Looking to reduce TV content backhaul costs when delivering large back-catalogs, catch-up TV or network PVR services to pay-TV operators, Edgeware has released a fresh multiscreen version of its Distributed Video Delivery Network (D-VDN) solution.

The new iteration features intelligent session and content management options, and monitoring features for real-time analytics that can cover adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming to millions of simultaneous devices.

Many TV and video service providers are acquiring rights to larger back-catalogs, and longer catch-up TV recording windows. Caching efficiency in delivery networks declines as more content is added and backhaul networks become congested. That in turn means that videos start to buffer or content is presented with lower and lower ABR streams, which may be good enough for free services but is not acceptable for premium, pay TV customers.

Unfortunately though, upgrading the backhaul network is capital-intensive and requires long lead times, so an alternative approach is to retain cache efficiency, even as content libraries grow.

The Edgeware D-VDN Solution strives to accomplish that via the new features. The options to intelligently distribute content and client requests across multiple servers in a content-aware cluster mean that the storage in each clustered server is effectively combined; increasing the cache hit rate and avoiding use of the backhaul network for cache-misses. Content needs to only be ingested once to each cluster, further reducing backhaul load.

Assets can also be distributed intelligently over multiple clusters to build a caching hierarchy; requests for the most popular assets are sent to the edge clusters and longer-tail request are served directly from centralized clusters to further enhance edge cache-hit efficiency.

Most connected devices today use ABR streaming for uninterrupted viewing over unmanaged networks. Streaming a single ABR-formatted movie consist of delivering thousands of video "fragments." The system resources required to log and process analytics for delivery of these files is significant and becomes prohibitive as audiences and content libraries grow. The new optional Edgeware monitoring modules aggregates requests into "sessions" and fragments into "assets." This reduces thousands of log entries to just a few for each session. These are collected and analyzed in real-time.

Logs can be made available via an integration API to specialist analytics applications such as Skytide (News - Alert) Insight, or they can be presented in reports via an optional analytics GUI within Edgeware’s own Convoy system. Examples include: content popularity, viewer engagement and delivered quality, segmented by consumer IP, region, device type, delivery server and origin server.

"Cost-effective delivery of large time-shift and back-catalogue services is a real challenge, as is true, real-time monitoring of the delivered quality as the service scales," said Jon Haley, vice president of Product Marketing and Business Development at Edgeware. "These new features were requested by customers striving to delivery highly differentiated, multiscreen services."