Earlier this month Swedish CDN specialist Edgeware announced the launch of its StreamPilot session control platform, a real-time delivery control system for streaming over multi-CDN environments.
The development stemmed from the accelerating move to third-party CDNs and new players in content delivery who have sidestepped building hardware. “We’re going to continue to serve the telcos but also move much more to the broadcasters and content owners,” the company’s CEO Karl Thedéen told TVBEurope.
“Even if we gave them equipment, they wouldn’t know where to put it,” added CTO Kalle Henriksson. “But what we’ve seen is that in that transition, a lot gets lost in the form of visibility and control of all the streaming.” StreamPilot brings back that level of insight, from monitoring to personalisation, all in real time.
“We see everything,” explained Henriksson. “We see if people watch or not, or what bitrate they’re watching, we can detect if they have a problem directly.” This allows for swapping over to a different CDN if a stream fails, detecting if someone is skipping ads, or overriding video quality. “Just because the network can deliver 4K, doesn’t mean that you should have 4K content, because it could be that we want to preserve bandwidth for a higher-paying customer,” added Henriksson.
Further applications include:
- Identifying rebroadcasts of streams (eg. a sport event is being streamed by a site that doesn’t have the rights) and shutting them down
- Blacking out content based on geographics (eg. a site doesn’t have the rights for a particular region)
- Sending specific broadcast messages to particular regions (eg. “There’s a gas leak in Birmingham”)
- Session granularity allowing you to see quality experience metrics for every session all the time
“All these results are in a real-time dashboard, which is giving back what the service providers had when they had their own network and lost when they went to third-party CDNs; we can give that back,” said Henriksson.
