World-leading CDN player Akamai plans to add new dimensions to its offering at NAB next week, and it looks to us that it reflects a growing use of UDP, the ancient protocol favored by its recent acquisition Octoshape.
In its press releases, it gives little detail and we shall be after more next week, but mentions three new approaches that it says will improve overall performance of OTT video services and the growing demands for both 4K and virtual reality.
The first stage seems to be using the Octoshape know-how to accelerate ingest, rather than accelerating content across a cloud infrastructure directly to the end user. Akamai did come out with some UDP multicast services in the past so perhaps we’re doing it a miss-service attributing all the ideas to Octoshape, a tiny start up out of Denmark acquired 12 months ago when it was on the verge (we were told) of some tier 1 deals.
By relegating the use of these protocols simply to handle to trip from an origin server to a neighboring CDN server, Akamai has made it virtually instantaneous to put a stream on a CDN – and calls this Accelerated Ingest. It said, “it is designed to minimize the amount of time live video streams take to reach the Akamai CDN from their origination point…. enabled by UDP and dynamic encoder to entry-point mapping (DEEM), which provides improved throughput and automatically optimizes entry-points based on current Internet conditions.”
Surely if Akamai really wants to “ensure the highest possible quality viewing experiences with fast start-up times, limited buffering and consistent video performance” it needs to almost re-invent how the CDN works, because right now live performances that go to millions of homes are in danger of being 1 to 2 minutes out of kilter with live events.
Back in November, Sweden’s Net Insight managed to get Live video to sync between apps and the cloud when it showed a demonstration of two screens for Formula One racing, one on a smart TV and another stream on a phone that carried an in-cockpit signal, showing that there are tricks to get CDN copies perfectly synchronized. We understand that system owes more than a little something to UDP multicasting, but with packet resends enabled for each user. This still has not been tested at scale however and anything that Akamai puts out must scale into millions of instances unchanged.
Akamai says it will be showing a huge reduction at NAB in the time between content capture and playback.
Akamai is also showing predictive delivery capabilities that aim to improve viewing experiences through instant start-up of high-quality/high-bitrate video with no buffering, which it says it will make available to white-label apps. The technology allows on-demand content to be pre-positioned and stored on mobile and in-home devices, overcoming the inherent challenges of delivering video over the radio access network and Internet. This seems a straightforward copy of the NanoCDN from French CDN player Broadpeak, an approach that has won it a number of contracts and a certain acclaim.