Disney and Lumen boost streaming, Google Cloud unveils Media CDN
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Disney and Lumen boost streaming, Google Cloud unveils Media CDN

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Disney and Lumen have partnered to produce standardised content distribution and management (CDN) metadata in an effort to improve streaming quality.

The multi-year deal is a result of both companies’ participation in the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA) – a consortium of 100+ businesses in the video industry that works together to improve the streaming experience for consumers.

Standardising metadata will allow content providers to use a common metadata model and a single API to publish CDN configurations to vendors.

For larger organisations with multiple brands, proprietary APIs can often be inefficient and costly.

Without the standardisation, firms will have to separately model and publish metadata within each CDN vendor’s management portal.

“We believe all streaming providers will benefit from standardisation across commercial CDN providers and the Open Cache industry, which is why we’ve led the charge, working alongside companies like Lumen, on evangelising this important work,” said Michael Fay, vice president of software engineering at Disney Streaming.

“Hundreds of millions of subscribers already engage with Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+, and as demand increases for our direct-to-consumer platforms, we believe standardisation will be a key driver in maintaining our reputation in delivering a high-quality viewing experience for subscribers at scale.”

Media CDN

In other streaming news, Google Cloud has unveiled a content and media distribution platform that will help media and entertainment customers to deliver efficient streaming experiences.

Media CDN is built with the same infrastructure that Google has used over the last decade to serve YouTube content and is now being leveraged at scale to Google Cloud customers.

Google says that its new platform achieves industry leading offload rates with multiple tiers of caching.

This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs according to the company.

Media CDN is built with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that will give viewers more control over how they can interact with content.

“We are excited to leverage Media CDN to continue to deliver an exceptional streaming experience for Stan users across Australia,” said John Hogan, CTO at Stan.

“With Google’s massive network and a deep reach into the ISPs, we are able to deliver the highest quality video for our users, no matter where they are.”

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