There is no denying that the way in which we all consume video is undergoing rapid transformation. In fact, when it comes to streamed video, service providers in the U.S. are saying that as much if not more of their bandwidth usage on Friday nights can be attributed to people downloading their favorite content from the likes of Netflix. Unfortunately, our viewing habits reliance on the Internet as a delivery source has put extreme pressure on service providers to enable use to have compelling experiences.

The good news is that unsatisfactory user experiences do not have to be the norm. Redwood City, Calif.-based video platform Qwilt is a provider of network edge caching solutions that enable network service providers to reduce the average bandwidth consumed by up to 50 percent, increase performance over competitive offerings by five times, all with a return on investment (ROI) within 12 months. In short, it is a means for service providers to not just cost-effectively address the problems of network congestion, but do so without sacrificing, indeed improving, the end customer experience.           

Enhancing the edge provides a competitive edge

As TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani recently explained in a blog about Qwilt, the company’s video fabric controllers are the secret sauce. As Tehrani noted, “The company is basically promoting a caching appliance/solution which isn't new but it adds in DPI, analytics and a great GUI and as a result will generate lots of excitement as it solves a real problem.” That problem is current reliance on legacy service-specific video caching solutions which are costly to maintain and power, and are insufficient in regards to the flood of traffic being generating by popular Over-the-Top (OTT) providers.

What Qwilt does is to employ transparent caching, which serves the majority of popular video content from the network edge, to enable service providers to vastly improve the end user experience by significantly reducing the impact of OTT traffic traversing their networks. Placing the majority of bandwidth-intensive media content in close proximity to the subscribers:

• Reduces the network congestion caused by traversing video traffic
• Minimizes video delivery latency
• Preserves content provider fidelity
• Frees up bandwidth for other services to further improve overall customer satisfaction

To learn more about transparent caching at the network edge and all of the benefits that can accrue to those deploying such capabilities, you are invited to join me and David Sahar, Vice President Product Marketing and Co-Founder of Qwilt for an insightful webinar, Is OTT Video Quality a “House of Cards?” to be held Oct. 10, 10 a.m. EDT.   We will be examining:  

• How the OTT Video ecosystem and its players are evolving
• How to identify and measure factors that affect subscriber Quality of Experience (QoE)
• What is transparent caching and how it improves the subscriber experience

It should go without saying the trend for more and more video consumption to be done online is not just inevitable but is rapidly picking up steam. It is also a fact that service provider QoE is the differentiated value that will attract and maintain customer loyalty. A physical quilt nits together various different threads to create something that we all perceive as valuable for keeping us warm and happy when we get cold. Qwilt by knitting together seamlessly the threads of various services so that service providers can provide a quality experience is doing the same thing and in the process helping ensure Friday Night Lights, and lights at all other times, illuminate us satisfactorily.