Could 'Edge-Native' CDNs Lessen Streaming Subscriber Churn?

jackreid598@gmail.com (Jack Reid) — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 01:54:45 +0000

Netskrt Systems, a Vancouver-based content delivery network (CDN) startup, believes it has the tool set that is needed to provide high-quality streaming video to hard-to-reach rural areas.

The company is touting the ability to more effectively deliver live sports to these regions and fend off subscriber churn in the process.

When watching fast-paced, competitive content like live sports, Netskrt claims that frequent buffering and inferior video quality cause customers in rural areas to “become frustrated with a poor quality viewing experience."

Churn inevitably follows.

Netskrt says streaming companies can solve the problem by incorporating its “edge-native CDNs” (eCDNS), content delivery networks specifically designed to ensure high-quality viewing experiences for non-metropolitan customers.

By incorporating an edge-native CDN into their content delivery strategy, streaming services can extend high-quality viewing to subscribers in remote and rural areas, and ensure up to 15% of subscribers who live beyond metropolitan areas won’t have to suffer from buffering or lower-resolution video, the company said.

The startup said eCDNs use a combination of cloud-based content and network management function to ensure outskirt internet-service providers and content providers can verify and validate that all their customers are getting the best possible experience.

“Content providers get an online set of rights to distribute their content online, but the question is, how can they be sure that they're reaching everybody to monetize effectively?” Netskrt Systems VP of product strategy Steve Miller-Jones told Next TV. “With eCDNs, they can verify that they are actually reaching the entire population with a quality that’s acceptable today.”

Netskrt cites S&P Global Market Intelligence’s prediction that sports media rights payments will exceed $25 billion in 2023 as proof of the need to cater to sports viewers.

“Every major company has experienced serious technical issues when streaming live events that attract large viewing audiences watching simultaneously,” Miller-Jones said. “Edge-native CDNs put every subscriber within one hop of an edge cache, minimizing latency, enhancing the delivery speed of video content and improving the metrics that affect quality of experience.

“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.

In January, Netskrt partnered with global software provider Thales to bring airplane passengers full access to streaming services while in flight through the use of these same edge-native CDNs.

Founded in 2017 by CEO and technological entrepreneur Siegfried Luft, Netskrt has previously employed on-demand streaming on railways in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, North America and other underserved locations.

Luft is also president and owner of Gulf Islands broadband provider Beacon Wireless, which he started in 2010. He also founded cloud computing startup Siaras as well as the telecommunications supplier Zeugma Systems.

What’s Rich About The ‘Rich Edge’?

Leslie Ellis — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 11:15:00 +0000

Long ago, in March of 2005, this column took on a popular term in tech-talk time: “the edge.” Which one? Where is it?

And here we are, almost a decade later, still talking edges — but something changed. The edge picked up some serious semantic bling, especially in the Prefix Department.

It’s not just “the edge” anymore. It’s “the rich edge.” “The intelligent edge.” As a word that routinely crisscrosses between everyday talk and shop talk, the “edge” can befuddle. There’s the edge of the counter, and then there’s the edge of the network.

Back then, we polled engineers: Where’s the edge? Responses: “It’s where RF goes to IP, or visa versa.” “After the headend, before the eyeballs.” “At the output of the set-top box.” (Still my personal favorite: “It’s where the bits fall off .”)

Our conclusion, back then, was that “the edge” is in the eye of the beholder, because different work disciplines see edges differently. And now, those edges are rich and smart. What happened?

First of all, this is “rich” as in “having or supplying a large amount of something that is wanted” more so than “sacks full of cash.” In a connectivity sense, edges are places where stuff gets handed off : Backbone traffic to regional fiber rings; fiber rings to nodes; nodes to homes and the connected stuff within them.

The “large amount of something” is where the intelligence comes in. It’s the addition of compute and storage resources — those building blocks of the “cloud.”

The quest for rich, intelligent edges is the reason why traditional cable headends are becoming headend data centers, with racks and racks of servers adjoining the traditional functions of signal demodulation, encryption, processing, remodulation and combining.

It’s most evident right now in video services. Remember when VOD began? Storage was distributed on a market-by-market basis. Titles were “pitched” (via satellite) to hundreds (thousands?) of recipient “catchers.”

Then “CDNs” (content-delivery networks) happened, with big “origin” servers in the middle and video zipping to markets over terrestrial fiber.

“Rich edges” are morphing VOD yet again: Small, nimble storage, buttressing the big servers in the middle and designed to both anticipate and locate the most popular content closest to viewers.

VOD is but an early example of a “rich edge” transformation. It’s what happens when “connectivity” (broadband) gets gussied up with the building blocks of cloud, so that our “connected” things work better — faster and more intuitively.

Nonetheless, our advice remains the same, when it comes to the edge: Always ask. Asking “which edge?” and, now, “what’s rich about it?” does two things. It shows the speaker’s knowledge precincts, and it spares you from envisioning a different edge than the one being discussed.

Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translationplease.com or multichannel.com/blog

Latest from Next TV in Cdns

Could 'Edge-Native' CDNs Lessen Streaming Subscriber Churn?

What’s Rich About The ‘Rich Edge’?