Case Study: Speeding Video Delivery to the Filipino Diaspora

EdgeStream built its VDN to provide a TV-like viewing experience in SD, DVD, and HD quality to global audiences cost effectively. "While developing our platform and core competencies, we knew that to deliver a QoS over the public internet we had to conquer network congestion and latency issues, which as we know can occur at any time and significantly impact the quality of service," says Chung, now the company’s CTO.

"We developed software that would allow us to mitigate these effects and build a quasi-centralized network using commodity servers and achieve high capacity utilization of the infrastructure. Early on in the product development cycle we concluded that best results are achieved when the quality of streaming video is measured as close to the display as possible" said Chung. "Our continuing research over the years has allowed us to develop, perfect and patent two key technologies, 1) Internet Congestion Tunnel Through (ICTT) and, 2) Continuous Route Optimization(CROS); both these form the core of our Video Delivery system and Network."

EdgeStream’s ICTT is a proprietary technology for improving high-speed, error-free video delivery, based on familiar HTTP and TCP/IP protocols. EdgeStream decided to use these protocols, as they support error-free streaming and are firewall friendly. ICTT makes delivery tolerant of high network latency by breaking up the original compressed files and using patented multi-source techniques to stream the video to a displaying device, even when it is 20 router hops away. "We are able to treat the video as simple data files which allows us to transport DVD and HD high bit rates without any problems," says Chung.

The use of CROS and ICTT provides higher performance, along with load balancing, fault tolerance, and network optimization features. The EdgeStream client implements CROS by continuously monitoring the data delivery, and if necessary, adaptively switching the deficient data stream to alternate paths, servers, or server locations in real time without interruptions. This delivery method improves overall network utilization while providing a "relief valve" for overloaded network segments of the public Internet. The switching is done totally transparently, without interrupting the user’s video, and can happen multiple times if necessary.