Liberty Global Boosts Video Delivery with Teltoo P2P
Pay TV group Liberty Global is introducing peer-to-peer (P2P) video delivery to augment its CDN in Europe.
It has partnered with Teltoo, a software-only, decentralised video delivery technology company, in which Liberty Global has an investment stake.
Beginning in The Netherlands, the plan is to rollout Teltoo out across Liberty Global's territories.
"The idea is to provide a service to Liberty Global's Horizon OTT platform," explains Pablo Hesse, founder and CEO, Teltoo. "Liberty Global's next-gen entertainment platform Horizon 4 is already live in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland, and is set to launch across other markets, including the UK across Virgin Media, in 2020.
"Due to the explosion of video content, massive infrastructure investments are needed to solve the unpredictable spikes in video demand that frequently happen," he says. "The problem in delivery is the topology of the network, so instead of concentrating on media companies we focused on infrastructure companies."
Its deal with Liberty Global is claimed as the first instance of a peer-to-peer CDN partnering with a Tier 1 operator.
"We have collected enough data from the topology of the network," Hesse says. "Our understanding of network assets is pretty robust."
One of the advantages which Teltoo says its technology offers is elasticity in streaming peak events.
"Even multi-CDN networks are not flexible," says Hesse. "Most people are looking for elasticity in video delivery service, especially if they own the infrastructure."
Teltoo began its relationship with Liberty Global in 2016 when it was a participant in the Virgin Media Techstars accelerator program, an incubator for start-ups.
"We met with the CTO at that time and he told us he needed more capacity to deliver popular events like Formula 1," says Hesse. "When you have your own infrastructure it's important to have that dimensioning.
"Another important point is the flexibility you get with regards to time to market. Having a P2P technology give you the flexibility to see how that service evolves and to add more capacity for services as required."
Hesse also claims that the overall performance of the CDN's streaming provision is boosted with Teltoo, too.
"When you push traffic out of our CDN, the overall network performs better since it is less stressed. By introducing Teltoo, the bitrate and the overall stability of the CDN improves. In Europe, because most media groups are concentrated, CDN prices are very low. Here we can maximize video quality and provide the elasticity so that operators can maximize experiences at peak times."
Teltoo uses WebRTC and its own protocols and back end services to establish browser-based peer-to-peer connections without the need of a plugin. It claims to instantly offloads up to 85% of CDN usage which reduces both CDN spend and CAPEX investments.
It also works with, and is part funded by, Telefonica.