You are the CEO of a company, and you want to send a message out to your staff. You are a friendly, people-oriented CEO, so you decide to send out individual emails to each staff member: “Dear Umesh, Please remember the AGM has moved to Monday…”; “Dear Julia, Please remember the AGM has moved to Monday… “
What a friendly boss you are! There is one challenge though. Your company has 150,000 employees. Of course, you don’t mind, because you’re a very, very fast typer – and you’re calling in extra help from your staff who are also writing on your behalf.
“Dear Vivian, Please remember…”
One other problem, your email service provider has a limit of 500 emails a day. Luckily you have already opened up alternate email accounts that will let you and the team send even more.
“Dear Yana, Please…”
By the end of day three, the board has intervened and sent you on a long rest break that is likely to be permanent.
As silly as this sounds, it is being carried out in reality by the broadcast industry worldwide. Our video streaming technology is based on the principle of a CDN sending one stream to one device. The more viewers, the more streams are required, and the more CDNs are provisioned. This usually isn’t a problem when it comes to on-demand content, but when broadcasters start streaming live content to big audiences, when low latency is even more important, as with sporting events, the limits to this way of doing things start to reveal themselves.
For a major sporting event, audience numbers can go from zero to hundreds of thousands almost instantaneously. Traditional one-to-many CDN technology requires that broadcasters spend substantial revenue – and electricity – on provisioning CDNs for anticipated viewership, plus a lot extra. It’s the CEO hiring people in advance to get ready for the next time personalised emails need to be sent to all employees, without knowing when exactly this will be or if it will be needed at all.
Provisioning more and more CDNs has been the only practical way the industry has developed to cope with the (nice to have) problem of big live audiences. The result is greater expense and a bigger carbon footprint, that keeps expanding in proportion to the size of the audience, but it has so far seemed the only logical way to deal with the problem.
But what if you didn’t have to keep sending streams this way, over and over?
Peer-to-peer technology for video broadcasting is well-known in the industry and has been tested for years, but the technology has had limitations, particularly with low latency, until now. This summer, major broadcasters, including France Télévisions, will be using next-gen P2P technology by Quanteec to live stream the world’s biggest sporting events to the world’s biggest audiences.
Peer-to-peer means that rather than sending all streams from the CDN, only a small amount of CDN provision is required and the streams are instead sent between viewers. Using this new iteration of P2P, major broadcasters can offer a stream which has genuine low latency, something essential for sports broadcasting.
Another improvement of this new generation of P2P is that it is easily deployable on all the different device types (TVs, laptops, smartphones, etc.). Lightweight software is added to the broadcasters’ video player, enabling the stream to be shared horizontally across the network among users, and the additional power required to resend the stream from the user device is negligible.
Using traditional CDNs, the more viewers there are, the greater the need for additional support. But in peer-to-peer streaming, the opposite is the case. The more viewers – or peers – there are on the network, the easier it is to stream content. P2P takes advantage of the power of already existing compute sitting idle on the device of every home viewer.
Host country France has been aiming to make this a landmark Olympic Games in terms of green initiatives. Broadcasters are also aware of the opportunities to showcase greener technologies on a global stage.
The peer-to-peer technology that this group of major broadcasters will be using this summer could reduce their costs by at least 25 per cent and, at the same time, cut their streaming energy consumption by up to 50 per cent.
Peer-to-peer streaming shows that the best way of solving a problem may not be to keep adding more to what you’ve already been doing, but to do substantially less.
