Eliminate Video Start Failures With Multi-CDN

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First impressions are everything.

As a web publisher, you spend significant dollars to create awareness of your online video service, secure great content and build out your technology platform, only to have Video Start Failures frustrate your audience and drive them from your site.

As part of the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA), Cedexis has worked with leading content producers, programmers and technology providers to define critical video QoE metrics, including Video Start Failures.  Video Start Failures are the failure to deliver your core value at the critical moment of purchase/consumption.  When a video start fails, you don’t get to show any ads, or worse, you get a frustrated customer who just paid for premium content but is not sure if their entitlement is lost or corrupt.

The following is a brand new Cedexis Radar Video QoS report showing SVA defined Video Start Failures for a single web property that was testing Cedexis Opemix multi-CDN load balancing for their video web delivery.

videostartfailure-improvement-with-openmix-10-2016

Multi-CDN had 73% more successful video starts!

For the ~350 Million video streams that occurred over this 3-day time frame, single CDN video starts failed a bit more than 7.0% of the time.  For those sessions that were routed across multiple CDNs, the video starts only failed  1.9% of the time.  For 350M sessions, that is 17,850,000 better first impressions!

An introduction smooths a first meeting.

So, how does Cedexis so dramatically improve Video Start Failure rates?  The answer is, the Cedexis Radar Community.  The Radar community is composed of thousands of websites that host the Radar RUM tag (or SDK) to collect performance data on their site, and the CDNs and Clouds used to deliver their content.  Being a community, each member benefits from the performance data collected by all the other members.

Multi-CDN selection by Cedexis is unique because of this community data.  We have insight into the availability and performance of each of your CDNs before that video session starts, greatly improving video start success audiences globally.

Be on the watch for additional post about SVA defined video metrics.

Imagination's Finest Hour

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Imagination-Quotes-1-Ali

If Mr. Ali is right (and who would tell him he’s not) then ROBLOX gives wings to its users over 20 million times a month. ROBLOX is the premier user-generated online gaming platform powering the imagination of tens of millions of monthly visitors and maintaining over 15 million active games across computers, tablets, phones, Xbox, and VR. This is the World’s Largest User-Generated Imagination Platform.

Maintaining the infrastructure to support this much traffic is also an act of imagination. Fortunately, ROBLOX has an incredibly talented team, as well as some of the most innovative partners around. They quickly understood that using a single CDN is not optimal from a performance OR a cost perspective. After testing with seven different CDNs, they selected the best four to achieve their perfect mix of costs, regional performance, and availability.

“By federating asset delivery across multiple CDN providers,
 we were able to leverage regional strengths of the individual providers, have automatic failover should a provider experience an outage, and most importantly improve speed of delivery to our end users.”
-Jared Shapiro, ROBLOX

To learn more about how ROBLOX achieved these excellent results, go check out our Case Study on ROBLOX.

Also, if you plan to be at the Content Delivery Summit, come listen to Jared from ROBLOX explain how they achieved this success! See you there.

imagine

Imagination’s Finest Hour

/in /by

Imagination-Quotes-1-Ali

If Mr. Ali is right (and who would tell him he’s not) then ROBLOX gives wings to its users over 20 million times a month. ROBLOX is the premier user-generated online gaming platform powering the imagination of tens of millions of monthly visitors and maintaining over 15 million active games across computers, tablets, phones, Xbox, and VR. This is the World’s Largest User-Generated Imagination Platform.

Maintaining the infrastructure to support this much traffic is also an act of imagination. Fortunately, ROBLOX has an incredibly talented team, as well as some of the most innovative partners around. They quickly understood that using a single CDN is not optimal from a performance OR a cost perspective. After testing with seven different CDNs, they selected the best four to achieve their perfect mix of costs, regional performance, and availability.

“By federating asset delivery across multiple CDN providers,
 we were able to leverage regional strengths of the individual providers, have automatic failover should a provider experience an outage, and most importantly improve speed of delivery to our end users.”
-Jared Shapiro, ROBLOX

To learn more about how ROBLOX achieved these excellent results, go check out our Case Study on ROBLOX.

Also, if you plan to be at the Content Delivery Summit, come listen to Jared from ROBLOX explain how they achieved this success! See you there.

imagine

MUBI: Creating a high performance video streaming infrastructure using Cedexis and low cost Clouds

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In video distribution, multi-CDN is a best practice. It helps ensure availability, performance and cost control. However, there are circumstances where orchestrating commercial CDNs is not the best solution.

This is what happened at MUBI, a British OTT platform focused on quality.

MUBI-Web-Screenshot-oldboy

They evaluated using a single CDN, but this solution was quickly discarded – MUBI customers complained about service outages and quality concerns. Similarly, the use of multiple CDNs was inappropriate: it would not have allowed MUBI “to have visibility into what exactly happens between us and our users … a content delivery network (CDN) is a black box, governed by confidential network routes.”

MUBI innovated. MUBI created its own cloud-based network of multiple cloud regions. You can read all the details in the case study, but here’s what it looks like:

MUBI-Infra

“Our video streaming infrastructure consists of several dozen media servers at key Internet hubs around the world. Every request from a user on a video stream is automatically routed to the most reliable server to which the ISP can connect. As a navigation system based on real-time traffic data, Cedexis knows when to suggest an alternative route over the public Internet to ensure effective distribution. ”

– Alexander McWilliam, Vice President of Engineering at MUBI

The benefits are many for MUBI: Infrastructure control – and costs control – plus 100% availability, with optimal performance allowing it to broadcast videos in HD whenever users log in. All of these benefits along with the the ability to manage traffic peaks and to expand the network very easily, as needed.

You can download the MUBI case study for free here.

Cedexis’s GESTE Study: The future of the Internet in France, is sadly not here today

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The golden rule of inaction for the French Internet is proven again this year. By this we mean that no improvement has been seen. While the news sites that make up our GESTE panel had some amazing traffic peaks related to the bombings last November in France, The increase in Internet use and increased video consumption appears to have had little impact on overall network performance.

Whatever improvements in capacity that have been deployed have clearly been counterbalanced by the constant increase in traffic. This is good news on the 4G Fibre, on increasing bandwidth, operators are investing unevenly, but investment is happening. French Internet users can therefore benefit from new services, better videos, more content, without major additional damage to their quality of experience.

Recall, the Quality of Service in France is ranked rather low. 16th in the ranking of European countries in terms of Quality of Service with our Observatory – this is a shame, given that the measures taken on the content published by French sites and hosted in France – it now demands a massive deployment of the capacity to allow everyone access to new services and new uses for information, stay in touch with the authorities, eat, be entertained, learn, etc.

At the end of 2015, a web surfer on French soil always takes longer to access a French newspaper than a Latvian, a Slovak, a German, an Irishman, a Czech or an Estonian , to name a few. Again, the lack of progress is obvious: France remains in the same place year after year, despite efforts such as the France Almighty flow, for example.

For Internet users, the consequences are real. There are serious inequalities: for instance when some enjoy smooth navigation with times of 1.5 seconds or less, others must wait 40 seconds for a page to appears so, if the median time to load for all operators, is 7 seconds – a figure already high – the difference between the fastest and slowest Internet users is 33.4 seconds.

The year 2016 is an important year for the digital market at the legislative level. A text on the “New Economic Opportunities” on digital and other “digital Republic” are expected in Parliament in the coming months. The two projects alone summarize a large part of the underlying issues of this report without an optimal quality of service, “New economic opportunities” will be greatly limited without improvement in service. Without accelerated quality of service, the “digital Republic” will not be for everyone.

Page load time in France

Obs1

Page load time in France in the DROM-COM

Obs2-DROM_COM

Page load time for European or French-speaking networks

Obs3

Find the full report as well as previous editions GESTE on the site.

Cedexis's GESTE Study: The future of the Internet in France, is sadly not here today

/in /by

The golden rule of inaction for the French Internet is proven again this year. By this we mean that no improvement has been seen. While the news sites that make up our GESTE panel had some amazing traffic peaks related to the bombings last November in France, The increase in Internet use and increased video consumption appears to have had little impact on overall network performance.

Whatever improvements in capacity that have been deployed have clearly been counterbalanced by the constant increase in traffic. This is good news on the 4G Fibre, on increasing bandwidth, operators are investing unevenly, but investment is happening. French Internet users can therefore benefit from new services, better videos, more content, without major additional damage to their quality of experience.

Recall, the Quality of Service in France is ranked rather low. 16th in the ranking of European countries in terms of Quality of Service with our Observatory – this is a shame, given that the measures taken on the content published by French sites and hosted in France – it now demands a massive deployment of the capacity to allow everyone access to new services and new uses for information, stay in touch with the authorities, eat, be entertained, learn, etc.

At the end of 2015, a web surfer on French soil always takes longer to access a French newspaper than a Latvian, a Slovak, a German, an Irishman, a Czech or an Estonian , to name a few. Again, the lack of progress is obvious: France remains in the same place year after year, despite efforts such as the France Almighty flow, for example.

For Internet users, the consequences are real. There are serious inequalities: for instance when some enjoy smooth navigation with times of 1.5 seconds or less, others must wait 40 seconds for a page to appears so, if the median time to load for all operators, is 7 seconds – a figure already high – the difference between the fastest and slowest Internet users is 33.4 seconds.

The year 2016 is an important year for the digital market at the legislative level. A text on the “New Economic Opportunities” on digital and other “digital Republic” are expected in Parliament in the coming months. The two projects alone summarize a large part of the underlying issues of this report without an optimal quality of service, “New economic opportunities” will be greatly limited without improvement in service. Without accelerated quality of service, the “digital Republic” will not be for everyone.

Page load time in France

Obs1

Page load time in France in the DROM-COM

Obs2-DROM_COM

Page load time for European or French-speaking networks

Obs3

Find the full report as well as previous editions GESTE on the site.

Case Study: In2White, or How to Manage Traffic Peaks and Large Content Delivery to Ensure Your Project’s Success

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There’s nothing worse than having a great project you have poured your heart and soul into, to then be let down by the technology you use to show it to the world.

Last summer at Cedexis, we had the great pleasure of working with Filippo Blengini on an outstanding project.

Snow-Mountain-

Filippo and his team of photography enthusiasts had spent some time at the highest peak in the Alps, Montblanc. Awestruck by the panoramic majesty of the mountain, they were inspired to pay tribute and share this classic French beauty with the online world.

They decided the best way to do this, would be to publish the largest online photograph possible of the mountain, one that would catch both the vastness and the minutiae of the landscape.

It wasn’t an easy task for Filippo and his team; they planned on combining no fewer than 70,000 High Definition pictures into one breathtaking high precision picture, boasting 14 levels of zoom with cutting edge clarity.

Delivering this content online obviously posed a big challenge: to display this amazing image each user would on average expect to download a large amount data, around 30MB. With this large data transfer occurring the question was asked; how would they manage to ensure the fluidity of the user experience whilst ensuring that with such large content the site wouldn’t crash under the load? Any failure would dramatically affect the projects success and all the work done by In2White team.

An additional obstacle arose due to the success of the site, with media coverage promoting the site this would lead to a large traffic increase during the first few weeks of the photo being published. Not only were the increases unpredictable in timing, they were also unpredictable in magnitude.

Filippo came to Cedexis to find a solution.

Cedexis was able to provide a solution through the use of Cedexis Radar (a real-time monitoring solution) and Openmix (a real-time load-balancing service), allowing Fillippo to ensure the quality of the delivery at times of peak as well providing a high performing experience to each and every end-user.

In only a few weeks In2white had over 3 million views coming from all around the world. Thanks to Radar and Openmix, each viewing experience was coupled with world-class performance by the website.

Want to know more about how we worked with In2White to make their project a real triumph? Download the case study here.

Case Study: In2White, or How to Manage Traffic Peaks and Large Content Delivery to Ensure Your Project's Success

/in /by

There’s nothing worse than having a great project you have poured your heart and soul into, to then be let down by the technology you use to show it to the world.

Last summer at Cedexis, we had the great pleasure of working with Filippo Blengini on an outstanding project.

Snow-Mountain-

Filippo and his team of photography enthusiasts had spent some time at the highest peak in the Alps, Montblanc. Awestruck by the panoramic majesty of the mountain, they were inspired to pay tribute and share this classic French beauty with the online world.

They decided the best way to do this, would be to publish the largest online photograph possible of the mountain, one that would catch both the vastness and the minutiae of the landscape.

It wasn’t an easy task for Filippo and his team; they planned on combining no fewer than 70,000 High Definition pictures into one breathtaking high precision picture, boasting 14 levels of zoom with cutting edge clarity.

Delivering this content online obviously posed a big challenge: to display this amazing image each user would on average expect to download a large amount data, around 30MB. With this large data transfer occurring the question was asked; how would they manage to ensure the fluidity of the user experience whilst ensuring that with such large content the site wouldn’t crash under the load? Any failure would dramatically affect the projects success and all the work done by In2White team.

An additional obstacle arose due to the success of the site, with media coverage promoting the site this would lead to a large traffic increase during the first few weeks of the photo being published. Not only were the increases unpredictable in timing, they were also unpredictable in magnitude.

Filippo came to Cedexis to find a solution.

Cedexis was able to provide a solution through the use of Cedexis Radar (a real-time monitoring solution) and Openmix (a real-time load-balancing service), allowing Fillippo to ensure the quality of the delivery at times of peak as well providing a high performing experience to each and every end-user.

In only a few weeks In2white had over 3 million views coming from all around the world. Thanks to Radar and Openmix, each viewing experience was coupled with world-class performance by the website.

Want to know more about how we worked with In2White to make their project a real triumph? Download the case study here.

Cedexis assists Shutterstock with immense growth

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Many of our best customers are managing extreme growth using Cedexis to distribute traffic to multiple CDNs or cloud. Recently Nathan Milford of Shutterstock wrote a nice piece highlighting just such a situation.

When Shutterstock says extreme growth they mean it. Triple digit growth in CDN traffic from 2013 to 2014 and more of the same expected for the foreseeable future.

Screen-Shot-2015-05-12-at-12.02.02-PM

You can read the original piece by following the link above but we wanted to highlight one quote from the article here.

Cedexis enables us to optimize with multiple CDN providers based on their strengths.

We can, among other things:

· Move off legacy CDN setups and have some uniformity across business units, which will give us more bang for our buck;

· Switch, automatically, to a different CDN if one has an outage or other problems;

· Switch, automatically, to a different CDN if we hit an overage in order to prevent overage fees;

· Optimize for CDN’s strengths, including file size and geographies; and

· Put traffic that’s in slower markets on slower, less expensive CDNs.

In sum, we are letting the market compete leveraging our CDN traffic to provide us with more cost control and flexibility. Once these concerns are out of the way, we can reinvest that money elsewhere in order to improve our product for the customer.

Music to our ears.

Focus on AdTech: How Smart Ad Server blows away the competition

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Online advertising technologies are amongst the most demanding. Doing it well takes a tremendous understanding of the internet. A company must deliver its assets on someone elses platforms flawlessly all the time or risk not getting paid. Varying geographies, localization, networks all have an impact on delivery.

SmartAdServer1

And as the business expands how do you grow into new geographies and markets?

“The reporting feature of Cedexis Radar helped us compare potential
CDN partners with existing CDN partners over a period of 24 hours in
order to evaluate performance.”
Julien Bailhache, Site Reliability Team Manager at Smart AdServer

Come see how this top AdTech Company tuned its operations for optimal delivery using Cedexis Openmix.

“Cedexis will continue to play a key role in ensuring the overall
availability of our services. We can use Cedexis as a global resolution
engine to make sure that performance is maximized in all use cases.”
Julien Bailhache, Site Reliability Team Manager at Smart AdServer

SmartAdServer2