Video: The Future of CDN: An End-to-End Ecosystem
Where is the CDN industry headed? Not too long ago, CDNs were primarily focused on delivery bits, but delivering better quality video is not as hard (or as exclusive to CDNs) used to be. If the recent spate of acquisitions by major CDN players is any indication, increasingly, the emphasis is on building an end-to-end ecosystem that encompasses not just delivery but ingest, transcoding, storage, management, analytics, and more.
Read the complete transcript of this clip from Dan Rayburn's CDN pricing presentation at Content Delivery Summit 2016:
Dan Rayburn: For years, you had CDNs saying, "We can help you deliver bits. We can help you deliver better quality video." Well, delivery is not the hard part anymore. Over the next two days at Streaming Media East, content owners on stage won't be talking about delivery. They're talking about, "How do I ingest, transcode, store, manage, montage, protect, business rules, track, analyze, business analytics?" All that stuff in the middle of the ecosystem, that's the complex stuff. Well, the CDNs have realized that, so they've gone out in the market and made acquisitions to try and make an end-to-end ecosystem.
Let's see if I can remember all of these. Amazon acquired Elemental in November for $296 million. Level 3 acquired Servecast a long, long time ago. Comcast acquired thePlatform. Verizon acquired Edgecast, Uplink, and Volicon. Limelight acquired Delve. IBM acquired Ustream and ClearLeap. That gives you an idea. Almost all the all the major CDNs in the market are acquiring companies to get that broadcast ecosystem, and a lot of them are doing it for live linear--so services like a Sling TV that are broadcasting live linear, that's a platform, as well.
This is the future of CDN. It's an ecosystem. You're always going to have some CDN customers who say, "Look, I don't care about your ecosystem. I do it myself. I [transcode 00:02:21] my own videos. All I want you to do is deliver content with great quality at a great price."
We're always going to have that in the market, but most of the major mid-tier, tier two broadcasters, Fox, Disney, Viacom, all these guys, delivery is not the hard part for them. They don't have that much traffic either. You'd be surprised. It's not as big as you think. The hard part is take one video, [transcode 00:02:21] it 20 different ways for every device you have to deliver it to, multiply that times 50,000 videos. Just management of that alone is insane. Then if you're talking about HEVC coming down the line, depends on whose stuff you look at in the market. In coding from H dot 264 to H dot 265 today takes about, on average, seven times longer, and again, multiply that times 50,000 clips. The problem is not pushing the bits out. It's all the stuff you have to do just to get the bits ready for delivery, so that's where CDN is headed.
Related Articles
EastBanc's Eric Hoffman offers 4 essential insights on how to make your enterprise video infrastructure more reliable, versatile, and capable for meeting the requirements of current and future large-scale video events.
17 Oct 2016
Conviva's Ed Haslam explains how measuring your users' quality of experience (QoE) and strategizing based on experience metrics can grow video-driven ad revenue.
31 Aug 2016
Streaming Media EVP Dan Rayburn discusses why using multiple CDNs make sense for some content owners and not for others.
22 Aug 2016
Plex's Greg Edmiston, HBO's John Narus, and Machinima's James Glasscock discuss the challenges of controlling and standardizing the user/viewer experience across the diverse device landscape.
17 Aug 2016
Ooyala analyst Jim O'Neill and Machinima SVP James Glasscock discuss why content owners and broadcasters are recognizing the need to get on board with OTT in the face of cord-cutting.
15 Aug 2016
V-Factor Technologies' Jeremy Bennington explains how content providers can monitor live video delivery in real time and ensure consistent quality across different encoding profiles.
10 Aug 2016
Vimeo's Anjali Sud, StreamVPG's Scott Farb, and CME Group's Scott Szczurek discuss the latest marketing and branding content creation trends at Streaming Media East 2016.
08 Aug 2016
Vimeo VP of Platform Marketing Anjali Sud discusses successful (and not-so-successful) strategies for building branding campaigns with on-demand online video.
03 Aug 2016
Wowza's Ryan Jespersen outlines the workflow for streaming live 360° and virtual reality video from capture to ingest to stitching to delivery.
01 Aug 2016
MP & Silva's William Mao discusses the pros and cons of opting for an ad-based VOD model vs. building a subscription service.
27 Jul 2016
Frost & Sullivan's Avni Rambhia discusses issues with latency, bandwidth, user experience, encoding, reach, and quality facing content creators as they make the leap into live VR.
20 Jul 2016
Streamroot's Erica Beavers makes the case for adaptive bitrate streaming and explains how to deliver the best possible user experience via ABR encoding.
18 Jul 2016
Panelists from NBC, Flix, and comScore discuss which OTT business models will and won't work going forward, and whether or not you need scale to be successful.
13 Jul 2016
Google's Serge Kassardjian, Whistle Sports' Brian Selander, and Recurly's Dan Burkhart discuss the challenges of differentiation in the OTT services market.
11 Jul 2016
RLJ Entertainment's Titus Bicknell describes how Acorn TV used an innovative strategy for adapting long-tail marketing to identify revenue streams in a broader assortment of niche content markets.
06 Jul 2016
Should you be delivering HEVC? It depends on what you're delivering and who you're trying to reach. Frost & Sullivan analyst Avni Rambhia breaks down the key issues of sticking with AVC vs. migrating to HEVC in this clip from Streaming Media East 2016.
04 Jul 2016
Panelists from Streaming Media, Beamr, Brightcove, Verizon, and Yahoo! discuss the balance between encoding quality and bandwidth at Streaming Media East 2016.
29 Jun 2016
Twitter Manager of Content Strategy and Planning Nina Mishkin provides 3 strategic tips on how to leverage Twitter to get your videos seen, expand your reach, and grow your brand.
27 Jun 2016
Once you've decided on the bitrates that you want to deliver, it's time to determine the best resolution for each one, from 360p on up to 1080p. Streaming Learning Center's Jan Ozer shows you how.
24 Jun 2016
Streaming Learning Center's Jan Ozer explains how to choose data rates and resolutions for adaptive bitrate streaming to most effectively meet client expectations and end-user needs.
22 Jun 2016