Rightster Explains Smart Caching for Long-Form Libraries
Why cache an entire streamed movie when viewers are likely to shut if off after a few minutes and look for something else? At the recent Video Infrastructure Summit in London, Steve Miller-Jones, director of solutions engineering for video technology and services company Rightster, explained the smarter way for long-form libraries to cache.
"The challenge with large long-tail libraries, which all of the long-form libraries typically are, is going to be that the CDNs or any intermediary cache doesn't really want to pull that whole long-form movie into cache in case the user abandons after five minutes -- they've wasted a load of bandwidth, a load of connection to origin time, and a load of cache disc space in churn on caching a movie they didn't need to cache," Miller-Jones explained.
The solution involves turning that long file into many more manageable, smaller files.
"So there's been a lot of focus -- say, if you're still using Netflix as the example -- if you use a tool like Charles Proxy to watch what the Netflix player is doing while you're watching a video, it's getting itself little manifests, much like an HLS or an HDS delivery, and it's requesting byte ranges," Miller-Jones said. "The delivery CDN -- and they use multiple CDNs -- is supporting the use of byte ranges to turn a long-form file into short sharp chunks that can be very efficiently cached and easily load-balanced across the globe on a CDN, and that also minimizes the connection to origin."
For more on streaming video infrastructure trends, watch the entire panel discussion.
Infrastructure Trends Panel: Mobile, OTT, IPTV, and Web – Divergence or Convergence?
Moderator: Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Editor, Streaming Media
Rob McManus, Product Marketing Manager, Nokia Siemens Networks
Steve Miller-Jones, Director Solutions Engineering, Rightster
Maria Ingold, Technical Consultant, Mireality
Yaroslav Gorodetsky, CEO, CDNvideo
An annual session in the programme, this year we look at the variety of issues and technology challenges faced by operators and content providers when delivering content to the increasingly diverse range of technologies used by consumers and businesses to access their content.