How IP-based video transport empowers content providers

Malik Khan, LTN executive chairman and co-founder, discusses the benefits of IP-based networks

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Malik Khan, LTN executive chairman and co-founder, discusses the benefits of IP-based networks

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The media industry is undergoing a transformation in the way content is delivered and consumed. The worldwide expansion of broadband and wireless internet availability has combined with an increasing number and variety of connected consumer devices to displace the decades-old model of delivering one version of content to a mass audience through traditional broadcast, cable and direct-to-home satellite channels.

Consumers today demand more content on more devices, and they expect it at the same high quality they know from traditional linear broadcast services, but with a much greater degree of convenience. Given the many differences in broadcast infrastructure, viewer preferences, and standards and regulations across global markets, interoperability and customisation have become critically important to revenue generation. To monetise content optimally, content providers must be able to pursue both consumers and advertisers across diverse geographies, devices, languages and cultures.

In working to meet consumers' voracious appetite for greater content customisation, companies are increasingly moving away from one-size-fits-all delivery via the satellite or fibre links that traditionally have connected programmers to their distribution outlets. The high cost and limited capacity of satellite transmission limit the number and quality of programme variants that a content company can reasonably provide to consumers. The entry of global OTT broadcasters into the European market puts further pressure on content providers to shift to a delivery model that readily supports multi-platform distribution.

For all of these reasons, content providers today are looking to IP-based terrestrial transmission over both private networks and the public internet as an alternative - and much more flexible - means of video transport.

Overcoming the internet's inherent obstacles to live video delivery

Both private IP networks and the public internet traditionally have enabled video delivery at a cost that renders them unsatisfactory either financially or in terms of video quality.

Private IP networks such as those using MPLS (multiprotocol label switching), for example, are expensive, and the cost of using MPLS networks goes up as the number of endpoints increases. Limited to a single carrier's network, MPLS networks can be vulnerable to failure if that one carrier experiences a failure. These limitations continue to be a factor in working with MPLS networks.

The public internet, on the other hand, has basic architectural limitations that render it unreliable for delivery of high-value content, and particularly live programming. High traffic on ISP networks can lead to congestion and dropped packets, both of which can cause delays that ultimately undermine video quality and makes it impossible to maintain real-time video applications. As a unicast system, the public internet does not support the simultaneous delivery of a single feed or stream to multiple destinations. Rather, a unique feed must be sent to each target destination.

The limitations of the public internet are, however, being overcome through the application of innovative overlay technologies and with the creation of a network comprised of professional data centres using proprietary routing protocols.

Patented innovative technologies like LTN's Rapid Error Recovery (RER) protocols and Dynamic Multi-carrier Routing (DMR) algorithms, combined with a global backbone network architecture and a fully managed video transport service, creates an extremely highly reliable video transport service over the public internet. Content providers' appliances connect across this network to data centres where routing and processing intelligence enables traffic monitoring, data processing, dynamic routing, and decision-making that combat and overcome the underlying congestion and resulting loss across internet last miles, as well as aggregation, transit and peering points.

Because each data centre has access to multiple carrier networks, traffic thus flows between content providers and data centres, or between data centres, dynamically over multiple carrier paths as dictated by real-time performance metrics. Use of the data centre closest to each receiver, with multiple copies of feeds distributed only at that last-mile data centre, further adds to efficient video delivery. Reducing end-to-end latency to as little as

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