Uncovering the secrets of CDN user-driven product changes

Preface : OTT-TV and IPTV have become popular due to the trend of large-screen video. Traditional broadcasting and operators have also found the rhythm of transformation in the gap of the rapid Internetization of the times, but this does not seem to reduce their anxiety under the Internetization.

At the Asia-Pacific OTT/IPTV Industry Conference on May 17-18, the topic discussed by the bigwigs of the radio and television industry also revolved around "fine operations". It can be seen that under the trend of large-screen high-definition video, the annual increase in costs is a reality that every video company has to face, whether it is for radio and television new media, Internet video or live broadcast. For video companies, there are two main cost components. One is content copyright. In recent years, the popularity of various IPs, the rise of online dramas, and the country's further emphasis on cultural copyrights and policy tightening have made video companies pay more attention to content copyright. Content copyright has also risen under this environment and policy advantages, making video companies daunting but have to do it. The other is bandwidth cost, which is what we often call CDN cost. With the development of large-screen high-definition video and users' increasingly sophisticated viewing experience, the burden of bandwidth has also increased exponentially year by year, especially since the outbreak of live broadcasting.

2017 Asia Pacific OTT/IPTV Video Innovation Forum - Discussion on the theme of "Refined Operation"

Competition in the CDN industry is becoming increasingly fierce, and the market structure continues to change

It can be said that CDN vendors are the biggest winners in the Internet of Everything. However, where there are opportunities, there are challenges. While CDN has made a lot of money in the era of big video, it is also experiencing an industry reshuffle under fierce competition. Although old CDN vendors such as Wangsu and ChinaCache still have a quantitative advantage in terms of overall market share, this advantage is gradually weakening with the entry of BAT and innovative CDN vendors. From the 2016 financial report released by Wangsu, it can be seen that these old CDN vendors are experiencing a painful change, especially after the first price reduction of CDN, the pattern of the CDN market is no longer the situation of more than a decade ago where I sell and you have to buy.

Price war is raging, is it a blessing or a curse?

Faced with fierce competition, CDN vendors are constantly adjusting their strategies, and the first to bear the brunt is the price war. However, according to the reporter's observation, those vicious price wars that rely on capital accumulation are not advocated by the market, and will only cause the industry to suffer greatly. Only the technical competition that reduces the cost of CDN through technological innovation is the healthy competition in the industry. It is worth mentioning that Yunfan Accelerator, which was hailed as the dark horse of the industry in 2015, has occupied a place in the CDN industry in less than a year through technological innovation. They cleverly combined CDN and P2P, and achieved technological innovation by utilizing the complementarity of their own architectures. It is also reported that the Yunfan Accelerator technical team originated from the former Qvod technical team. However, Qvod's achievements and contributions in P2P are the most advanced in the video technology industry, which is also one of their magic weapons to create phenomenal products. On this basis, they have upgraded this technology and developed a delay-free P2P, which can control the live broadcast delay within 2s.

Yunfan Accelerator combines CDN and P2P to achieve technological innovation by leveraging the complementarity of their own architectures.

CDN vendors, who have experienced multiple price cuts, are no longer the self-righteous teenagers of the past. The concept of CDN companies as service providers is also changing. For CDN companies, the greater the bandwidth, the greater the profit, but now CDN vendors are constantly lowering the price of CDN. As we all know, the cost of CDN bandwidth has increased exponentially year by year with the large-screen and high-definition video, which is undoubtedly a huge burden for video companies. CDN vendors have also seen this. They are no longer blindly pursuing high costs and high profits, but changing their ideas to reduce the burden on enterprises. With the rapid development of the Internet, various novel APPs are constantly emerging. This is a battle for user attention, especially for the video industry.

CDN Transformation: From Products to Customers

As a service provider, the CDN industry is no longer complacent in this Internet era. It not only reforms itself, but also pays more attention to the experience of enterprises and provides services from the perspective of enterprise needs. We can see this from the development of the CDN industry in the past two years.

In the past 20 years of CDN development in China, most of them have adopted foreign open source systems. In 2015, a completely self-developed CDN architecture system appeared in China, which was developed by the new CDN manufacturer Yunfan. This has further promoted the development of domestic CDN, no longer subject to some unknown factors of foreign open source systems, making it easier to quickly locate problems and greatly saving time and operation and maintenance costs.

Provide one-stop solutions for the live video industry in the technical field

As the bandwidth cost of the video industry surged, the CDN+P2P model mentioned above emerged and has become the main operating mode of CDN. Under the special domestic broadband policy, it mainly utilizes the idle uplink bandwidth of end users and transmits nearby, saving time, effort and cost. Basically, this model can save an average of about 50% of bandwidth for corporate users. This is also the sharing factor of the early Internet.

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Driven by this sharing factor, the shared CDN project was launched in 2016. This is a major innovation in the CDN industry's business model, which makes full use of the idle bandwidth resources of enterprise users and reactivates the idle bandwidth costs of enterprises. This undoubtedly relieves the burden on the video industry. However, the operation of the shared CDN project undoubtedly requires a very large amount of data and precise and rigorous calculations to support it. We assume an ideal state, where all idle resources are online, large and small bandwidth resources across the country, idle periods calculated by seconds, uncontrollable bursts, etc., you can imagine how huge this project is, and it will inevitably experience some hardships to achieve it. However, it is reported that Yunfan Acceleration, the advocate of this project, has already conducted tests on a small scale before officially proposing shared CDN. After nearly a year of actual combat, it is now completely comparable to mainstream CDNs, and shared CDN will definitely become a trend.

Large-screen and high-definition video is also one of the mainstream trends in the development of the video industry, which puts higher requirements on video bit rate. H.264 can no longer meet this requirement, so the H.265 codec technology, which is said to be born for 1080P, came into being. Compared with H.264, H.265 can transmit higher-quality videos in a limited bandwidth environment, and can play videos of the same quality with only about half of the original bandwidth.

Yunfan Accelerator launches the first full H.265 solution in China

At present, H.264 real-time software coding is very mature. H.265 coding puts great pressure on mobile phone computing and cannot encode in real time with high quality. However, H.265 real-time decoding does not have a CPU bottleneck. Yunfan Accelerator is the first in China to combine H.265 with the existing H.264, that is, the H.264+aac audio and video coding solution is still used on the streaming end to push high-definition live video streams. Through the cloud transcoding platform, H.264 and H.265 different video streams are output at the same time. The H.265 code stream is used for Android, iOS, and OTT end playback, and the H.264 code stream is used for flash end and users who have not updated the client. Through an encoding and transcoding process, high-quality video signals are transmitted at low code streams, while high-quality images are fully retained. Without affecting the existing h.264 system, the connection is complete, and the new and old technologies are compatible with each other, which is convenient and fast for enterprises.

With the rise of 4K and 8K and the continuous upgrading of terminal hardware equipment, I believe that H.265 is likely to become mainstream in the next five or even ten years.

Through repeated technological upgrades, CDN vendors have changed their financial disadvantages in price wars and fully utilized their technological advantages. Not only that, in addition to their own professional CDN data transmission, CDN vendors have also begun to provide corresponding SaaS services to business owners, providing one-stop solutions. In fact, whether it is full business or for different fields, CDN vendors themselves are very familiar with each of their service areas. CDN provides supporting solutions for different fields, which can not only reduce R&D costs for business owners, but also save a lot of market research costs. Especially for traditional industry transformation companies and start-ups, they can make full use of funds in the fields they are more proficient in and explore business models.

Conclusion : These are the changes that CDN vendors are making under increasingly fierce competition, from products to users, from the perspective of user experience to product change and service improvement. I believe that ending the blindness of an era, putting oneself in the shoes of users, and winning the hearts of users can maintain the long-term and healthy development of an industry, and this is true for every industry.