Scaling Streaming Delivery: Technical Scale vs. Operational Scale

Learn more about streaming at scale at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete panel, LS101. Delivering to the Masses, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Scott Goldman: When we talk about technical scale, you know we're talking about CDNs, the ability to deliver to millions of viewers concurrently and dealing with spikes but you know we keep on talking to a lot of these media companies that I think Pete, you had mentioned it before. We talk about how many events we're doing concurrently or per week, so I think we're pushing about 50,000 managed events per week, and CDNs can handle that. We've talked about that before.

But there are a lot of operational considerations when you're dealing with the live nature of events. It's not like setting up a linear channel where you plug it in, You take a few months--many, many months-- set it up and you're good to go. You're just monitoring it, but live events are dynamic and they change. Your inputs change. You're going to get different video formats. You're going to get some folks that have SCTE triggers to mark your ad breaks and starts of an event. You're going to get some people that think that they have SCTE triggers in their events, and we all know that it's standard to implement things like that.

So, having a really flexible dynamic--not only a system--and I think what we're doing a lot now--not we, the industry--is being able to pull ourselves away from the steel in the ground, these big automation systems, and be able to virtualize a lot of the manual operation of events, so you can be a little bit more flexible and dynamic with both the infrastructure, the operational infrastructure, and also the human infrastructure as well. It takes a lot less now to be able to operate a live event in a cloud, in a little web app, than it would be having to operate an Imagine system or a Grass Valley system to operate these events. So when I think about scale it's really being able to operate 100 events at one time with 25 people, or 1,000 events a week, and being able to handle the dynamic nature of all the various formats and locations that video comes in from.

Is it Critical for a CDN to Have Its Own Backbone?

Jolokia's Pete Mastin and Limelight Networks' Rob Coluantoni discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different content delivery architectures in this clip from a Live Streaming Summit panel at Streaming Media East 2019.

09 Aug 2019