To cope with the rise in subscribers and traffic, the MENA OTT and Anti-Piracy Virtual Week conference, hosted by BroadcastPro Middle East magazine was held over the period of three consecutive days. It brought together vendors, solution providers, consultants and end-users to discuss major questions affecting the video streaming industry, assess the challenges amid unprecedented surge in consumption due to COVID19 waves, as well as elaborate on 2021 expectations.
The panel discussions were the highlight of the event. “Are We Tech-Ready?” talk joined panelists Salloum ElDahdaah, Chief Technology Officer, ITWorksME, Nauman Qureshi, VP of Product, StarzPlay, Peter Riz, CTO, OSN, and Rick Cordeiro, Director – Middle East and Africa, Brightcove Inc. They debated on some interesting conversations around how AI, ML, hybrid technology models and private CDNs will help provide a better streaming experience to users.
Answering a question about Private CDNs vs Hybrid models, ITWorksME CTO Salloum ElDahdaah strongly advocated for a Hybrid CDN approach involving Multi-CDN and private services installed with dedicated servers. “This is the latest technology to get ultra-high-performance,” he said. 24/7 content requests worldwide highlighted the inadequacy of traditional CDN technologies and the emergence of more adequate services such as Multi-CDN, Private CDN or Hybrid CDN which proved to be essential in certain geolocations, he added.
“In the case of Lebanese market, there is no CDN with an actual Point of Presence in this location- besides Akamai newly. Given KWIKmotion, our OTT platform solution, is the platform of choice for leader broadcasters in Lebanon we invested in this field and strategically placed three PoPs around the major ISPs and IX here, peaking recently to five PoPs. This structure allowed us to reduce latency significantly and bring the content seamlessly to the Lebanese audience all the while minimizing response times and ensuring premium service quality”, Salloum reasoned.
“As for UAE where our clients are also major video content providers and their users are spread across the globe, we are using a Hybrid model with several PoP nodes to avoid congestion in peak times and keep off glitches in the stream quality due to lack of capacity at the level of certain CDNs. Hence, we managed to balance the traffic between the networks of two or three CDNs to increase user performance and secure a reliable service”, he added. Salloum however pointed out that the above-mentioned scenarios are rarely approached in markets like US, Canada and Europe, unlike MENA and GCC. Those regions adopt a different business model, as PoPs are welcomed and affordable while bandwidth is much cheaper.
All panelists concluded that utilizing advanced CDN structures is one of the most effective ways to deliver content with high performance and reliability on a global scale while having the ability to allow traffic to be properly routed, attacks to be mitigated, and a continuous uptime to be maintained.