Beyond Traditional Content Delivery: Data Streaming Trends with Apache Kafka

With the acceleration of lockdown caused by the pandemic disaster, our data-consuming trend is rapidly changing. The top radical changes are definitely remote education and remote working. And as Medianova, we have already successfully handled these two use cases by introducing the Free Medianova Meet and collaboration with EBA, Turkey’s educational electronic content network. Besides these, let’s look at the list we have prepared for you and how we are ready for these new trends.

By all means, deep-seated contents such as e-commerce images and video-on-demand contents are still in high demand since we are all at home and tend to buy everything online or watch online movies and series for entertainment. And Medianova outperforms in these platforms with up-to-date technologies such as Docker, Origin Shield, BBR, Brotli, WebP & Image optimization, and much more. Moreover, we are also getting ready for the latest trends by introducing state-of-art streaming architecture on top of our Content Delivery Networks. Here, we summarized the most prominent use cases for the new data streaming trends.

Once data streaming comes to the scene (especially if the case is real-time streaming), Apache Kafka gives promising results with its high-throughput, low-latency service. Another significant advantage is the perfect-fit with Machine Learning, an inevitable solution for all industries today.

We list the top use cases below, which gained the most credit with the new-normal. So put aside the traditional content deliveries for now. Open your brains for the new use cases.  It is time to get to a new normal.

Interactive Contents

Interactive Contents are one of the most real-time streaming sources which tire content providers out. During 2020, we saw a transition step by step from traditional text-based content to dynamic, appealing content that offers users an immersive experience. The best example of this was the virtual museums that left their mark on 2020. Moreover, most e-commerce platforms, including the second-hand ones, have encouraged own users to use on-demand visual calls or 360-degree view of the goods. In the last year, many official document transfers are happened online due to Covid-19. This situation has also accelerated the usage of the chatbot and document transfer over chats. According to the 2020 Content Preferences Study*, 67% of the buyers stated that they rely on the visual-aided and interactive content more than the last year. With thousands of users who demand interactive content, it is challenging to provide a stable connection unless CDN. Apache Kafka offers a smooth data flow pipeline and speeds up the connection for interactive content.

Personalization of Everything (PoE)

Here, we are introducing a new concept: Personalization of Everything (PoE). Yes, we are talking about ‘everything’: personalized assistant, personalized marketing, personalized content, and so on so forth. In a nutshell, personalization means giving a response to people according to their feelings, choices, and characteristic behaviors. According to Experian’s technical report, personalized marketing emails receive “29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates”. The technical idea is to collect specialized behaviors of the users as much as possible. With the guidance of the data streams and powerful machine learning support, Apache Kafka endpoints successively gather real-time user behavior to come up with a personalized result.

Natural Language Processing

One more bonus study: Natural Language Processing (NLP). Apache Kafka is also a great enabler for large text files besides video, voice, and images. Continuous NLP pipelines with Python and Java are possible with Apache Kafka, bringing together two successive programming languages. Especially with the release of Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) in June 2020, the world has experienced a giant leap forward in artificial intelligence. However, NLP platforms and NLP providers suffer from the large text file transfer in real-time. With the usage of the Apache Kafka streaming platform, it is possible to connect different NLP sources to train NLP models.

We have covered three new data streaming trends with the Apache Kafka solution, which is possible for small- and large-sized real-time streaming. These demands have existed for a long time; however, due to the Covid-19, the need for these platforms is rapidly increasing. And our innovative CDN solutions are shaped to support content providers.

Because we care for data, and we know the value of data. We are getting ready for your new streaming trend to get more intelligent with you. Get in touch with us to learn more about how Medianova can build and manage an optimized and dedicated CDN for you.