Malaysia’s Astro adopted Broadpeak Origin Packager for its streaming platform and EdgePeak local caching for fibre customers to power scalable, efficient streaming across its service.
Malaysian entertainment content company Astro has invested in two major enhancements to its services – hybrid origin packaging to speed up video delivery for its streaming platform sooka, and a CDN upgrade capable of high performance local caching for Astro Fibre customers. The deployments result in lower infrastructure costs for Astro, meanwhile serving millions of Malaysian viewers with live and on-demand video experiences.
“At Astro, we are focused on continuously enhancing the quality and reliability of our streaming services to meet the evolving needs of our customers,” said Euan Smith, Group Chief Executive Officer of Astro. “As part of our broader innovation initiatives, we are acquiring scalable and flexible infrastructure that supports the delivery of high-quality content across platforms like sooka and our Astro Fibre broadband services. Our collaboration with Broadpeak that focusses on packaging and CDNs is one element of this project, enabling us to adopt a modern architecture that supports efficient content delivery and positions us well for future growth.”
Cloud-Hybrid Architecture – Broadpeak Origin Packager
Astro has deployed Broadpeak’s high performance Origin Packager as part of a cloud-hybrid architecture for sooka, Astro's standalone OTT service delivering premium live sports, local content, originals and on-demand entertainment to mobile-first and home screen audiences. In collaboration with Irdeto, which is supplying their personalised streaming aggregation platform and UX/UI, video streaming player provider Bitmovin and other ecosystem partners, the new solution replaces sooka’s previous origin system.
Broadpeak’s Origin Packager helps by enhancing flexibility and performance in the system overall, combining on-premises servers with AWS instances to optimize scale, resilience and cost. It carries out just-in-time packaging to improve throughput as well as encryption for live events, linear channels and VOD content in multiple ABR formats.
Its on the fly packaging and built-in cache mechanism mean the Packager consumes fewer encoding and storage resources, generating cost savings. The ability to deliver content to any off-net or on-net CDN allows users to deliver content through the CDN of their choice and use a combination of delivery infrastructures, meanwhile handling operations from a single origin.
Optimised Delivery for Fibre Customers
At the same time, Astro has deployed the Broadpeak EdgePeak software engine to optimize content delivery to Astro Fibre customers as part of its hybrid CDN approach. The new deployment introduces local caching capacity at the edge of the ISP network, aiming to improve streaming performance and quality of experience (QoE) for Astro Fibre subscribers – meanwhile keeping energy requirements low and saving costs.
EdgePeak’s caching and edge computing capabilities help with security, energy efficiency and resource utilization demands for operators that want to build their own high performance CDN. It can be used to take advantage of the essential elements of Broadpeak’s streaming software through open APIs.
“Astro is an example of how Tier 1 operators in APAC are taking greater control of video delivery and adopting effective streaming solutions,” said Jacques Le Mancq, CEO at Broadpeak. “This partnership shows the strong demand for scalable, high performance streaming solutions that enable operators to optimize costs, elevate quality of experience and move with the future of video.” www.broadpeak.tv
