Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 24) video to go Ortiva Wireless—The Mobile CDN Essential to enabling any mobile experience is delivering video to a mobile device. True, mobile streaming can be as straightforward as streaming to the desktop, but is that really the optimal way to deliver mobile video? Not according to Ortiva Wireless. “Traditional CDNs are designed to get content as close to the edge as possible and provide multiple copies to allow for resiliency,” says DeWayne Nelon, CEO of Ortiva Wireless. “But there’s nothing a traditional CDN can do for you from that last point of presence down to the consumer regardless of what that device is. And that last length is what causes difficulties when trying to deliver mobile video.” This is the challenge Ortiva set out to solve through the development of what it calls the industry’s first mobile CDN, though that’s admittedly something of a misnomer. “Delivery is not what we’re about; it’s that last little bit of the network. In fact, we’ll often work with other delivery networks for the transport piece,” says Nelon. By leveraging its mobile CDN, Ortiva claims it can reduce the amount of needed downlink and backhaul transport and capacity, increase the reach of the video signal to a broader geographic area, and ultimately enable a better overall mobile experience. A graphic rendering of how Ortiva claims its technology shapes content to take advantage of all available bandwidth in real time, even when the network drops to 2.5G speeds. what the encoder encoded, we stream what your network and device will bear.” Ortiva constantly measures the network conditions and adjusts on the fly. “We’ll change the ratio of I-Frames to P-Frames, or we may change the quantization levels, or the audio-visual bandwidth mix. We’ll do them all in combination with each other to create a different experience,” says Nelon. For example, in unsteady conditions, they may send more I-Frames than P-Frames in order to create a more resilient session, but in good conditions they’ll send more P-Frames in order to get a higher-quality picture. The important thing is that these adjustments are made every few seconds during a streaming session in real time. “You can’t make these decisions in advance. And through us, you don’t have to create multiple versions of the same content to accommodate these varying network conditions,” says Nelon. The system comes set up with some default biases— for example, stressing fewer stops and stalls over higherres video—but customers can adjust these to fit the demands of their content. For example, default settings prioritize video over audio delivery, but if you’re sending music videos the audio may be more important. Ortiva’s Stream Shaper handles on-demand delivery, while TV Shaper covers live video, which they claim to deliver with as little as 15 seconds of latency, compared to the multi-minute latency of its competitors. Also available is Web Shaper, which applies similar principles to the delivery of rich websites to mobile devices. “With Web Shaper you don’t have to dumb down sites for mobile devices. Instead, you can create sites as rich as you’d like them to be and then tag each frame or item with how important it is for you,” says Nelon. “So say you want a site to load in 35 seconds. As the page is requested, in about two or three seconds we’ll measure the network and determine how much we can get down this pipe. Then, in the remaining seconds, based on the priority you gave us, we’ll send the best possible rendering of that page down to the mobile device.” In addition to working with content owners, Ortiva has a number of deals with major carriers on the horizon as their ability to serve content that minimizes the impact on the network has caught carriers’ interest. It accomplishes these feats through the use of three tools. First is the point of content ingestion, which looks at the video assets coming in and assesses how they can be tweaked to work under constrained network conditions. Second is their network resource monitoring, which looks at feedback from handsets to determine network conditions. And third is the streamer, which takes the network conditions, looks at the options available to adjust the content, and assembles a stream on the fly that is custom-built for the network conditions at the moment the stream is requested. “Every other solution takes what was encoded and streams some version of that. It may draw bitrate down, but in almost every case the streamer will stream what the encoder encoded,” says Nelon. “We don’t stream 24 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007 Skyward Mobile—Building Mobile Browsing Applications Building mobile applications as part of a larger mobile media experience is not new. Mobile gaming in particular has been an in-demand space for a while now. But being able to create mobile applications quickly and easily, and expanding their scope beyond gaming and their capabilities beyond the limited capacity of mobile devices is another matter entirely. “The mobile space is very much like the web was in ’93–’94. There are a few early adopters, but the mass market hasn’t gotten there yet because the experiences are too hard to use, too slow, and too unattractive. Therein lies the opportunity,” says Jeremy De Bonet, CEO of Skyward Mobile.
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