The prevalence of streaming on the Internet is increasing exponentially. Media sites and portals are seeing their streaming traffic double every six to eight months. Increasing broadband penetration in US households and greater availability of popular content are contributing to this rise in popularity.
Streaming media has unique requirements that place more pressure on the underlying network. When compared to data transfers, streaming is affected significantly more by the quality and consistency of the network. This is because true streaming requires fast start-up times and predictable quality for it to be acceptable for the end-user. Any network congestion will cause interruptions or deteriorate the quality of the video stream. Furthermore, any packets that are delayed or lost by the network may not have time to be retransmitted. Hence the underlying network has a high impact on the quality and experience of the end-user.
The typical solution to the network problem is to reduce the encoding rate of the stream, or to host the content as close to the user as possible, usually through a CDN. However, reducing the encoding rate diminishes the quality, while CDNs are typically expensive, are limited in the improvements they provide for live or time-sensitive content, and still do not solve issues between the user and the network.
Asankya's Parallel Networking Technology intelligently characterizes the network, enabling Parallel Networking to react to network changes in real-time, and to utilize multiple network resources in a tightly coordinated fashion.
By addressing issues at the network transport level, Asankya enables the following for streaming media:
Higher Encoding Rates: Network resource utilization is maximized, so higher encoding rates can be used without sacrificing end-user receiving quality.
Improved User Experience: Asankya reduces congestion-related loss and delay, which provides a more consistently high-performing experience for the end-user.
Reduced Cost: Deploying Asankya provides the highly consistent streaming quality at a fraction of the cost of access bandwidth or a CDN.
