The revolutionary Eluvio Content Fabric could reduce media pipeline costs for a large broadcast streaming service to one-sixth of what is paid today if the Fabric is used to replace a traditional cloud media stack and CDN combination, according to Michelle Munson, CEO and Co-Founder at Eluvio. The figures are based on a calculation where the broadcaster spends five times as much on cloud as on CDN, and today spends a total of $24 million on these two requirements. These astonishing savings can be expected for end-to-end, direct-to-consumer streaming distribution. The savings can be even better for a larger scale service.
“It is a no-brainer to use us” Munson declared at IBC, adding that the Eluvio Content Fabric delivers an inflection point for the economics of direct-to-consumer streaming.
On the eve of IBC2024, Eluvio announced a significant partnership with Bedrock, the media-tech joint venture between M6 and RTL Group that creates and operates full-scope streaming platforms for media companies offering AVOD, SVOD and hybrid VOD services. Bedrock solutions support linear channels, live sports and on-demand video to over 45 million users in Europe and the two companies are collaborating on go-to-market activities to serve this sector using Eluvio Content Fabric. They were demonstrating their joint capabilities at the Amsterdam exhibition.
This is a non-exclusive deal, but Munson says: “They are our go-to-market partner in Europe today. They are so future-looking that they doubled-down to really understand us and invested their knowledge and time in this. They are a great group of people.” Eluvio has also created a Content Fabric operations team in Europe.
Eluvio Content Fabric is a next-generation content distribution and storage protocol that replaces filed-based workflows and legacy media clouds and CDNs with an alternative media delivery solution for streaming. It enables unlimited re-use of the same content without making file copies. The protocol runs in a decentralized manner over TCP/IP on an open global network of nodes, which is how it avoids the use of third-party media clouds or CDNs. Content owners do not have to change what they ingest into the fabric, while the output from the fabric is standard adaptive bitrate video, meaning no changes are required on receive devices.
Eluvio says its content fabric reduces bandwidth and storage requirements compared to existing delivery architectures, resulting in greatly reduced costs and carbon footprint. According to Munson, “The traditional content publishing and distribution stack has so much complexity because the media, metadata, processing are all part of siloed workflows, and achieving fast or scalable streaming performance is often by brute force.” She contrasts the ‘content native’ approach of the Eluvio Content Fabric to what she terms that ‘brute force’ of legacy distribution models.
Companies and creators whose content experiences have been powered by Eluvio include Amazon Studios/MGM, Dolly Parton, FOX, SONY Pictures, Telstra, UEFA, Warner Bros. and WWE. Announcements from Eluvio during 2021-22 included a streaming and ticketing platform for concerts and premium exhibitions, distributed directly from artists to their global audience, built on Eluvio Content Fabric, and Liquid Media Group’s first blockchain film streaming with a slate of digital panel presentations at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
Dolly Parton partnered with FOX Entertainment’s Blockchain Creative Labs to launch ‘Dollyverse’, an audience-centric Web3 experience. The “Dollyverse’ released an exclusive selection of official and certified Dolly NFT collectibles, including limited-edition NFTs of the ‘Run, Rose, Run’ music album.
In August 2022, a ground-breaking Web3 documentary experience for The Real Cannonball Run (a fast-paced docuseries about the legendary coast-to-coast automotive protest race across America) became one of the first films to be produced, curated and distributed on the blockchain directly to fans. The initiative used cutting-edge cloud and Web3 technology provided through a technical solutions partnership with the media solutions provider company called ‘base’, powered by Eluvio’s Content Blockchain.
During 2023-24 Eluvio has increasingly turned its attention publicly towards the direct-to-consumer streaming distribution market and on the eve of IBC disclosed European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) as a new customer. EPCR is using Eluvio for OTT live match streaming and sell-through, plus archive monetization, and was one of the featured case studies at IBC.
Eluvio’s Creator Studio App enables companies to manage, distribute, authorize and sell D2C or B2B media services. The company claims this app is ideal for building multi-platform branded media properties with multiple monetization options, including subscription and PPV. Live sports streaming, premium VOD and video archive services are among the use-cases. Creator Studio App combines easy management of Fabric-hosted content, and made its debut at NAB Show in April.
NAB also saw the introduction of a new generation of the Eluvio Content Fabric core, termed the Casablanca software release. Eluvio completed the Application Suite that goes with Casablanca in time for IBC, where it was given its full commercial launch. This is firmly focused on the premium live streaming, FAST and PVOD space.
Among other things, Casablanca is credited with ultra-low latency at scale for HTTP live streaming with standard HLS/DASH ABR globally. The company is claiming sub-second Fabric-to-client segment delivery times for 99% of clients and segments, with a 300-millisecond average. There is deterministic three seconds end-to-end latency at scale independent of client location, and no need for a custom player. Eluvio says the figures are proven in a performance testbed and global live events during 2024.
The Casablanca release supports multi-stream audio in live and VOD. It supports multiple languages, dubs and audio stream variants in one live stream playout. Eluvio promises fast start-up for giant VOD objects and says PVOD objects with many localization variants will start streaming instantly.
There is frame accurate dynamic content insertion in live and VOD streams, and just-in-time transcoding of ads and content, Eluvio says of Casablanca. This release also includes a holistic view of operational performance covering metrics like segment delivery times, playout buffer levels, configuration errors, source health and availability. The new Content Analytics & Reporting App provides always-on, real-time insights on viewing metrics, with support for detailed filter queries by title, geography and device.
Casablanca Release also introduces what Eluvio describes as comprehensive AI content discovery. This includes AI content tagging, summarization, multi-modal search, and automatic clip generation. For content security there is forensic watermarking in live streaming (in addition to VOD) using Nagra NexGuard A-B sequences with Fabric JIT transcoding and playout. All consumer video packaging, encoding and DRM combinations are available including for Microsoft PlayReady DRM, Google Widevine and Apple Fairplay. The company says pirated sessions can be instantly stopped at source via dynamic updates of content authorization policy.
Speaking about Eluvio’s prospects in the BVOD market, Munson says: “I would hope someone will use us for that.” In fact, the company is already running pilots for BVOD over the Eluvio Content Fabric. This market ambition partly explains the partnership with Bedrock, which has strong leverage in this space.
Jonas Engwall, CEO of Bedrock, says: “By combining Bedrock’s extensive reach and deep expertise with Eluvio’s next-gen capabilities, we hope to establish a new benchmark for how our customers can efficiently manage, deliver, and monetize premium video content to their audiences.”
Eluvio has never hidden the fact that it sees itself as a CDN replacement, and is also pitched as a replacement for established media clouds, so the obvious question is how much of the market the company could serve if D2C streamers agree with Munson that “it is a no-brainer” to use the Eluvio Content Fabric. Munson is confident they are ready for the attention and solution demand, but is the television industry really going to throw its weight behind a completely new paradigm for streaming over the Internet?
Munson says the Eluvio Content Fabric is a no-risk approach for content owners, explaining that Eluvio does not own the Content Fabric itself, having open-sourced the technology. If Eluvio went bankrupt the protocol enables a content owner to join their own node to the fabric, with that node taking on all the functions of the fabric. “If you added a bunch of nodes, you would be the fabric!”, Munson declares. “This is not a centralized model, and you could remove us, and the fabric could go on.”
“Yes, someone could build a rival fabric – anyone can build one,” she adds. “It’s a true utility network.” But it does require hard engineering, and that is what Eluvio has already done.
For any broadcasters (or other D2C streaming providers) wondering where their content is processed physically, this can be all over the world in theory, but Eluvio can meet restrictions to ensure data stays in certain nodes. A media owner could state data centre preferences, for example.
Editor’s Comment
The Eluvio Content Fabric has been a fascinating development since launch – and you can see one of my early stories on the subject (from when I was Editor-in-Chief at Videonet) here. It is potentially game-changing, if it is as great as Eluvio says, so we have been watching closely to see whether it has a role in large scale direct-to-consumer streaming. The Bedrock deal points in the right direction, so we now wait to see if Michelle Munson gets her wish, with a BVOD announcement.
Photo shows Michelle Munson, CEO and Co-Founder, Eluvio.
