Sneak Preview: Origin to Edge: Video Caching and Content Delivery
On Tuesday, May 20, Mark de Jong, Chairman, CDN Alliance, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect May panel “Origin to Edge: Video Caching and Content Delivery.” The conventional wisdom in streaming these days is the closer you cache your content to your end users, the easier it is to handle traffic spikes and achieve your latency goals. With live sports, a distributed architecture is almost mandatory. Edge caching also offers more capabilities on personalization, security, and anti-piracy, and can be used to combine edge compute functions. However, centralized delivery often is more cost-effective. How do you find the balance on how distributed to go, and how do CDNs offer these kinds of differences? How can you manage and operate it if you go for highly distributed setups?
Confirmed panelists include:
- Iuniana Oprescu, Principal CDN Architect, Sky
- Subhrendu Sarkar, Senior Engineering Manager, Video Platform, Warner Bros. Discovery
- Jeff Gilbert, ex-Harmonic, Principal Strategy Consultant, XStep
- Christopher Levy, CEO and Co-Founder, BuyDRM
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Mark de Jong is the co-founder and chairman of the CDN Alliance. With more than 20 years of experience in online video—more than 15 years of which has been spent in online video streaming, distribution, content delivery, and CDN, de Jong has built a career in bridging innovation, technology, business, and strategy in the areas of CDN, OTT, streaming media, and infrastructures. de Jong is also an advisor at several video tech startups and scale-ups and is the founder and CEO of Axello, a consulting company for online video tech and online video distribution, bringing together telcos, broadcasters, and content players with online video tech startups, enabling a new wave of innovation.
Iuniana Oprescu is Principal CDN Architect at Sky, where she is in charge of CDN strategy and architecture covering both technical and commercial aspects for delivering Sky content to all consumers, including partnering with ISPs in Europe. The team she leads also drives the strategy for distribution of third-party content onto the Sky Broadband networks through hosted caching or interconnection.
“When we talk about caching, a distributed estate brings advantages in terms of traffic volume reduction on the backhaul network, but this is often a trade-off with datacentre space, cache inefficiency, and operational complexity. Like all engineering choices, it is a matter of compromise and optimising for what is important for your particular use-case,” Oprescu says.
Subhrendu Sarkar leads the Video Platform at Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO Max. With more than 20 years of experience in media streaming, Sarkar has built his career working across the stack from media players, media compression, real-time streaming, and content delivery. Prior to working at Warner Bros. Discovery, he led Crunchyroll’s Video Engineering groups, and he has rich experience in building innovative products around media compression, streaming quality monitoring, and AR/VR streaming in both small startups and mid/large organizations in Silicon Valley.
“Anything that a user customizes, you probably can be able to use the edge,” Sarkar says. “So recommendation systems, ad insertions, manifest customization, and so forth. DRM services [that] you may want to have tied to specific entitlements of users. And the other set is things like CDN routing, switching decision-making, and CDN log analysis. And this again comes back to tying to the CDN edges or CDN providers who provide edge computing.”
Jeff Gilbert is an executive leader, pioneer, and blue-flame thinker in the field of content distribution and monetization solutions for the Media & Entertainment industry. He currently provides marketing and strategy consulting to companies in and around the media and entertainment industry, including telecom companies, independent software/hardware vendors, and media companies themselves. Previously, Gilbert led content distribution initiatives for Harmonic. Prior to that, he co-founded one of the first IPTV operating companies in the US and has worked for three of the top five commercial CDN services as well as a top media company.
“The biggest challenge facing content delivery today is economic, not technical,” Gilbert asserts. “The delivery supply chain is consistently losing money, which is an existential risk to all who rely upon it. Overall economics should be a key part of the equation when deciding how to deliver specific content.”
Christopher Levy is the CEO and Co-Founder of BuyDRM, where he leads the company’s international staff as part of its mission to deliver the leading DRM service platform. He works with a global customer base to ensure they are deploying best-of-breed solutions they can base their business on, including brands such as ABC, EPIX, F1 TV, FOX, FuboTV, NBC Universal, Roku, Soundcloud, and Tubi. Levy’s specialties include HLS, MPEG-DASH, Offline Playback, In Flight Entertainment, Live Webcasting Technologies, and CDNs.
Levy’s focus for this panel is on new edge functions. “There’s no clear link between edge caching and anti-piracy. There is however, a link between edge functions and anti-piracy. Some of the newer content delivery networks support edge functions where you can do content encryption or watermarking, for example. If you watermark a file though, you won’t edge cache it for long since it’s only good for the user you made the file for,” he explains. “You can integrate web-streaming access tokens in conjunction with DRM to create further protections like denying unauthorized simultaneous streaming, for example. “I look forward to discussing these types of deterrents to piracy and other related issues at the conference.”
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