LIVE-like P2P delivery for VOD
When peer-to-peer for VOD is effective up to 60%
For an OTT service deliverability is a key. If we consider one day of an OTT service life, most commonly we’ll see how it operates CDNs to reach its max effectiveness with fewer expenses. Here peer-to-peer delivery works very impressively on LIVE content on growing audiences like sports. Why not try P2P delivery for a Catch-Up & VOD?
In this article, we explain how to execute VOD delivery in peer-to-peer CDN as good as for LIVE. Let’s go!
A bit of history. Initially, P2P CDN is designed for the LIVE browser to browser delivery with WebRTC as a core bone. Video-on-demand is about playing conventional clips via streaming services but not real-time broadcast. Compared to LIVE broadcasts when P2P increases the capacity of in-house CDN up to 5 times and reduces the use of (and expenses on) 3rd party CDN up to 50% accordingly, P2P delivery was often considered as tech-wise and budget-wise ineffective for VOD.
Why is that? If you have a million viewers and all of them are watching the same live-stream simultaneously (that’s what LIVE is), then P2P CDN performed really good: it serves up to 80% of CDN traffic, it saves CDN budget, it improves video quality, it significantly reduces rebuffering. If you have the same million viewers on VOD, they watch thousands of different videos (movies, TV series, recordings) in different parts of the stream (that’s what VOD is for those who joined the beginning of the movie, the middle, the end). And combining viewers in a single network doesn’t work. That’s the main difference.
During the research for a particular OTT service (one of our major EMEA clients) we’ve checked P2P deliverability for VOD and we’ve got an average efficiency to be around 10%. Not much for a business opportunity. Despite the fact that P2P is not commonly used for VOD delivery, we’ve run Teleport Media on different types of VOD to see why VOD peeing efficiency was low and what we could do about it.
As we’d turned on P2P on VOD titles, we recognized a clear difference of how P2P performs on 3 types of VOD. Let’s check it out!
1. Hot Catch-Up
The most LIVE-like VOD content is a catch-up. For an OTT it’s daily news or a talk show that is just released immediately after streaming LIVE. It’s highly popular and it appears at a particular time so it normally has got simultaneous viewers to spike the same as LIVE for the first hours.
As you can see from the chart, P2P CDN for a popular catch-up content has almost the same effect as for LIVE streams: up to 60%. It shoots up rather quickly, getting up to 50–55% on 600 simultaneous viewers. And it’s not surprising: in the first hours after a popular TV show or news is released, the viewers who didn’t watch it LIVE come and join the stream. Getting up to 800 simultaneous viewers on catch up is quite enough for P2P CDN to show its full potential.
2. A new episode
When GoT new episodes were released, the demand, as well as the delivery graphs, were sky-high. So for TOP titles, it’s LIVE-like. Lucky OTT services with P2P delivery can cope with it, the others don’t or it costs a fortune. That’s why let’s consider A new episode VOD type for second spot titles only.
On the example of a relatively popular title, we can see even on the first 100 simultaneous viewers that P2P CDN is quite stable serving about 40% of total traffic. This is true for the 3rd or the 4th episode of, let’s say, season two of famous yet not a TOP title, eg. Fargo, Victoria, My Kitchen Rules.
3. VOD catalog or a long tail
Any OTT service stores a VOD catalog with titles that aren’t new already for a long time, but they keep constant demand for years, like Friends, Gossip Girl, or LotR movies. This is how it looks like on the chart:
The example of the VOD catalog (which is a long-tail content) actually represents the fluctuate graph for general VOD peering serving no more than 10–20% of traffic in total. Notable: for a long-tail content with very low activity (and almost 0% in peer-to-peer) coupled with active content (an efficiency level of 10–20%) lowers the overall VOD peering efficiency down.
The second point that we see from the chart is the answer to WHY it happens. According to the detailed statistics, this is a “local” peering value. It can be around 60% — 80%. At the same time, you can see a frequent graph of efficiency indicators. It changes greatly from minute to minute. One of the main reasons for these fluctuations is the “low base effect”. There are not many downloads from server CDN and P2P CDN, and in absolute figures, a slight difference in download volumes in neighboring minutes due to the low base causes visible fluctuations in the efficiency rate. So, we got an average of 10% of VOD delivery in peering.
For our customers, we continuously make R&D to find better solutions for complex media delivery problems. P2P CDN for VOD content can indeed be a new business opportunity with increased efficiency up to 50–60% if you apply some of our recommendations when testing VOD peering:
- facing new active titles, the less active titles will no longer “pull-down” the statistics, and there must be a noticeable increase in overall efficiency.
- when experimenting with VOD peering, include catch-up video and most popular titles of your VOD catalog to get the full potential efficiency up to 50–60%.
To achieve LIVE-like P2P deliverability on VOD titles we used Teleport Media’s know-how — the time slot search — a method of finding the best-fit peers to get the most of VOD peering.
Basically, the time slot search is the kind of search logic that connects most suitable peers to each other, and in our research it makes the VOD peering be almost as effective as the LIVE. The only difference is that for LIVE about 80–90% of viewers look at (almost) the very edge, we call it stream-edge. In case of VOD, viewers are watching different moments, so the time slot search allows us to connect the peers that are watching nearby moments.
Try LIVE-like P2P for VOD today! Get in touch with us and get a tailored solution for your streaming business https://cutt.ly/Teleport_Media_Apply
