In Broadcast - May 2020 - 52

52

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 10 - Issue 5 | May 2020

InMedia

Content Delivery Networks Elastic and Scalable
The internet won't buckle, even as major SVODs dial back their
bitrates, but the last months have seen every industry disrupted,
and the world is likely never to be quite the same again. Contributing
Editor Adrian Pennington asks: What are CDNs doing to keep business
communications and streamed entertainment going?...

I

f the pandemic had occurred in
two to three years' time perhaps
some of its detrimental effects on the
economy would have been alleviated
by the capability of 5G networks to
ensure a world with faster data, ultralow latency ultra-reliable high video
resolution connections.
As it stands today, that infrastructure
is still being built out. The biggest
increases in recent traffic recorded
by Nokia have come from the
videoconferencing sector, especially
Zoom, which has grown 700% from
February 1 in select networks in the
US. "We've seen a significant uptake
in additional CDN domains for multiCDN delivery of Zoom services (adding
Amazon - in addition to Zoom's
network)," noted Craig Labovitz,
head of Nokia's Deepfield portfolio of
products, in a blog.
Other Nokia data revealed newly
launched SVOD Disney+ relies on as
many as six CDN providers for its video
content distribution in Europe. These
include Akamai, Level 3, Limelight,
Edgecast, CloudFront and Fastly.
"Disney+ use of multiple CDNs has the
potential to cause traffic shifts (as CDN
providers balance their traffic)," wrote
Labovitz.
He highlighted that SVOD content
delivered from the internet is further
testing network peering capacities;
Nokia has seen the growth of Netflix
cache-based streaming by 20%, and
growth of OTT-based streaming by
over 100% in some networks. Labovitz
also noticed that a large
portion of Netflix content now
originates outside of on-net
CDN caches (located within
service providers' networks).
Most internet engineers
seem to agree that any network
carrying applications to the
end user - mobile and fixed line
networks, WiFi, cable or ISPs needs to shift to the Edge.
Wowza Streaming Engine

Edging Toward Scalability
As Wowza puts it, "the power of
edge computing comes down to
proximity. For live streaming, this
delivers greater scalability and
lightning-fast delivery - not to mention
advanced AI/ML capabilities."
In a nutshell, edge computing
involves decentralising data storage
and computation. By bringing realtime processing and decision-making
closer to the user, edge computing
helps reduce latency, enable advanced
analytics, and improve security
(among other capabilities).
"Edge environments promise to
also amplify automation by reducing
the volume of data moving through
networks," Wowza says. "This will
become increasingly important as 5G
is rolled out, and the IoT takes over."
Wowza offers organisations the
ability to deploy Wowza Streaming
Engine and Amazon Web Services
giving "a highly elastic and scalable
way" to deploy software powering
high-quality video and audio streams
to any device, anywhere.
Architecture that is able to process,
compute and store various types
of requests from end users in this
distributed fashion is termed Multiaccess Edge Computing (MEC) by
Vimmi.
"There is no doubt that MEC is
a powerful future-proof tool for
network providers who are dealing
with diminishing ARPU and increasing
traffic loads today, and presents a
unique opportunity for long-term

growth," says Eitan Koter, Co-founder don't have to worry about the
& Co-CEO.
underlying infrastructure such as
"Telcos
are
embracing
edge provisioning and managing servers or
computing as it aligns well with runtimes which can be costly and time
their growth plans for the future. consuming. Instead, they're able to
MEC will serve as the ultra-network concentrate on writing and deploying
infrastructure of the future."
code to create or enhance user
MEC is also in use by Web giants like application experiences.
Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.
"Functions are globally available
Each has their own initiative for MEC. and run in the same locations as
Google, for instance is deploying the CDN - closest to where content
YouTube servers while Facebook is requests are received - which ensures
promoting TIP (Telecom Infra Project), the lowest possible latency for code
an initiative about virtualising the execution and delivers optimal user
Edge and processing all video and VR experiences," Limelight explains.
at the Edge of the network. Amazon is "An API-first approach to serverless
deploying Green Grass application at computing with support for Node.
the edge of telcos, though large scale js, Python and Go frees developers to
5G deployments, delayed now but focus on innovation and integration
expected from 2020-22.
with their content workflows."
Just as caching content
at the edge enhances
delivery,
moving
the
applicable logic to the
edge can help improve
the
performance
of
applications.
Akamai's
EdgeWorkers does this by
putting computation and
logic as close as possible to
users for fast development
and implementation of
Akamai's Network Operations Command Center
modifications to digital (NOCC) claims the industry's best view of the real-time
condition of the Internet
experiences.
"With
EdgeWorkers,
serverless
It's ideally suited to streaming video
functions run directly on the edge," and content delivery use cases such
Akamai explains. "Simple services as personalized streaming, access
have full access to the request and control, dynamic ad insertion, content
delivery insights; more complex protection, A/B testing, and image
microservices can leverage data manipulation, Limelight says.
embedded in the function or remote
data solutions. Services can access all Cloud Container
of the data from the HTTP request,
Since the start of the year, Arqiva
including cookies, headers, URL, and has been managing the content
query parameters."
processing, packaging and delivery of
Last
month
Limelight A+E Networks EMEA for the channel's
Networks announced the launch Amazon Prime on demand service in
of its own distributed serverless Germany and UK. Specifically, Arqiva
computing capabilities. Branded is managing A+E's archive content in
EdgeFunctions,
the
new both UK and Germany, from where it is
capability means developers currently stored on Amazon Simple
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.akamai.com http://www.akamai.com http://www.wowza.com http://www.wowza.com http://www.wowza.com http://www.wowza.com http://www.wowza.com http://www.wowza.com
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