Advanced Television

Google Cloud unveils Media CDN

April 26, 2022

At the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit, Google has announced the general availability of Media CDN, which it describes as “a modern, extensible platform for delivering immersive experiences with unparalleled scale and intelligence”.

Media CDN will enable media and entertainment customers to intelligently deliver streaming experiences to viewers around the globe. The same infrastructure that Google has built over the last decade to serve YouTube content to over 2 billion users can now be leveraged to deliver media at scale to Google Cloud customers with Media CDN.

Google alsorevealde that large-scale streaming services including U-NEXT and Stan are already benefiting from this new service.

In a blog post, Google explained: “Media CDN’s foundational advantage is the Google network. We have invested decades of resources to build tremendous capacity and reach in over 200 countries and more than 1,300 cities around the globe. Modern video applications are sensitive to fluctuations in latency, so getting content closer to users enables higher bitrates and reduces rebuffers, resulting in a superior experience for the end user. Media CDN builds on the success of the existing Cloud CDN portfolio for web and API acceleration and complements it by enabling delivery of immersive media experiences. In addition to running on planet-scale infrastructure, Media CDN tailors delivery protocols to individual users and network conditions. Media CDN includes out-of-the-box support for QUIC (HTTP/3), TLS 1.3, and BBR, optimizing for last-mile delivery . When the Chrome team rolled out widespread support for QUIC, video rebuffer time decreased by more than 9 per cent and mobile throughput increased by over 7 per cent.”

“Media CDN also achieves industry-leading offload rates. With multiple tiers of caching, we minimise calls to origin — even for infrequently accessed content. This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs. These features are built into the product and seamlessly support customer content hosted on Google Cloud, on-premises, or on a third-party cloud,” added the blog post.

“We are excited to leverage Media CDN to continue to deliver an exceptional streaming experience for Stan users across Australia. 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,” commented John Hogan, Chief Technology Officer, Stan

“Our mission at U-NEXT is to deliver the highest quality and most entertaining content to our users. Google Cloud’s Media CDN helps us efficiently scale our infrastructure, which is challenging with a vast library of content. Media CDN offloaded 98.3 per cent of requests from our origin server while delivering consistent great quality,” added Rutong Li, Chief Technology Officer, U-NEXT

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