Synamedia Quortex Play is an impressive example of a new breed of video delivery solutions that are reshaping the economics of streaming – and the carbon footprint associated with unicast delivery. NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division was revealed as a customer in July, providing evidence for how the multi-tenant SaaS and its just-in-time streaming engine can help small channel owners go direct-to-consumer with live events, rather than relying only on YouTube or social media.
And while the democratization of owned-and-operated live streaming could expand the television market, the greatest gains from Quortex Play could come at Pay TV operators. There, this cloud-based video processing technology can dramatically reduce the cost of streaming a long tail of 24/7 linear channels that are usually counted in hundreds.
Synamedia’s Quortex Play is built on multiple innovations, the first of which is the just-in-time processing engine that builds video streams on-the-fly, when viewers request them, rather than creating them in anticipation of viewer demand. Synamedia says services “dynamically spring to life”, with streams launching in seconds.
The second important advance is the use of spot instances – those chunks of cloud resource that are not reserved and which become available at short notice, and which are therefore considerably cheaper to use. Quortex Play can be used with reserved cloud resource, and it can book this if there is any danger of running short of spot instances, but it delivers the big savings by intelligently switching the video processes (e.g. encoding or packaging) between spot instances. In effect, a linear video stream can jump between one CPU instance and another and then another, including for live streaming. There is no compromise on QoE, Synamedia says.
“One of the ‘secrets’ to this architecture is the way it pre-empts the loss of one spot instance and finds spot instances across one or multiple regions,” explains Julien Signes, General Manager, Video Network at Synamedia. “We know if a server will no longer be available in two hours’ time. If necessary, we can mix spot instances with regular, reserved instances. We can guarantee that nobody ever goes black.”
For the Pay TV market, cloud costs could be reduced by around two-thirds when using Quortex Play for the video processing on long-tail channel line-ups. Signes points out that a Pay TV provider could have hundreds of channels, and not everything is being watched at any given time. When you also consider the multiple ABR profiles for each channel, it becomes even more likely that streams being created are not always being viewed.
So, rather than generating the different ABR bitrate versions of the channel, Quortex Play will only create the profiles that are actually being watched. And if nobody is streaming the channel at all, no video streams are created. When a request is received, only the relevant video stream is fired up, within seconds, instantly drawing upon the cloud spot instances.
Synamedia conducted a limited time test with a major U.S. service provider with a large channel offering, analyzing the CDN logs to understand viewing across channels and ABR profiles. This found that 70-80% of the video produced was not being used. It was available in the origin server but not pulled. By ending this wasted stream creation, CPU resource, energy and cost are all reduced.
Synamedia acquired Quortex and its Quortex Play technology in July 2022 and Signes says the new “preoccupation with sustainability and cost” makes it the right solution for today’s market. “For service providers it reduces infrastructure costs and helps them meet CO2 reduction commitments,” he emphasizes.
Besides the long-tail channel use-case at service providers, Quortex Play is used for disaster recovery (reducing cost by firing up a replacement version of a channel only when needed) and for live events streaming.
Synamedia claims the improved economics using this technology will help accelerate the migration of live video services into the cloud. Signes points to smaller broadcasters as beneficiaries. “It provides a low cost-of-entry for a local news channel, for example.” FAST channels could also gain.
Signes reckons streaming costs for a mid-tier 24/7 channel owner can be halved, on average. Time-to-market is another advantage, with 40 hours given as the average figure for channels to deploy after signing up to the multi-tenant cloud SaaS.
NATO Public Diplomacy Division used Quortex Play to live stream the 75th NATO anniversary summit (in Washington DC during July). While this is not mass-market entertainment, Signes views the implementation as a showcase for how smaller channel owners can now afford to use the cloud for broadcast-quality live events D2C distribution.
The streaming made full use of the just-in-time stream creation and spot instance orchestration. NATO also made use of another feature of this solution – the way it optimizes stream processing in real-time based on viewer demand.
During the 75th anniversary summit, analytics revealed that a high number of viewers in Ukraine were watching on low bandwidth connections. The resolution of those streams was reduced on-the-fly so it was easier for those people to access the content. So, as well as ending or starting an ABR bitrate profile stream, this solution can also change the bitrate ladder.
Photo shows Julien Signes, General Manager, Video Network, Synamedia.
