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How Disney Streaming Uses Metrics to Improve CDN Performance

Learn more about streaming at scale at Streaming Media East 2022.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Eric Klein: We work with multiple different partners in the CDN space of differing kinds. As I said, open-cache CDNs, on-net deployments. It really all depends on the different scenario, and we hold all of them to the same standard. For us, performance is the most important thing, because we're focused on the customer experience. It's all about ensuring that the customers have a limited rebuffer experience. Quick video start time, very few failures on playback, and a consistency at a high bit rate of experience. And for us, we use a bunch of different metrics, both some raw metrics, as well as some inferred metrics from tooling in the space being one of the tools, and looking at how those then line up across all of the different partners in different geographic regions.

From there, we factor that in with a reliability score, which is, I think, the unique thing about it, tracking the reliability and the performance. You need both vectors of how consistently are there issues, plus, how consistent is the performance, and actually do a weighted scale of the CDNs, do everything based on standard deviation from the mean of performance. And for us, it's all about them plotting and charting all of our different CDN partners against this scale and seeing who's the best, who's second best, who's got some challenges in areas to improve and then going and working with those partners to spotlight it.

So, for us, performance drives every conversation we do from a technical standpoint, with all of our CDN partners, day in and day out. I've got three people on my team focusing on that. And without that kind of focus and attention to detail, those little things can fall through the cracks. And our goal is to never have any customer experience impact.

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