VOD Ingest, Storage, and Intelligence

There are a few themes becoming apparent during today’s On Demand Summit in Philadelphia, and one is the need to improve on-demand infrastructure. People agree that demands on VOD networks have changed, as has the competitive landscape for video delivery. From a purely technical standpoint, this means the networks must evolve with greater ingest and storage capacity, and more software intelligence for content management. Once again I’m hearing many discussions of how an on-demand network should emulate an Internet content delivery network (CDN).

From a Motorola perspective, the trifecta of ingest, storage, and intelligence is right in line with the company’s VOD hardware and software development work. The new Motorola B3 server that launched earlier this year has 1:1 ingest capacity – the ability to push out 1,000 streams or ingest 1,000 streams simultaneously. As new experiments take place with time-shifted television (think remote-storage DVR), that ingest capacity becomes increasingly important for handling massive numbers of network-based content recording requests.

Meanwhile, between the Motorola B1 and B3 video servers, there is tremendous flexibility for storing content centrally and/or storing it at the network edge. It’s also possible for operators to scale storage and streaming separately, which is critical given the different ways operators deploy on-demand services.

Finally, Motorola’s VOD solutions inately include software intelligence for managing content delivery, and have for years. The intelligence to determine which content should be stored where and how it should be streamed comes from years of analyzing data from the widely deployed B-1 server. That data analysis now informs Motorola’s Content Propagation System.

More to come from the On Demand Summit, including more perspectives from operators and content owners.