Creating a true live streaming experience

Resource

Case Studies

Topic

Edge Compute

Net Insight is a global leader in streaming solutions, media networks, and resource optimization. With over 20 years of experience and 500 customers in 60 countries, they are a trusted partner and a leading force in creating a better media experience.

Industry

Software and technology

Use Cases

Live streaming

Key Takeaways

Using StackPath’s edge computing technology, Net Insight’s Sye solution is able to provide the best live streaming experience on the market with better-than-broadcast quality, perfect sync, ultra-low latency, innovative interactivity, and limitless scalability.

Situation

Brand new live streaming technology requires more than your average content delivery network

When Net Insight started considering the possibility of True Live Streaming, they understood the value of partnering with a network leveraging edge compute. The users of their ground-breaking live streaming technology, Sye, demanded global coverage to reach viewers in an instant. Furthermore, they required high-capacity infrastructure that could handle bursting traffic patterns and the harsh nature of live events.

Users interested in trying Sye as a managed service also wanted to be able to start small without being limited when growing in the future. Therefore, the Sye Streaming Service, which is owned and operated by Net Insight, demanded multi-CDN functionality as well as massive scalability at a competitive price point.

Objective

Find a partner capable of providing low-cost dedicated edge servers globally at any scale

Needing to deliver Sye to users ranging from some of the largest video streamers in the world to smaller startups made it very hard to work with just one traditional provider, but Net Insight continued to test out different solutions. Stefan Gustafsson, Chief Solution Officer at Net Insight, told StackPath that they launched their own managed Sye Streaming Service in the cloud as a complement to their Sye product, just to be able to address the smaller customers.

“We actually designed a full network supporting up to 250,000 simultaneous clients in the cloud. However, the price tag of larger volumes of data transferred from a cloud platform makes the business case very challenging once the customers grow beyond those number of users,” said Gustafsson.

As the high price point of the cloud did not work for larger-volume Sye customers, Net Insight understood that they had to find an additional network for large Sye users that outgrew the existing cloud-based service offering. When doing so they wanted to find a network that would serve both customers that outgrew the managed Sye Streaming Service, and large customers that needed their own dedicated Sye solution.

Approach

Leverage a full StackPath solution to support True Live Streaming

Armed with the experience of working with traditional networks and cloud providers, Net Insight started to work with StackPath to further expand their infrastructure and the availability of their live streaming technology.

Using StackPath’s infrastructure, the Sye software is entirely containerized in docker, providing management, alarming, and monitoring capabilities. The main content distribution components are ingress, fan-out and egress nodes, which are primarily used to receive a video stream from an upstream source and then replicate it downstream. In addition to this, ingress nodes also originate data that is delivered in perfect sync with the audio and video. This data can be used to create new interactive live experiences like live voting, betting, polling and quizzes.

To run Sye on the StackPath edge network, here is what happens:

  1. The live event video and audio is encoded at multiple bitrate levels and transported using SSP (Sye Streaming Protocol) to a group of StackPath ingress nodes.
  2. The ingress node copies the stream and sends it to StackPath fanout nodes. It optionally originates a synchronized data feed with interactive content.
  3. The fanout nodes stream audio, video, and data to StackPath’s groups of egress nodes. They optionally write what they receive to cloud storage for time shift capabilities.
  4. The egress nodes then stream audio, video and data to clients with per-client adaptive bitrate. They optionally also insert personalized ads into the stream as needed.
  5. Client apps integrate Sye capabilities using the Sye SDK and receive ABR video using SSP.

Results

Net Insight’s Sye solution, backed by StackPath’s edge computing technology, is able to solve all the issues that spoil the live streaming experience.

True Live Streaming unlocks the real potential of live streaming, offering:

  • Ultra-low fixed latency: No more buffering or drifting; configure your stream to sync with the linear broadcast or be even faster than TV.
  • Better-than-broadcast quality: Sye outclasses traditional file-based solutions and provides a top-of-the-line Quality of Experience.
  • Perfect sync: Sync video, audio, notifications, voting, betting, polling, quiz questions, and data overlays across all of your devices.
  • Massive scalability: Handle millions of global viewers with limitless scalability.

StackPath was my first exposure to a system that had truly embraced leveraging containers for delivery and was able to build a distributed application that could scale.”

Stefan Gustafsson • Chief Solution Officer, Net Insight

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