By Nabil Kanan, Principal Product Manager
More and more media companies are transitioning to a multi-CDN strategy to stream content across multiple networks to achieve greater scalability and optimize the quality of experience (QoE) for their subscribers, as well as for disaster recovery and business contractual reasons. In addition, having greater control over content distribution is enabling these companies to benefit from better pricing deals, more capacity, and service reliability. However, much like choosing the right CDN, selecting the right multi-CDN solution requires a thorough understanding of a company's individual needs and how best to optimize its content delivery.
Spreading traffic over more than one CDN has several advantages. It protects broadcasters and content providers against slowdowns and downtime; if one provider's network experiences an outage, traffic can be routed through another network. Also, adding CDN capacity in more geographic locations, guarantees that content is loading as fast as possible and at the needed video bitrate, regardless of the end user's location. Lastly, by sending content via the best performing CDN, content providers can expect faster startup times, less rebuffering, and high-quality video playback resulting in happier, loyal subscribers.
Regardless of how much control and customizability a customer wants for their multi-CDN approach, there are a few key elements that all good solutions share.
With Stream Routing, Verizon Media's multi-CDN solution, customers exercise a great deal of control over how their content is delivered with the flexibility to control what content is routed to which CDNs at any given time, for every event, every channel, and over different geographic regions. This is very advantageous if a company needs to honor pre-existing commitments to particular CDN providers or needs a single additional CDN to operate in a specific region.
Recently, we expanded our solution to give customers additional flexibility in how they optimize their video delivery worldwide. With dynamic decisioning, customers can augment their configured rulesets for content distribution and further optimize performance across multiple CDNs. This approach operates like a meta-CDN, automatically redirecting video streaming traffic and load-shifting to ensure consistent video quality at all times. Our solution is CDN-agnostic meaning that decisions about where to route traffic are made purely on performance metrics with data originating server-side as well as client-side.
The following diagram outlines the key areas and benefits of our multi-CDN solution:
The movement toward multi-CDN began with media conglomerates who needed the bandwidth for video streaming on a grand scale. Today, a multi-CDN approach is accessible and affordable for companies of any size that want fast, reliable content delivery.
To see a demo of Smartplay Stream Routing, visit Stand 5.B64 at IBC this month in Amsterdam. Schedule a meeting now.