The Dawn of a New CDN

Streaming Platforms Deserve a New Kind of CDN

Overview

Winning the streaming wars will hinge on a number of factors, but the quality of the subscriber experience delivered by streaming platforms is rapidly becoming one of the most important. Streaming platforms continuously measure a wide variety of quantitative metrics allowing them to better understand, and improve, subscriber quality of experience (QoE). For consumers, having armed themselves with high-resolution devices, QoE is a significant factor in their decisions to subscribe to—and avoid churning away from—streaming platforms. However, delivering sterling QoE to subscribers depends on partnerships with third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) over which they have limited control.

The Challenge

CDNs are clearly strategic suppliers to streaming platforms; they perform the vital role of delivering a valuable and expensive product (video entertainment) to subscribers. The challenge is that the CDN industry is going through rapid change and turmoil. Established players have exited and prevailing economics make it difficult for remaining participants to innovate in ways that materially benefit streaming platforms. Streaming platforms themselves are embracing live streaming, especially tier one sports, as a way to reduce churn and expand their subscriber bases. But the increased prevalence of large-scale, live streaming requires CDNs with a laser focus on video quality and a disruptive approach designed to drive sustained economic value. Such CDNs can be game changers for streaming platforms looking to attract new subscribers and keep the ones they have.

Introducing the Netskrt CDN

Purpose built for streaming video

Long specializing in delivering live sports and on-demand OTT video to hard-to-reach locations, Netskrt Systems has developed a unique and disruptive CDN footprint that is global in breadth while also providing visibility deep into last-mile internet service providers (ISPs). The Netskrt CDN technology portfolio and footprint has been deployed into a multi-tiered hierarchy of locations including core network transit points, IXPs and peering exchanges, mid-tier data centers supporting residential ISPs, and—importantly—within the networks of serving (last-mile) ISPs themselves. Whether deployed inside serving ISP networks or at upstream delivery tiers, real-time knowledge of actual network conditions between content delivery points-of-presence (POPs) and viewers yields a number of important benefits for the streaming platform:

1.) Quality

First and foremost, the Netskrt CDN is purpose-built to deliver streaming video, especially live tier-one events, and other large content drops. Based on actual results with tier-one streaming platforms, the combination of last-mile visibility, content-awareness (object type, title, resolution, etc.) and content pre-positioning, results in actual QoE metrics that materially outperform conventional CDNs.

2.) Capacity breadth and depth

The Netskrt footprint is scaled in two dimensions: the breadth required to operate globally as a full-scale CDN and the depth necessary to reach deeply into the internet infrastructure, all the way to the last-mile ISP. In addition to further enhancing subscriber QoE, this unique combination of scaling attributes provides streaming platforms with far greater flexibility in responding to viewer demand.

3.) Disruptive approach to content delivery

In order to counter economic models that fail to serve streaming platforms, Netskrt has developed an innovative technology portfolio that enables a more flexible, adaptable, and scalable underlying CDN footprint. The Netskrt CDN improves economics up and down the streaming value chain by dynamically instantiating capacity according to planned or actual demand. This ability to spin up and spin down capacity becomes especially critical when scaling up for the massive traffic spikes common to major content drops and tier-one sports events. The cloud-like on-demand capacity also serves to strengthen the underlying economics thereby giving streaming platforms a more dependable delivery vehicle for their valuable content.

Summary

With a clear trend toward a world in which all video entertainment is consumed via OTT streaming technology, new, more advanced content delivery networks are required to better address the scale, performance, and, especially, quality needs of both streaming platforms and network operators. But additionally, unless the underlying economic model supports the long-term objectives of streaming platforms, the overall streaming value chain will be imperiled. While obsessively focused on streaming video quality, Netskrt CDN is disrupting the CDN industry in order to deliver a more solid foundation for streaming platforms.