Background
This customer is a leading game streaming platform in China. Its live streaming content covers over 3,300 games. Numerous end users from all over the world, especially Southeast Asia and South America, are accessing its content via PC, web, and mobile terminals. Building on its success in game streaming, the customer has also extended its content to other entertainment genres, such as talent shows, anime and outdoor activities.
In May 2018, this customer went public and became the first listed game streaming company in China.
Challenges and Pain Points
As the customer’s business grew dramatically, so did the number of challenges. It was imminent for the customer to find a complete media streaming solution to address the following issues, and to improve the viewing experience of their end users around the world.
First, spotty cellular networks require streams in different bitrates
Almost half users of the game streaming platform are mobile users, and the cellular network environment is spotty in nature. Thus, it needs live streams in various bitrates to accommodate viewers from different network environments.
Second, poor push-stream quality
A significant number of anchors push streams from their mobile devices via a weak network. This not only leads to a poor quality of the push streams, but also degrades the viewing experience. Thus, this game streaming customer needs a solution to ensure the quality of streams pushed via terminals of weak networks and mobile terminals.
Third, lack of content auditing mechanism
While a lot of its content is uploaded by end users, the game streaming platform has an obligation to ensure the content is appropriate. Thus, a content auditing mechanism is needed to ensure the content quality and eliminate illegal content that is related to porn, drugs, and violence.
Forth, content infringement
The customer had frequently encountered live content hotlinking and copyright infringement, which negatively impacted its brand image as well as business income. Moreover, domain theft had induced extra bandwidth costs.
Solutions
CDNetworks Media Acceleration Live Broadcast (MALB) is an integrated solution for live content ingesting, delivery, processing, and protection. The following features of MALB have helped our customer, the live game streaming platform, to overcome its above-mentioned pain points and challenges.
Transcoding transcodes live streams into different bitrates in real time via CDNetworks powerful live transcoding centers. This meets the customer’s requirement of providing the same stream in different definitions for end users from different network environments and terminals.
QUIC-based Stream Pushing Scheme, which is compatible to traditional RTMP stream pushing architecture, effectively overcomes the issue of weak network in mobile devices etc. Because many anchors of this game streaming platform were using their mobile phones for stream pushing, the poor push-stream quality used to be a pain point of the platform. This QUIC-based scheme helped the customer to significantly improve its push-stream latency by 30% or more, and therefore led to a more smooth and clear viewing experience.
Real-time Screenshot has made content auditing a no brainer. With this feature enabled, CDNetworks will take screenshots of live streaming and storing the screenshots in CDNetworks Object Storage clusters. The live streaming platform can then audit screenshots to quickly detect whether any illegal content is being streamed.
Anti-hotlinking helps prevent live content from being stolen by third-party platforms. And the Watermarking feature further protects against content theft. These both solve the issue of customer’s content being stolen.
Key Impacts/Benefits
Providing end-users with high-quality video content and a pleasant viewing experience is vital for live streaming platforms. Only by doing so, can the platform attract more active users, and increase the traffic and popularity of the platform. This increased traffic and popularity will then generate more business income.
With more than 2800+ PoPs distributed globally, CDNetworks enables the game live streaming platform to deliver its live content to viewers all over the world in split seconds, reducing the viewing latency. In addition, CDNetworks live transcoding centers transcode a steam into various bitrates in real time, enabling viewers from different network environments to select the most appropriate bitrate and to view the video content smoothly.
Another key point for streaming platforms is content security, as content theft will negatively impact their business income. The security features of CDNetworks’ Media Acceleration Live Broadcast solution, including anti-hotlinking and watermarking, effectively protects the live content, ensuring the business income generated by popular content is not lost.
