Chosen a multi CDN strategy for your streaming TV services? Then let StreamPilot manage and control the delivery to optimize your viewers’ QoE, regardless of device, provider or media format.
Choosing a multi CDN strategy for the delivery of streaming TV services is the best way to ensure the highest quality for end users, offload peak traffic, enable redundancy, increase reach and reduce cost. Today a multi CDN strategy is an integral part of any streaming service.
Read more about how the ever increasing need for capacity is impacting the landscape of multiple CDNs in our blog.
Once the decision is made to use more than one CDN for the delivery of your content, the question that needs answering is: how do you get a unified view of the end user experience when data is being delivered from multiple sources to a variety of clients, independent of CDN and client?
There is a need for a tool to manage your video delivery across multiple CDNs. One that identifies problems in real-time, and automatically acts to avoid them.
Besides the difficulty of automatically gathering delivery statistics from the different CDNs within your eco-system, there is also the challenge of collecting information from the clients. One way to monitor the user experience is to integrate supervision inside the client. However, the client landscape is fragmented and holds a complex mix of device types, models and variations. This makes achieving 100% coverage of devices difficult – and expensive.
A multi CDN management tool should operate independently from the CDNs and agnostic to the clients with unified metrics across all platforms and media formats.
So, while using multiple CDNs to ensure quality is the right thing to do, it opens up a need for an independent delivery control system that identifies problems, processes and presents them and automatically take the required action to optimize the viewer’s quality of experience (QoE).
In response to the challenges mentioned above, Edgeware has developed the StreamPilot delivery control platform. StreamPilot inserts itself into the control plane between client and CDN for each session and orchestrates the delivery on a per-segment basis, totally independent of the delivering CDN. By sitting in this critical patch between the CDN and the client, StreamPilot collects session data and in real-time collects data related to the session, what bitrates are used, what is available and information on location and ISP.
StreamPilot provides a tight and automated loop between the session statistics and the ability to mitigate the problems it detects. In fact, StreamPilot can see trends such as combinations of client devices, ISP and geographic location that are experiencing issues which can impact on quality if left unattended.
The delivery control platform uses per-segment redirects which allow per-segment granularity for decision-making and monitoring and can in real-time migrate the delivery between different CDNs based on quality, geographic location and cost. It can also override a client’s bitrate request to a lower resolution in order to differentiate users, preserve network bandwidth or reduce cost.
Read more about StreamPilot and how the segment re-direct approach works here.
In this blog you can read about the compelling reasons why StreamPilot is essential for controlling your video delivery across multiple CDNs.
The StreamPilot platform is offered as a managed service hosted by Edgeware. The high availability of modern cloud platforms in combination with StreamPilot’s inherent redundant and auto scaling structure helps you ensure highest possible control and quality in your video delivery.
Let Edgeware help you orchestrate your multi CDN environment! Read our tech blogs for an in-depth explanation of the technical challenges that you need to address when using multiple CDNs for distributing your streaming TV content.
Fill out the form below and we will get in touch with you.