As the countdown to the CDN World Summit event continues (taking place in London at the end of this month), we speak to Mattias Fridstrom, Director of Product Management at TeliaSonera International Carrier and one of the speakers confirmed to attend the event.


In your opinion how has the market for Content Delivery Network services evolved over the past year?

Obviously the demand for CDN services has increased enormously, specifically from the huge increase in video traffic being carried over the Internet. This is due to the change in consumer behaviours, more devices (three screens) and increased quality demand (higher bandwidths in the home, bigger screens, HD, live etc). Online video, carried over Internet (and specifically fibre) has been and will continue to grow.

Furthermore, the CDN market is constantly being increasingly commoditised, prices that have previously climbed down aggressively on almost a monthly basis have now been stabilising during the last year, and larger industries are finding routine ways of working with CDN providers, usually with a mix of multiple vendors to secure quality.

The CDN technology is still quite diversified, with most players at least partly having their own technology and solutions. But we now see signs that the video delivery technology is becoming more and more standardised. The three major technology providers - Adobe, Microsoft and Apple - are all adapting similar HTTP, adaptive bitrate technologies for example. This is allowing hardware providers to build more standardised technology, which is already happening, but we think we will see even more of this in the future.



How far do you think CDNs will continue to grow, given the steady rise in popularity of online video?

We think we will still see a rapid and large growth from today’s levels. Given the fact that the amount of services, the amount of content and the amount of devices for online video is increasing, in combination with the fact that technologies for video delivery and CDN are being improved and made cheaper, has led to a far simpler process for the setting up video services.

We also think that some type of content (such as feature films) will see their biggest growth for online delivery with emerging technologies. Net TVs etc have not until very recently provided an easy means of delivering this content online in the way the consumer wants it. We also believe that we are seeing a potential mind shift from the studios regarding their online content rights. They are realising that a different kind of content rights business model might be necessary.



What consequences do you think this might have for the telecoms industry?


Taking it from a carrier perspective, it will mean that the majority of traffic being carried over the networks will in fact be streamed video, which will need some kind of quality/capacity improving technology, like CDN, multicast or peer2peer. Multicast is not a realistic option for the moment, peer2peer is showing great promises but not with the same quality of control that you would like, hence CDN is the only practical solution for the moment. In the future we are sure that there will be more competition from other technologies as well, and eventually we will probably see a situation where there is a mix of technologies (most relevant on a short term will be CDN + peer2peer)

The CDN edge caching will enable more and more content to be stored further out in the network where the CDN nodes are placed, which will mean that whoever controls where the content is being stored also controls how and where the actual traffic is being delivered. For a carrier to miss out on the control of this content will mean potentially losing the majority of the traffic.

All this makes a CDN services an increasingly necessary complement to a carrier's portfolio.


What are some of the major current challenges faced by CDN operators?

The one major challenge is control over quality.

Delivering an online video stream involves a lot of stages and different parties being involved. It means that the streaming platform and all its components - both hardware and software, the CDN steering mechanisms, the network hardware and software, the peering/transit agreement with other carriers and ISP etc, and even the last mile ISP network - need to be flawless.

This leaves a large part of the chain outside the control of the CDN provider. Content customers expect the CDN provider to guarantee the whole end-to-end delivery. There are many challenges to solving this, including how to ensure an optimal workflow between the different components, how to prioritise traffic and control systems for ensuring this workflow, how to  optimise the deployment of the CDN to minimise bottlenecks in the network, and so on.

One issue connected to this is the different areas of competence and technologies, where usually there will be one CDN and/or network operator, one hardware vendor, one CDN software vendor and perhaps also one content management system vendor (for end-to-end video streaming services). They all need to work together, covering each gap in the interface both operationally and technologically to optimise the workflow.

The other big challenge, also connected to the control of quality, is the capacity to deliver live content to many simultaneous viewers, where in many cases a normal CDN setup and network optimisation will be insufficient. We think here we already see a trend with CDN “federations”, and we believe we will see this more and more. CDN providers will "loan" capacity to each other to cope with traffic bursts. Here we really believe peer2peer solutions will be an increasingly important component for ensuring successful distribution of a high number of simultaneous streams.