OTT streaming video strategies for African service providers
The partnership will enable three6five, a leading IP networking service integrator in South Africa, to offer service providers in the region with Qwilt's award-winning open cache solution, as a leading strategy to address current challenges resulting from the growing demand for OTT.
The recent launch of new video streaming services throughout Africa is dramatically increasing traffic on operator networks as more subscribers start free trials and sign up for a monthly subscription, which often includes unlimited access to stream from the vast content libraries offered by these new content providers.
This rapid growth of streaming video offerings can create massive bandwidth demands for service providers who must find new ways to cost effectively and rapidly scale their networks without sacrificing quality of experience (QoE).
"The availability of new streaming services in Africa means that in order to remain competitive, network operators must redesign their network architecture to better support streaming video," said three6five CEO Tyrone Carroll.
Non-conventional approach
"A conventional approach to solving this problem means buying more routers, switches, links to upgrade networks and upgrading transit gateways and capacity. However, we believe and support Qwilt's open caching approach to solving next gen streaming video delivery challenges. No one knows streaming video and caching like Qwilt and, with over 100 open caching deployments worldwide, we're excited to partner with the company to bring the benefits of network cost savings and improved QoE to network operators of all sizes in Africa."
The company works with network operators across the continent to build and upgrade networks to cope with constantly evolving market demands led by the current advancements in streaming video technology. In doing so, there are unique constraints in Africa that must be taken into consideration such as high transit, peering and network infrastructure costs.
Additionally, with much of the OTT video content being served outside of the continent, maintaining the quality of subscriber experience and serving content at the highest available definition is a growing challenge. The company takes a rigorous and practical approach to IP services implementation and enabling reliable networks by fielding a range of best in breed products, combined with technical expertise to deliver technology recommendations based on real-world experience.
Africa could reach 60% streaming
"It won't take long before streaming traffic in Africa accounts for 60% or more of a service provider's downstream network traffic at peak, as we see now in Europe and the US," said Dave Matthews, VP of EMEA for Qwilt.
"With open caching, operators can offload 50% or more of streaming video traffic to a local cache on the network, reducing the cost of transit bandwidth and the cost of internal network capacity required to keep up with streaming demand. Our partnership with three6five will help operators prepare their networks to handle the rapid growth in streaming traffic from all types of content providers."
Qwilt's open cache solution is engineered specifically for high performance and scalable video delivery in the demanding environment of high capacity operator networks. Its solution is delivered as a fully managed service to speed deployment and streamline ongoing operation. The broader operator organisation, including network planning, engineering and operations teams, benefits from comprehensive media analytics, which offer insights into growth trends, content sources and consumer preferences. By relying on open caching for online video delivery at the network edge, operators can substantially reduce network capital and operational costs; a typical open cache deployment yields a return on investment (ROI) in less than 12 months.
"Qwilt is already working with a number of operators in South and East Africa where we serve over 50% of their video traffic locally. Based on these deployments, we have seen over 400% growth in streaming video in the last few weeks and are offloading online video content with greater than 70% cache efficiency in some cases. We've also seen QoE improvements in terms of average bit rate by 300," concludes Matthews.
For more information, go to www.three6five.com.
