Yunfan Accelerator's Chen Hui talks about how the revenue of new media in radio and television can outperform the cost

On May 17-18, the 2017 Asia-Pacific OTT/IPTV Ecosystem Conference was held in Beijing. Domestic OTT licensees, broadcasting and television operators, telecom operators, OTT terminal manufacturers, etc. were invited to attend. Many heavyweight industry guests brought the latest and hottest industry views at the conference. At the "Video Innovation Forum" held on the afternoon of the 17th, Chen Hui, general manager of Yunfan Acceleration New Media Division, gave a wonderful speech entitled "How Broadcasting and Television New Media Revenue Can Outperform Costs", which also answered the bandwidth cost and network smooth transmission problems faced by the guests in the development of OTT.

Yunfan Accelerator Chen Hui——General Manager of New Media Division

Chen Hui first introduced his 20-year career in call centers. In the field of customer relationship management, he had the opportunity to come into contact with video, video codec cards, and streaming media-related technologies. He then resolutely joined Yunfan Accelerator's focus on the streaming media industry.

Rapid growth in new media revenues is accompanied by rising costs

The operation of new media faces two major costs: one is content copyright, and the other is network bandwidth. Now online videos, live broadcasts, short videos, VR videos and other diversified developments have continued to enrich content formats; from the previous smooth, standard definition to high definition, ultra-clear, 3D, 4K, as well as low latency, second-level start, cross-screen interaction, etc., users have higher and higher requirements for watching videos; OGC, PGC and the current UGC content production model have matured, and the volume of video content has increased dramatically; and with the popularization of networks and terminals, the scale of video users has grown by leaps and bounds. By the end of 2016, the scale of video users reached 545 million.

The Internet has entered the era of big video and started a comprehensive growth mode

In the case where both revenue and costs are increasing, revenue is outperforming costs?

Chen Hui analyzed the Internet video business using the user, content, and platform triangle model. The growth in content quality and volume has led to an increase in content procurement and production costs. The increase in the number of users has provided a basis for corporate advertising and membership monetization revenue, but at the same time, companies' investment in the platform has also increased, including R&D costs for technology upgrades and bandwidth costs.

Triangular theoretical model of Yunfan acceleration

Technology-oriented: increasing value and reducing costs

Chen Hui said that as an emerging video CDN manufacturer, Yunfan Accelerator's mission is to provide higher value to enterprises and let them enjoy CDN. On the one hand, it provides enterprises with top-level services, and on the other hand, it helps enterprises reduce overall costs through the power of technology. Yunfan Accelerator has been thinking about how to help new media of radio and television reduce costs while improving user experience, and contribute to its revenue outperforming costs. As a CDN manufacturer, it does not try to increase bandwidth and charge more money, but always tries to reduce bandwidth. Yunfan Accelerator hopes to make the cost of video operation companies more reasonable, so that more budget can be used for refined operations or to launch better programs, and to make more intelligent arrangements for programs, rather than CDN tying customers' hands and feet and making them afraid to develop.

Innovation at the technical level to enhance value and reduce costs according to different customer needs

Chen Hui gave this answer. He believes that a qualified CDN company should first have a stable architecture, complete functions, excellent performance, reasonable prices, rapid response capabilities, and the ability to tap into customer needs. Among them, the bandwidth cost and smooth network transmission faced by OTT development, Yunfan Accelerator proposed to help customers reduce overall costs from three dimensions: reducing total bandwidth, reducing unit prices and value-added services. The core is: increasing value and reducing costs. This will answer how to make revenue outperform costs.

First: Reduce the total bandwidth

The full H.265 solution reduces bandwidth by more than 30%. The H.265 codec solution is more advantageous than H.264, and can reduce bandwidth usage by 30-50% with the same image quality. Yunfan's full H.265 acceleration solution uses the terminal to push H.264 high-definition code streams, and transcodes in the cloud to output H.264 and H265 encoded video streams at the same time. The H.264 code stream is used for playback on the flash side and users who have not updated the client; the H.265 playback side supports playback on Android, iOS, and OTT sides. It can use the open source H.265 decoder or the Yunfan H.265 playback kernel to reduce losses and reduce mobile phone heating.

Yunfan Acceleration Full H.265 Solution

Compared with other manufacturers' H.265 solutions, the video quality is higher, that is, H.265 encoding and streaming are performed on the streaming end, but the encoding capabilities of terminals such as mobile phones are weak, and H.265 can only be shallowly encoded, resulting in poor image quality. In addition, to solve the high-definition bit rate streaming, you can use the terminal streaming acceleration component SDK to ensure smooth and stable live broadcast.

P2P technology verified by hundreds of millions of users, content encryption-level anti-hotlink technology, to avoid unnecessary losses

Yunfan Accelerator P2P has made a lot of optimizations based on the original Qvod P2P technology. It supports multiple services such as large file on-demand, live broadcast, download, and supports cross-platform and multi-terminal intercommunication. In particular, the unique P4P function can increase download speed and intelligently control upload. It also supports CDN+P2P dual acceleration, eliminating the problems of reduced playback experience, increased lag, and slow start after traditional p2p is turned on. It effectively combines CDN's anti-hotlink and anti-hijacking technologies, ensures content security, service availability of more than 99%, and playback buffer-free ratio of more than 95%, ensuring the security and stability of customer services.

P2P technology verified by hundreds of millions of users

Yunfan Accelerator not only supports common referral anti-hotlinking, IP blacklist and whitelist, and dynamic URL parameters and paths, but also provides content block encryption and asynchronous disabling anti-theft technology. Block encryption can achieve better anti-hotlinking effect for live broadcasts; for downloads and HTLM5, asynchronous disabling can be used, which will prohibit/block access from abnormal sources in real time based on big data analysis, helping customers to do a good job in content security protection and avoid unnecessary losses. Yunfan Accelerator content encryption solution helped a radio and television customer clean up more than 100G of hotlink traffic (the peak of live broadcasts of hot programs ranged from more than 100G to tens ofG).

Second: Reduce the unit price

Against the backdrop of a price war in the current CDN industry, Yunfan Accelerator has made breakthrough progress in the shared CDN that it began exploring in 2016. Its performance and stability are comparable to those of mainstream CDNs, while the price has been reduced by more than 30%.

Yunfan Accelerator has launched the world's first high-definition video live broadcast system based on zero-delay P2P + streaming media technology, which is compatible with five major terminals: Flash, PC, iOS, Android, and OTT. It uses an active discovery mechanism from users to target nodes, and accurately analyzes the quality of each node through big data calculation, so that high-quality nodes can supply sources to non-high-quality nodes. Although it sacrifices a part of the sharing rate (40% on average), it can control the live broadcast delay to about 1 second, comparable to high-quality CDN transmission networks. In more than half a year since its launch, it has been verified and recognized by many top customers such as Zhanqi Live.

Third: Improve value-added services and provide higher value

In the context of the development of Internet video, Yunfan Accelerator, based on its global CDN network and years of technology accumulation and latest breakthroughs in the field of streaming media, deeply analyzes the needs of various vertical fields and launches a variety of video-related functional components including streaming, beauty, AR special effects, recording, cloud director, microphone connection, playback and other top functional modules. Currently, it has provided customized services for many large enterprises and helped Lang Live, which focuses on the Taiwan market, and Livestar, which focuses on the US market, to create their independent live broadcast applications. The maturity and stability of related technologies have been verified.

Yunfan Acceleration Cooperation Customer Cases

Yunfan Acceleration Cooperation Customer Cases

In terms of cooperation cases with customers, Yunfan Accelerator has been in operation for only more than a year, and its technical strength and service capabilities have been recognized by many customers. It has signed service contracts with more than 50 top industry customers, including multiple licensees, local TV stations and new media, and multiple interactive live broadcast platforms (Zhanqi, Longzhu, etc.).

Yunfan accelerates the customized services provided to radio and television new media customers

In his speech, Chen Hui focused on the customized services provided by Yunfan Accelerator for radio and television new media customers. In addition to providing CDN, P2P, and player customization, Yunfan Accelerator also provides cloud director and other products for a radio and television customer, providing convenience for them to conduct news reports and outdoor variety show live broadcasts in multiple scenes. Reporters only need to install the news streaming APP on their mobile phones, and the back-end director uses the cloud director platform to switch and mix the mobile live broadcast images of multiple front-line reporters with the same playback address, so as to achieve seamless connection and coherent playback of multi-directional shots. You can also use the microphone connection function, so that front-line reporters and interviewees can interact with the back-end director and host in real time to answer questions that the host and the audience are concerned about. The live broadcast content will also be synchronized to the back-end cloud storage in real time. After the front-line reporter completes the live broadcast, he can also immediately watch and check the recorded broadcast image that has just been broadcast. The back-end editor can cut and edit the live broadcast image at the first time and publish it to the public in a timely manner.

Finally, Chen Hui also revealed Yunfan’s plan for the next stage of acceleration. Based on big data analysis, it will cooperate with customers to develop cloud advertising, cloud e-commerce and other services to help customers expand their revenue.