‍By Jake Hilton, Sr. Manager, Software Dev Engineering, Verizon Media

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are well-established as an integral part of streaming media workflows, enabling a high-quality video experience that scales globally. While most streaming services leverage the CDN to enhance video performance, they may be missing an opportunity to leverage the CDN’s full power in securing their OTT streaming infrastructure. In this article, we’ll review how a CDN can be deployed as a security layer in an OTT streaming infrastructure to mitigate DDoS attacks and other vulnerabilities. …

By Richard Yew, Principal Product Manager, Verizon Media

The threat posed by credential stuffing attacks to OTT streaming services became crystal clear recently. Within a few hours of a much-hyped launch of a popular streaming service, user accounts were hacked and offered for sale at a discount. This breach morphed into a PR challenge as thousands of subscribers turned to social media to vent their frustrations about locked account access and service accessibility issues.

As this experience illustrates, credential stuffing attacks are an emerging challenge for OTT security teams. Streaming service subscriptions, driven by free trials, cord-cutting and exclusive content…

By Derek Shiell, Director Engineering, Verizon Media, and Harkeerat Bedi, Senior Manager — Research, Verizon Media

The need to balance compute power with latency has made edge computing a hot topic, fueled in part by the emergence of the 5G Edge, which promises ultra-low latency. The 5G Edge’s <10 ms of latency is foundational to enable virtual reality, the Internet of Things (IoT), and autonomous vehicles. Without edge computing, these functionalities would be seriously constrained.

While 5G Edge is making rapid strides forward, content delivery networks (CDN) have enabled edge compute use cases for many years, offering massive network capacity…

By Muhammad Rehman, VP & Head of Product — Delivery, Security and Compute, Verizon Media

Demand for video streaming, gaming, telehealth, real-time inferencing and other applications has skyrocketed. Computing at the “CDN Edge” can provide enterprises with a high-performing, reliable, low-latency solution that is just 10–25 ms away from internet users in major U.S. metros. A centralized cloud architecture meets many of today’s use-case requirements for performance and Quality of Experience (QoE), but emerging use-cases demand much more. …

By John Bowers, Senior Software Engineer, Verizon Media, and Nate Cahoon, Product Manager, Verizon Media

Digital rights management (DRM) is an industry standard that gives content owners options for protecting premium content. An effective DRM solution must work with the vast majority of playback devices, integrate easily into the workflow, and appear transparent to users. If it can support advanced features like offline playback, so much the better. While DRM may not be a top priority for many streaming service operators, its impact on the viewer’s playback experience can’t be an afterthought.

The goal with any DRM system is to…

Nabil Kanaan Principal Product Manager, Video, Verizon Media
and Terri Allegretto, Product Marketing Manager, Verizon Media

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As streaming video services mature and proliferate, so does the consumer expectation for flawless video delivery. Multi-CDN is a technique initially created to improve the viewer experience by dynamically balancing workloads across different CDN providers. But multi-CDN also has the potential to expose information that unlocks new possibilities in how, when, and why streams are delivered through different providers.

Some of these variables include CDN price commitments and preferences, content (live vs. VOD), device type, geographical footprint, and ISP. When the multi-CDN platform…

Harkeerat Bedi, Research Scientist, Verizon Media, and Scott Yeager, Software Engineer, Verizon Media

Live sports are exciting to watch. Especially during pivotal moments, like when a shot comes out of nowhere to win the game. These moments can also be exciting for the technical team responsible for delivering fluid, real-time action. Live sports streams, which must balance a number of technical considerations and trade-offs, average around 30 seconds behind the live game on the field. Why the delay?

While content delivery networks are essential, they cannot reduce the latency caused by other parts of the video workflow. For example, latency…

Colin Rasor, Director of Traffic and Performance Management, Verizon Media

Quality streaming of video depends on millions of things going right, such as managing a constantly fluctuating workload or dealing with “flash crowds” when large numbers of viewers enter a stream at the same time. It’s why delivering a reliable, high-quality video stream as part of a paid service — where viewers expect a TV-like experience — requires tools and metrics to finely articulate performance challenges so you can know where and how to fix issues.

CDNs are an indispensable solution in video streaming because they provide low-latency scalability on-demand…