CDN has so many derivatives?! Yunfan Accelerator takes advantage of technological innovation to conquer the new blue ocean of short videos

[51CTO.com original article] 2017 has quietly passed the halfway point. Looking back at the past six months, the Internet has been eroding, subverting, or changing, and has chemically reacted with more and more industries. Among the many hot search terms on the Internet, "short video" can definitely firmly occupy the top three positions.

In September 2016, Toutiao announced that it would inject 1 billion yuan in subsidies into its short video business;

In January 2017, the 2016 Short Video Content Ecosystem White Paper survey showed that short videos had attracted more than 30 rounds of financing in 2016;

In April 2017, Alibaba Entertainment launched a 2 billion “Big Fish Plan” for short video content…

The reason why "short videos" have become a "hot item" is inseparable from the support of CDN technology. Compared with those eye-catching astronomical figures, reporters are more concerned about how CDN technology for short videos is different from live broadcast and on-demand. Can the application experience of CDN companies in the field of live broadcast and on-demand be directly copied? In the context of the national guiding policy to "cool down" the video industry, what changes will occur in the competition landscape of CDN companies? What kind of CDN companies will stick to the attention of video industry customers?

These questions were answered one by one by Wang Huan, General Manager of Yunfan Acceleration Internet Division. Although Wang Huan spoke slowly and his speech was not fast, his speech was rich and clear. In the short two-hour interview, he also shared a lot of technical information. After the interview, the reporter had a clearer understanding of the value of CDN to video and the CDN market situation in 2017, and shared it with netizens.

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The short video "*** column" pattern has been determined

Many people tend to think that short videos are just hype, and that they are essentially no different from small file downloads except for the short playback time, so the on-demand and live broadcast technology experience can be completely copied. Wang Huan directly denied this. He said straight to the point, "The technology of the live broadcast system cannot be directly copied to the short video distribution system. The two are completely different in terms of distribution system, platform, and application environment."

He explained in detail that, first of all, in terms of technology, the files of short videos are relatively small and most of them are played through smartphones. The upload volume of UGC business content is very high. The backend of short video websites ranked high in the market usually uploads several terabytes of content every day, which places relatively high storage requirements on the distribution server.

Secondly, in terms of customer needs, short video customers have very high requirements for the start time and fast download speed. The user network environment is complex, and CDN manufacturers must have comprehensive small operator coverage and acceleration capabilities in weak mobile network environments, because many users upload and watch short videos using mobile data rather than indoor WIFI. Live broadcasting is very different. Live broadcasting enterprise customers have high requirements for stable network connectivity and latency. The demand for live broadcasting products is no lag, low latency, and to be ready to go, and to minimize the first screen time.

Wang Huan believes that although short videos have become a "hot topic" since 2016, Meipai, Miaopai, Kuaishou, and Toutiao have established the top echelon of short videos, and the growth of video traffic brought by short videos is unlikely to repeat the "grand" growth of that year. With the growth of users in second- and third-tier cities in China and the injection of capital, the business model of short videos will become more and more mature.

Price war is not a protracted war. Technological innovation is the key to competition.

Wang Huan frankly said that for short video enterprise customers, the key to CDN products is stability. Although many manufacturers use "speed" as their main selling point, in fact, there is not much difference in speed between the products of the top-tier manufacturers in the market. He pointed out that the factors of node distribution, network architecture, cache, and software optimization are more critical. "Compared to the speed difference of a few milliseconds, customers pay more attention to the stability of the service and the speed of response once a problem occurs."

Through Wang Huan's words, we can actually taste the fierce competition among CDN vendors. Unfortunately, in today's world where CDN vendors are engaged in price wars, some vendors are obsessed with cost "control" and ignore the development path of technological innovation, which requires dedicated research and long-term investment, and are unwilling to take the long route to catch big fish. Obviously, Yunfan Accelerator does not agree with this approach.

Wang Huan said, "CDN needs to have economies of scale and needs to develop to a certain scale to reduce costs, but many CDN manufacturers do not have this awareness. A healthy company needs to be profitable. Yunfan Acceleration chooses to use technical means to reduce product costs, which neither harms customer interests nor affects its own development." The reporter learned that Yunfan Acceleration has always insisted on reducing product costs through technical means, increasing product added value through technological innovation, and providing customers with a complete set of solutions, allowing customers to focus more on innovation in video business operations themselves.

He gave an example to the reporter and told the reporter that Yunfan Accelerator not only sells a single CDN product, but also provides customers with services such as link optimization, H.265 solutions, online transcoding, and cloud director. Yunfan Accelerator's complete streaming media solution also includes voice noise reduction, beauty, porn detection and other functions. Not long ago, Yunfan Accelerator provided customized development services for a game company in Shanghai and developed a complete set of APP solutions, covering the design and development of live streaming engines, storage, cloud transcoding, live suites, live systems, content distribution, players and other functions. Customers only need to work on the business level and do not need to spend too much energy on the underlying IT technology.

On the necessity of CDN customized services

Of course, the premise of technological innovation is to establish a deep understanding of customer needs. Wang Huan believes that this is precisely the advantage of Yunfan Accelerator.

He took the application scenario of live broadcast personnel collecting videos outdoors as an example: When people broadcast live football games, there is often no access to fixed networks at the game site, and the mobile phone signals are in the 3G or 4G signal segment, which has a great impact on the stability of the live video. Yunfan Accelerator has launched a weak network optimization function for this purpose and provides packet loss compensation. In terms of technology, Yunfan independently developed a streaming acceleration engine based on the UDP protocol, which can greatly improve the streaming quality under network jitter conditions. The entire process from the collection end to the streaming server can guarantee the upload quality. In addition, the upload acceleration function provides users with speed guarantees for video transmission in weak network environments. "We have done tests. In an ordinary ADSL 512Kb upload broadband environment, the upload rate can be expanded to 20M through the Yunfan upload accelerator. [These data confirm] and the user is in an unaware state, which automatically increases the upload speed."

Unlike traditional CDN vendors that provide standardized services, Yunfan Accelerator prefers to provide customized services based on scenario development. In Wang Huan's view, with the development of the network environment, customers will always have some pain points at different stages, and standardized services can only scratch the surface and cannot really solve customer problems. Yunfan Accelerator will communicate deeply with customers, respond quickly to customer needs, and provide customized services. For example, the needs of radio and television live broadcast platforms for multiple screens, LOGO, watermarks, subtitles, cloud directors, etc. are all provided by Yunfan Accelerator.

Experts in video streaming

During the interview, Wang Huan mentioned Akamai many times. He believed that Akamai conducted an in-depth analysis of customer business scenarios at the beginning of product design, thought about customers' most important needs, and provided customers with automated, intelligent, professional, and one-stop solutions. It also conducted in-depth research on expansion capabilities, ease of use, visualization, and data analysis, and quickly iterated its products from usable, easy to use, to excellent.

Yunfan Accelerator, which takes Akamai as a learning benchmark, is actually a dark horse in the industry. The reason why it was able to quickly open up the market in a short period of time and achieved remarkable results in the radio and television industry, interactive live broadcast, and the Internet industry is mainly due to Yunfan Accelerator's understanding of CDN and strong technological innovation capabilities.

Wang Huan analyzed the entire CDN supply chain for the reporter and analyzed its technical features one by one. In the server phase, different services need to be treated differently. The technical requirements for pages, streaming media, on-demand, downloading, and live broadcast are different. Some focus on computing, some focus on storage, and some require read and write speeds. In the bandwidth phase, the focus is on service node selection. The operating system is very important and needs to be optimized in the kernel to strip irrelevant components to make resource utilization higher. In the protocol phase, TCP protocol optimization is needed to make its transmission efficiency higher. In the system optimization phase, dynamic routing optimization is included, as well as cache software optimization and DNS optimization.

"Yunfan Accelerator has deep technical accumulation in every link of the supply chain. The service team has service experience in both the TO C market and the streaming media industry, and is clear about the user's pain points. The combination of such technological innovation + service team has formed Yunfan Accelerator's unique advantage." Wang Huan concluded. In addition, the company's strategy of focusing on live broadcast on demand and supplemented by download pages is also in line with market development trends.

At the beginning of the interview, Wang Huan revealed that Yunfan Accelerator will enter the overseas market. Currently, many domestic Internet companies are bringing their products overseas, and national policies also encourage this, such as the Belt and Road Initiative. Culture and enterprises are gradually moving towards internationalization. This trend means a new blue ocean for Yunfan Accelerator. At present, Yunfan Accelerator already has good supplier partners, and its overseas business is developing smoothly. In terms of technological development trends, Wang Huan said that in the future, Yunfan Accelerator will continue to move forward steadily and follow Akamai's path of automation, intelligence, and specialization.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]