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Streaming on eCDN and Peer to Peer
What is an eCDN?
An eCDN is an enterprise content delivery network that allows media to be delivered over a private network to a large number of users in a reliable manner, without impacting the bandwidth available to access the Internet.
Traditionally, eCDN solutions implemented on corporate networks are based on hardware and software solutions (cache, proxy, multicast, etc.).
Thanks to mesh network technology (Peer to Peer) it is now possible to take advantage of the advantages of an eCDN without installing software or hardware on the company’s computer network.
Difference between a CDN and an eCDN
Outside of the enterprise, traditional CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are used to deliver content closer to the end user to increase performance. While eCDN (Enterprise CDN) uses the same technological concept, it solves a very different problem.
Large companies generally set up their private network, allowing the interconnection of all employees and allowing them to access the Internet and company services. These private networks are usually very fast and support high bandwidth, but their connection to the outside world (Internet) is often limited in bandwidth and capacity.
So, in short, eCDN is a CDN-like solution that works around a limited internet downlink of the corporate network to allow video streaming directly from the private corporate network.
Peer-to-peer distribution within the corporate network
In a P2P setup, each viewer can download the video from the cloud, but can also send the content to another viewer. This means that only a small portion of viewers actually download the video from the cloud, and the majority of data travels between viewers within the corporate network.
It is possible to connect each viewer to several other viewers to create a mesh network of peers who exchange video parts in real time. Connecting to multiple other peers also increases reliability as there are multiple alternative sources from which to download the video.
A solution based on peer-to-peer video streaming is able to adapt to demand in an “elastic” way, because the more viewers there are, the more capacity there is.
Advantages :
- No physical installation requirements.
- The capacity increases with the audience.
- There is no need for specific end-user software to view the content.
- This method allows companies to use the capacity of their existing network without the need to increase the bandwidth of their Internet line.
Peer-to-peer distribution between all users
In order to reduce the bandwidth consumption on the CDN of streaming video distribution, it is also possible to use the Peer to Peer functionality on a large number of viewers.
In order to distribute the video stream data among viewers connected from hundreds or thousands of independent internet connections, the use of STUN server allows the data exchange over the WebRTC protocol.
Online-Event P2P Video Distribution Solution
Online-Event offers a solution for distributing streaming streams thanks to the Peer to Peer technology integrated into the Video.JS player.
In order to avoid congestion of internet lines linked to the use of VPN connection within a company or interconnections between several isolated company networks. Online-Event offers filtering on IPs, range of IPs or groups of users on which this feature will be activated.
Thus, the objective of reducing bandwidth consumption will be achieved since the use of Peer 2 Peer distribution will be limited to users of the same private network.
A series of tests and exchanges with the ISD of the impacted sites will be expected as part of the preparation of your event.
Technically, this distribution feature is based on an open-source javascript library (p2p Media Loader) integrated into the media player (Video.JS).
This library allows peer to peer communication between viewers (WebTorrent) and a torrent tracker server (wt-tracker) in order to update the list of viewers currently playing in real time.
The advantages of this solution are:
- Completely transparent support, everything is integrated in the media player
- On a private network an effective drop of 80% in traffic
Supports both live and VOD streaming in HLS and MPEG-DASH format - 100% open-source solution
- No installation or configuration required for spectators
- The entire technical solution is securely hosted on our servers