You may have heard about the new EU regulation on content portability. In essence, it means that everyone who has paid to watch online content from a provider in their home country, must also be able to do so in any other EU country where they are staying for a limited period – on holiday, or on a business trip, for example. So, the providers of paid online content services must ensure the cross-border portability of their services. Providers of free-of-charge online content services (such as public service broadcasters) can choose whether to offer portable services to their subscribers.
Ensuring the content is accessible is one issue, but just as important is how to deliver it at high quality for viewers in other countries. Operators usually delivers content via a CDN – either its own or a third-party service. But the footprint of this service will be (or at least it should be) optimized for viewers in its home market.
Fortunately, help is at hand. Edgeware’s CDN Selector allows you to route your customers’ TV requests to a different CDN based on certain criteria – such as geography – allowing you to select an alternative CDN service for your roaming viewers. This might be a service with better EU coverage, or a more attractive EU-wide tariff. Or you could even pick and choose different CDN providers for different countries. Routing policies can be based on asset name, bit-rate, device type, content type, network type and even the load of your existing CDN, as well as geography of course. The CDN Selector integrates with all the major CDN providers, including Akamai, Limelight, Level3, AWS Cloudfront, Microsoft Azure, Fastly, Google Cloud CDN and Verizon.
So now you can meet the new EU regulations, optimize your delivery, and most importantly give your viewers the experience they expect, wherever they are watching from.
The regulation on portability of digital content was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 30 June 2017. The new rules will become applicable in all EU Member States from 1 April 2018, and the regulation will apply retroactively, meaning it also covers subscriptions that are already in place.
You can read more about Edgeware’s CDN Selector here.
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