23 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Edgeware
OTT ACTUALLY IS THE WAY TO GET THE BEST POSSIBLE TV EXPERIENCE NOW
MAKING YOUR MARK At IBC2018, Edgeware will demonstrate its watermarking technology in which a bitstream is embedded in the image as it is sent out. “The system is very difficult to break. There are other ways of doing watermarking, but most of them are inefficient when it comes to the CDN. Typically what people do is create two versions of every programme – an A and a B version – and they’ll send out the segments in a randomised order which essentially creates a code of A and B segments. Viewers don’t know it, but you may be watching A, A, B, B, and I might be watching A, B, A, B. You can unpick that if someone tries to pirate the content, but that has a lot of overhead because you have to send out twice as much information through the CDN.” Edgeware’s watermarking method makes subtle changes to some pixels in some of the frames. The watermarking is invisible to the human eye and executed on the fly as the content is being sent out from the CDN. The transition to OTT is being taken on by traditional broadcasters and satellite providers and Edgeware is helping them in the transition. “OTT is an interesting market because it allows smaller channels to expand distribution, but it’s also bringing about a massive shift in the attitude of more established broadcasters and satellite providers as well. “Obviously, there’s a convenience factor in moving to OTT. But why might you move wholeheartedly? The people who are going to make this work are those who are seeing it as a way of surpassing what they can deliver in broadcast.”
“Using multiple CDN providers is a trend a lot of people are adopting,” says Brandon. “We’re helping people extend that, so not only can you use multiple CDN providers, but you could also build capacity for most of your regular traffic, but still have the ability to offload peak traffic.” Streaming popular live events requires some technological forethought. To manage the streaming of the FIFA World Cup or Olympics, or the international premiere of everyone’s favourite Netflix series, requires some level of prediction in advance when a lot of viewers are trying to come onboard. “It’s the onboarding process that is often overlooked in this. It’s alright to say,
‘We have enough capacity for steady state – when we have a few million people watching, we can stream it.’ But you also have to set up all those sessions. And the unique thing about live events is everyone wants to start watching them at about the same time.” As a solution, Edgeware offers automatic ‘predictive load balancing’ technology. When the system sees a queue of viewers building up, it starts to copy that content onto more servers than would otherwise naturally be needed to hold that content. It gets ahead of the curve by prepopulating servers with content and preventing congestion.
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