Content Delivery Revisited in This New Virtual World

Remember MWC 2020?

Unfortunately, no one does, because it was canceled this year due to these challenging and uncertain times. We had planned to announce and demonstrate many products and solutions in the Fira Barcelona Gran Via, but then quickly pivoted that work to a virtual setting. As part of several pieces of news, we signaled our plans for a better way to offer content delivery services, particularly for streaming video.

Just prior to the planned start of MWC 2020, my colleague Humberto La Roche published a blog, CDN Caching and Video Streaming Performance. Humberto described a project sponsored by Cisco’s Research and Open Innovation initiative to explore a couple of questions:

To what extent do Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches deep inside the ISP or the operator network improve Quality of Experience (QoE)?
Is it sufficient to simply deploy the CDN appliance just past the peering point?

Read Humberto’s work for details, but the overall results of the research show the potential of edge computing deployments to enhance the QoE of video streaming.

Today we continue the story with a joint news release – and of course, we’re still doing things virtually.

In the news release, we reveal two new strategic partnerships, Qwilt and Digital Alpha, and introduce a new model for streaming media delivery based on open caching, offering operational stability, more capacity, higher quality, and lower costs. Additionally, we report on a well-known service provider, BT, that is deploying a new open caching service to offer higher quality streaming video to their customers in the United Kingdom.

The growth of video exposes several problems in the current content delivery model. Some challenges include:

Traffic growth, bit rate resolution, and device growth
Fragmentation of over-the-top video content across many sources
Mass live streaming creates new peak capacity requirements
New use cases such as virtual reality require very low latency performance

Limitations include:

Service providers don’t monetize delivery, yet they bear the cost
Service providers lack visibility and control
Service providers’ investments in capacity aren’t optimized
Content delivery via limited peering points is suboptimal

Based on edge computing principles, our content delivery solution helps network service providers deploy a new open architecture and implement a new business model. The solution is based on Open Caching, an architecture developed and endorsed by the Streaming Video Alliance and offered as a service.

This turn-key offering helps service providers deploy a streaming platform optimized for their network with a high degree of control over content flows. It leverages a platform that caters to the needs of global and regional content providers for consistency in content delivery and performance assurance.

We don’t know yet what MWC 2021 might look like, be it back in Barcelona or virtual. Whatever the venue, stayed tuned as we continue the story.