Beeline Builds TV Everywhere Service on Broadpeak CDN Systems
Beeline is the third largest telecom operator in Russia, holding spectrum sharing arrangements with its two competitors. The company commenced testing of LTE-Unlicensed and LTE-Advanced Pro (4.5G) systems in 2017, and has now also launched a Beeline TV service. Beeline can deliver live, VOD, catch-up and start-over TV video at high quality to a wide range of subscriber types - through set-top boxes, smart TVs, mobile devices and the Internet - using high capacity content delivery network (CDN) systems from Broadpeak.
Broadpeak's CDN and video streaming systems for content providers and pay-TV operators are completely software-based and built for scalability, which has made it easier and faster for Beeline to accommodate traffic growth and control the quality of experience (QoE) to subscribers, compared to setting up the necessary infrastructure with proprietary hardware.
“For huge networks like those in Russia, delivering TV services to customers at scale is a serious challenge,” said Oleg Karadzhi, CTO of Media Business at Beeline Russia. “We need scalable, elastic video delivery with a low total cost of ownership. The decision to work with Broadpeak as systems provider was based on the company's video streaming deployment experience and software-based approach to video distribution, which have helped to keep delivery costs low while refining the QoE for Beeline TV subscribers.”
Beeline is using Broadpeak’s BkM100 video delivery mediator and BkS400 cache servers, deployed in various points of presence (PoPs), thereby establishing video streams for all subscribers across Russia on national and local channels, at competitive broadcast quality. Broadpeak BkM100 software, running on a standard 1 RU server, handles redundancy, load balancing and fail-over management of the video servers and on-demand sessions.
It supplies web services for integration with Service Platforms and CMS, making it straightforward to integrate into networks. Its topology manager monitors the network topology and updates each server’s status, and has complete visibility of the location, availability and status of video streams. This means that each subscriber request is fulfilled in the most cost-effective way from the most suitable video stream, based on the service requested and the customer location.
BkM100 Mediator also continuously monitors the popularity of content based on usage patterns. It can define a minimum number of viewings for each PoP before the content is cached – popular content is automatically located in the edge servers while less frequently viewed content is kept in the larger central library. This automated strategy reduces the need for storage at the edge, increases disk lifetime and, in effect, lowers the system's total cost of ownership globally.
The BkS400 video cache servers use HTTP adaptive streaming – the software activates supported HTTP adaptive streaming formats without a proprietary hardware platform, running on IT servers. Because open Internet video streaming architectures employ origin servers that centralise all content, storage is highly scalable but streaming throughput is limited. Therefore BkS400 systems cache content at the edge, nearer to subscribers, reducing traffic at the origin level and increasing streaming capacity to respond to variable demands from end-users.
Typically, HTTP cache servers can't differentiate among the content they are delivering or the recipients they deliver to. In contrast, BkS400 video cache servers are aware of live and VOD assets and can correlate individual chunk requests with end-user live or VOD sessions, resulting in consistent video session reports and more appropriate provisioning.
With Broadpeak BkA100 video delivery analytics, Beeline can also gather data about video delivery by monitoring quality, generating statistics about content popularity, and reviewing feedback on performance at the servers, network and player levels. Video delivery systems generate large quantities of information within operator networks that needs to be shared and utilised by various departments to improve system management, efficiency and quality of service.
BkA100 supplies and centralises the raw data in a variety of formats, enabling different teams within an organisation to access data. The software computes key values based on familiarity of the operator’s business, and a dedicated GUI displays dashboards and graphs, which can be exported in multiple formats for archiving or using immediately.
Supported by the flexibility and scalability of Broadpeak software and systems, Beeline is in a position to support continuous traffic growth and deliver television experiences without making a heavy infrastructure investment. broadpeak.tv
