Both French middleware provider Expway and Canadian hosted media specialist Quickplay Media have unveiled mobile CDNs for LTE-Broadcast (LTE-B) at this year’s MWC. Both offerings are aimed at the same customers and operators, but neither company can decide if the other is a rival or not.
Expway’s FastLane product focuses on optimizing the link from the network cell to devices using LTE-B, Multicast Dynamic Switching, and pre-emptive caching. It has already landed itself a big deal with chip giant Mediatek – integrating Expway middleware into MediaTek’s helio smartphone SoCs to support LTE-B video streams. Expway says FastLane delivers content to mobile devices while complementing third party CDNs such as Akamai – of which we were given a demo at the Akamai booth in Barcelona this year, showing a seamless transition from unicast stream to multicast stream.
Faultline spoke to both Expway and Quickplay at MWC, and the two offerings seem extremely similar. However, Expway told us that Quickplay’s offering differs in that it is selling a service rather than a product, and it doesn’t have its own broadcast delivery server, and also that Quickplay claims to have a CDN agent but doesn’t.
Expway told us that the CDN agent part of its offering is the essential component for collecting cache and user data, as part of the terminal software integrated in devices and apps, for generating vital QoE statistics.
Quickplay, a long standing OTT player, has also unveiled a very similar product saying that its own platform will enable operators and content programmers to roll-out commercialized services in push VoD, as well as live broadcast streams.
Quickplay’s platform also integrates with third party CDNs and uses its own software-defined head end to ingest, package, and publish content – to allow the delivery of content over any LTE network – by the caching of pre-positioned content on LTE-enabled devices. Quickplay also says its API Gateway, Virtual Set Top Box, supports features that unify broadcast and unicast head end capabilities for linear and VoD distribution.
A spokesman at Quickplay said, “We work extensively with mobile operators and our CDN solution includes a server that can interoperate with all vendor BM-SC’s (the sever that drives the broadcast), powering any operator network, and our CDN client provides a services layer that is agnostic to the underlying device and middleware. We have invested extensively in core platform enhancements with the acquisition and integration of Roundbox, a recognized innovator in mobile broadcast and one of the industry’s most deployed solutions.”
“Expanding our capabilities opens the gate to new business models and for the first time, new applications (digital signage, push VoD, in-venue applications, expanding quadplay to other areas), which is critical in driving monetization as video becomes increasingly pervasive. We are in advanced stages with several leading operators all around the globe and have begun commercially deploying many of these services. ”
It’s important to consider the impact of LTE-B on the mobile side, since unicast one-to-one transmission will never be economic for popular linear broadcast services, the real battle will be between mobile operators and broadcasters for control over spectrum used for some form of multicast video transmission.
AT&T, a long standing QuickPlay customer, has the potential to play a trump card over Verizon if it can harness LTE, WiFi and LTE-B to create a credible video experience around content already contracted to DirecTV, which can be extended to mobile.
Verizon’s Go90 OTT service launched in September 2015, and in December we reported that the US operator had been keen to ensure that Go90 can embrace WiFi as well, in places where LTE is not available, which is why it has worked with Expway and also LTE chipmaker Sequans to enable delivery of LTE-B services to an LTE-WiFi router. This means all devices in range of the WiFi router can receive LTE broadcast streams.
“We believe that we are on the cusp of an explosion in the growth of applications and services related to premium mobile video and connected devices,” said Quickplay CEO Wayne Purboo. “Momentum in the LTE-B space has been building over the past year with trials proving-out technology, an expanding array of consumer and IoT devices, interoperability and business models. We are very bullish on the future of LTE-B and are poised to help providers around the world monetize mobile video and large file distribution.”