Verizon Content Delivery Summit Keynote: Removing Complexity
“Business on the internet is complicated,” said Chris Carey, chief product officer for Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS).
Carey delivered the first keynote address at today’s 2014 Content Delivery Summit, taking place at the New York Hilton Midtown.
“Verizon, perhaps just a few years ago, may not have had a part in this conference,” Carey said, noting that he was proud to have been part of looking at where Verizon needed to go with digital media.
To move forward, Carey said there was a fundamental question that needed to be answered.
“How do we take, today, what are a lot of disparate services from a variety of providers and remove complexity in the equation?”
Carey noted that it’s not just one but many competitors that Verizon Digital Media Services faces, and that the challenge is an opportunity to provide customers a one-stop shop for digital content delivery.
As part of this one-stop shop concept, which would provide global services on a single platform, several acquisitions were needed, including CDN EdgeCast, CyberTrust on the security front, and UpLynk on the “virtual head end” front.
“We believe that Verizon can play, must play, a large role in simplifying the complexity of services on the Internet,” Carey said.
Carey noted that OnCue, which Verizon acquired from Intel Media, is a pure-play over-the-top (OTT) platform. It has been added to the VDMS portfolio and is being integrated into the next generation of service offerings.
“How are we doing on these decisions and acquisitions we’ve made?” Carey asked, noting that VDMS has seen 100 percent executive retention at EdgeCast. “This has allowed us to accelerate a whole host of things that we may not have been able to see for a year or two if we had grown organically.”
Carey then provided an overview of how the integration of the various acquisitions allows for acceleration.
“Expansion is where we’re really focused now, we’ll double it this year,” said Carey. “Consumer demand will continue to outstrip the capacity of all of us together.”
In closing, Carey switched over to talk a bit about the wireless spectrum, including Long-Term Evolution (LTE).
“There’s a standard being created within Long-Term Evolution called eMBMS," said Carey. "It allows the massive number of radio-access networks that we all have in our pockets to be turned it into a broadcast platform.”
Mobile devices, starting in 2015, will have a tuner that allow them to connect to a multicast feed of a major event. In addition, an LTE dongle allows for on-the-spot acquisition from a camera.
“If the college AV geek has an LTE dongle, he can attach it to a camera, walk down to the field hockey game on campus, and then broadcast that out,” said Carey.
That ability to easily integrate acquisition and delivery on the radio-access network is key to growth, according to Carey, along with the simplification of publishing video on the internet.
Carey then opened for a series of questions from the audience.
“We can support up to 10 to 12 Mbps for a single stream,” Carey said, answering an audience question about single-stream eMBMS and overall local network capacity. “We can do about a dozen channels concurrently before we start running into conflicts with the LTE voice and data that also run on the LTE network.”
“Verizon is leading the charge for the eMBMS standard,” Carey said, “but it’s a published standard that any service provider can implement.”
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