IPTV & Push Video-on-Demand
Use Case: STRATACACHE Scalable Video-on-Demand
How to utilize the latest in set-top content distribution and pre-positioning, to overcome the challenges of cost, bandwidth, & scalability in traditional IPTV and VoD implementations, and to provide the most desirable features to subscribers.
Get the PDFScalable Consumer Video on Demand
Global providers of telecommunications, cable, wireless and satellite services are unlocking the new and lucrative revenue stream provided by Video on Demand consumer services. Video on Demand service represents a new opportunity to monetize existing infrastructure, currently used for voice, data or broadcast services. Delivery of television, movies, media, advertising or other popular content to a set-top box through a broadband, wireless or satellite network connection also helps service providers round out their "triple-play" service offering, and to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
With the continued global growth of broadband access, Video on Demand services quickly follow. This revolutionary service transforms the viewer's experience by allowing not only "time shifting" - choosing when to watch (a la TiVo), but can also eliminate many of the regional, national or global limits of the traditional broadcast cable or satellite architecture. Video on Demand allows service providers to offer an endless array of specialty content to consumers who are willing to pay to watch what they want, when they want it.
Early experiments by content providers worldwide are clearly demonstrating that loyal fans are willing to pay premium prices to have early access to content (such as TV shows) or to download the content to mobile devices that allow the consumer to "place shift" to mobile devices (Apple Video iPod or Slingbox) that make Video on Demand content portable.
Additionally, Video on Demand services are empowering new revenue streams for service providers by allowing highly-targeted rich media advertising to be pre-positioned at the consumer device, delivering a precisely targeted advertising demographic based on consumer specific data. Service providers can also enhance recurring revenue by offering Personal Video Recorder services (PVR) and online game distribution and play services. Providers can use Video on Demand service to encourage consumers to upgrade to "premium" levels that provide fixed IP addresses, guaranteed bandwidth levels, and efficient access to their premium Video on Demand content.
While Video on Demand can be hugely successful, what challenges are involved in this market?
Market Challenges
Available Bandwidth. Video on Demand can run over an existing network infrastructure, but it can be very bandwidth intensive. The inefficient provisioning or delivery of Video on Demand services can force unnecessary and expensive bandwidth upgrades.
Content Diversity. As the cost of storage decreases, and the number of content owners providing content for On-Demand purchase increases, content will grow to the "any content/any time" model, requiring vast storage and bandwidth resources.
Quality and Content Size. Video on Demand delivery networks already struggle to provide adequate bandwidth for standard definition video content. The emergeance of, and demand for, even larger HD quality content only compounds these overwhelming bandwidth challenges.
Content Security. Service providers must be able to ensure secure content delivery and encrypted content storage with effective digital controls. It's a critical requirement in guaranteeing adoption and partnership with leading content providers.
Cost effective Strategies. Deploying hundreds or thousands of streaming Video on Demand servers at head end locations or network aggregation points is an expensive proposition for both initial capital expenditure as well as ongoing, maintenance and support costs. Additionally, providing all content in a streamed, on-demand format, is increasingly bandwidth inefficient, as bandwidth is consumed repetitively tens of thousands of times to deliver the same "popular" content across the network again and again and again.
The STRATACACHE Solution Strategy
STRATACACHE OmniCast allows service providers to dramatically reduce their investment in infrastructure, streaming servers, ongoing bandwidth consumption, and the associated management overhead by efficiently pre-positioning Video on Demand content to the disk enabled set-top box in advance of the consumer request.
This strategy allows service providers to efficiently and securely deliver content to the end consumer, provide ongoing content security and conditional access via digital rights management of the content, while significantly reducing the ongoing cost of providing Video on Demand services across the network.
Solution Benefits
Bandwidth and Infrastructure Savings. Instead or serving the same file tens of thousands of times to consumers, a single, bandwidth efficient transfer can pre-position the content on the set-top box, eliminating redundant and inefficient consumption of bandwidth and server resources.
Custom Consumer Programming. Service providers can transparently pre-position requested or "subscription" content directly to end users set-top devices, providing highly unique channel/content choices.
Content Quality. Standard or high definition content is provided to end users directly from the set-top device, eliminating any chance of network congestion or bandwidth limitations negatively impacting the user's experience.
Lower Cost & Greater Revenue. Service providers not only eliminate costs in their infrastructure with fewer on-demand streaming servers, but they also enjoy a host of new services that the consumer can purchase driving additional revenue to the bottom line.
STRATACACHE OmniCast and Video on Demand Services
STRATACACHE OmniCast provides the most scaleable, most efficient and reliable solution for mass content distibution available on the market today. OmniCast is hardware, content and transport independent, allowing service providers to build a scaleable distribution layer on top of any existing IP network infrastructure.
OmniCast's patented MFTP protocol and Forward Error Correction (FEC) functions deliver unmatched delivery efficiency providing service to as many as 100,000 concurrent clients from a single server. With advanced distribution and bandwidth rules, OmniCast helps service providers re-capture significant bandwidth lost to inefficient transmission while providing a distribution architecture designed to scale to support massive content sets, heavy transaction workloads and large populations of edge devices effortlessly.
To learn why leading service providers worldwide use OmniCast to deliver content and media throughout their networks please contact STRATACACHE today.
TiVo is a registered trademark of Tivo Corporation.
Slingbox is a registered trademark of Sling Media.
iPod is a registered trademark of Apple.
