Online Video Viewing On The Rise – Seeking CDN Innovation
This comes as no surprise of course but according to Nielsen online video viewing is up 25% per user, while the total online video streams are up 41% from last year with the obvious leaders being YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.
With all of us glued one way or another to our PC’s a few hours each day watching video, whether for business or personal pleasure (even those boundaries are starting to merge/blend into a single component) online content continues to evolve and diversify. Now that the online content industry is evolving so rapidly, we are seeing the CDN market move far beyond delivering static content. Evolution is the most natural thing in the world so instead of resisting it we should prepare properly for what is coming.
The biggest shift in content demand is the growing prevalence of streaming content – especially video – and the special technological capabilities and infrastructures that enable true live streaming. Everywhere you go people are talking about live broadcasts, over the top streaming and adaptive bit rates. As the demand for live events increases, customers will be looking for providers that can deliver and support the most advanced streaming. As long as competition is fierce and differentiation between CDN providers continues to blur, customers should especially be focused on seeking out innovative new methods of delivering content that go beyond traditional proxy-cache models, such as solutions that optimize the last mile for viewers in a profound manner.
3Dcdn has developed breakthrough Quality of Service Analyzer technology, for ensuring that media delivery performance levels are measured and monitored at all times. What does this mean in plain English? We collect objective real time performance data from viewers, to provide detailed and objective performance and availability metrics. Covering critical issues such as denial of service, latency, player’s buffer problems, length of picture freeze/disappearance, missing frames, disconnects and more in this manner, allows us to assess performance in real time.
We are also very proud of our Quality of Service Optimizer that allows media clients connected to the 3Dcdn network to dynamically route their requests for media to the best sources available to them. In this way clients can pick the right servers and also switch between them on the fly – with no picture halts – to overcome last-mile and ISP related network problems.
The ability to ensure viewers actually receiving what you deliver, when and how you planned for them to receive it is an art form in itself. A lot of things have to be synchronized perfectly in the background for that to happen and it usually involves leveraging our togetherness in the most profound manner to pull off the best results. Ultimately what really transpires in the last mile is based on the extent of the preparation put into the effort. Granted viewers simply click in to enjoy the results but connecting all the different points to work harmoniously together requires quite a lot of orchestration and planning that the person on the receiving end is generally blissfully unaware of.