Video via the Internet is popular, very popular. Even so much that severe capacity problems threaten to choke its delivery. For the home user this may not be apparent, as last mile connectivity has much increased over the past years. However, the growth of video streamed via ‘the web’ does outpace capacity growth in the Internet backbone. And on top of the increase in the amount of video consumed, there also is a shift towards higher qualities; requiring even more delivery capacity. Think for example of the wave of ‘over the top’ services starting to be deployed.
Octoshape's software combines cloud and multicast technology in a dynamic way.
In a new EBU Technical Review article, three experts from streaming facilitator Octoshape explore what solutions can be deployed to face this major capacity challenge. They make a case for using a more distributed model (based on receiving so-called ‘streamlets’ from multiple locations) instead of the common Content Distribution Network (CDN) approach. One of the novelties is the integration of cloud services. The authors explain why that is attractive. They also note that current cloud infrastructures easily are larger than the largest CDN system available and that If fifteen percent of the top ten cloud infrastructures were aggregated, they could recreate the capacity of the entire world’s CDNs streaming infrastructure! Besides the distributed, cloud-based approach, the article also discusses how multicast is used or simulated to increase the streaming performance even further. The full article is available here.