Streaming the Olympics:
The Challenge of Broadcasting Modern-Day Spectacles
Arpad Kun
Sr. Director of Network Operations, Ustream
Video streaming the Olympic games has been a challenge since streaming services have been available. Unfortunately, massively large scale, long-term events like the Olympics do not happen often enough to allow the ecosystem to have a granular learning curve. While the video industry is rapidly learning how to deliver content over-the-top (OTT) on demand, live events at a global scale still challenge a lot of providers, including network operators. Prepositioning content on caches deep inside eyeball networks is the direction in which we see the industry moving to help OTT delivery, however, with live events at such huge scale, pre-warming caches is only just one challenge. The number of different Olympic contests happening at the same time (parallel channels) increases the amount of raw video data to be moved from production through encoding and onto the eyeball networks, the high concurrency and demand of diverse live content together makes the streaming the Olympics an immense challenge.
Bandwidth Constraint
The bandwidth constraint between the cloud and foreign networks such as ISPs and enterprise networks is getting more acute as the industry moves towards centralization of computing. The cloud delivers great value when it comes to cost reductions by sharing computing resources. However, the trend toward centralization opens new challenges as new and existing live and on-demand streaming providers (like OTT) rely on the cloud. It is easy to start in the cloud, but when the business grows and its delivery has to scale, streaming providers are reliant upon third-party Content Delivery Networks.
CDN Silos
CDNs are vertical silos in terms of functionality, feature set and reach. If the content provider wants to deliver on a global scale, it has to integrate with a large variety of different CDN providers, as no single CDN has adequate global capacity. The integration also requires working with each individual CDN using commonly supported standards to provide consistent quality of service and scalability across regions and providers. In addition, CDNs rarely reach deep inside ISPs or enterprise networks, where the demand for bandwidth increases steeply as video traffic shifts from legacy
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