Downloads are widely used for delivering online video at encoding rates higher than 512Kbps. Downloads enable portability, allowing users to view real-time content even when disconnected from the network. Downloads requires storage space on the receiving end, and there is a varying level of delay from the user's play request to the start of playing. Downloads are commonly offered in two ways:
Download & Play - The entire content is downloaded onto the user's device and then played back. The primary service measure is download speed - how long does it take the user to download the entire content.
Progressive Downloads - The content begins playing as soon as enough is received to ensure consistent playback. The time the user waits before playing is greatly reduced, but as the video or audio proceeds, it is susceptible to decreases in download speed which causes the playback to stop, skip or degrade in quality.
The key issue with downloads is delay. Traditional CDNs are able to provide some speed improvements but at a high cost. P2P techniques are able to address the cost, but face other issues including availability, data integrity, security and usage spikes.
Asankya has the only offering that addresses all of these service delivery issues at a reasonable cost. Asankya GigaNodes and SoftNodes are able to operate in tight coordination to give the highest throughput, and lowest latency, loss and jitter, to the download applications. This results in:
Maximized Download Speeds: Asankya outperforms its nearest competitors to provide the highest performance in speed of transfer. Since Asankya transported packets arrive in-order, Asankya overcomes the drawbacks of P2P file-sharing technologies. These techniques struggle to support progressive downloads due to the reassembly needed with unintelligent file segment transfer.
Highly Consistent User Experience: Whether pure download or progressive download, Asankya is able to provide a consistently high quality experience. It is able to overcome major shifts in network performance with affecting progressive download quality or download & play speed.
Reduced Cost: Deploying Asankya provides the highest downloading throughput and consistency at a fraction of the cost of access bandwidth or CDNs.
