90 million times illegally . This figure includes illegal streams , torrents and downloads . Piracy shouldn ’ t be viewed as the more reliable option .
If you look at how this content is delivered , streaming traffic needs to be thought about like road traffic . Just because there ’ s no traffic outside your house , that doesn ’ t mean the roads on the way to your office aren ’ t congested . As you go deeper into the network , the aggregated level of TV traffic builds and builds . And this traffic is only going to keep building as online video consumption increases , especially with the rising popularity of 4K .
Gorillas in the market prevent potential delivery disasters by turning to private TV content delivery networks ( TV CDNs ) to help keep up with their growing number of users . Netflix alone built 1600 hardware servers into their distribution networks . A TV CDN helps a content distributor to deliver content consistently , even when there are sudden spikes in requests for programs . The system keeps a copy of popular shows in the catalogue and delivers it to users from there with each server being able to distribute to a smaller number of people locally , rather than sharing their content through the main network in an attempt to deliver to potentially millions of viewers at once .
This localized approach frees up the roads , allowing users to access their content faster , with no speed bumps along the way .
PROTECTING CON- TENT FROM THE PIRATES OF THE INTERNET
A private TV CDN – such as Edgeware ’ s solution – delivers very high-quality content at scale . Keeping copies of popular shows on servers located close to the viewer saves huge amounts of network bandwidth and reduces the risk of buffering by bypassing potential network congestion .
The very nature of a CDN is to copy content - opening it up to potential piracy on the seas of the internet . To guard content through delivery , there are several ways content owners can protect their assets , both using the bit-streaming nature of online video to their advantage . One of the more popular ways is in the form of manifestbased watermarking .
Manifest-based watermarking is essentially creating a unique stream made up of sections . The client ( a set-top-box , tablet or PC ) requests one threesecond segment after another during playback . Each segment
has two versions – A and B – and as they ’ re delivered to the client , a unique combination of the program is created . The listing of these segments is held in a manifest that the client understands and one that can be identified if pirated .
While this manifest-based approach creates a unique code that does survive a CDN , challenges remain . The CDN not only needs to store twice as much content , but the long watermarking latency and erasability could see pirates downloading different versions of the show and mixing them up – meaning this technique has security limitations .
62 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www . broadcastbeat . com