Superior streaming quality is essential for standing out in today's highly competitive and saturated online video space. With little tolerance for low video quality and playback issues, consumers quickly move on to another streaming service if they face problems — enter Multi-CDN.
Multi-CDN switching systems enable content owners to harness the power of multiple content delivery networks (CDNs), providing a dependable and cost-effective way to prevent outages while improving the quality of experience for end users. But not all M-CDN switching systems are built the same.
CDN Active Switching represents the next generation of M-CDN for video streaming, maximizing bitrate and avoiding playback issues. Keep reading to discover how this innovative solution works and how it is helping streaming services achieve major quality gains.
The advantages Multi-CDN for video streaming
In case you are not yet familiar with Multi-CDN, this strategy involves employing more than one CDN to deliver video content to end users. CDNs are vulnerable to outages and traffic bottlenecks, so, by employing multiple CDN providers, streaming services can rest easy knowing that if one falls short, a backup is readily available to maintain content accessibility — a particularly important reassurance for the streaming of live events such as sports.
Performance and user experience go hand in hand with the concept of Multi-CDN, as smart algorithms choose the most optimal CDN provider based on metrics like throughput and response time. This approach improves content delivery speed and streaming quality, boosting user satisfaction and customer retention.
Multi-CDN systems also prove their worth in cost-effectiveness and flexibility, allowing streaming services to cherry-pick CDN providers according to their business needs and cost-performance ratio. By eliminating sole reliance on a single provider, video businesses can choose the CDN best fitting their business requirements, and service contracts can be negotiated more favorably while maintaining high-quality content delivery.
There are several M-CDN switching technologies available in the market today, ranging from more to less sophisticated and flexible and offering the possibility to switch CDNs before or during video playback.
Where CDN Active Switching comes in
So, what makes Active Switching so ground-breaking?
CDN Active Switching belongs to the more advanced group of Multi-CDN technologies known as mid-stream CDN switching, which are capable of switching CDNs during video playback.
With a traditional M-CDN system, if something happens after a CDN was selected at the beginning of the stream, it is not possible to switch to a better-performing CDN and thus avoid buffering or the video freezing. Mid-stream CDN switching divides the video file into video segments or chunks and allows for each one of them to be served by a different CDN, ensuring availability and consistent quality.
CDN Active Switching is a new mid-stream switching technology developed by NPAW and exclusive to its CDN Balancer Multi-CDN switching system. By collecting bitrate throughput information locally, a plugin integrated into the video player can detect CDN failures before they happen and switch amongst the originally designated CDNs for a seamless, transparent CDN switching with no join time increase.
CDN Active Switching leverages multiple content sources in parallel to maximize the delivered bitrate to the end user. These sources can either be CDNs or peer-to-peer (P2P), which makes Active Switching an ideal solution for streaming live content such as sporting events, for which huge viewer concurrency can be a challenge.
For the first time in the history of video content delivery, CDN Active Switching features bi-directional communication between server and client to tailor the experience to each end user. The throughput limit is now the end user’s connection, not the CDN capacity. And even in that case, Active Switching will choose the most appropriate CDN for each user and device – all while real-time error and rebuffering correction ensure a smooth viewing experience.
Unparalleled quality gains
By enabling Active Switching on their streaming platforms, our clients are reporting remarkable improvements in content delivery reliability and quality of experience. These include significantly reduced buffering, startup errors, and in-stream failures, along with improved join times.
For example, by using CDN Active Switching over the course of 90 days, NPAW customers reduced the buffer ratio by 67% on Android and by 40% on web — a crucial advantage when it comes to boosting user engagement and satisfaction.
The use of Active Switching also provided an impressive 91% reduction in the number of startup errors for Android, as well as 88% fewer startup errors on web. Meanwhile, the average join time on web decreased by 28%, substantially reducing the risk of impatient users dropping off before the video starts.
CDN Active Switching is revolutionizing streaming quality by delivering QoE gains never seen before. As the online video market evolves and competition between services intensifies, streaming services can rely on this cutting-edge solution to maintain a competitive edge at a reasonable cost.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to one of NPAW’s M-CDN experts to experience the benefits of Active Switching firsthand.
This article was written by Till Sudworth, CMO of NPAW.
Bio: With almost two decades of experience working within the TV & Media domain, Till understands the needs of the different customer groups in the space — from Broadcasters to Operators. He is an expert in implementing business models to improve B2B and B2C customer development and boost customer satisfaction, upselling rates, and churn prevention, both in the TV and in the SaaS industr