Background
This customer is a well-known video-focused social networking platform. It hosts a variety of short-form user videos, including pranks, stunts, tricks, jokes, dance, and entertainment videos, and the video durations range from 15 seconds to three minutes. In addition to the short-form videos, this video platform supports live streaming. Its APP was the most downloaded APP of 2020 and retained that title in 2021. More than 1.2 billion users from all over the world have used its service by Q4 2021, and that number is expected to reach 1.5 billion by the end of 2022.
Challenges and Pain Points
Along with the rapidly growing users and business scale, the customer was facing increasingly more challenges. In order to further grow its global business, a highly professional video streaming solution must be adopted to tackle the following issues:
First, a content auditing and management mechanism is needed. While a lot of content is uploaded by its end users, the video platform needs to make sure all published content in the platform is compliant with the local regulation and legislation requirements. And once inappropriate content is spotted, the platform should be able to ban the content immediately. Otherwise, the platform may be punished and even banned, severely impacting the brand image and business income.
Second, content theft was causing economic losses. Content theft has become a common issue that video streaming platforms must deal with. In the era where content is king, content theft will lead to user churn and direct economic losses. Thus, the customer needs to introduce security strategies to protect its video content.
Third, customer origins were overloaded by skyrocketing user growth and major events. Due to the rapid growth of user numbers, the soaring user requests have brought great pressure to the origins of the video platform. Meanwhile, the video platform was suffering huge pressures from constant bandwidth bursts caused by large-scale events. This pressure was putting the origins at risk and endangering the service availability and continuity.
Fourth, cross-nation and cross-ISP transmission degraded the video quality and viewing experience. As this customer has large amounts of users all over the world, its video content needs to be distributed among different countries and ISPs. However, due to the long distance and complex transmission routes, this type of transmission was rather slow and unstable. This had impacted the video quality and loading speed, compromising viewing experience.
Finally, customer’s business growth was leading to an increasingly higher operation cost. On the one hand, the customer’s business scale is increasing dramatically, so more operation staff was needed to ensure a secure, stable, and reliable service. On the other hand, a lot of edge-cutting technologies and development were needed to meet its business needs. Both factors were driving the business costs higher.
Solutions
In order to further develop its business globally, this customer had decided to cooperate with a professional video streaming CDN provider. With more than 20 years of service experience, abundant PoP resources and advanced technologies, CDNetworks was selected as a major CDN provider of this customer. And the Media Delivery solution of CDNetworks has helped them overcome the above-mentioned challenges and pain points.
Media processing features facilitate content auditing and management. With the Live Screenshot or VoD Screenshot feature enabled, CDNetworks can take screenshots of any content streamed to the platform for content auditing. In the meantime, CDNetworks empowers the video platform to ban/unban streaming content via API at split second.
Security features safeguard customer content. CDNetworks offers a series of security protection features, such as DRM, anti-hotlinking, anti-hijacking, and access control, dramatically decreasing the risk of content theft. Besides, CDNetworks performs routine inspections, once suspicious requests are detected, the customer will be informed and necessary actions will be taken to protect against the attack.
CDNetworks copes with the huge traffic caused by rapid business development and hot events. Since founded in 2000, CDNetworks has provided CDN services to customers of different scales from all over the world for more than 20 years. With over 2800 PoPs in 70+ countries, CDNetworks scalable CDN is able to handle large volumes of traffic during peak hours and hot events. Meanwhile, as soon as any sudden bursts are detected by CDNetworks real-time monitoring system, the auto-scheduling will be immediately triggered, avoiding server overloading and service interruption.
Improved video quality and loading speed help enhance viewing experiences. Through self-developed NGB Scheduling and Intelligent Routing, CDNetworks ensures all end users of the customer are served by the optimal CDN PoP via the fastest route. This effectively lowers video latency, and therefore improves user experience. In addition, CDNetworks LBHD reduces the stream bitrate without comprising use-perceived image quality, guaranteeing the viewing experience of viewers from poor network environments.
CDNetworks professional services save technology and operation costs for the customer. Firstly, CDNetworks natively supports a series of advanced technologies (e.g. QUIC, DASH and CMAF) and features (e.g. VoD Streaming and Adaptive Bitrate). Thus, this customer does not need to develop these technologies by themselves, lowering the development costs. Furthermore, if needed, CDNetworks also provides customized development for our customers. Secondly, CDNetworks provides 365/24/7 multi-lingual technical support, ensuring the service stability and continuality. Meanwhile, CDNetworks assigns dedicated technical support engineers to VIP customers. These engineers will conduct routine inspection, conclude reports, and have meetings regularly with the customer, keeping the customer aware of any operation issues. Therefore, the customer can reduce a large amount of investment in service O&M.
Key Impacts/Benefits
To sum up, CDNetworks has enabled the customer to deliver a better viewing experience in a more secure manner and at a lower price. A better viewing experience: By leveraging CDNetworks global CDN network, end users of this customer are served by the nearest PoP. In addition, advanced technologies, such as LBHD, are used to make sure users of poor network will be able to watch videos of a decent quality.
A more secure service: CDNetworks has provided a series of security related features to protect against content infringement. The customer can choose to use any of the following security features based on your needs:
DRM
Anti-hijacking
Anti-hotlinking
Access control
Lower cost: By using the existing CDN networks for stream delivery, the customer does not need to build and maintain all these infrastructures. In addition, CDNetworks natively supports a lot of edge-cutting technologies, which are otherwise development-required for the customer.