The Broadcast Bridge: What was your view on the Content Delivery market before you joined MainStreaming, and how has that changed since you joined?

Raesig: At Joyn, as an OTT service provider with services covering multiple countries, it was always important to have a good balance between customer experience and cost.  Our efforts were focused on bundling total delivery volumes with the wider ProSieben services.  Before I left Joyn we had achieved a good commercial structure with multiple global CDN (Content Delivery Network) partners, but we had not been able to find a cost-effective CDN switching capability that would enable important real-time action on our streams during live events.

Joyn, like most other Streamers, had a big challenge with managing peak audiences on large live events, while VOD delivery had much lower peaks but much higher volumes.  We paid the same price for all types of content delivered but we could not guarantee the right level of capacity for peak audiences, and we could not get the best ROI for high volume VOD delivery.

I joined MainStreaming because I felt this problem could be solved, and I could see MainStreaming provided the ingredients to do it with its proven mix of public CDN and private CDN services.  It is clear to me that hybrid content delivery models that blend dedicated capacity and multi-tenanted public networks are the right solution to deliver best ROI to Streamers.

For ad-driven businesses, cost-effective reach is everything, so the mission is to have more viewers watching for longer.  Joyn was also a subscription service, which requires the absolute best possible quality for premium content on all devices to minimize customer churn.  MainStreaming’s solutions cover both options very well with the right type of capacity models for maximum cost-effectiveness while simultaneously enabling quality delivery of premium content.  Add to this the necessary observability of service performance, and I see that MainStreaming offers all means to enable Streamers to grow profitably.

The Broadcast Bridge: MainStreaming was founded in 2016 and now serves large customers like DAZN, Sky, Rai and Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta TV.  What has been the focus to reach this stage?

Raesig: Streamers working with live Sports typically have a content delivery profile with high peaks of viewership.  DAZN in particular sets a new standard by being a streaming-only provider for top-tier sports like football in some of the world’s largest markets like Italy and Spain.

These Streamers must maintain the highest possible quality during live events with large audiences.  Turning down the quality to reach all the audience is not an option because best resolution on the living room TV for high value subscribers is business critical.  It is a fundamental expectation of a live sports viewer, especially a paying subscriber.  It requires having delivery capacity of the highest quality.

MainStreaming has thrived with the Streamers you mentioned by working on tailored solutions to manage their delivery.  Our analytics solutions are integrated with our customers’ solutions to understand quality deeply and make optimization decisions in real-time.  Today our new CMCD+ implementation is further improving this capability.

The Broadcast Bridge: A major subject in the broadcast industry is the ongoing audience shift from Linear to Streaming services.  What does this mean for a content delivery business like MainStreaming?

Raesig: An important aspect of the shift from Linear Broadcasting to IP Streaming is that the proven delivery quality that broadcasters have evolved over many decades is changing due to now delivering content across multiple disparate networks and internet service providers.  This is creating challenging complexity and is compounded by the fact that sufficient network capacity for flawless streaming delivery is not available yet simply because internet infrastructure has not been built specifically for video delivery.

We can overcome this problem through close collaboration with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to optimize for video content, and not only web content.  This enables us to deliver the same broadcast quality as in the past.  But at the same time, broadcasters are used to having deep insight into delivery performance with full control of dedicated networks including rapid fail-over and back-up systems.  This has gone away with IP Streaming.  But building out private CDNs gives Broadcasters back the observability, manageability, and service quality they have been used to.

The Broadcast Bridge: Is there an ideal architectural blueprint we should be aiming for?

Raesig: I think the hybrid model of private and public content delivery networks operating together to optimize a streaming service’s total cost of delivery and quality of viewer experience (QoE) has been well-proven by streaming pioneers like Netflix and DAZN.  We can build on this model for all broadcasters.  

I would emphasize that the ideal architecture should utilize deeply deployed Edge locations inside ISP networks for maximum efficiency.  We already see from the streaming pioneers that a private CDN deployed strategically inside ISP networks as the core of the platform offers best possible control and ROI, and it also helps ease network congestion points for other upstream CDNs.   We have been a leader in this area and are pleased that our efforts have been acknowledged by the awards we have won this year.

I also should add that Streamer requirements for observability are growing fast.  The ideal architecture must include deep insights into how the streams are streaming, so Streamers and their suppliers can be proactive in managing all manner of quality and security issues.

The Broadcast Bridge: We all hear about the many billions of dollars that are lost to pirated video services.  It is a large industry issue that we know reduces the industry’s ability to invest in new content, jobs, and technology innovations.  What is MainStreaming doing to help protect Media revenues?

Raesig: The Piracy subject has two key elements – compliance with rights and revenue leakage.

Rights owners are strict about compliance with the rights they sell to broadcasters, and they do not accept under-performance.  Breaching of rights through a lack of content security controls is a serious issue.

Revenue leakage is a key business concern for subscription-based services.  Piracy drives substantial customer churn.  If viewers can access content for free or a lower price, they won’t pay for the official service.

Piracy is complicated because for every new security measure there will be a new leak.  Broadcasters must think about how long they can defend their content, how they detect security breaches, and what action they take against security breaches.  A specific consideration for broadcasters with live sports rights is how fast they can detect and act on security breaches.  Just like QoE, broadcasters want to act in the moment to address the issue.  It is not very helpful to do a post-event analysis as the damage may have been done already.  Acting after the live event is not good enough, and broadcasters should have a toolkit to act in real-time.   

This is why MainStreaming announced new Anti-Piracy services at IBC2024 and is very focused on delivering innovative real-time capabilities for our customers that will ultimately encourage viewers to pay for the official service.  We know this will bring important revenues back to the legitimate Media industry, ultimately helping us all invest for the future.

But Anti-Piracy is just part of the overall Security subject for Streamers. There is also a Data Security concern to overcome, for example European public service broadcasters wish to keep literally all their data preferably within their country or in Europe to ensure full compliance with the regulations and their taxpayers’ wishes. MainStreaming is well positioned to address this need as we can offer full compliance.

The Broadcast Bridge: Thinking about the future of production format and new viewing formats, how do different content formats like 4K, AR and VR drive your business?

Raesig: If you provide premium content and consumer expectations are equal to broadcast quality and latency, then you must ensure you meet that standard.

Implementing 4K can provide an amazing viewer experience and we see demand growing, but it does add to the general problem of not having enough bandwidth to serve the growing number of viewers. I see AR and VR in test beds and work is happening in smaller niche services, but in the next 3-5 years, I expect this type of content to add another level of significant demand on our delivery capacity.

Therefore, we are remaining focused on more distributed and smarter content delivery mechanisms that minimize traffic on ISP networks, to enable high quality streaming at large scale. We are building our experience ahead of the industry’s demand curve with our private CDN model that is already part of solving this problem, both technically and commercially.

The Broadcast Bridge: While the world of Streaming often focuses on the large global streamers like Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, and TikTok, what is your perspective on the key areas of growth for Content Delivery businesses in the coming years?

Raesig: The two main growth drivers in Content Delivery are the transition from Broadcast to IP delivery, and the introduction of new advanced viewing services.

An additional growth driver is the adoption of video by traditionally text-based and photograph-based publishers. Most publishing services and many corporations are now publishing a lot of video content. It wasn’t long ago that Instagram, as an example, contained mostly photos but now the amount of video delivered on Instagram is significant.

Yet another growth area relates to regional deployments. Even the most mature markets in terms of broadband penetration are not yet ready for the volume and scale of content delivery we are heading towards based on the main growth drivers I mentioned earlier. In markets that are developing from a broadband perspective, the problem is amplified. As I noted before, we need more capacity, and so we need to deploy smarter IP-based distribution technologies to efficiently support the growing consumer demand.

The Broadcast Bridge: The concept of the Edge is often a confusing one. People often ask “Where is the Edge?”. At the same time, Edge Computing is becoming more commonly used in Media Delivery. What is the Edge for MainStreaming?

Raesig: Our Edge is the last point in the streaming delivery chain where the stream and content is managed before it reaches the viewer’s device. In principle, the closer we are to the end consumer when we deliver a piece of video content to them, the less we utilize the network leading up to that point that starts from the Origin. This reduces network usage and risk of congestion, and because of that it also improves quality of experience and reduces delivery latency. It’s a win for everyone involved – the viewer, the ISP, and the content provider. MainStreaming’s technology is focused on deploying in this way, and we have been highlighted for this in recent Edge Computing reports from Forrester and STL Partners.

This architecture is even more important when delivering video at high scale. If 1000 viewers are in one part of a city and we deliver to them from their part of the city, we have fewer problems that affect viewer experience in the content delivery supply chain. And if we deliver content into that local location from other nearby Edges, rather than communicating back to the Origin or an intermediate caching layer from every Edge, we also help reduce overall network congestion.

This deeply distributed architecture is the most important improvement we can make to reduce the total network capacity required for streaming delivery. Our goal is to bring content once into an ISP network Edge domain, and then deliver content from the closest possible points to the consumer. This is what we define as the Edge.

The Broadcast Bridge: Multi-CDN is a common feature in most architectures at least for larger streamers? Is multi-CDN here to stay, and is it a trend for smaller streamers?

Raesig: Using multiple CDNs is common practice in the industry because it provides Streamers with reach, resilience, and price-competitiveness, even if it adds some business and operational complexities. We expect large streamers to continue to focus on multi-CDN strategies.

For smaller streamers, we see a growing trend towards multi-CDN. Historically, it has been difficult commercially and operationally for them to implement a multi-CDN set-up, but with growing audiences and more live streaming there are higher capacities required and more pressure on delivery performance, so utilizing multiple CDNs makes more business sense. Simple ways to manage a multi-CDN set-up are important and it’s another reason we have these solutions for our customers.

The Broadcast Bridge: The growth of Streaming is placing extra pressure on the Sustainability credentials of Media Delivery. How is MainStreaming approaching this subject?

Raesig: This is a very important topic and we should not underestimate the power requirements of IP-based delivery. As we increase total worldwide power consumption related to Streaming, we should be very conscious of the renewable energy sources we are using, but overall we need to focus on an absolute reduction in power consumption.

Using highly efficient systems for distributing content is key. In this area MainStreaming has focused on enabling our infrastructure to use as little power as possible. Our machines only go into performance mode when required and can reduce power consumption during off-peak times. This has been an excellent outcome of our partnership work with Intel.

On top of this base layer of power efficiency, we then look into any possibility to more smartly distribute content to reduce the equipment deployed. This is not about cutting corners on performance because we need great performance and energy efficiency. It’s not good enough to have one or the other. For example, if we can deploy our software-defined CDN functions into existing equipment of ISPs then we can avoid adding incremental hardware for streaming distribution. This sort of thinking is central to our work.

These approaches help us to be certified as carbon neutral. We will continue to make efforts to understand where there are additional power saving elements, working with organizations like the Greening of Streaming of which we are a founding member.

The Broadcast Bridge: So, what does the near-term future hold for MainStreaming?

Raesig: We are taking all the experience and insight we have gained in our home Italian market, working with the major media brands at very large scale like Sky, DAZN and Rai, and we are expanding internationally as quickly as possible.

We are building out infrastructure in Western Europe to provide the same hybrid model for broadcast-grade services to all the advanced streaming services in this region.

We are then taking our deep experience of streaming at broadcast-scale in a country with complex ISP infrastructure into emerging markets. We want to help the transformation of content delivery in these emerging streaming markets where ISP networks are complex and content delivery is often managed from outside the country’s borders or in a very centralized way that does not allow for streaming at scale.

Building local presence is another key element of our near-term business plan. We have established entities in Germany and the UK to have more local presence and business operations in each region.

And finally, because Streaming is a complex technology ecosystem, working with Partners is at the core of our business strategy. We are purposefully growing our partner network of systems integrators and managed service providers who bring our services to Streamers of all sizes. A great example is our recent collaboration to provide our services to support the distribution of Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta TV service, which has turned into a much wider partnership that offers our services to all types of Streamers in the German market. This is the type of partner-centric approach we are replicating in all the markets we are targeting.