Greta Rolls Out Hybrid CDN and Peer-to-Peer Delivery Service
Greta, a Swedish hybrid CDN, also has ambitious plans for the content distribution industry. The startup is hot on the heels of its $1.1 million seed funding round led by BlueYard Capital, a venture capital firm with an eye to the “decentralisation of markets.”
According to Anna Ottosson, CEO of Greta, “We had other VCs who wanted to get in on the round but we decided to go with BlueYard as the only institutional investor at this stage as our primary aim wasn’t to secure funding but rather to get access to BlueYards’ knowledge and global network.”
Greta currently possesses technology that calculates the most efficient distribution route for images and video and delivers it via traditional CDN providers or through its own P2P solution. The problem it has focused on solving is improving UX by reducing loading times and managing site performance during peak times. The solution is as simple as a line of Javascript, which, when added to a site, analyzes traffic and begins coordinating CDN for optimal performance.
Greta’s peer to peer solution, which is based on webRTC, allows for direct P2P content delivery onto webRTC-supporting browsers without requiring end users to download anything, which is great for regions lacking in CDN networks.
“Traditional CDNs are restrained by building physical infrastructure, which Greta is not, meaning that they have to build out their network in order to provide their customers with better performance. The existing CDN infrastructure is heavily concentrated to Western Europe and North America, with very limited infrastructure in regions such as the Middle East and Africa where internet traffic is growing with over 40 per cent year on year,” said Ottosson.
Voddler Launches Peer-to-Peer Delivery Service to Africa and APAC
Voddler, a Swedish VOD streaming solutions company, is targeting the burgeoning MEA and APAC markets, where internet traffic is burgeoning, year on year, and is set to launch its VoddlerNet Live, a peer-assisted delivery platform with direct streaming from source providers, in the regions. The platform is slated for commercial release later this year and will likely be targeted at live OTT content providers, such as sports broadcasts.
“Peer-assisted video delivery offers an innovative way of providing a very large number of edge servers without the associated costs,” explains Adam Lewis, president & CEO.
“A typical CDN design is one-to-many, with content flows from a central hub to edge servers and then to consumers. In a peer-assisted system, end-user devices act as nodes in a vast, webbed network, sharing content with each other. With every member of a service acting as an edge cache, video content bypasses the CDN’s server infrastructure, traveling shorter distances, and avoiding peak traffic slow-downs and thus ensuring a buffer-less viewing experience. The more consumers the service has, the more robust and resilient the peer network becomes.”
Peer-assisted delivery is ideal for booming and underserved internet populations in regions such as Africa and the Asia Pacific. This is especially the case with live broadcasts, where peaks in traffic can overload servers and place exorbitant pressure on OTT infrastructure.
VoddlerNet 2.0, is optimized for markets with weaker devices (in terms of outdated OS and poor battery life), such as can be found in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. With IP traffic rates spiking in the Middle East and Africa, and OTT video rates set to surge, potential demand for reliable video streaming is huge.
What VoddlerNet 2.0 promises to do is help VOD players reach entire markets that have been sidelined in terms of OTT due to poor infrastructure.
Edge Security’s Next Big Target: Ad Fraud
Advertising fraud costs U.S. digital display advertisers billions of dollars in revenue each year. Despite growing awareness of such activity and increasing investment of time and resources dedicated to combating it, bot-based fraud levels remained stable between 2014 and 2015, costing advertisers an estimated $7.2 billion this year, according to fraud detection firm White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers. The two firms found that more expensive ads, with CPMs exceeding $10, and programmatic video inventory were two common targets for fraudulent activity.
Additionally, analysis conducted by the fraud detection firm EY found that invalid traffic cost digital display advertisers $4.6 billion in 2015, including an estimated $169 million in expenses spent to mitigate invalid traffic.
Given the costs, it is no small wonder that 78% of brand marketers list click fraud and bot activity as their greatest concerns in a 2016 survey conducted by MyersBizNet. The scope of the problem is such that as much as 8.3% of all digital display ad impressions in Q1 2016 could be characterized as fraudulent.
Pulit Enters the Content Delivery Market
Pulit is a Japanese startup focused on innovating distribution technologies for digital video and image content, has garnered $500,000 in seed funding from a group of investors. The investors, led by South Korean startup BonAngels, also includes five Japanese tech entrepreneurs.
Pulit currently has a patent for a SuperDistribution System for digital images, which it has plans to build upon and scale.
What makes Pulit potentially disruptive is its vision for video content distribution, which flies in the face of the way in which subscription-based video distributors, such as Amazon and Netflix, operate. Pulit promises to wrest control of content distribution back from such platforms and place it in the hands of content holders and creators.
Under the SuperDistribution System, as soon as content creators upload a video onto the cloud, the cover image is embedded with a Robust Image Watermark and a URL is assigned to the video.
This affords content creators and holders control over how their content is distributed and accessed by users, without such contract restrictions as they would encounter through Netflix or Amazon, say. They can freely set their videos for demand-side platform advertising, opt for a pay-per-view model, or a free distribution model with commercial insertions. They can also control digital rights management, restricting user access to video according to conditions set by content holders.
Alibaba Cloud Ramping Ups it DDoS Mitigation Services
Alibaba is heightening its security offerings, with Cloud Anti-DDoS, a cloud-based security service which protects applications from DDoS and Trojan attacks. The solution allows users to mitigate common attack patterns and establishes a network attack prevention firewall that is impervious to SQL injection, XSS, and other variants of network attacks.
As part of the suite of Alibaba Cloud services, the anti-DDoS solution is available to Alibaba Cloud users free of charge, providing rigorous security measures for cloud hosting architecture for no investment at all.
Benefits offered by Anti-DDoS beyond DDoS mitigation include increased visibility of the threat landscape, with real-time tracking of attacks, and ease of deployment.
Anti-DDoS is built upon the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 family of processors and provides multiple layers of defense, on the network, host, and data link layers.
For those seeking added security, Alibaba Cloud also offers Anti-DDoS Pro, “a value added protection security service to provide complete protection of your online business applications from malicious DDoS attacks.” Beyond powerful mitigation capabilities, the solution can also eliminate single-point-of-failure from real-time DDoS attacks, HTTP flood attacks, and web application attacks.