Case study

Granting Customers Flawless Viewing Experiences With Agile TV

Media and Entertainment
Person browsing a streaming platform on a desktop computer showing popular TV series.

Challenge

A key issue in over-the-top (OTT) television streaming is ensuring glitch-free delivery of large live events. With high customer expectations of streaming quality and significant financial investments for streaming rights, Agile TV sought how to improve consistency of seamless, high-quality delivery.

Outcome

We built a high-performance, low-latency video CDN capable of delivering large-scale live events flawlessly – ensuring a glitch-free experience with no buffering or delays.

Agile TV is a leader in video streaming solutions, with one of its flagship products being TV content delivery network (CDN), which delivers Over-The-Top (OTT) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) content.

 

One of the biggest challenges in OTT streaming is ensuring glitch-free delivery of large live events. These events – whether local or global, a championship final or a reality TV showdown – draw massive audiences with high expectations. Major broadcasts like the Super Bowl, the World Cup or the Olympics not only come with intense media coverage and social media buzz but also represent significant financial investments for streaming rights. Given their visibility, failure is not an option.

 

For streaming providers, these high-profile events offer a unique opportunity to enhance brand reputation, attract advertisers and add value for subscribers. However, the risks are just as high – if viewers experience latency, buffering or interruptions, dissatisfaction spreads quickly, damaging trust and business outcomes.

 

Unlike on-demand OTT content, large-scale live events attract hundreds of thousands of simultaneous viewers, often on multiple devices and networks. This puts immense pressure on unicast delivery systems, making a high-performance video CDN essential for delivering seamless, high-quality streaming experiences at scale.

Smartphone streaming a live music performance, placed on a ledge in a dimly lit venue.

Live content vs VOD

When delivering OTT TV, not all content can be treated the same. Live content exhibits very different viewer behaviour compared to on-demand (VOD) content. There may be a huge number of clients requesting exactly the same content, with the majority of requests coming within a very short time frame. In our experience, 50-60% of all requests typically occur within the first two minutes.

 

Our objective was to build a high-performance, low-latency video CDN capable of delivering large-scale live events flawlessly – ensuring a glitch-free experience with no buffering or delays.

Professional video camera recording a performance in a dimly lit setting with purple lighting.

A high-achieving CDN is no easy task

Building a high-performance, low-latency video CDN is no easy task. Over several months, we focused on developing key features such as multi-threading support, chunked transfer encoding (CTE) and HTTP/2 implementation to enhance performance.

 

Let’s discuss the benefits so far:

  • The hardware (HW) streamer’s capacity doubled from 10K to 20K clients.
  • The software (SW) streamer now utilises 85-90% of network capacity.
  • Low latency has been reduced to just 2 seconds when streaming DASH-LL and HLS-LL content.

Ensuring system stability, however, was a long-term effort. Fixing critical bugs took years of debugging and root cause analysis. One major challenge was a hanging FPGA issue on the HW streamer when streaming DASH-LL, which severely disrupted customer services. Diagnosing the issue was particularly complex since it originated on the FPGA side.

 

By leveraging our deep expertise in kernel drivers and system architecture, we successfully identified the root cause. This breakthrough enabled the platform team to fix their bug and restore system stability, ensuring a seamless experience for our customers.

Professional working remotely at a desk with a laptop, documents, and a coffee mug.

Securing success in streaming for the future

To keep Agile TV 's customers satisfied and confident in products, a high-performance, low-latency video CDN is essential for delivering a high-quality viewing experience. By providing reliable and cutting-edge streaming solutions, Agile TV has significant opportunities to secure new contracts and expand its market presence.

 

This project nurtured a stronger, long-term business relationship for us and Agile TV, built on trust and credibility. Bolstering our abilities with a leading video streaming solutions provider helps to further our unique experience in the industry.

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