DigiMeld - Technology and Solutions

Despite the tremendous growth of video streaming on the Internet, doing it in large scale is still a big deal. Video demands a lot of bandwidth, and accompanied by the increasing demand for full screen, higher resolutions and long-form videos, this issue will raise their head to challenge all of us.

Traditional unicast and CDN solutions are limited in meeting the challenges on efficiency and scalability. When large number of viewers request streams, the media servers need to scale proportionately to the increase in demand. Publishers have to spend ever-increasing amounts of dollars on their infrastructure and bandwidth. Despite the declining cost of hardware and bandwidth, the economics of such delivery are not favorable to long term growth of the industry.

DigiMeld Solution - Grid-streaming

DigiMeld harvests viewers' unused uplink bandwidth to relay stream data and offload the stream traffic from the media servers, thus optimizing the overall load balance of the network. Every viewer simultaneously retrieves, views and shares video data with other viewers within a safe and encrypted network.

Grid-streaming is much more scalable because when the number of concurrent viewers explodes, the viewers will offload the most data and requires only a little overhead on the media servers. Grid-streaming also enhances the QoS (quality of service) when the number of concurrent viewers is huge since more viewers can share data with each other.

How It Works

DigiMeld grid-streaming implements two distinct sub-systems to handle live and on-demand streaming - each optimized for its specific performance.

For live streaming, the content is initially cached on the media servers and then distributed to a handful of "super viewers". Once those "super viewers" begin viewing, all additional viewers become a component of the grid-streaming network retrieving the streaming data from, and in turn supplying data to, other peers in the network.

However, for on-demand videos, not all the viewers are watching the same content at the same time. With the exception of some very popular content, the possibility for the peers to simultaneously hit the same content packets is much lower. In this case, a supplementary CDN is needed to guarantee the QoS. DigiMeld adopts a hybrid approach that uses a combination of CDN with grid-streaming.

Benefits

DigiMeld's Grid-streaming is not a replacement for CDNs. DigiMeld's Grid-streaming platform can be leveraged within existing infrastructure to create greater benefits.

Cost Effective

For online video publishers, DigiMeld Grid-streaming can be deployed within their existing infrastructure, while implementing additional peer assisted resources through simply implementing the DigiMeld Grid-streaming Player.

For CDNs, they can leverage DigiMeld Grid-streaming to allow peer assisted delivery to load balance their networks and avoid congestion. Peer assisted delivery also reduces their cost structure, while at the same time improving quality of delivery.

For enterprises, bandwidth cost is the top concern for the IT managers. For large organizations, streaming events like CEO's speech to employees (globally distributed) can be very costly, because data traffic across the LANs is big when using the traditional unicast or CDN technologies. DigiMeld Grid-streaming can drastically reduce the bandwidth cost since the viewers in the same LAN can serve data to each other and the traffic is localized.

Value-added Publishing Tools

DigiMeld solution also provides multiple publishing tools to facilitate user interactivity and various business models.

Search engine optimization: DigiMeld has specialists to promote publishers' content on the web and make it easy for viewers to find publishers' content through search engines.

Flexible ad-insertion: DigiMeld provides ad-insertion modules such as pre-roll, mid-roll, scrolling text and picture-in-picture.

Subscription and pay-per-view: DigiMeld supports payment-based business models such as channel subscription and pay-per-view. DigiMeld provides an online payment infrastructure.

Self publishing: Utilizing these tools to generate a user-controlled playlist and create your own channels.

Viewer statistics/reporting: Publishers can determine in real time the number of concurrent viewers by age, gender and zip code.

DigiMeld Solution Stack

Geographically targeting/filtering: This tool enables publisher to deliver content to a designated geographic area only.

Interactivity: DigiMeld provides viewer interactive modules like live chat while watching, community/forum and RSS to enhance the loyalty of the viewers.