Interview with Tassilo Raesig, CEO, MainStreaming
From premium live sports to a range of other mission-critical applications, efficient content delivery is critical to live streaming at scale. Edge delivery enables high-performance streams on a global level by widely distributing edge notes as close to the end user as possible. In this interview, MainStreaming CEO Tassilo Raesig discusses the ongoing challenges facing global CDN services in their efforts to deliver broadcast-grade streams that meet client expectations for performance, scale, and monetisation.
Hybrid Edge Networks
Broadcasters and OTT providers are continually seeking high-performance streaming solutions that balance quality with cost efficiency. MainStreaming’s role, Raesig says, is to “offer a variety of solutions that start with private CDN implementations for broadcasters that require high quality of experience with a lot of spikes in their traffic profile.”
He goes on to explain that for services with typical VOD traffic that needs to be delivered in both high-quality and low-cost profiles, “we specialise in having set up an infrastructure that goes very deep towards the edge.” This places it “very close to the consumer with a sophisticated orchestration platform that delivers the content in a very cost-efficient way with high quality and low latency. It’s a very good way of delivering the content even through complex infrastructures.”
As demands increase throughout the streaming ecosystem for greater video quality and delivery speed, Raesig explains how MainStreaming’s deployment of edge solutions built within existing ISP networks creates more resilient infrastructure.
On one side, he says, broadcasters and OTT providers face the challenge of working with “limited capacity in terms of peering between CDN services and ISPs in any given country—some of them better than others.” Deploying solutions closer to the end user speeds up delivery, while “also mitigating the capacity limitations that ISP networks have.” This approach also spares ISPs from “having to increase their investment in infrastructure to deliver video.”
Raesig underscores the point that CDN networks were not built to transmit live video (especially at scale), “but more as a commoditised Web-based content delivery network. However, our approach in MainStreaming is to enable the ISPs to offer high performance capacity to broadcasters and OTT services while saving on infrastructure investment and even participating in revenue sharing on the traffic they get.”
Opportunities and Optimisation for ISPs
Given the inherent bandwidth limitations Raesig describes, helping ISPs optimise video delivery while at the same time reducing network strain is another critical challenge facing an edge CDN like MainStreaming.
“We have a very intelligent caching solution called Smart Origin that helps to acquire the content that needs to be delivered in an ISP’s network only once, without having to go through the whole network all the time,” he explains. “Distributing that to our edge caching solution is also delivering the content only where it needs to be and not creating congestion throughout the whole network. By combining our orchestration with the caching inside the ISP, we help to mitigate the congestion issues and at the same time deliver at high quality because we can direct the content in the best way to deliver it to the end user within the network.”
Another way MainStreaming empowers ISPs is through their CDN-as-a-service model, which helps ISPs take advantage of growing opportunities to monetise video delivery and generate new revenue streams, while also keeping quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS). “In our model,” Raesig says, ISPs “can sell the capacity in their network directly to OTT services, broadcasters, or innovative delivery companies.”
Anti-Piracy Efforts
Piracy and CDN leeching are issues that continue to plague the industry, and siphon off revenue from content providers as viewers watch illegal streams of premium content. Raesig describes content protection as “an ever-ongoing whack-a-mole if you just rely on DRM solutions or forensic solutions such as watermarking and embedding customer information into the content itself. It helps you on one side to do a DRM solution, but as you develop a new one, there’s a lot of people who try to produce solutions to go around it. And forensic solutions don’t help you to protect the content while you provide it. If you stream a football game, finding out two days later that viewers watched it somewhere else is not interesting to anyone anymore. It doesn’t help your revenue streams.”
MainStreaming’s strategy, he says, is to deploy “a real-time anti-piracy solution that uses our CDN management capabilities to identify piracy attempts in terms of VPN usage.” The toolbox detects “license usage outside of the licensed country and CDN leeching where single clients use the content and redistribute it through other means, circumventing the origin player and security measures that are in place. We can detect it while it happens. And this is where we provide our partners and customers a toolbox where they can select what to do with the identified issues. We can block the IPs and shut down the VPN tunnels that go into the network or even just degrade the quality to a level where it’s not interesting anymore to use that content by the end user. Even if it’s available, a pixelated football game is not really worth watching.”
Advanced Analytics and CMCD
Raesig also touches on the necessity of gathering real-time analytics during live streams to maintain and improve quality of experience (QoE) for end users, and how MainStreaming leverages Common Media Client Data (CMCD) to optimise data-driven insight.
“CMCD is a well defined and established standard for analytical purposes and for delivering a rich and very good set of data about the performance of the player in the end customer’s environment,” he explains. Using this data also helps to evaluate “how we performed in the last broadcast or in the overall performance in this week or this month. We have taken this to the next step, saying, ‘We can use this data in real time to identify delivery problems on the go and then take action to improve that.’”
Emerging Challenges for OTT Broadcasters
Looking just over the horizon, Raesig expects the primary challenges OTT and streaming broadcasters are likely to face involve available capacity for IP-based delivery. “If we look at developments in the last one or two years,” Raesig says, “we see a huge amount of broadcast viewing moving into IP. As traditional broadcast bandwidth viewing is decreasing, satellite transponders are being shut down. Terrestrial broadcast services are being reviewed in many European countries while there is also an acceleration of video moving from a broadcast environment into IP, which collectively present a set of challenges that need to be managed.”
The first key challenge, he says, “is total capacity, which is not really there today. If you would move all of that into IP, there’s not enough capacity in any given country’s network.”
The next critical issue is “the resilience and security requirements that we know from the broadcast world, especially for public broadcasters where you need to have backup systems and emergency situations being covered, where transmission is crucial. This is not present in the current IP landscape.”
All of this IP infrastructure required to provide this level of resiliency, he says, “needs to be built up in the next few years while at the same time meeting increased demand. It’s a little bit like rebuilding the plane while flying it at a higher speed.”
As for what’s ahead for MainStreaming, he says, delivering effective live streams at scale is and will remain the company’s “main mission.” What’s more, as the sports licensing world continues to move “into pure IP-based providers like our customer DAZN, it’s becoming a very important place in the whole value chain and ecosystem that we are ultimately trying to fill. And in collaboration with a lot of other parts, we can help to make that transition work in a time traditional broadcasting plays—especially in the sports world—a smaller and smaller role.”
www.mainstreaming.com
Tassilo Raesig is a serial founder, CEO, and CTO with extensive experience in media and consumer electronics, having led Joyn and Sony’s digital strategy in Europe. Specialized in digital transformation and innovation, he holds an MBA in Economics and a Computer Science degree.
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