The 2019 edition of the BroadThinking event organized by the EBU took place in Geneva on the 26th and 27th of March.
For Broadpeak it was a great opportunity to demo its multiCDN Diversity feature, which allows content providers to improve the quality of their video delivery by combining several sources and dynamically requesting more from the ones that are performing better.
Nivedita Nouvel, VP Marketing at Broadpeak and Guillaume Bichot Broadpeak’s Head of Exploration at EBU 2019 in Geneva.
We also attended the conference presentations, which are always good food for thought.
Several content providers (including RTVE, SVT, SwissTXT, and IRT) and one operator (Deutsche Telekom) shared their strategies for improving their services. The questions in their minds: How can content providers fight against Netflix? And how do you not become a dumb pipe when you are a network operator?
According to research shared by the EBU:
- traditional TV watching is declining
- online TV viewing is growing fast
- public service media-on-demand offers are in many cases behind the audiences generated by Netflix or Amazon Prime, and this trend is stronger with the younger generations
- streaming traffic and quality are increasing
The answers to the questions above relate precisely to the closer relationship that needs to exist between content providers and network providers. Of course, local broadcasters have the possibility of producing and distributing specific content that will complement SVOD offers, focusing on live events and replay functions. But they need to gain more control over their delivery in order to compete in terms of quality. To do so, a growing number of content providers are adopting the same strategy as Netflix: bring their content closer to viewers, down to the network operator’s infrastructure, through local caching.
However, as SwissTXT explained, a bunch of Nginx caches is not enough to make a reliable edge delivery solution. Configuration, monitoring, support and maintenance all require a professional and future-proof implementation.
At Broadpeak, we believe that the best move for content owners is to implement local caching in a multi-CDN context. This allows them to optimize an important part of the traffic by dynamically caching the most popular content locally while leveraging a CDN service for less popular content or to handle fail-over if required.
The Diversity technology implemented between a local cache and one or several CDNaaS is precisely meant to enable seamless fail-over in such a case.
More information about Broadpeak solutions for content providers can be found here.
