Edge-native content delivery networks (eCDNS) could help streaming companies reduce subscriber churn by providing high-quality streaming video to hard-to-reach rural areas.
According to Netskrt Systems, a CDN startup, issues around buffering and inferior video quality cause customers in rural areas to “become frustrated with a poor quality viewing experience”.
An Edge-Native CDN is specifically designed to ensure a high-quality viewing experience for subscribers on the outskirts of the internet, said the company, as it combines cloud-based content- and network-management functions with appliances suitable for deployment into last-mile access networks of all types.
The technology can draw on network awareness, content awareness, and consumer behaviour analytics, to manage live and on-demand content delivery and ensure outskirt ISPs and content providers alike can verify and validate that all their customers are getting the best possible experience, it added.
“Every major company has experienced serious technical issues when streaming live events that attract large viewing audiences watching simultaneously,” said Steve Miller-Jones, VP of product strategy at Netskrt Systems.
“While typical CDNs bring content closer to the viewer, Edge-Native CDNs extend that strategy by putting every subscriber within one hop of an edge cache, minimising latency, enhancing the delivery speed of video content, and improving the metrics that affect QoE.
“Caching is the secret to QoE, and when edge-native caching is in place, viewers in last mile, or ‘last subnet’ locations have an equally high-quality viewing experience as millions of other subscribers in highly populated urban areas,” he added.
