BCA Show Daily - Day 2 - 54

SUNTEC SINGAPORE

A part of

Show Daily | Wednesday 27 June 2018

MARINA BAY SANDS * SUNTEC SINGAPORE

How a Powerful Player API Can Help
Solve Today's Delivery Challenges
For video engineers it is clear: the online video industry is evolving at an incredibly fast pace...

uring the last years, we saw the demise
of old streaming protocols and the
introduction of new ones, the disappearance of
browser plugins, an explosion in video capable
consumer devices, new advertisements
formats and many more.
Although the challenges today are different,
they are not simpler: delivering video reliably
over the Internet, in a blink of a second, while
at the same time reducing the delivery cost
is for sure one of the biggest obstacles to
overcome. This article will demonstrate the
importance of a versatile and powerful video
player API in solving these challenges.

Increasing Reliability
and Performance
When delivering your video content over
a single content delivery network (CDN),
reliability will always be a concern. While
the chance of an outage occurring is always
minimal, it can drastically hamper your
reputation, especially if it occurs during a
world event such as the World Cup 2018.
This is the reason why more and more
companies are now using multiple CDNs for
their video delivery.
Ideally, the video player API will provide
information about the error rate, latency
and data transfer rate of different CDNs,
as well as the ability to manipulate and
redirect network requests as they are
made. This enables your video player

to choose between different CDNs as the
video is being played and to autonomously
recover in the rare cases where one of the
CDNs becomes unavailable.

Reducing Delivery Costs
When talking about viewer experience, the
most common key metrics are start-up time
and seek time. In order to actually deliver this
experience to end users, a state-of-the-art
content delivery network is required, which
tends to be costly. While this low start-up
time and seek time is desirable, using multiple
CDNs to deliver video content provides
possibilities to reduce on these high delivery
costs.
To accomplish this, the video player API
should provide information about its current
buffer size, updates about any changes in
its buffer size, and should allow network
requests to be redirected as the developer
pleases. This can be combined with cost
weights of the different CDNs to make
decisions during playback. The flexibility of
the API enables your video player to choose

Using multiple CDNs can
reduce high delivery costs

The flexibility of the API enables your video player to choose between CDNs

an expensive high-speed CDN during start-up,
seeking or in situations where its buffer size is
low and switch to a lower cost CDN when its
buffer size is sufficiently high.
Overall, about 80% of video data can be
delivered from a lower cost CDN without
hampering the viewer experience.

The Role of a Video Player API
Increasing reliability and performance
as well as reducing delivery costs can be
achieved by combining content delivery over
multiple CDNs with a powerful and versatile
video player API. While this is just one case
where the video player API plays an important
role, similar cases can be made for optimising
the adaptive bitrate behaviour, collecting
analytics about bandwidth usage, server side
or dynamic ad insertion or resolving peak
noise in audio.

Finally, care needs to be taken to ensure that
these cases can be tackled across today's
fragmented landscape of video capable
devices.
When using multiple different video players,
there is a preference for consistency in
feature sets and API. This is easier to
accomplish using a multi-platform video
player. THEOplayer is a multi-platform video
player with support for various web, mobile
and smart TV platforms. Working together
with some of the world's biggest telcos,
broadcasters and publishers, its feature-set
and API are made to tackle the most complex
cases, including all the above.
If you would like to hear how our team can
help you tackle these cases, reach out at
contact@theoplayer.com or visit us on stand
4B2-08.
www.theoplayer.com

http://www.theoplayer.com http://www.theoplayer.com https://www.mediacorp.sg https://www.mediacorp.sg https://www.mediacorp.sg

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BCA Show Daily - Day 2