The Myth of Cloud-Based Optimization Latency

It is likely to be a respectable assumption — if it have been true that cloud-based cell video optimization options encounter “latency” points — that video or different multimedia is delivered sooner with legacy, hardware-based, inline choices. Far from it! Cloud-based video optimization options are succesful of offering international cell operators and their customers with sooner video supply and superior bandwidth discount at a proportion of the associated fee, with high quality of the buyer video-viewing expertise a given.

Here’s the way it works. Latency happens when an internet web page is loading and fetching a sequence of small objects, like JavaScript and pictures. Anyone who’s watched an internet web page or cell internet web page load, whether or not within the dial-up period or in 2012, is aware of the sequence. Little objects like textual content will render first, adopted by the bigger ones like footage and movies. That’s latency — the big objects are being pushed via constrained community pipes, and subsequently want extra time to get to your display. The largest objects, and more and more the preferred ones today on cell, are typically video. You’re going to pay some form of latency penalty it doesn’t matter what for that video — for example, it sometimes wants 4-5 seconds of pre-buffering to get began, or it’d take even longer on a constrained operator community.

So sending that video out to the cloud to be optimized (i.e. decreased in network-clogging bandwidth) will make the supply even slower, proper? Wrong. The magnificence of cloud-based optimization options just like the one Skyfire deploys to cell operators is that the millisecond-level “hit” you absorb routing that video to the cloud for optimization is made up for — after which some! — within the optimization itself. That buyer sitting with cellphone in hand goes to see that video ahead of they in any other case would have with an inline answer, as a result of {dollars} to donuts it has been optimized, and subsequently delivered way more shortly. Inline options don’t catch all video format varieties, and once they do, they optimize at lower than half the bandwidth financial savings of cloud options.

Wouldn’t that then imply that the video is so compromised — so over-optimized — that customers could have a horrible viewing expertise? Au contraire. Numerous inside and exterior research verify that customers of a cloud-based video optimization answer merely can’t inform when their video is “optimized”. They actually love the fast start-up time and non-buffered expertise — to say nothing in regards to the bandwidth financial savings and hits to their bucket of megabytes on this new period of capped knowledge plans. Nearly seven out of eight U.S. smartphone owners say they care extra about smoothness and fewer buffering time on a normal definition video over excessive definition pixel high quality whereas watching cell video over a poor connection, in response to outcomes from a survey performed on-line in May/June 2012 by Harris Interactive.

In addition, the cloud itself in lots of circumstances will have a a lot fatter web pipe than the distribution heart does, resulting from backhaul constraints inherent with an inline structure. Cloud options can get that video to servers extra shortly, and thereby ship it to the consumer extra shortly. Users have a tendency to understand that, and so they are likely to reward their cell operators accordingly for good service supply by sticking round and never churning. Given an operator’s reliance on cloud-based structure as an alternative of an inline legacy mannequin, this additionally helps scale back consumption in that operator’s backhaul, as a result of movies are actually optimized earlier than they even attain the distribution heart. That leaves extra room for different knowledge in that backhaul, and it helps postpone the day of reckoning when extra gear have to be ordered to maintain up with ravenous shopper video consumption.

Mobile operators who want to improve the consumer expertise and scale back prices on their capacity-constrained networks ought to take into account cloud-based video optimization options, as a result of the parable of cloud latency is just that — a delusion.

Share your ideas on utilizing the cloud for cell video optimization vs. in-house, hardware-based options within the feedback part beneath.

Jay Hinman is the Senior Director of Marketing for Skyfire, the place he heads up advertising and marketing to international wi-fi operators, product advertising and marketing, outbound and on-line advertising and marketing and public relations.

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