Qwilt and Cisco are highlighting milestones in their technology partnership in at this week's NAB 2023 (Apr. 15-19) in Las Vegas, with the companies collaborating to demonstrate the need for a new model for content delivery, while touting the rapid global adoption of their joint technology platform by both service providers and content publishers. The companies note that some of the world's largest streaming brands rely on the platform for highly distributed delivery of live and on-demand media.
Key milestones of the companies' partnership being recounted for attendees at NAB include: serving over one billion unique subscribers through content distribution and partnership agreements; deploying to over 150 service provider partners globally, including Airtel India, J:COM Japan, Telefonica Spain, Vodafone Turkey, and others; and exceeding 100 Tbps of deeply embedded service provider edge network capacity to meet the increasing demand for content delivery and edge cloud services.
The joint technology platform being demonstrated at NAB 2023, comprised of Cisco’s edge infrastructure and Qwilt’s Open Edge platform, provides Quality-as-a-Service content delivery by pushing content caching and delivery far out to the embedded edge of the carrier network.
As reckoned by the partners, service providers deploy Qwilt and Cisco’s Open Edge platform deeply within their networks and, by doing so, move content closer to their subscribers than third-party commercial or private CDN systems. Content providers, in turn, onboard quickly and use the Open Edge capabilities to deliver content closer to users, improving Quality of Experience (QoE).
The partners say the platform reduces the cost of building network capacity and substantially improves delivery quality, to ensure that service providers can scale more efficiently, while serving media and applications at the highest quality.
Future edge
The Qwilt-Cisco partnership allows any service provider to rapidly deploy, scale up, and create a foundation for future edge use cases. Importantly, content providers can easily onboard the solution through a single API that provides access to the global footprint of Qwilt-enabled service providers.
A key ingredient to Qwilt’s Open Edge platform is Open Caching technology, a specification Qwilt helped create within the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA). With Open Caching, the streaming ecosystem is aligned, bringing streaming platforms and service providers together to deliver content efficiently at scale with the highest quality. Qwilt leads the industry in commercialized Open Caching services.
At its NAB 2023 demonstrations, Qwilt and Cisco confirmed that their partner platform improves re-buffering time by 55%, time-to-first-frame by 31%, average bit rate (ABR) by 13% and error rate by 9.4% for live-streamed media delivery.
Executive Quotes
"By combining state of the art technology and powerful go-to-market across Cisco, Qwilt and our ecosystem partners, we have built a global platform that delivers unparalleled performance and value creation in the content delivery space. Together, we’ve created the foundation that’s enabling current and next-gen enterprise use-cases with the benefit of a global, consistent, edge cloud footprint, and the power that Cisco and our ecosystem can uniquely provide.”
-- Theodore Tzevelekis, vice president, Business Incubation, Cisco Networking
“We are excited to share milestone achievements that improve the quality of delivery for a growing number of applications. Open Caching has revolutionized content delivery for some of the largest global OTT and broadcast brands, and Qwilt’s game-changing contributions to software and cloud services have unlocked the potential of edge cloud services deep within service provider networks. Said simply, with Qwilt’s content delivery model, everyone wins.”
-- Alon Maor, CEO and co-founder, QwiltIn the below video recorded earlier this year live from the floor of the MWC Barcelona 2023 (Feb. 27 - Mar.2) event, Cisco and Qwilt representatives review the Edge Cloud for Content Delivery platform as full-stack, turnkey, managed solution that enables a new architecture and business model for content delivery, and a key part of a simple, secure, seamless" means of integrating 5G and Wi-Fi connectivity "to connect everything, everywhere," as reckoned by the partners.
