Happenings at Mobile World Congress 2010
Origin Digital recently had the opportunity to share its technology and solution sets with a broad assortment of international players in the mobile services market. As an exhibitor and workshop presenter within the Accenture Pavillion at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Origin shared not only its advanced IP broadcast management solutions and player frameworks, but also its broader strategy for accelerating the consumption of video on mobile devices - while protecting carrier networks from network burden due to backhaul, and performance issues related to congested Internet gateways.
With more and more mobile users accessing both live and on-demand video content on any number of rich content enabled devices – led mostly by Apple’s iPhone – carrier networks are getting bombarded with traffic that their data networks were really not designed to handle. To understand this, consider that an hour of typical web browsing on a mobile phone consumes about 40 megabytes of data, while an hour spent watching fuzzy YouTube videos will consume upwards of 180 megabytes, and a live event, like a match or concert, might consume up to 300 megabytes or more.
The cumulative effect of proliferating devices and growing video consumption habits among mobile users is a “cratering” of carrier networks – which impacts all data services for all users, and commonly contributes to what is still perceived as an inferior viewing experience. It doesn’t help matters that for the vast majority of content being consumed, the carriers have no revenue stake – and with the popularity of unlimited data plans, this just adds up mounting cost, as carriers are forced to contemplate massive network upgrades, just to be competitive. Most major networks are feeling this pain, and many of them are publicly crying “uncle”.
Origin Digital has partnered with the global leader in CDN services, Akamai Technologies, to create a unique offering which both reduces the burden on the carrier networks caused by consumption of popular content and also creates a mechanism for “plugging in” content partners to create high quality experiences which result in revenue. The solution combines what is called a Private Content Delivery Network (or PCDN) with Content Acceleration Services. It works like this:
Working with Accenture technical and business consulting teams, the carriers frame up their goals and projections around the use of video on their networks – now and going forward. Then, the Akamai technologists create a plan for embedding their global caching servers within the carrier networks – as dedicated nodes to handle the carrier traffic. Finally, Origin Digital acts as the “on-ramp” for partner content which is acquired, managed, encoded and delivered directly to the cache points within the carrier network. The combination of services can have dramatic results:
1. The carrier will instantly experience relief across its network and will lighten the reliance on Internet gateways, because popular content requests don’t have to travel repeatedly from the tower out to the source on the public Internet. After the initial retrieval, the content can be pulled from the cache which can be located proximally to the towers at the aggregation points.
2. The carriers can now begin to engage partners for subscription or possibly ad supported content onto their network, because Origin Digital can capture and process the content – and deliver directly onto the cache points.
3. Because both Origin Digital (on the processing end) and Akamai HD Network technology (on the delivery side) both support smooth streaming, delivery from the cache to the tower and out to the user is automatically optimized depending on the available bandwidth on the network and also the quality of the user’s connection. So, all users receive the best video stream their connectivity can afford them. This creates a big leap in the quality of the experience – which can’t be overestimated in an industry where subscriber churn profoundly affects the bottom line.
Not surprisingly, there was a high degree of interest in this among the mobile carriers which Origin Digital had the opportunity to speak with – and it looks like the coming weeks will be very active as these discussions progress.
Author - Curt Kendall, VP of Business Development
With more and more mobile users accessing both live and on-demand video content on any number of rich content enabled devices – led mostly by Apple’s iPhone – carrier networks are getting bombarded with traffic that their data networks were really not designed to handle. To understand this, consider that an hour of typical web browsing on a mobile phone consumes about 40 megabytes of data, while an hour spent watching fuzzy YouTube videos will consume upwards of 180 megabytes, and a live event, like a match or concert, might consume up to 300 megabytes or more.
The cumulative effect of proliferating devices and growing video consumption habits among mobile users is a “cratering” of carrier networks – which impacts all data services for all users, and commonly contributes to what is still perceived as an inferior viewing experience. It doesn’t help matters that for the vast majority of content being consumed, the carriers have no revenue stake – and with the popularity of unlimited data plans, this just adds up mounting cost, as carriers are forced to contemplate massive network upgrades, just to be competitive. Most major networks are feeling this pain, and many of them are publicly crying “uncle”.
Origin Digital has partnered with the global leader in CDN services, Akamai Technologies, to create a unique offering which both reduces the burden on the carrier networks caused by consumption of popular content and also creates a mechanism for “plugging in” content partners to create high quality experiences which result in revenue. The solution combines what is called a Private Content Delivery Network (or PCDN) with Content Acceleration Services. It works like this:
Working with Accenture technical and business consulting teams, the carriers frame up their goals and projections around the use of video on their networks – now and going forward. Then, the Akamai technologists create a plan for embedding their global caching servers within the carrier networks – as dedicated nodes to handle the carrier traffic. Finally, Origin Digital acts as the “on-ramp” for partner content which is acquired, managed, encoded and delivered directly to the cache points within the carrier network. The combination of services can have dramatic results:
1. The carrier will instantly experience relief across its network and will lighten the reliance on Internet gateways, because popular content requests don’t have to travel repeatedly from the tower out to the source on the public Internet. After the initial retrieval, the content can be pulled from the cache which can be located proximally to the towers at the aggregation points.
2. The carriers can now begin to engage partners for subscription or possibly ad supported content onto their network, because Origin Digital can capture and process the content – and deliver directly onto the cache points.
3. Because both Origin Digital (on the processing end) and Akamai HD Network technology (on the delivery side) both support smooth streaming, delivery from the cache to the tower and out to the user is automatically optimized depending on the available bandwidth on the network and also the quality of the user’s connection. So, all users receive the best video stream their connectivity can afford them. This creates a big leap in the quality of the experience – which can’t be overestimated in an industry where subscriber churn profoundly affects the bottom line.
Not surprisingly, there was a high degree of interest in this among the mobile carriers which Origin Digital had the opportunity to speak with – and it looks like the coming weeks will be very active as these discussions progress.
Author - Curt Kendall, VP of Business Development
posted by Origin Digital at
10:06 AM
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