CDN and ABR specialist Broadpeak has come out lauding a world first – combining encryption and packaging of HLS and DASH to create one simplified and ultimately cheaper video chunk. Faultline’s first course of action, as with most first-to-the-finish-line claims, was to touch base with a number of rival vendors to check the credibility of Broadpeak’s announcement.
The fact that not a single one of five major competitors got back to us speaks volumes. Broadpeak’s breakthrough clearly has its competitors on the ropes, faced with technology that has removed the need for multiplying streaming formats and therefore reducing delivery and storage costs for service providers.
On one hand, Broadpeak has achieved a leg up over the competition, but on the other, the move could be considered an act of self-harm – slashing CDN prices further.
Broadpeak half agreed with this projection, while claiming immunity to CDN price pressures. “The market may indeed push the global CDN service providers to lower their fees as they often compete on price, and their typical charges are subscriptions based on committed volumes of traffic delivered each month,” a company representative explained to Faultline.
“Now, when choosing a Broadpeak CDN, our customers are effectively deploying our technology in a similar way to a network capacity: the Broadpeak CDN software is used to power delivery of their content across their network footprint. As a Broadpeak CDN reduces their transport costs, our customers consider this investment to be benefiting compared to the Global CDN services subscriptions. Therefore, our offering is not subject to the same price pressures as the global CDN service providers,” continued the Broadpeak spokesperson.
Broadpeak has successfully delivered DASH and HLS video fragments using the same chunks and container for both protocols, applying Common Media Application Format (CMAF) to each and using the CBCS (Cipher Block Chaining Security) encryption scheme. In order to reach all devices, OTT video service providers have historically been forced into delivering content in two totally separate packaging formats and two different encryption schemes. Introducing a common video streaming scheme for several players eliminates this avoidable extra spend and should provoke widespread responses from vendors across the video streaming ecosystem.
Asked whether rivals will be forced into following suit, Broadpeak told Faultline, “Yes, probably. As this innovation offers an optimization of storage costs, operators and content providers will be looking at this feature with interest.”
Delivery was achieved using the latest version of Broadpeak’s BkS350 origin packager, which is now available as a powerful storage cost optimization tool for OTT service providers.
Another crucial question is why now? Simply put, the containerized nature of HLS and DASH was restrictive until CMAF was developed, meaning each protocol had to be delivered in different containers with different encryption schemes. Life was then made more complex by DRMs like FairPlay and Widevine which each required contrasting encryption schemes, CBCS and CTR (counter mode) – meaning a different chunk was needed for HLS and another for DASH.
Broadpeak has changed that. Now that Widevine allows CBCS encryption and all major browsers support CBCS, it is possible to encrypt a single CMAF fragment for both HLS and DASH formats. Broadpeak’s BkS350 technology takes CMAF as the packaging container format and CBCS as the encryption scheme for the HLS-DASH marriage – while allowing customers to cache twice the amount of content while using the same amount of CDN storage.
Broadpeak told Faultline that US security vendor Verimatrix was the key server supplier in this case, but mentioned that it is working on integration with other multi-DRM providers.
In the past, Broadpeak has partnered with digital video technology and DRM provider castLabs. We refer to an announcement from August 2017 which talked about unified packaging and encryption technologies on a range of devices with analytics to highlight performance issues. Portuguese telco Nowo was the first customer to go live with this technology and we have enquired with Broadpeak as to whether castLabs is involved in the latest unification of packaging and encryption.
Broadpeak has been busy, also revealing a new QoE video software suite called S4Streaming – giving service providers more control over streaming quality and bandwidth usage. S4Streaming uses a combination of server-side technologies to measure available bandwidth on the server side rather than the player side. Broadpeak claims monitoring performance on the player level, which ABR streaming is exclusively reliant on, can cause problems due to limited information on network congestion.
S4Streaming takes its data from the latest generation of streaming servers using modern network transport algorithms, making for more accurate bandwidth measurement with centralized control of quality stream selections for QoE estimations and dynamic adaptions.
It’s worth noting that satellite fleet operator Eutelsat is a substantial investor in Broadpeak, injecting €10 million into the business in July 2019 in exchange for a 20% stake. At a time when the satellite players are pushing into hybrid delivery, notably with rival SES releasing its Satellite and OTT in Sync technology in September last year, Broadpeak’s cost reduction breakthrough by unifying HLS and DASH could prove a valuable weapon for Eutelsat’s hybrid satellite OTT system Cirrus – targeted at multiscreen providers.
Indeed, many DTH players are acknowledging the time is right to migrate to OTT and are deploying upgraded Broadpeak products to get there, particularly in Asia Pacific, with Dish TV and Astro two prime examples. Broadpeak contends that a combination of multicast-ABR, CMAF and CTE (Chunk Transfer Encoding) can bring total OTT stream latency down to just 2 or 3 seconds.
Broadpeak also told us, “The leading idea here is to reduce the storage requirements in the CDN, effectively making existing CDN delivery capacity more efficient: higher cache hit-ratio translates into better experience with higher video bit-rates and reduced buffering on playback.”