November 19, 2024

How Multicast ABR Could Have Knocked Out Video Freezes During Netflix’s Live Streaming of the Paul/Tyson Match

The Facts

Paul / Tyson boxing match was live streamed by Netflix on November 15th.

The event attracted more than 120M viewers, with a peak of 65M simultaneous streams—making it the largest streaming audience ever recorded on the Netflix platform.

Many viewers, however, experienced issues like video freezes, jerky images, and audio-video sync delays, leading to frustration.

On Facebook, Downdetector mentioned “over 1 million reports across 50 different countries. The U.S. led the way with over 530,000 reports peaking at approximately 11:00PM EST prior to the main event.”

Netflix Streaming Strategy

Netflix has built its own Content Delivery Network (CDN) to be independent from CDN service providers and fully control the quality of its video delivery. They rely on their own system of cache servers deployed in the infrastructure of operators worldwide.¹

Caches allow storing a video locally, closer to the end-user, to avoid network congestion by distributing traffic among several local points of presence. Each cache is provisioned with content and streams a portion of the demand in unicast (point-to-point, with one stream per user).

Thanks to its end-to-end investment in streaming technology, from encoders to players, Netflix is often considered a reference for quality of experience—at least for VOD.

Why Is It Different For Live Content?

Due to the surge of demand, when everyone connects at the same time to watch content, caches can become saturated very quickly. They reach their maximum capacity and are unable to deliver more traffic in good conditions.

In live streaming, content must be captured, encoded, transmitted, and displayed to viewers as close to real-time as possible – any delays or network imperfections may be seen on the screens!

Is There a Solution?

Yes: the use of multicast. It is the equivalent of broadcast on IP networks, enabling the delivery of the same content to an unlimited number of users without impacting the network infrastructure.

This is what network operators use for their legacy broadband TV (or IPTV) services to deliver live video (using a format called MPEG-2 Transport Stream) to their set-top boxes.

Why Is Netflix Not Using Multicast For Their Live Content ?

Mainly because Netflix, like all over-the-top streaming platforms, uses Adaptive BitRate (ABR) streaming format (and not MPEG-2 Transport Stream) that allows to carry content transparently on operators networks leveraging http. And this format is not natively fit for multicast delivery and reception on all target devices (smartphones, tablets, connected TVs in addition to set-top-boxes).

Moreover, mobile devices do not support multicast reception, that would be too costly in terms of battery consumption.

And finally, operators control the access to their multicast resources and do not often open it to 3rd parties.

No Solution For Netflix Live Content, Then?

Yes! Multicast ABR technology has been developed to address this very need. It allows operators to stream Adaptive Bitrate content over their multicast networks.

The traditional unicast stream is converted into multicast in the head-end, after the live video has been transcoded and packaged in an Adaptive Bitrate format, and an agent in the home gateway or set-top-box converts the multicast back to unicast so that it can be played by any device transparently.

No matter how many people are watching the live content, only one stream is sent through the network, maintaining the same footprint. The quality and latency are also improved since multicast streaming on operators’ managed networks is more stable.

This is the solution of choice for high-audience live content delivery. Operators who deploy this technology on their network can offer this capability to third-party content providers like Netflix, avoiding quality issues related to traffic peaks during popular events.

Has This Technology Been Deployed Already?

Yes! Broadpeak has deployed its nanoCDN® multicast ABR technology in more than 30 operators’ infrastructures worldwide, serving 30 million users. A major sports content provider like DAZN is using it on the TIM network to deliver soccer events in Italy (Broadpeak’s Multicast ABR Technology Used by DAZN to Stream Live Sports Events to Millions of Devices).

It has significantly improved the quality of experience, reducing error rates by 85-90% (both at stream initiation and during playback) and decreasing rebuffering times by 75%, minimizing the time viewers spend waiting for content to load when the stream freezes.

Multicast ABR on the Rise

In the world of streaming, multicast ABR (mABR) may seem like the underdog, but it has the power to knock out buffering and deliver smooth, high-quality video. mABR is ready to step into the ring and support massive events—no gloves required!

Want better streaming quality? Ask your ISP and video service providers about multicast ABR and share this blog with them!