Cdn – the Engine of Your Media Delivery Stack

CDN – THE ENGINE OF YOUR MEDIA DELIVERY STACK

DRIVE CONSISTENT, RELIABLE, BROADCAST-QUALITY EXPERIENCES TO EVERY DEVICE

In a global market defined by innovation and consumer expectations, the engine powering your media delivery stack is as important as the content being carried.

How fast, and reliably, content is delivered is often a major factor in outages, latency issues, and buffering— all of which can hit the brakes on great consumer experiences.

As consumer expectations for the quality, reliability, and speed of online media grow, smart delivery strategies must evolve to keep pace. The popularity of streaming video, online gaming, and large media downloads mean Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are critical to a success. The multi-CDN approach provides global reach and offers the speed, security, and reliability businesses need to expand to new digital and geographic frontiers.

The right CDN strategy can widen delivery footprints and help securely meet consumer demands. Cisco Systems’ in-depth research on the future of visual networking shows today’s operator should be gearing up to fuel even more screens as overall IP traffic will increase nearly threefold over the next five years.

BY 2021 CONNECTED DEVICES AND VIDEO WILL WILL EXCEED THE HUMAN COMPRISE 80% OF POPULATION THREE TIMES OVER ALL WEB TRAFFIC.

The market for delivery of new content will grow with the rise of online gaming and multi-purpose entertainment technologies like virtual reality mature. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 74% of all the video games were sold in digital format in 2017. More than 22 million Americans already use virtual reality platforms, and the global VR gaming market is expected to be worth $22.9 billion by the end of 2020. The demand for an infrastructure and strategy sound enough to stand up to the rigors of increasing file sizes and speed necessities is paramount. SPEED, QUALITY, AND CONSUMER EXPECTATIONS Milliseconds matter. Every additional second of delivery time brings more potential for outages, latency issues, and buffering. Forward thinking media delivery strategies like performance routing and an open-source architecture ensure your business has the speed needed today and the scalability for tomorrow. PERFORMANCE ROUTING: DYNAMIC DETERMINATION OF THE BEST PATH TO EVERY SCREEN Businesses could choose to switch traffic from one CDN to another for a number of strategic reasons. The advantage of CDN redundancy is if there’s a problem or bottleneck with one network, a “detour” employing a different CDN can make an end-run around the traffic jam and get the content delivered seamlessly. Specific business rules can trigger a switch, such as diverting traffic to a different CDN once the traffic hits a certain level or based on other criteria such as contractual usage limits. CDN switching rules can also be based completely around cost-effectiveness, choosing your path from origin to device primarily on price.

THE KEY TO TRUE PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT IS THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND THE EXPERIENCE AT THE INDIVIDUAL USER LEVEL THROUGH PRACTICAL, “THIS-CUSTOMER-AT- THIS-TIME” INSIGHTS ACROSS DEVICES, PLATFORMS, AND GEOGRAPHIES.

The right measurement approach depends on your needs, but they generally fall into three different types of programs:

Player-based: This method captures playback data directly from the playback device in real time, and then delivers insights and metrics computations that can be monitored and acted upon while a program is in progress.

File-download-based: This approach analyzes metadata tags — small static test object downloads and not the actual video stream itself. The test object measurements are aggregated together to paint a generalized, high-level picture of how well a CDN is performing.

CDN-server-based: This approach measures every stream while it’s being played, to provide performance metrics that can be more accurately attributed to a specific CDN within your network. As a CDN moves video content through the network to intended destinations, the measurements from different streams can be aggregated into a more accurate performance snapshot from the CDN-server perspective.

Video quality is highly susceptible to degradation, which is why the best multi-CDN solutions are built to respond to real-time, active health monitoring of the entire network emphasizing performance scores over any other metric. STANDARDS-BASED OPEN-SOURCE ARCHITECTURE What does open-source mean? Simply, the holder of a program’s copyright makes its source code available to users (called “committers”), granting rights to collaborate, change, and distribute modified or improved versions.

More than “free access,” the Open Source Initiative provides a specific multi-tenet definition that builds a more engaged community of developers and fosters a culture of engagement, mutual benefit, and continuous improvement.

THE NON-PROPRIETARY NATURE OF THE OPEN-SOURCE MODEL IS THE OPTIMAL STARTING POINT FOR THE CREATION OF A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK THAT ISN’T RELIANT UPON ANY ONE COMPANY OR TECHNOLOGY.

Long- and short-term benefits to your media delivery:

Faster innovations: Open source projects often deliver many critical features over short timelines due to the fact contributions come from multiple high-profile and well-funded companies in parallel. This leaves them well-positioned to accommodate next-gen media requirements such as new protocols, interactive features, and e-commerce systems.

Flexible configuration: Each user decides how much or how little of it to implement. The freedom to tailor deployment, select features, and avoid reliance on specific hardware all mean your CDN has the agility to adopt or adapt to new innovations or delivery needs.

Standardization: While proprietary CDN platforms move further from industry standardization, in an effort to patent and protect their intellectual property, open-source efforts constantly move towards unified standards.

Improved security: With more talent from across the industry working on open-source code, vulnerabilities, risks, and design flaws are uncovered that might not have otherwise been recognized. Coupled with the aforementioned acceleration of development time, it’s a win-win for improved content security. THE MULTI-CDN APPROACH TO MULTIPLATFORM DELIVERY IS “GOOD ENOUGH” REALLY GOOD ENOUGH? IS MY CDN SMART ENOUGH TO ALWAYS CHART THE SHORTEST, CLEANEST, MOST EFFICIENT, AND HIGHEST-QUALITY PATHWAY TO EVERY SCREEN? HOW DO I KNOW I’M MEASURING THE RIGHT THING?

Often, speed alone will not ensure your content gets to where it needs to as quickly as possible. The edge-tier of every CDN provides Points of Presence (PoPs), where your audience and your content interact. By employing the use of more than one CDN, you get more PoPs for your programming. Additional CDNs can widen your delivery footprint and allow you to serve customers from many more locations and over different network routes — this is especially true when attempting to deliver content to a global audience.

The variability of performance is another reason to utilize a multi-CDN strategy. Individual CDNs vary in their performance across different locations, network, and time of day. No single CDN can perform well in every area of the world. Quality of experience will differ depending on their proximity to points of presence, as well as capacity and utilization.

A multi-CDN media delivery strategy ensures downloads are seamless and downtime is not a concern. If one server crashes, the next is ready to compensate and deliver content to users by caching content nearest to your destination. This improves performance and reduces errors and crashes by offloading bandwidth from the origin. The more servers there are, the better the odds the consumer will be in close enough proximity to enjoy “clean” playback, free from interruption.

A NETWORK OF SERVERS, STRATEGICALLY SCATTERED ACROSS A SPECIFIC GEOGRAPHICAL FOOTPRINT WILL BRING YOUR CONTENT CLOSER TO THE MANY SCREENS THAT WILL DISPLAY IT WITH THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE QUALITY. DNS VS. HTTP 302 REDIRECT ROUTING: BEST CDN CACHE MATCHING METHOD FOR VIDEO DELIVERY A multi-CDN strategy is all about “routing,” but that means different things at different parts of the content delivery journey. CDN-switching technology needs to determine the best network for each playback experience, based on whatever business rules you’ve established (such as performance, cost, timing, or contractual obligations). Once the CDN has been selected, the next step is to identify the right server within that network’s ecosystem. A multi-CDN approach must ensure the clients are routed to the closest CDN cache to guarantee the best possible performance and playback experience.

Most CDNs offer only one cache selection method. However, some offer both DNS-based and redirect-based cache matching. DNS matching is the workhorse most CDNs use — well suited for serving web pages, small objects, and video. However, 302 redirect cache matching performs better for large media libraries and software downloads.

The two methods are similar, with the client’s DNS server connecting to the traffic router to initiate the process. The main difference is with 302 redirect routing, the client connects to the traffic router where we evaluate the client IP address, as well as the file being requested. Together, those are used to make a better cache-matching decision. To accurately identify the location of both client and content, we need two things: The client’s location, so it can determine the closest CDN server; and the content’s URL, to help locate a server that already has the content in cache. DNS ROUTING 302 REDIRECT ROUTING DNS SERVER DNS SERVER

CDN TRAFFIC CDN TRAFFIC ROUTER ROUTER

CLIENT CLIENT

CDN EDGE CDN EDGE CACHE CACHE

With DNS-only routing, all that gets returned is the DNS server location, and the domain portion of the URL. The HTTP redirect routing adds a small increment of time at the front end of a delivery event, but it provides the full URL and client location — resulting in a best-possible server selection. TIERING AND ORIGIN PROTECTION: SERVE MILLIONS OF CONCURRENT USERS, AND PROTECT YOUR CONTENT Once your content is uploaded to an origin server for distribution, the volume of origin requests must be considered for both stress on the origin infrastructure as well as the cost of egressing content. A good CDN will provide a mid-tier layer by default which funnels down requests to the origin. This reduces load on the origin, reduces egress costs, and improves CDN performance.

Many CDNs charge more for these services and some may not be able to manage the volume of requests. Without this feature, many customers end up spending more on origin protection services through third parties. Comcast provides a standard CDN mid-tier at no additional cost which provides all of these features, protects your origin, and reduces your cost. NEW FRONTIERS WORLDWIDE ONLINE-GAMING TRAFFIC REACHED 915 PETABYTES PER MONTH IN 2016 AND IS EXPECTED TO GROW BY 79% MORE IN 2019, ACCORDING TO CISCO SYSTEMS.

The value of the global PC online game market in 2015 was $25.1 billion and is expected to increase by 25% in 2019, according to Capcom. For developers, infrastructure and scalability matter.

Ever-growing file sizes and concerns over download speeds create the need for content delivery networks to provide continuous and quick access for consumers. The last thing game developers and players want is for slow speeds or technical failures to ruin the next big release. Capacity is finite. Delivery of large files like games and VR experiences and live streaming game play can create choke points in individual CDN or locations. Multi-CDN solves for this by distributing the load.

Increasing demand for latency-free online-gaming experiences, broadcast-quality video content, and dynamic content that changes on a real-time basis like streaming sports, news, and concerts, will drive growth in the media delivery market.

Recent events like the World Cup and Winter Olympics generated large volumes of streaming video in 2018 with Conviva measuring over 9 million peak concurrent plays during the World Cup final. The Cisco VNI forecasts a 36% compound annual growth rate in CDN internet traffic per month from 2017 to 2022.

TO CAPITALIZE ON NEW OPPORTUNITIES, CONSUMER EXPERIENCES WITH ONLINE CONTENT SHOULD BE AS GOOD, IF NOT BETTER, THAN BROADCAST, AS WELL AS CONSISTENT AND RELIABLE.

Comcast Technology Solutions offers a tailored content delivery network architecture engineered to deliver online media at scale. Partner with someone with a mind toward the meaningful differences in media delivery strategy and reimagine your approach to media delivery. ABOUT COMCAST TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS Comcast Technology Solutions provides a portfolio of media, entertainment, and technology solutions. We invent technology that solves industry challenges, reimagines what is possible, and transforms business through new innovations. Built on Comcast’s know-how, proven facilities, platforms, and infrastructure, Comcast Technology Solutions offers more than 20 years of reliable real-world broadcast and digital experience. We partner with customers to redefine business strategies and deliver the future to global audiences. FIND OUT MORE 800-824-1776 | ComcastTechnologySolutions.com [email protected]