Edgeware unveils 'big event' live OTT solution

June 19, 2018
Edgeware has announced a suite of new features intended to support live over-the-top (OTT) services at a large scale, and in a higher ...

Edgeware has announced a suite of new features intended to support live over-the-top (OTT) services at a large scale, and in a higher quality than conventional broadcast TV. The technology has been developed for operators that have invested in the rights to popular sporting events and reality shows that attract large audiences all watching simultaneously.

"Onboarding a huge number of clients, each requesting the same content within a very short timeframe, is a challenge for a unicast delivery network," said Johan Bolin, VP of products at Edgeware. "This new suite of technologies makes sure content distributors avoid overloading streaming servers, reduces pressure on their origin servers from cache-misses, and makes sure all users have the highest-quality viewing experience."

The feature suite includes Edgeware's Dynamic Asset Spreading, which is designed to enable operators to spread popular content across a wider range of servers than would be populated usually. The more popular the content, the wider it's spread, increasing the streaming capacity for big events while reducing the risk of overloading servers.

Also new is Predictive Session Load Balancing, which is designed to dynamically react to a buildup in the queue of requests, monitoring them against pre-set limits. It controls the onboarding of large numbers of viewers and directs new client requests to the next available server to avoid congestion before it can occur.

Edge Asset Request Consolidation is designed to prevent streaming servers from sending out many identical requests for the same content if there is a cache-miss. Cache-misses can occur for live content in latency-minimized CDNs because new segments of content may not have been written to the origin server before the client requests them. The feature is designed to consolidate thousands of identical requests for new segments into one, before sending it to the origin, alleviating pressure on the origin server and saving backhaul capacity. Edgeware is also offering an Online Monitoring Service that includes a system health check before major events, proactive response to any issues that may occur during the event, and additional reporting.

The new features are available now, both as part of Edgeware's software portfolio and on its purpose-built TV servers.

"The task of streaming live OTT programming of the world's biggest events is onerous and often affects an operator's most expensive content," said Bolin. "That's why we can't treat it the same way as other traffic types and need to put in place purpose-built technologies to deliver the best experience."