Dailymotion/Peer5 Partnership Is A Big Win for WebRTC
Last month, Peer5 announced a partnership with Dailymotion, one of the biggest video hosting platforms in the world. The move will see Dailymotion leverage Peer5's peer-to-peer content delivery network (CDN) to improve the delivery of its live and on demand streaming service to users across the world.
The fact that one of the world's major publishers has chosen a WebRTC-based peer-to-peer video delivery technology to enhance the streaming of its live video content is a great example of how the world's major publishers are finding new and exciting ways to enhance their offerings and grow their video streaming capacities.
As Dailymotion head of architecture Pierre-Yves Kerembellec stated last month, Peer5's WebRTC solution offered Dailymotion the capacity it was looking for. "In order to grow our audience and exceed our current 300 million viewers, we need to think beyond traditional HTTP-based CDN services," he said. "We chose Peer5 because their WebRTC-based peer-to-peer solution solves our three biggest live streaming challenges—capacity, quality and cost-efficiency—while requiring no end-user software installation."
Based in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Peer5 operate a serverless content delivery network for massively-scaled video streaming, providing a TV-grade broadcasting solution for the internet. Peer5's engineers turn peak-demand into an advantage, so the more users watch a video, the more effective the streaming becomes. By increasing its customers' streaming capacity by a factor of 50, Peer5 ensures publishers can offer their audiences near-perfect video playback with no buffering.
Dailymotion is one of the largest video streaming services in the world and an innovator in the space. According to data from Sitecatalyst, the platform receives more than 300 million unique visitors per month who watch more than 3.5 billion videos per month. With this type of volume, it not only made sense for Dailymotion to build its own CDN, but to also write its own software to load balance between multiple 3rd party CDNs.
There is no doubt that Dailymotion is positioning itself as a leader in the video streaming space. Chairman Maxime Saada and his team are also the original sponsors of the hls.js project, the open-source JavaScript library that implements an HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) client. Originally authored by Guillaume Du Pontavice, hls.js has been also been adopted by companies such as AOL, Twitter and The New York Times because it provides a robust and high-performance, non-Flash-based client for HLS adaptive streaming. Despite having one of the biggest server-based CDN infrastructures in the world, Dailymotion is also a big supporter of peer-assisted (i.e., peer-to-peer) delivery of video content.
A byproduct of becoming one of the biggest providers in the world of streaming content is the need for vast infrastructure. One issue with server-based CDN infrastructures is their inability to handle surging streaming demands, which can be very dynamic. Because the server-based CDN has a fixed amount of capacity, the strain on the system can often have an impact on performance. As Dailymotion looks to its bright future and the increased demand of streaming content, they have come up with an innovative way to lower infrastructure and bandwidth cost, while increasing overall scalability and quality of service for its users.
Though the partnership is in its early stages, Dailymotion is already seeing some fantastic results from its partnership with Peer5. In South Korea, the platform have already been able to offload ~80% of the traffic that previously flowed through Dailymotion's server-based CDNs to Peer5'S peer-to-peer network. This means that Dailymotion can now increase its audience in South Korea by a factor of 5 without deploying any incremental hardware, which is obviously a huge win for them, both in terms of scalability and cost efficiency.
In South Africa, Dailymotion has reduced the amount of rebuffering that viewers experience by 75%, leading to happier viewers and, ultimately, longer session times which are more monetizable.
So it's clear that Peer5's WebRTC-based solution is the perfect partner for Dailymotion. Many companies such as Facebook, Snapchat, Google, Skype, and Slack are using WebRTC for their real-time communications capabilities in the form of video/audio chat, but many are failing to utilize the full benefits of this emerging technology.
Peer5 has tapped into the DataChannel API that WebRTC offers allowing for peer-to-peer based data sharing. Dailymotion is offloading expensive hardware and bandwidth cost by creating a network of connected peers that share streaming content.
Dailymotion's tie up with Peer5 is illustrative of the fact that WebRTC offers a host of benefits across a number of functions. WebRTC is used in various apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, appear.in, and platforms such as TokBox and the recently IPO'd Twilio.
But the overarching principle of the WebRTC project remains that its APIs should be open source, free, and standardized, and that they can be built into web browsers and be more efficient than existing technologies.
Customers are engaging with brands and businesses across an increasing number of devices—wearables, websites, social media, mobiles, and tablets. At each touchpoint, customers expect a customized and personalized experience optimized specifically for them. Put simply, the more entertained, engaged, and cared for a consumer feels, the more likely they are to stick around, buy something, and keep coming back. WebRTC is helping developers do that on a daily basis.
We are heading down a path where consumers will soon expect to be able to communicate with family and friends or customer service representatives from 'within' every application that they use. As a result, I believe traditional telephony will fade away to become what we call "smart communications" and that revolution will be led by companies like Twilio, Nexmo, and Cisco that provide innovative ways to enhance communications.
WebRTC gives us the ability to communicate in smarter, more efficient ways by adding real-time communications capabilities to applications through the use of live audio and video streaming, screen sharing, secure document sharing, traditional telephony integration and much more.
Mobile apps also present one of the biggest opportunities for developers to deliver cross-channel engagement, as a user registering for service and logging in from multiple devices, each persona can be measured.
Exciting times indeed…
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