MainStreaming CEO Tassilo Raesig Talks Resilient Edge Delivery and Optimising QoS and QoE at Scale
From premium live sports to a range of other mission-critical applications, efficient content delivery is critical to live streaming at scale. Edge delivery enables high-performance streams on a global level by widely distributing edge notes as close to the end user as possible. In this interview, MainStreaming CEO Tassilo Raesig discusses the ongoing challenges facing global CDN services in their efforts to deliver broadcast-grade streams that meet client expectations for performance, scale, and monetisation. Raesig explains how MainStreaming’s edge solutions work within ISP networks to create resilient infrastructure, optimise video delivery, and reduce network strain.
Hybrid Edge Networks
Broadcasters and OTT providers are continually seeking high-performance streaming solutions that balance quality with cost efficiency. Regarding network implementations and solutions MainStreaming is deploying to meet these demands, and how the company’s approach benefits customers, Raesig explains, “We offer a variety of solutions that start with private CDN implementations for broadcasters that require high quality of experience with a lot of spikes in their traffic profile."
Raesig cites live sports as an area where such spikes are common, and says that for sports streams, "we deploy guaranteed capacity and infrastructure, but we also run our global CDN services, which are like infrastructure that you can use on demand on top of already-guaranteed capacity requirements."
He goes on to explain that for services with typical VOD traffic that needs to be delivered in both high-quality and low-cost profiles, “we specialise in having set up an infrastructure that goes very deep towards the edge.” This places it “very close to the consumer with a sophisticated orchestration platform that delivers the content in a very cost-efficient way with high quality and low latency. That’s the core of our network that goes in line with very sophisticated caching solutions,” he says, that are built on “strong relationships and partnerships with service providers who value our way of not congesting their network. It’s a very good way of delivering the content even through complex infrastructures.”
As demands increase throughout the streaming ecosystem for greater video quality and delivery speed, Raesig explains how MainStreaming’s deployment of edge solutions built within existing ISP networks creates more resilient infrastructure, even with the challenges of doing so at global scale.
On one side, he says, they face the challenge of working with “limited capacity in terms of peering between services and ISPs in any given country--some of them better than others.” Deploying solutions as close to the edge speeds up delivery by caching content close as close to the end user, while "also mitigating the traffic limitations that ISP networks have.” This approach also spares ISPs from “having to increase their investment in infrastructure to deliver video.”
Raesig underscores the point that these networks were not built to transmit live video--especially at scale--“but more as a commoditised Web-based content delivery network. This is where we enable the ISP to save cost on infrastructure investments, but at the same time also be able to offer high capacity and bandwidth to broadcasters and OTT services running through their network and finally participate in revenue sharing on the traffic they get, which has not been the case in the past.”
Raesig sees partnering with ISPs as good for everyone involved. “Building up our partnerships with the ISPs as a win-win situation, ensuring smoother delivery of the traffic going around the barriers of peering capacity and enabling business models for them where there haven't been any before.”
Opportunities and Optimisation for ISPs
Given the inherent bandwidth limitations Raesig describes, helping ISPs optimise video delivery while at the same time reducing network strain is another critical challenge facing an edge CDN like MainStreaming.
“We have a very intelligent caching solution called Smart Origin that helps to acquire the content that needs to be delivered in an ISP's network only once, without having to go through the whole network all the time,” he explains. “Distributing that to our edge caching solution is also delivering the content only where it needs to be and not creating congestion throughout the whole network. By combining our orchestration with the caching inside the ISP, we help to mitigate the congestion issues and at the same time deliver at a high quality because we can direct the content where actually we see is the best way to deliver it to the end user within the network.”
Another way MainStreaming empowers ISPs is through their CDN-as-a-service model, which helps ISPs take advantage of growing opportunities to monetise video delivery and generate new revenue streams, while also keeping quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS) at the broadcast levels.
“In terms of the classic business model,” Raesig explains, “a lot of the traffic was managed through transition and other ways of traffic delivery where the ISP did not really benefit from the video delivery traffic itself, other than maybe some peering elements that they could set up with the classic exchanges. In our model,” he continues, ISPs “can sell the capacity in their network directly to OTT services, broadcasters, or innovative delivery companies.”
With this model, MainStreaming customers serve as “revenue drivers” for ISPs. What’s more, becoming a MainStreaming distribution partner puts these ISPs in a position to “sell the service of their own ISP capacity, but as well for the rest of the country where we serve as a delivery platform.” So, on one side, ISPs can monetise their own network, but also “approach big customers that want to have the coverage of the whole country, including. The network in Germany, Deutsche Telekom, is an example of that. They are our distribution partner, and we basically approach all the relevant players with a lot of creative solutions in terms of bandwidth usage, capacity models, and other enabled business structures together.”
Anti-Piracy Efforts
Piracy and CDN leeching are issues that continue to plague the industry, and siphon off revenue from content providers as viewers watch illegal streams of premium content. As Former Head of Digital and Media Strategy at Sony Pictures Europe, Raesig’s experiences with contending with the challenges and evolving strategies of securing premium content go back many years.
During his six-year tenure at Sony, Raesig recalls, content protection “proved to be an ever-ongoing whack-a-mole if you just rely on DRM solutions or forensic solutions such as watermarking and embedding customer information into the content itself. It helps you on one side to do a DRM solution, but as you develop a new one, there's a lot of people who try to produce solutions to go around it. And forensic solutions don't help you to protect the content while you provide it. If you stream a football game, finding out two days later that viewers watched it somewhere else is not interesting to anyone anymore. It doesn't help your revenue streams.”
Mainstreaming’s strategy, he says, is to deploy “a real-time anti-piracy solution that uses our CDN management capabilities to identify piracy attempts in terms of VPN usage.” The toolbox detects “license usage outside of the licensed country and CDN leeching where single clients use the content and redistribute it through other means, circumventing the origin player and security measures that are in place. We can detect it while it happens. And this is where we provide our partners and customers a toolbox where they can select what to do with the identified issues. We block the IPs and shut down the VPN tunnels that go into the network or even just degrade the quality to a level where it's not interesting anymore to use that content by the end user. Even if it’s available, a pixelated football game is not really worth watching.”
With all of these options on the table, Raesig explains, “we leave it to the customer to decide what to do with the detected piracy attempts. This has proven to be something that helps to bring people back into subscriptions, reducing the use of piracy services quite significantly.”
Advanced Analytics and CMCD
Raesig also touches on the necessity of gathering real-time analytics during live streams to maintain and improve quality of experience (QoE) for end users, and how MainStreaming leverages Common Media Client Data (CMCD) to optimise data-driven insight.
“CMCD is a well defined and established standard for analytical purposes and for delivering a rich and very good set of data about the performance of the player in the end customer’s environment,” he explains. Using this data also helps to evaluate “how we performed in the last broadcast or in the overall performance in this week or this month. We have taken this to the next step, saying, ‘We can use this data in real time to identify delivery problems on the go and then take action to improve that.’”
If, through CMCD data, MainStreaming is able “to detect a certain area of end users having increasing problems, we use that information to inform our orchestration, reroute the traffic, and maybe go to an even more distant edge cluster because in that area an ISP might have a different technical problem and therefore improve basically all the key KPIs and metrics that are relevant for the quality of experience.”
Emerging Challenges for OTT Broadcasters
Looking just over the horizon, Raesig expects the primary challenges OTT and streaming broadcasters are likely to face involve available capacity for IP-based delivery. “If we look at developments the last one or two years," Raesig says, "we see a huge amount of broadcast capacity moving into IP. As traditional broadcast bandwidth is decreasing, satellite transponders are being shut down. Terrestrial broadcast is being stopped in some of the European countries with a time plan attached to it, meaning that the acceleration of moving video from a broadcast environment into IP is presenting a set of challenges that need to be managed."
The first key challenge, he says, “is total capacity, which is not really there today. If you would move all of that into ip, there’s not enough capacity in any given country’s network.”
The next critical issue is “the resilience and security requirements that we know from the broadcast world, especially for public broadcasters where you need to have backup systems and emergency situations being covered, where transmission is crucial. This is not present in the current IP landscape.”
All of this IP infrastructure required to provide this level of resiliency, he says, “needs to be built up in the next few years while at the same time meeting increased demand. It’s a little bit like rebuilding the plane while flying it at a higher speed.”
Raesig also points to “the arrival of additional streaming services from gaming or virtual reality” pushing new capacity requirements to even higher levels. “Smart and efficient distribution of content will be key in the coming years. Capacity is not increasing at the same speed as the demand.”
As for what’s ahead for MainStreaming, he says, delivering effective live streams at scale is and will remain the company’s “main mission.” What’s more, as the sports licensing world continues to move “into pure IP-based providers like our customer DAZN, it’s becoming a very important place in the whole value chain and ecosystem that we are ultimately trying to fill. And in collaboration with a lot of other parts, we can help to make that transition work in a time when broadcast plays—especially in the sports world—a smaller and smaller role.”