloud computing was a success by taking computing into central locations and away from individual businesses. This worked well for many for financial reasons, because it freed organisations up from managing some aspects of their own infrastructure and enabled scaling of services. However, the logic of what happened next was always done in this one central place. If you’re in Australia and the cloud location is in the EU, then that’s a long wait until you get the result of the decision that needs to be made. Edge computing allows small parts of logic to live in the closest part of a CDN to you. This could well mean that the majority of a service’s infrastructure is in the US, but some of the CDN be it CloudFront, Limelight or another will be in Australia itself meaning pushing as much of your services as you can to the edge will result in significant improvements in speed/latency reduction.

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Speakers

	Steve Miller-Jones VP Strategy & Industry, Limelight Networks
	John Porterfield Technology Evangelist, JP’sChalkTalks YouTube Channel

Video: CDNs: Building a Better Video Experience

Posted on 28th October 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With European CDN spend estimated to reach $7bn by 2023, an increase in $1.2 in only three years, it’s clear there is no relenting in the march towards IP. In fact, that’s a guiding principle of the BBC’s transmission strategy as we hear from this panel which brings together three broadcasters, beIN, Globo and the BBC to discuss how they’re using CDNs at the moment and their priorities for the future.

Carlos Octavio introduces Globo’s massive scale of programming for Brazil and Latin America. Producing 26,000 hours of content annually, they aim to differentiate themselves as much with the technology of their offerings as with the content. This thirst for differentiation drives their CDN strategy. Brazil is a massive country, so covering the footprint is hard. Octavio explains that they have created their own CDN to support Globo Play which is based on 4 tiers from their two super PoPs in Rio and Sao Paolo down to edge caches. Octavio shows that they are able to achieve the same response times as the major CDN companies in the region. For overflow capacity, Globo uses a multi-CDN approach.

Bhavesh Patel talks about the sports and news output of beIN, both of these being bursty in nature. Whilst traffic for sporting events can forecast, with news this is often not possible. This, plus the wide variability of customers’ home bandwidth are drivers in choosing which CDNs to partner with. Over the next twelve months, Bhavesh explains, beIN’s focus will move to bring down latency on their system as a whole, not on a service by service level. They are also expecting to continue to modify their ABR ladders to follow viewers as they continue their shift from second screens to 60 inch TVs.

The BBC’s approach to distribution is explained by Paul Tweedy. Whilst the BBC is still well known as a linear, public broadcaster, it has been using online distribution for 25 years and continues to innovate in that space. Two important aspects to their strategy are being on as many devices as practical and ensuring the quality of the online experience meets or is comparable to the linear services. The BBC has been using multiple CDNs for many years now. What changes is the balance and what they use CDNs for. They cover a lot of sports, explains Paul, which leads to short-term scaling difficulties, but long term scaling difficulties are equally on his mind due to what the BBC calls the ‘glide path to IP’. This is the acknowledgement that, at some point, it won’t be financially viable to run transmitters and IP will be the wise way to use the licence fee on which the BBC depends. Doing this, clearly, will demand IP delivery of many times what is currently being used. Yesterday’s article on multicast ABR is one way in which this may be mitigated and fits into a multi-CDN strategy.

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Looking at today’s streaming services, Paul and his colleagues aim to get analytics from every player on every device wherever possible. Big data techniques are used to understand these logs along with server-side, client-to-edge and edge-to-origin logs. This information along with sports schedules can lead to capacity planning, though many news events are much less easy to plan. It’s these unplanned, high-peak events which drive the BBC’s build up of internal monitoring tools to help them understand what is working well under load and what’s starting to feel the strain so they can take action to ensure quality is maintained even through these times of intense interest. The BBC manage their capacity with their own CDN, called BIDI, which provides for the baseline needs and allows an easier-to-forecast budget. Mulitple, third-party CDNs are, then, the key to providing the variable and peak capacities needed.

As we head into the Q&A Limelight’s Steve Miller-Jones outlines the company’s strengths including their focus on adding abilities on top of a ‘typical’ CDN. For instance, running applications on the CDN which is particularly useful as part of edge compute and their ability to run WebRTC at scale which not many CDNs are built to do. The Q&A sees the broadcasters outlining what they particularly look out for in a CDN and how they leverage AI. Globo anticipate using AI to help them predict traffic demand, beIN see it providing automated highlights whilst the BBC see it enabling easier access to their deep archives.

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Speakers

	Carlos Octavio Head of Architecture and Analytics, Globo
	Bhavesh Patel Global Digital Director, beIN MEDIA GROUP
	Paul Tweedy Lead Architect, Online Technology Group, BBC Design + Engineering
	Steve Miller-Jones Vice President of Product Strategy, Limelight Networks

Video: Low Latency, Real-Time Streaming & WebRTC

Posted on 24th August 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Can any stream be too low-latency? For some matching broadcast latency, is all they need. But for others, particularly for gaming, gambling or more interactive services, sub-second is a must and they are happy to swap out parts of their technology stack to make that happen. WebRTC is often seen as the best choice for anyone wanting to go achieve an almost instant stream. Started by Google in 2011 for video conferencing applications, WebRTC hit a 1.0 release in 2018 and has been adopted by a number of companies catering to the broadcast market.

WebRTC stands out among the plethora of streaming protocols since it is an actual stream of data and not a series of files transferred just in time. Traditionally buffers have been heavily used in streaming because it was so hard to get data to the player when the mainstream internet was starting out in the 90s and as the mobile internet was establishing itself 10 years later. Whilst those buffers are very helpful in dealing with delayed data, they are a big set back in delivering a low-latency stream. With WebRTC, there is very little buffering, so when using the protocol you have to understand that you may not get all your data delivered and if packets are missing glitches will be seen. This is one significant difference since MPEG DASH and HLS will either show you a blank screen or a perfect rendition of the file chunk that was sent thanks to TCP. This is an example of the compromises of going to sub-second latency; there are no second chances to get the packet again. And whilst this compromise may be a great exchange for an auction site or betting service, for other streaming services, it may be better to use CMAF with 3-second latency.

In this talk, Limelight Networks Video Architect Andrew Crowe introduces WebRTC and explains how it can be deployed. He starts by talking about the video codecs it contains. VP9 has recently been added to the options and for a long time, it was a VP8 technology. Andrew explains how the codecs it carries does have a knock-on effect on its compatibility with browsers. UDP is the underlying technology to all low-latency technologies since the bureaucracy of TCP/IP gets in the way of real-time media streams. Andrew also explains how security pervades WebRTC from its use of DTLS (which is like HTTPS/TLS for UDP) to secure RTP and SRTCP.

The last part of the talk discusses the architectures that CDN LimeLight uses to enable large-scale WebRTC streams including the need to get through firewalls. Andrew discusses how some features of the technology suit small-scale events, but can’t be used with thousands of viewers. He also discusses how adaptive bitrate streams can be delivered, although not within WebRTC itself, there is enough information to implement ABR in addition to the standard stream.

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Speakers

Andrew Crowe
Video Architect,
Limelight Networks

Video: Reducing Stream Latency

Posted on 20th June 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Latency seems to be the new battleground for streaming services. While optimising bandwidth and quality are still highly important, they are becoming mature parts of the business of streaming whereas latency, and technologies to minimise it – as Apple showed this month – are still developing and vying for position.

Here, the Streaming Video Alliance brings together people from large streaming services to explore this topic finding out what they’ve been doing to reduce it, the problems they’ve faced and the solutions which are on the table.

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Speakers

	Kevin Johns Distinguished Network Architect, Content and Media CenturyLink
	Chris Sammoury Principal Engineer II, Charter Communications
	Richard Oesterreicher CEO Streaming Global/Hellastorm
	Patrick Gendron Director, Innovation Harmonic
	Johan Bolin Chief Product and Technology Officer, Edgeware
	Steve Miller-Jones Vice President of Product Strategy, Limelight Networks
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

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