Streaming Video Alliance Outlines Open Caching Efforts

The Streaming Video Alliance (SVA) has published the guiding principles and system attributes that have been developed by its Open Caching Working Group.

The SVA was established by a number of major companies in the online video sector to help the industry overcome problems in expanding the online delivery of content by developing open architectures and standards. 

As part of that push, SVA set up the Open Caching Working Group to develop proposed standards, best practices and policy for a new layer of content caching within the ISP network that are close to consumers. 

Open caches offer a number of clear benefits by aggregating “compute and storage resources that complements, extends and enhances that of any individual CDN,” the group noted.

In addition, “open caches offload large volumes of streaming traffic from both CDNs as well as the peering and aggregation path inside ISP networks, in network nodes where CDN-only caching systems could not efficiently or economically operate,” the group argued, “and will dramatically improve the end user experience by eliminating or reducing potential congestion points in the network and enabling the network to scale efficiently to meet online video demand.”