Blockcast proves that edge caching is the differentiator that makes the most impact in performance testing delivery networks: 6x faster download speeds, 90% reduction in startup times, and 93% faster segment delivery when serving content from deep within operator networks.
Delivering content at scale is becoming increasingly difficult as audiences grow, streaming quality rises, and user expectations continue to increase. Content providers must balance performance, cost, geographic reach, and operational complexity while ensuring a consistently high-quality experience. By placing caches deeper into ISP networks and combining edge delivery with multicast and federated capacity, new approaches are emerging that improve performance while reducing delivery costs and operational overhead.
There are lots of challenges that providers face when delivering their content to users but the gist is the same — a bad experience with content delivery, whether slow startup times and buffering for streaming video, or slower downloading for games, can result in viewer abandonment. But it’s not just performance. Content providers also have to worry about other challenges as well:
But, one of the biggest challenges is geography. Trying to provide a good user experience with streaming video when those users are not connected to major ISPs can be hard. That’s because CDNs are not often peered with smaller ISPs. The result is that a user’s request for content may have to travel a long distance, through transit, to a peering location where a CDN cache exists which may compound those other challenges.
By delivering content through this RELAY node rather than backhauling it through the network, the network operator would be able to reduce the amount of content streaming through the middle-mile (allowing them to serve more content at higher bitrates) but also reply to user requests for content much faster. For streaming video, this improves both latency and video quality.
Blockcast RELAY nodes are caching containers that serve content to nearby subscribers using both traditional unicast and more efficient multicast delivery methods. The node runs on standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, making deployment straightforward for network operators.
As we mentioned earlier in the challenges content providers face with delivering to geographies served by smaller ISPs (who don’t represent a large enough subscriber base to make economical sense for CDNs to peer with or install equipment in their networks), not all content requested by the network operator’s subscribers would be served through the installed RELAY node. Some of those content requests would go to other CDNs that, as we explained, might be miles and miles away, peered with a much larger ISP nearer a big city. Our hypothesis was that these requests, which had to be sent over the open internet, would be slower to return than those requests served by a local cache, embedded in the operator network.
To test this hypothesis, we embedded a Blockcast RELAY node in the operator’s network as an edge cache. We then ran performance tests for on-demand video, comparing three key metrics–download speed, start time, and segment download time (key for modern streaming video)–against well-known commercial CDNs: Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, and Fastly. The data table below provides the raw analysis:
One of the key measures of CDN performance is download speed. If the CDN doesn’t have enough throughput, serving high-quality content, like 4K, to multiple users becomes more challenging, requiring more infrastructure (caches) to handle spikes in viewer traffic.
And the greater the distance between the user and the cache, the greater the chance that throughput will fall off as external factors, such as network congestion, limit the available bandwidth for delivering that content.
But placing a cache closer to the end user, at the edge of the ISP network, can mitigate those external factors and provide a more sustained high throughput. As the graph above shows, the Blockcast CDN (BCDN) located deep in the operator’s network significantly outperformed requests served by external CDNs, delivering almost 6x the download speed.
One of the most significant issues with streaming video is start-up time. When the video doesn’t start up quickly enough, it can cause viewer Quality of Experience (QoE) issues that may have business impacts (i.e., increased subscriber churn). As the table shows, the Blockcast CDN node outperformed the other three CDNs by a significant margin.
Even if a CDN has tremendous available capacity, that doesn’t mean the delivery experience will be great. There are several factors between the CDN cache and the end user, such as bottlenecks in the ISP network, internet congestion, or the performance of the cache itself, that may reduce delivery speed. The result is slower downloads, lower bitrates, and more buffering when streaming video.
The key data point for delivery speed here is transfer time–the time it takes for a piece of content (in this case, a segment in a segmented streaming video, like HLS or DASH) to be transferred to the user after the request has been received and responded to by the node.
Again, the Blockcast RELAY node deep in the operator network significantly reduces delivery time and is strongly correlated with startup time.
For your largest streaming events — sports finals, premieres, breaking news — traditional unicast delivery means paying for the same bits multiple times. Blockcast’s TreeDN architecture leverages native multicast where available, and implements intelligent packet replication at the edge router level when it’s not.
Cost Reduction Example:
Any content provider who values availability knows the importance of running a multi-CDN strategy, but faces hurdles with onboarding new providers. Blockcast operates the Open Capacity Marketplace, a multi-CDN federation that allows content providers to more easily integrate capacity from major CDNs. Through a common configuration based on SVTA Open Caching, content providers onboard once to access a growing list of CDNs.
The Blockcast CDN is open for business and already serving website and streaming video content. Get your traffic onto a CDN that outperforms others! Reach out today to schedule a demo.
Geography affects content delivery because many smaller ISPs are not directly connected to major CDN infrastructure. As a result, content requests may need to travel long distances to reach a CDN cache, increasing latency and reducing performance. This can lead to slower startup times, buffering, lower video quality, and a poorer overall user experience.
A Blockcast RELAY node is a caching server deployed deep within a network operator’s infrastructure. Running on standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, RELAY nodes store and serve content locally using both traditional unicast delivery and more efficient multicast methods. By placing content closer to subscribers, RELAY nodes reduce latency and improve content delivery performance.
By serving content directly from within the operator’s network, RELAY nodes reduce the distance that content must travel to reach viewers. In Blockcast’s testing, locally deployed RELAY nodes significantly outperformed major commercial CDNs in download speed, startup time, and segment delivery speed. Faster content delivery can translate into higher video quality, reduced buffering, and improved viewer satisfaction.
Traditional content delivery requires a separate stream for every viewer. Multicast allows a single stream to be distributed to many viewers simultaneously, reducing bandwidth consumption across the network. For large-scale live events with hundreds of thousands or millions of viewers, multicast can significantly reduce backbone traffic and lower content delivery costs while maintaining quality.
The Open Capacity Marketplace (OCM) is Blockcast’s multi-CDN federation platform that enables content providers to access capacity from multiple delivery networks through a common integration framework. Built on SVTA Open Caching standards, the OCM reduces the complexity of onboarding and managing multiple CDN providers, making it easier to expand delivery capacity and improve resiliency without maintaining numerous custom integrations.
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