How Can a Private CDN Be The Solution To All Your Problems

The World Of Legacy CDNs

OTT service providers have thrived on disruption. They pioneered the shift in the video broadcast industry away from the satellite network from the days of Television broadcast heydays, to utilizing the internet servers to deliver the content. It completely changed the game of how we consume video content such as movies, TV shows, and live games. 

CDNs have been critical in fueling the growth of Over The Top Services – helping them evolve and mature to deliver more enormous amounts of data over the internet while ensuring a great Quality of Experience (QoE). CDNs have become very popular and today, “CDNs will carry 72% of Internet traffic by 2022 up from 56% in 2017” Cisco report says. However, the OTT subscriber base has continued to grow rapidly and now OTT service providers have hit roadblocks with traditional CDN architecture as well. The  OTT players are looking at scaling for performance and pricing – which are vital at this juncture. 

The subscriber base for OTT is getting bigger. In 2012, there were 46 million worldwide OTT subscribers. It is projected to reach 650 million by the end of 2021. However, multiple challenges remain. The user experience needs to scale as well. Still,  because of the massive data streaming, there are often complaints of sub-optimal UX and streaming performances over traditional CDN services, which use shared servers for caching content.

It is fuelling the demand for innovations in CDN solutions. Traditional CDNs are a good fit if the user base is concentrated around a certain geographic area. However, for modern OTT service providers who aim to serve a global network of subscribers, it can easily encounter network congestion and other issues. 

Multi-CDN solutions were embraced by service providers to address these shortcomings. However, in the case of a multi-CDN approach, huge unpopular contents might be replaced in the shared cache server by other content provider’s popular contents, and this will cause a cache miss. The shared platforms become uncontrollably congested, and as a result, the QoE can suffer. Hence, Multi CDNs too are experiencing performance and profitability problems. These obstacles call for innovations that will disrupt the legacy CDN models. 

The onus, therefore, falls on the service providers and CDNs to innovate, so that they make winning bets with disruptive technologies to keep succeeding and profiting. 

With the high competition in this OTT space, the winners will be the ones who can maintain high user engagement and a satisfactory user experience. There is nothing that would turn off the user base more than buffers and low bitrate experiences. The rise of supporting technologies such as the 5G has made it even more necessary for service providers to up their game to match their rivals.

Here, a Private CDN Comes Into The Picture… 

A private CDN supports high-performance service over a secure infrastructure with dedicated servers, that ensures high performance at all times for users irrespective of where they are located.

It can help even big OTT service providers to deliver video broadcasts in high quality, with minimal latency. 

How private CDN model works is that it enables the OTT providers to deploy video cache solutions inside the internet service provider (ISP) network. By working this way, Private CDNs can reduce latency through peering with ISPs.

Emerging technologies, such as docker container and software-defined networking, are enabling OTT service providers to set up their Private CDNs through collaborating with an agile Private CDN provider.

With the Private CDNs, OTT providers can deploy agile software techniques with embedded intelligence to run load balancers, anycast DNS platforms, image and video delivery apps with big cache pools. It makes sure the perfect and customized delivery is available to growing OTT players as well. 

OTT service providers can also benefit from agility provided by private CDNs to deploy microservices, such as monitoring, in-depth analytics and load testing on edge – delivering a better service to its customers.

Bad user experience is a revenue risk for OTT service providers, and Private CDNs will provide the scalability needed to deliver an optimal experience. Big OTT players such as Netflix have already switched to building and deploying their private CDNs to ensure consistent high-performance. 

Video on demand drives the majority of traffic. However, live event videos have become an integral part of the marketing strategy for many businesses, and this is fuelling peak video consumption and traffic spikes. Private CDNs enable a significant economy of scale, providing the best scalability in terms of cost and performance to handle these short-term traffic spikes.

Closing Thoughts About Private CDN 

Some of the clear benefits of Multi-CDN mixed with a Private CDN are:

– You can control the delivery quality and analyze performance at a granular level

– Cache size can be customized based on your business model, target geography and content size.

– You can control the cost of other cloud CDNs in the mix because you will know the real cost of running a CDN

– You will not have to find and employ a tech team experienced in CDN which is already scarce. You may have to train your existing staff – which is expensive and may reduce your time to market. 

Additionally, you can focus on your target region with Managed CDN and still serve other global regions with cloud CDNs.

OTT providers that do not have a dedicated tech team capable of deploying the private CDN solution can run into obstacles while setting up the private CDN. Here, having the right technical partner for creating a private CDN can help to mitigate many of the challenges that OTT operators encounter. 

At Medianova, we help OTT providers deploy cost-effective CDN solutions to avoid the internet’s congestion, gain the necessary financial economies of scale and deliver supreme service delivery with increased delivery speeds and lower latency for improved end-user streaming. We bring years of expertise and knowledge in setting up the right solution for OTT service providers, that are optimized to the business objectives and user requirements. Contact us and let us build the nuts and bolts for you while you relax and focus on your content production.