21923 - SCTE Broadband Aug2023 COMPLETE v1 (1)

74 Vol. 45 No. 3 - September 2023 Issue There’s no hiding from it, more people today are shifting from watching video through traditional broadcasts to consuming streaming video across various devices. One shift that likely won’t ever happen is consumer expectations for a flawless video experience. Even though most streaming video is delivered over the Internet - an unmanaged network that can cause issues – viewers’ appetite for a high quality of experience remains the same. They want their online video to look and operate like broadcast television from cable providers. Indeed, as streaming video quality expands with UHD and 4K formats, network operators have struggled to create scalable delivery architectures devoid of buffering and providing seamless playback across various connected devices, including smartphones, computers, and smart TVs. On the Internet Service Provider (ISP) side, the demand for and subsequent rollout of high-speed broadband continues to surge, and service providers are finding themselves in a perpetual cycle of deploying additional capacity to meet viewers’ appetite for quality content. The typical strategy employed to address this demand is to expand their core and edge capacity through technologies like fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) and fibre to the home (FTTH), the latter being the primary strategy for large swathes of the sector. But ISPs are also unrelenting. They continue to look at new ways to improve network utilisation and ultimately reduce the inevitable bottlenecks within the network and across peering points caused by the more media-rich diet their subscribers are now consuming. So, what’s the way forward here? Open Caching promises to be the answer. What is Open Caching? Let’s start by defining Open Caching – simply put, it’s a set of interface specifications designed to implement a fully featured and unified content delivery network (CDN) whose edge nodes are deeply embedded in ISP networks. Open Caching was created by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA), Shira Kadmon, Program Manager, Qwilt In the streaming industry, there is one goal, and one goal only – deliver video streams in the quality they were intended. That’s what Qwilt’s mission is today. Shira Kadmon, programme manager at Qwilt speaks to Broadband Journal about what open caching is, how it works and what problems it’s trying to solve. Optimising By Shira Kadmon, Programme Manager, Qwilt video delivery with Open Caching from the industry