Edgeware Dramatically Improves Delivery Efficiency and Monitoring of Large Pay TV Services

Company adds major new features to increase delivery efficiency and improve real-time monitoring of challenging multiscreen services.

London, England(19 Mar 2013)

 

Edgeware, the technology leader in distributed video delivery, today released the latest multiscreen version of the Edgeware Distributed Video Delivery Network (D-VDN) Solution. The new release includes intelligent session and content management options that enable increased savings in backhaul costs when delivering large back-catalogues, catch-up TV or network PVR services. It also includes new, advanced monitoring features to enable true, real-time analytics, even when delivering adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming to millions of simultaneous devices.

 

Many TV and video service providers are acquiring rights to larger back-catalogues, and longer catch-up TV recording windows. Caching efficiency in delivery networks declines as more content is added and backhaul networks become congested. Videos start to buffer or content is presented with lower and lower ABR streams, which may be good enough for free services but is not acceptable for premium, pay TV customers. Upgrading the backhaul network is capital intensive and requires long lead times so a smarter solution is to retain cache efficiency, even as content libraries grow. 

 

The Edgeware D-VDN Solution now includes options to intelligently distribute content and client requests over multiple servers in a content-aware cluster. The storage in each clustered server is effectively combined, increasing the cache hit rate and avoiding use of the back haul network for cache-misses. Content needs to only be ingested once to each cluster, further reducing backhaul load. Assets can also be distributed intelligently over multiple clusters to build a caching hierarchy; requests for the most popular assets are sent to the edge clusters and longer-tail request are served directly from centralized clusters to further enhance edge cache-hit efficiency.  

 

Most connected devices today use ABR streaming for uninterrupted viewing over unmanaged networks. Streaming a single ABR-formatted movie consist of delivering thousands of video “fragments.” The system resources required to log and process analytics for delivery of these files is significant and becomes prohibitive as audiences and content libraries grow. The Edgeware D-VDN Solution now includes optional monitoring modules that significantly reduce this overhead. Each Orbit delivery server aggregates requests into “sessions” and fragments into “assets.” This reduces thousands of log entries to just a few for each session. These are collected and analyzed in real-time, using much fewer system resources on the Edgeware Convoy Management System. Logs can be made available via an integration API to specialist analytics applications such as Skytide Insight or they can be presented in reports via an optional analytics GUI within the Convoy system. Examples include; content popularity, viewer engagement and delivered quality, segmented by consumer IP, region, device type, delivery server and origin server.

 

“Cost effective delivery of large time-shift and back-catalogue services is a real challenge, as is true, real-time monitoring of the delivered quality as the service scales,” said Jon Haley, VP product marketing and business development, Edgeware. “These new features were requested by customers striving to delivery highly differentiated, multiscreen services.”

 

Meet Edgeware at stand 167 at TV Connect in London, March 19-21, 2013.

 

About Edgeware 

Edgeware is the technology leader in distributed video delivery networks, designed to allow operators to monetize video services such as video on demand (VOD), time shift TV and network Personal Video Recorder (nPVR), as well as offering wholesale Content Delivery Networking (CDN) management services. Edgeware provides the video delivery systems needed to offer video services across managed and unmanaged networks, with the ability to reach any screen, at any time, with any content. Edgeware is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with a U.S. office in Boxborough, Massachusetts. 

 

For more information, please visit www.edgeware.tv.