Voices of Video
Explore the inner workings of video technology with Voices of Video: Inside the Tech. This podcast gathers industry experts and innovators to examine every facet of video technology, from decoding and encoding processes to the latest advancements in hardware versus software processing and codecs. Alongside these technical insights, we dive into practical techniques, emerging trends, and industry-shaping facts that define the future of video.
Ideal for engineers, developers, and tech enthusiasts, each episode offers hands-on advice and the in-depth knowledge you need to excel in today’s fast-evolving video landscape. Join us to master the tools, technologies, and trends driving the future of digital video.
Voices of Video
Expanding Horizons with Open Caching and Edge Networks
What if harnessing the power of edge computing could transform content delivery and redefine your streaming experience? Join us as we explore this exciting frontier with Mark Fisher from Quilt, a leading innovator in the space. Mark shares his extensive journey through significant internet trends, highlighting Quilt's groundbreaking partnerships with industry giants like Comcast and their pivotal role in setting open caching standards. His insights reveal how these collaborations are not only enhancing performance but also shaping the very future of streaming technologies.
Our conversation takes a deep dive into the dynamic world of edge computing partnerships. We uncover how strategic alliances with operators like Comcast and technology titans like Cisco are facilitating the deployment of edge nodes, creating a seamless integration into cloud-controlled platforms. This discussion unveils the potential of real-time applications, such as gaming and rendering services, at the network edge, and offers a glimpse into the exciting industry developments that are unfolding. Mark helps us navigate through the complexities of implementing technologies like WebRTC, ensuring no single solution is seen as a one-size-fits-all.
The future of streaming is rife with challenges and opportunities, especially as the migration from broadcast to IP networks accelerates. We discuss the critical importance of network capacity for high-quality streaming, particularly during major global events, and the race for ultra-low latency delivery to sync with broadcast signals. As we look at emerging trends, Mark offers an intriguing perspective on the evolving landscape, including Netflix's shift towards live content and advertising. Plus, we get a fascinating peek into Quilt's expansion in the Middle East through a partnership with Saudi Telecom, underscoring the global reach and influence of edge computing advancements.
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
voices of video. Voices of video. The voices of video voices of video okay, well, good morning everyone. We are back for another very exciting edition of Voices of Video, and I have with me today Mark Fisher from Quilt. So first of all, mark, welcome to Voices of Video.
Speaker 2:Thanks, mark, good to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so we were talking before we started, you know, before we opened the session, and it's been 10 years since we crossed paths Now I think maybe it was a few years before that. Even We'll get into exactly what we're referencing, because we're going to talk about this kind of a cool thing that you know, Quilt has been doing beyond building your product. So, anyway, a little teaser we're dangling out there, right? But, yes, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:And I just want to say for everybody listening live, if you have questions, this is a fireside chat type format and we want to get to your questions and we're very happy to take really any question and if we can't answer it, we'll just say so, right, yeah, so so feel free to just, you know, type in some questions in the chat and our producer, anita, will pick those up and then you know we'll we'll do our best to get to them. So with that you know, mark, why don't you say a few words about who you are and what you do at Quilt? And then you know, I wouldn't assume that everybody knows exactly who Quilt is and what you do. So let's start there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great, and thanks for the invitation, mark, to join you today. So I've been working in various startups now for a number of years, maybe tracing or tracking with the big trends across the internet Early 90s, the commercialization of the internet, internet service providers, then to the mobile Internet with a company, danger, that was acquired by Microsoft, then to Internet of Things, a company, jasper, which was acquired by Cisco, and now at Quilt. I'm in every case and now I'm responsible for marketing business development. And now I'm responsible for marketing business development. It's been, you know, a great experience across the board, and what makes it great are the people that you are with, that you work with, whether they're in the company where you work or across the industry. That, for me, has always been very rewarding. Yes, so Quilt and I agree with you, not everyone would know us. We obviously had big news this week, an announcement of a partnership with Comcast, which we're very proud of and was years Absolutely Spend some time talking about that for sure.
Speaker 2:So Quilt is a software and cloud services company.
Speaker 2:We're unique because we really are focused on edge computing as a general category, but what we do to go to market is unique.
Speaker 2:In particular, we have a very strategic relationship with Cisco, who's an investor, and with them we go out and partner with big service providers and sometimes smaller service providers, and we do that to put our software on compute hardware deep inside their networks, close to consumers or businesses.
Speaker 2:And once that's done, that infrastructure is in place, that edge cloud, service provider, edge cloud then we turn, we unite it, we federate it, if you will, with our cloud services. And then we turn to today big content providers, some of the biggest stream platforms in the world, and we say, hey, we've got a better way to deliver your content live streams, vod or, in some cases, just software downloads. And we can demonstrate the difference by our performance, where we routinely outperform every other commercial CDN because we have this advantage of being closer. It's sort of that simple. At the beginning of what we're doing, we're taking that use case as the foundation. That's what gets us in the door with these big service providers, like a Comcast who we've announced this week, and then we're going to turn our attention to other edge computing use cases. We can talk about that as time goes on, yeah, yeah, amazing.
Speaker 1:Remind me, by the way, when was the company founded? What year was quilt?
Speaker 2:yeah, so we've got some history. Uh, we were founded in 2010 um that's right the company over 12 years now.
Speaker 2:we've, you know, it's been quite a journey and I should say, before talking about comcast, that, um, you know, one of the things we recognized early on, because we believe deeply in this notion of deep partnerships, collaborative partnerships with service providers that we can then turn and use as an infrastructure and network to do all sorts of things today content delivery. We were one of the founding members of what was at the time the Streaming Video Alliance. It's now the Streaming Video Technology Alliance, and we were very keen to be the catalyst, one of the catalyst companies for that, because we believe that the industry needed to get together in a collaborative way to build, among other things, the specifications, the standards for things like open caching, which is the foundation. With open caching and our work there, then the likelihood that they'll you know as time goes on embrace this, endorse this, deploy it and support it is that much better and that's proven to be true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's talk about open caching. Why don't you give you know the one-minute primer on what open caching is, and I also would be very interested in having you tell the evolution of you know. Explain the evolution of open caching from when the company was founded to now, because I think it's fair to say and I'm not going to take words out of your mouth but in 2010, networks looked maybe maybe very different. Is networks looked maybe very different goes too far, but looked different. The way content was delivered was different. In other words, 2010,. There was a different problem than there is today in 2024, so nearly 15 years later. So explain open caching and then you know how the technology and its application has evolved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, happy to do that. So, and just for background, on Quilt and I'm sure some of your viewers will know this and understand it perhaps better than I but we began with this notion of a product around transparent caching. Without going into that in detail, that was a clever way to help service providers more efficiently deliver content like big software downloads and streaming video in their networks. However, that depended on unencrypted traffic and it was clear to us pretty quickly that you couldn't simply depend on that. You know streams in the clear that could be then candidates for transparent caching. So with that in mind, and to your point about open caching, we had the vision for service provider direct participation in the value chain of content delivery.
Speaker 2:Obviously, there were CDNs at the time Akamai for example who were doing this in a different way, and we recognized, partly because we knew service providers and spent a lot of time with them, that I'll call it the traditional CDN architecture and methodology offered very little collaboration with service providers, and it's the way things have developed. It's the fault of no one, but there was a better way. So I'll just give you the extreme example We've had recently NFL games in the US, thursday Night Football, for example. That's publicly known. Amazon delivers that through streaming. Peacock delivered famously some NFL games earlier in the year and then just recently In the traditional method. A big CDN, a commercial CDN, would deliver literally millions of redundant unicast streams into the exchange points, peering points, of a major service provider like Comcast.
Speaker 2:And those would trace their path through the core, out through distribution and then into the access network, into viewers homes. That creates a really inefficient traffic flow and even contact. During the earlier in january this year, when the nfl game the playoff game was was streamed via peacock. They said it was the biggest day on the internet for them ever. That one event.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Something like 16 million right Concurrent.
Speaker 2:Correct, it was the largest streamed event in the US so far and I'm coming back at open cash and so sorry for the journey here, but we recognize there's a better way and and in that in in looking at this, we said you know, if we could get a service provider to be a participant in value stream, deploy the caching technology deep in their network in a very distributed way and close to users, we could send and it's literally a simple you know one or two Unicast streams into the network.
Speaker 2:They reach those caches and then from their fan out to the user's homes. As many as I want to watch. It could be 16 million, it could be 100 million for the super and the offload benefit to the service provider is massive, Massive. 99% of the traffic vanishes off the core. And they don't have to build a bigger network through brute force.
Speaker 2:They can simply depend on open caching. We took what was a network transport problem or use case. We transformed it into an edge computing use case. Edge computing wins in efficiency and economy every time, but we recognize that to do this, we have to get the industry together, sit at a table together, start to translate and build the specifications that would allow this to happen in such a way that everyone at the table and I mean by that service providers, content providers and even CDNs everyone's a participant in that, such that, when it's done, everyone can look at it and say, yeah, that's exactly what I wanted, let's do this, and that's what happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really.
Speaker 1:I know it was a ton of work. You know, to build an industry forum is. I mean, if someone has never done it, they just you just have to do it to understand how hard it is and then not only to build it but to keep it running and then to have it achieve its mission. You know, I think and you know we don't have to talk about all the failed attempts and the groups that started and then kind of flamed out, but congratulations, because it was a huge initiative for a vendor to take on and I was fortunate and honored to be in some of those very first In fact I think I was at the very first meeting and some of the other subsequent meetings. First, in fact, I think I was at the very first meeting and some of the other subsequent meetings. So it was really cool to see how the SVA and then now the SVTA, you know, has evolved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just to add to that quickly, you know we had, at the time of the announcement of the formation, we had some outstanding founding companies right Among those.
Speaker 1:That was amazing.
Speaker 2:Among those was Comcast right, verizon level three. Now Rumen Fox was on board.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Baseball. You may remember Joe, and Zarrillo was the-. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Of course, of course.
Speaker 2:It's not the result of any one company or one person's vision. It's the collective power of a group saying let's make this better. And I should say the SVTA, now run by Jason Thiebaud. It's got a huge remit. The domain of opportunity and use cases and problems they're looking at is pretty vast, and they've done good work across a wide variety of issues that the industry faces, and one of the unique things we felt about the SBTA is that it wasn't a narrow audience of people trying to solve a narrow problem there's room for that but this was the full ecosystem saying let's look at each of these things. It could be live streaming, it could be quality measurement, it could be advertising a really wide range of things and so I'm really happy to see how effective it is yeah, yeah, well, let's so.
Speaker 1:So tell me this for those who aren't as familiar or haven't deployed Quilt or, you know, haven't talked to you directly, tell us is Quilt a software company and you know you're deploying your, your solution, you're licensing your solution that then an operator is deploying? Are you actually deploying hardware? What is your model? And you know? I think that would be good, yeah absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thank you and yeah, so in simple terms, and I'll describe the method by which we deploy, maybe that'll help illustrate. We're a software and cloud services company. So let's first take the side of the equation where we're working with an operator. We create a partnership like Comcast. We won't buy the hardware. We work with Cisco and in some cases they provide their hardware UCS into the solution, or the service provider can bring its own hardware. Either way is fine.
Speaker 2:We then, and they deploy that right, so they provide the space, the power, the networking, you know the IP that goes into that. They put it as deep in their network as possible. This is something we work with them in advance on the design. We then put our edge software there OS, and then the edge applications that we offer. We web connect that, so we connect that to our cloud, so we cloud enable each of those nodes and just as an example say, for example, with Verizon, there would be hundreds of those nodes across their network to support. And then we in every case, for every operator and there are, you know, 180 plus operators worldwide who support this today- worldwide who support?
Speaker 2:this today. We unite those or often it's used, the term's used. We federate those onto a single unified platform where the control plane is in the cloud that we run and then we can onboard a content provider. It's publicly known that Peacock, for example, is on the platform and with that single API interface, which is a SVTA open caching standard, we can bring that content provider onto the platform and then expose to them, make available to them, the universe of federated service providers that are using our open caching technology. Interesting, yeah, so that's the short version. Hopefully that.
Speaker 1:Okay, one of the things, one of the questions I have, because it's very much a personal interest and for NetEnt, you know we're getting involved more and more as hardware is making its way. As hardware is making its way, um, dedicated hardware is making its way into the video network and so I'm speaking of, you know, gpu or vpu to do real-time much higher capacity video encoding, transcoding, that's, um, you know, not bound by a CPU so much, much more efficient. Does the open caching standard enable, for example, now, encoders to be at the edge of the network, so that you're actually even doing the encoding in real time at the edge of the network? Can you comment on that? Is that built into the standard? Is anybody deploying that? Are they thinking about deploying it or is it not you?
Speaker 2:know possible. Well, it's certainly possible. Let me approach it from a couple of perspectives. So we don't have anyone who's doing that today. We've had that conversation because it's of interest to some. For the reasons you're saying, it could be a more efficient way to do this. Um, open caching doesn't? The specifications at the moment don't explicitly address such a use case, but there's there's no reason why it couldn't be.
Speaker 1:You know, part of the suite of use cases that are in other words, rather than, rather than pulling a stored uh, either a stored asset or a a stream being the input, it could, literally the input could be an encoder. Right, it's just sitting there and it's producing. You know it's outputting the appropriate files in real time, you know the appropriate encodes for whatever device.
Speaker 2:You know it's is uh being supported, I guess, or devices uh, yeah, yeah, exactly right, and, as I said that there have been a number of people who've talked about it with interest, um, yeah but the other one just throwing you know new ideas. Uh uh, gaming companies have talked about doing rendering at the edge. I think it's kind of a similar notion which is, yeah, you can do it there more efficiently and faster, so these things are coming, I think and there's no reason why open cache and can't support you, you, you, no doubt.
Speaker 1:uh, netflix knows who you are, but you know you should be talking to netflix because obviously it's very public. They are building a cloud gaming network and it would just seem to me with their Open Connect platform, which of course they write a lot about. So this is all public is kind of the largest edge distributed network, probably in the business, and maybe not, but at least with my limited understanding. So, yeah, very interesting well let me comment on that just generally.
Speaker 2:This is not about netflix specifically, but just generally. One of the things that we've heard from service providers telcos, broadband providers, cable providers, mobile providers is this idea that, um, a lot of people, a lot of and you can imagine, I'm sure you know them all but a lot of companies some hyperscalers, others with streaming services want to get into those networks and want to be deployed deeply with their, I'll say devices, their edge delivery devices. But it seems to be a consensus among service providers that they're saying, yeah, I can't do that for 10, 20, 30 people. It would be a nightmare to manage.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of hardware. That's exactly right, and so at least several that we've spoken to, who are major service providers, are saying we'd like to have this capability on a unified platform from one partner that we can then offer to all, and and that's at least um a sense that we're getting about open caching, because it, as we've already said, it's it's a industry specification, yeah, adopted as a standard by the itf, uh, and it's open, and so so this is something that we think works in our favor so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great. Well, this is the perfect lead-in, because you referenced the Comcast announcement that came out. That was Tuesday, I believe, so we're recording this on Thursday, so a couple days ago ago now. Congratulations, uh, uh. We even have some listeners who have, uh, who have posed some questions. So, um, I I want to talk about this, and one of the questions that I have and and I saw in the chat, is you know, maybe, maybe you can explain in layman's terms, you know, how, how this is going to improve the streaming experience for Comcast customers? And, like, my question is sort of a follow-up is is this a Comcast customer of the Cape? Because you know one of the things we always, when we say Comcast, are we talking the cable network, are we talking the you know the IP over QAM, or are we talking the open Internet?
Speaker 1:So maybe you can even clarify that. But just in layman's terms, how is this going to improve the experience? Comcast didn't do this just because they needed a press release, so there's a reason that they're adopting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's exactly right. Um, and you can imagine now, they were one of the founding uh members of the streaming video tech.
Speaker 1:I remember that yeah, so we we've got some. You've had a long deep. We spent time with them, you know but very specifically.
Speaker 2:So this is comcast, the you know cable provider okay, okay.
Speaker 2:Interesting. It's the network, yes, and so they're a national ISP three plus million broadband users. They're very, very big in the US, one of the biggest cable providers in the world, and, as I mentioned earlier that we will have compute hardware placed deep in their network in a highly distributed architecture. It will be the most distributed CDN if you will ever. And on that hardware that they provide and they run and own and operate, we will put our software, we will cloud connect it and then we will provide the control plane that unites that into the rest of this federated network I've been talking about.
Speaker 2:So why did they do this?
Speaker 2:I think and there's a sorry for the just like straight up marketing promotion here, but there's a great video on our site in which our CEO, alain Mayor, interviews network officer Elad and he talks about you know the dynamics, the forces that are driving them to this kind of outcome, a partnership with us, and they have other announcements about virtualization. But specifically, they're trying to activate their edge because they know it's valuable and it's of interest to many in the industry, not just streaming providers In such a way that it's unified, that it can be made available to anyone who wants to make use of it, to make use of it, and it would be then used for a whole range of use cases, not just streaming, but potentially gaming. Other consumer use cases. There are enterprise use cases right that, for example, networking, security, collaboration, iot, connected cards. There's a really broad range of edge computing use cases that I think. Well, in their case, I think we see with them coming and their goal is to create the foundation on which all that stuff can be built and run efficiently.
Speaker 1:And so this is hopefully that's helpful. This is what's driving, I think, their effort here. Can you quantify? You said it's the largest distributed CDN or network. What does that mean? Is that based on number of machines? Is it number of locations? Is it capacity? What exactly does that mean? The largest?
Speaker 2:Yeah thank you, it's good to be clear about this. So, in our view, when we talk about distributed, we're referring to some people call it on net distribution. We often refer to it as deeply embedded caches of who has the most deeply embedded caches. I'm putting aside capacity for the moment, because we have more than enough capacity to deliver against the demand we and the customer demand we have today, but it's the proximity and the distribution that gives us advantage, right? So we're inside the network, we're downstream of peering points, exchange points that can be congested, but, more importantly, we're deep in the network, over on the access side, past the core. We're downstream of peering points, exchange points that can be congested, but, more importantly, we're deep in the network. You know, over on the access side, past the core, past aggregation, sitting on the access side. So there's nothing closer, there's nothing with more proximity than we have. And if you were to aggregate all of these in this federated CDN that we have, all of these deeply embedded caches, nobody has. This is thousands of caches that we have. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, yeah, definitely that's helpful. You know, I recall that Comcast recently launched an enhanced 4K service, and maybe that was around the Olympics, I'm not remembering now exactly, but I'm just curious is there any relation there or can you tip your hat towards? Is this now going to enable some, shall we say, say, higher quality experiences? Because, let's face it, when you talk about, you know whether it's quote enhanced 4k or, you know, xr, vr, even gaming for that matter the big challenge, the big hurdle, is really network capacity. At the end of the day, um, so you know, people say, you know how come. You know service x, service y, service z, you know they don't have more 4k or they don't. You know, you know they're not streaming with better quality and it's like, well it? It's pretty simple it comes down to capacity and cost you know.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I curious. Can you comment on? Is there any you know? Were you an enabler to that or you know that announcement?
Speaker 2:Well, 4k is one of the use cases that's enabled, if you will, by what we're doing. Absolutely, you know. I don't think it was the driver, for the reasons I've already said. They have a vision for edge computing that transcends 4K or any one thing.
Speaker 1:But yeah, 4k would be an example.
Speaker 2:But back to your earlier point, and I completely agree capacity is the scarce resource here. As we look at what's happening with the use of internet and streaming, just look narrowly at live streaming. Uh, you know, we. We say 16 million live streams. That's a us record. You know the the super bowl is a hundred million users. Do we want to someday exclusively stream that event? Maybe, and so it's. You're exactly right, the, the capacity to do it. It becomes the constraint and, as I said, that's what we solve for when we work with service providers, like we do, because we're offloading, you know, 99% of the core traffic associated with a big event. That's the way you get to 100 million. I mean big events, right, the cricket finals, that's a billion viewers, and if they all want to stream it, that's a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. Well, I am looking here in the chat and there are a number of questions that came in and then are coming in, so why don't we switch here? It continues. Many of them are in the direction we're already talking, so yeah, so okay, what are the main gaps? To bridge the gap of the big migration of broadcast to IP? Ip Boy, this is an interesting question, but you're working primarily with service providers, so I think you're in a good position. Just comment generally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, generally and there's several parts to this at least that we see so many of these big service providers, cable companies, for example, they're already going to all IP services, right. So, for example, I mean I'm a Comcast customer at home. When I watch Xfinity, I'm streaming it, right, it's not the broadcast signal that I'm getting, I'm streaming from their platform. Others are doing the same thing, and when we're deployed in one of these networks, and when we're when we're deployed in one of these networks, we can support that streaming of their managed content. We do that today with Verizon, fios TV, for example. So we help enable that.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of doing this responding in part to your, to your question. The larger question of the massive transformation from broadcast to IP is certainly underway. We see those trends, but it will take time and, as I said, capacity is one of the constraints that needs to be solved for to get us to the other side. You know it'll take years, for sure, right, for everyone to stop using broadcast television and start streaming, um, but but it's, it's an unstoppable force in the industry, it's inevitable, and so I think it's just. You know, so I think I, I I would.
Speaker 1:I would like you to comment, though, because I think the question, uh, is okay. All all of what you said is true and you know the trends and, like you say a lot really, all of these networks, they're already IP networks, so you know one of my. So my initial response to a question like this is like well, what gap are you talking about? Because, fundamentally, other than I don't know, you know some really remote regions of the world, or you know where there still are significant legacy build-outs, like I don't know in the Americas who isn't running an IP network, you know. So now that's my response. I'm sure others, who are much closer to the details, could say, oh, but Mark, you know. I'm sure others who are much closer to the details could say, oh, but Mark, controlled network, my closed network, and then I have my inner the internet right, because that is still true and even inside Comcast, right, you know there, there there's sort of two networks. I mean not sort of. There are two networks you know that you interact with.
Speaker 1:So I'm wondering do you have any perspective of you know like at what point, or will they never merge for whatever technical or political reasons, or you know whatever.
Speaker 2:Well, again, I think it's going to be a long, long time before somebody shuts off the broadcast network at one of these big companies.
Speaker 1:For example.
Speaker 2:The other gap, though just to continue on the list would be solving for ultra-low latency delivery. So we want the signal, that's right. If someone's streaming to arrive at the same time the broadcast signal does, so that you know, the classic problem of social media spoiler doesn't take place. I think we're getting there and we're working with one of the largest streaming platforms in the world on a ultra low latency protocol, awesome UDP based that is delivering the signal within you know, a few seconds, five seconds.
Speaker 2:So we're starting to see that part of it being, because it used to be right, maybe 60 seconds, which was an unacceptable delay, and people wouldn't consider that if they had you know, money riding on the game, but we're getting there on that front. But yeah hopefully the problem, you know, the transformation, the migration. It'll take time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, for sure, okay. Well, a question that came in was about WebRTC and specifically the person is asking you know, well, I'll just read the question, because it's pretty well formed what do you think about the future of streaming via WebRTC and then its impact on CDN infrastructures? And they go on to say and transcoding. So yeah, webrtc, is it playing a factor? Will it never play a factor? Is everything going to go to WebRTC? What's your view there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think this is promising. I'm afraid I'm going to answer it in the more general case, because I've used the example of one of our customers who's a global streaming platform and they're using a UDP-based stack for live streaming. That gets us to a few seconds of delivery, that is, latency between the broadcast and the stream. If it's going to be WebRTC, great, we can support all of this. So we're looking for you know what our customers want, as opposed to for us, you know, promoting a particular path or a very specific stack. Beyond that, I, you know, I will see, we'll see where this, where this goes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, exactly it's. It's a really exciting space. It's a really exciting space and I think you know. Just my personal commentary is I think one of the challenges excuse me that we have in the industry and when we're having these sorts of conversations is that there is no sort of hand wave. You know and I'm picking on WebRTC here but there almost never is a scenario where it's like, well, webrtc is going to solve that, or XYZ is going to solve that, or oh, this is going to you know, sort of that.
Speaker 1:And oftentimes I find I'm in conversations where questions are framed or where it's kind of like. It's like, oh, but isn't you know, fill in the blank, technology going to solve that. And it's like, well, let's zoom out. And first of all, you have to understand the incredibly complex architectures of how content is delivered from you know, from origin, from source, from you know, whatever the topology, whatever the topology is, to the viewer.
Speaker 1:In one scenario, it actually might be true that WebRTC largely is going to be the way the content is delivered, but for that very same stream, there could be another scenario based on a different geographic proximity and the networks that are involved and the devices that are involved, that WebRTC will never work, you know, and there can be a third, and there's a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. So I make this observation more for listeners who are listening, you know, to conversations like this or just having other conversations throughout the industry, and it's very natural and it's perfectly reasonable to be really leaning in like, hey, what technology should we be looking at, building on, maybe even doubling down on? But regretfully, for all the years that I've worked in the space, I have never seen, and I don't see in the future, a scenario where a technology is want to debate. You know, feel free to comment on LinkedIn, you know, let's talk about it. So, all right.
Speaker 2:Let's move on, Completely agree.
Speaker 1:Mark, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, let's move on. So all right. So here's an interesting question. All right, so here's an interesting question how can hundreds of gigabytes of data be used for real-time analytics? What can the best turnaround expect? How can hundreds of data be used for real-time analytics?
Speaker 2:Do you know what this question means use edge computing as a resource to handle processing of data in proximity to the device that's producing it, because that's more efficient and more responsive than centralized cloud computing? Yeah, the answer is very possibly yes, and at least there are definitely use cases around edge computing where the assumption is we want to process analytic data from a device as close to that device in the cloud edge cloud as close to the device as possible. Uh, so so?
Speaker 2:we're not doing that today that's not a current um use case we're supporting, but I think it's okay there, in theory it's it's one that's possible yeah I don't know if that's the question okay, all right, well, um, well, feel free.
Speaker 1:I know Mark is very accessible on LinkedIn. I'm accessible on LinkedIn, so you know. If we don't hit your question or if you have a question that you weren't able to raise, yeah, hit us up. Ok, are you developing? This person wants to know if you're developing the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, so I think it's like Saudi Arabia, bahrain. So yeah, are you you know? Do you have any deployments there or anything coming up, or can you hint something coming up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can say what's public, which is we have. We announced some time ago a partnership with STC, saudi Telecom.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And we are deployed there and they have announced again publicly that they are delivering content throughout the region. I can't name exactly the countries within that region, but they're referring broadly to the Middle East. So yes, we're there with that partnership and it're referring broadly to the Middle East. So so, yes, we're there with that partnership and it's active.
Speaker 1:Awesome, yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great. Okay, um, well, let's, uh, let's, you know, let's wrap up, um, where I have a two-part question for you and I won't do the usual, you know, crystal ball. Where are we going to be in five years? I, I, personally, I hate those questions, yeah, but but I do have a two-part question and it's and, and I'll start I'll. I'll start with the first part and that is where.
Speaker 1:How are networks? You know, I referenced it when you started the company, when Quilt was founded in 2010. It was. You know, network architectures look different. You know, largely. You know 95% of, or what you know. I'm just guessing. I don't know the real number, but it's probably in that range of content being streamed.
Speaker 1:It was file based, it was bod. You know, there was actually, um, relatively speaking, very little live. Uh, I mean, there was live video. I'm not saying there wasn't, but you know very little. Um, certainly, that hasn't been flipped. I mean, still, the majority of content is still file-based, it's still VOD.
Speaker 1:There's an asset that's sitting on an origin server somewhere and being distributed, but let's face it, you see, netflix who, just a couple of years ago, I can remember famously, this was more than a couple of years ago. You know I can remember famously this was more than a couple of years ago. But asking somebody whose name I won't reveal, but somebody we all know very well inside Netflix, at that time, you know, why doesn't Netflix do live? And the response that you know that I got back was I mean, it was as firm as anything Netflix will never do live. All about the VOD, you know, sort of like ad. You know Netflix will never do advertising. And then, next thing, you know Netflix is doing advertising very much and you know so, on transforming, you know um, over the next, you know, say, three to five years, so kind of the medium term horizon, uh, with this really decided move to like live live streaming. You know, and and it's not going anywhere. It's not like this is a fad.
Speaker 2:This isn't 3d video, remember that yeah, by the way, the first part of my question is got.
Speaker 1:I got it, where are we?
Speaker 2:going the. The netflix comment lives now in the archive with apple's comment they would never sell a phone, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, exactly, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know I I think, and just looking at at streaming and video, um, you know things are happening there. Live is is more and more a part of the fabric. Exclusively live streamed events are that way. I mean you just look at this is public around Amazon. But look at what they're doing with Premier League. I mean I don't think there's a sport at the moment that they aren't live streaming. They're securing deals to exclusively stream events across the spectrum of sports. There is live linear right, so there are fast services that are increasing as well.
Speaker 2:We see that taking off. I think, just sort of generally speaking, we will see this continued migration and preference from consumers. I think that's the most important thing, never mind what platforms are promoting what do consumers like. There's a whole host of reasons, I think, for consumers to prefer to stream an event either video on demand, but certainly a live event rather than watching a broadcast television. You know mobility, flexibility, it's extraordinary and the selection of content is just kind of endless. So I think we'll see that just continue to take off. There are things like 4k streaming, as you mentioned. There's immersive experiences, you know AR and VR, those kinds of things, maybe some of them being promoted by Meta and others. That, I think will you know will potentially see get more traction.
Speaker 2:I'll just say too, and this is maybe the more boring part, we see enterprise use cases as also picking up here where, as I mentioned before, collaboration, iot, connected car security, networking those will consume resources at the edge, and that's the kind of thing we expect.
Speaker 1:So what does this mean, though, for how networks are built? Um, because that that's really a heart of my, of my question, and I'll and and I'll, and I'll add another layer of context. Um, I, I guess, a couple years ago now, akamai bought linode. Right now, uh, and they're, and they've been very active out promoting, uh, you know the the edge, edge computing. I mean linode is their. You know cloud edge, edge computing, I mean Linode is their.
Speaker 1:You know cloud edge computing platform, and I mean we both just came back from IBC. You know a lot of. You know Akamai is out there and, by the way, other networks too. It's one of the trends that I, dan Rayburn and I talked about in a couple of days ago in his latest podcast episode. Was this trend? So then, my question is okay, if Akamai is building compute into the edge and you know they're positioning it a little bit different, I mean, you know everybody has their angle right, but at the end of the day, this is edge computing, you know at the end of the day, you know that's what they're doing.
Speaker 1:They're making hardware available in a distributive fashion that an Akamai customer and one can assume Tata and kind of go down the list of all the obvious that they're probably either doing it, are doing it, planning to do it, and just haven't announced it this is coming. Are doing it, planning to do it and just haven't announced it. You know like this is coming. So what does this mean for the way that CDNs and networks are built and the architectures? You know? What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:on that. Well, yeah, I mean, and Linode is a good example to bring up, at least from public statements. They were, linode was maybe 20-something sites. At the time of the acquisition, akamai paid, I think, $900 million for the company. They've announced plans since then to roll out. Akamai has announced plans to roll out to 100-plus locations with that technology, with that edge computing stack from Linode, with that technology, with that edge computing stack from Linode.
Speaker 2:Back to the point about networks. It seems to me that if you're, you know, really focused in on edge computing, there's a definition there that plays right. So it could be a premise edge, the device where some of those edge computing use cases are running, because that's the most efficient place to do it. But it's not no longer the centralized cloud. We know that. That's understood. What the hyperscalers do we believe that back to your point about networks that it's the service provider who has unparalleled proximity scale reach service provider who has unparalleled proximity scale reach that has to activate in their network an edge computing capability and it should be as deeply embedded, as close to the users as possible. That's where we come in and I think others, if you look at the hyperscalers Azure, aws, I mean they do have a kind of edge ambition and in many cases they believe that should be sitting inside a service provider network.
Speaker 1:We agree with that.
Speaker 2:But you know, the service provider has to be a collaborative partner if that's going to happen. And that's at the heart of what we do really well. You know, you mentioned Alkama. It's not clear to me whether they can really activate that in the same way. I think that's the, you know, the mystery that has to be solved. Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating. I think we can end on this note. I won't really pose it as a question, but I'll give you a chance to you know, either say yes, you know, or comment further. But it seems like where Quilt is positioned really well is that you know you're able to bring together the constituents who you know. There's obviously technology components. There are technology components that you bring that are needed, right, that a service provider needs to be able to deliver.
Speaker 1:You know, throughout this, you know, as I used the word earlier morass of networks and architectures, right, no-transcript, it's public and well-known. You know Netflix has done an amazing job of building out OpenConnect. I mean, I think the last public number, like whatever 80,000, you know machines or pops or I don't even know how it's defined, but it's a huge number that they have deployed. They've done an amazing job. But that was hard and there's still networks who are like yep, not in our network, you know, and so that's a challenge. You reference Akamai. You know like, like ah, you know there's some where it's kind of like oh, we're not too excited about maybe getting, you know, having having a commercial CDN inside our network. So is this is my characterization correct where you know you're bringing technology, but you're also able to bridge some of these gaps. Is that, you know, either too simplistic a view or is that an incorrect view?
Speaker 2:No, Mark, you're spot on. Yeah, you're spot on and I'm glad you raised this point A good way to maybe close up. But yeah, the tech we bring is powerful and open caching as an open specification is powerful for the reasons we've done really well. That sets us apart is recognize early on the need to collaborate deeply with, cooperatively with, service providers and bring that, bring the ecosystem, the value chain together in that way. I should say, quilt of the inspiration for the name was, to this very point, the idea of stitching together a fabric so that it comes becomes a whole, a complete, and I really do think we've done that better than anyone else. You know can witness the Comcast announcement this week.
Speaker 2:I think, that speaks to our ability here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. I think it's a great way to end Quilt love the name. You know you're stitching together all of these, um, these hard things and ultimately enabling the ecosystem to deliver content, you know, more efficiently, and you know that has a positive impact on cost, positive impact on user experience. Uh, you know, just has a positive impact. So, hey, mark, um, thank you for joining me. Uh, we went a bit long, but you know, as I told you before, we pushed record or pushed go live. You know the way we run this is if the conversation's rolling, we just keep rolling and at the point that you know it kind of naturally winds down, then we wrap it up. So really appreciate your time and thank you for coming on. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Mark, thanks for having me Take care. This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies If you are looking for cutting-edge video encoding solutions check out NetInt's products at netintcom.
