Live ABR Streaming at Scale: Base Camp to Summit

This post was authored by Chief Technology and Architecture Office Sangeeta Ramakrishnan and Video Strategic Marketing Lead Brian Ring.

Video – it’s the ultimate shiny object; a huge bandwidth hog; and consumers love it. That’s driving massive traffic growth on our public, private, fixed & wireless networks. The latest Cisco VNI[1] predicts Internet video traffic will hit 1.9 billion terabytes – or 1.9 Zettabytes – in 2021. That’s nearly 4x the 2016 figure. Here’s what that looks like:

A key reason we’ve made it this far is the advent of HTTP Adaptive Bit Rate streaming. From HDS to HLS, from Smooth to DASH, ABR has been a critical enabler of explosive video growth, taking us from the postage-stamp-sized Real Player on a PC to Netflix 4K UHD on a TV.

But in reality, video streaming is comprised of two completely different worlds. Above, we’ve described the world of on-demand.

Then, there’s Live. In truth, achieving media-scale Live audiences with today’s ABR technology is extremely difficult. As an industry, our great success enabling on-demand is more like reaching Base Camp than Summiting Everest. As video enters the Zettabyte era, the real challenge is still ahead of us.

To meet it, Cisco’s Service Provider Video team is working on the next-generation of Live ABR streaming technologies. At NAB, Sangeeta Ramakrishnan & Gaurav Rishi will outline four critical areas of innovation. Stacked one on top of the other, these technologies can take us to where we need to be in order to support Live Streaming at Scale.

Join us on Wednesday at 10:40am in N255 to learn about:

Encoding Optimizations for Live ABR
- Variable, quality-guided rate control
Reducing Live Lag Latency
- Controlling latency from 40+ seconds down to broadcast-comparable levels
Multicast ABR
- Enabling economic viability for mass-media sized live streams; also, fast channel change
Video-aware Networking
- Transport layer optimizations & protocol enhancements such as QUIC, in-path caching, and hybrid Information Centric Networking