Welcome to the G&L Newsletter, IBC 2024 special edition!
G&L Systemhaus
G&L Geißendörfer and Leschinsky GmbH – all your streaming needs, under one roof. We got you covered.
G&L's IBC Highlights: Efficient and forward-thinking streaming media gems you should get to know
The Swiss Knife of Video Processing – AVPU
The central focal point of our IBC - International Broadcasting Convention 2024 presence was our Audio Visual Processing Unit or AVPU. It is our multi-tool for low-energy, high-density video and audio processing. With up to ten NETINT Technologies Inc. Quadra T1U accelerators and 32 3G SDI inputs, we demonstrated live-streaming and recordings workflows with ABR ladders including AVC and HEVC in full HD – all in one rack unit. This hardware setup and our modular, composable software stack running on Kubernetes is currently being rolled out to customers.
We also noticed significant interest in not using these machines for live transcoding, but for integrating them into existing on-premise VoD transcoding workflows. Many of the companies we spoke with have built their own transcoding farms based on FFmpeg. We are happy to meet our customers' need to work on-prem. We already did extensive performance and VMAF-based quality tests with FFmpeg transcoding on the AVPU and its Netint cards. Coming back from Amsterdam, we are preparing a VoD version of our AVPU for interested customers.
All you need is L... inode – Akamai Connected Cloud
While our AVPU is designed to deploy our media and metadata processing software stack on-premises, most of our workloads are hybrid, utilizing cloud services to varying degrees. At IBC 2023, Akamai Technologies introduced their latest acquisition, the cloud provider Linode . At IBC 2024, they could tell about many production workloads that had been moved onto what is now called the “Akamai Connected Cloud”. During an Akamai Lunch & Learn session, our CEO, Alexander Leschinsky , had the opportunity to present how we had moved a large VoD packaging setup and a complex live event streaming service to the cloud service f.k.a. Linode.
One of Akamai’s announcement at IBC was the addition of compute instances with NETINT Quadra T1U accelerators, the same models we use in our AVPU. This allows us to seamlessly transition our NETINT-enabled software stack, built on a flexible SDK from our friends at Norsk , between on-prem and cloud environments, enabling highly integrated hybrid workflows.
If you’re dealing with media-related cloud workloads and facing challenges with cloud complexity, vendor lock-in, or high compute and egress costs, reach out to us to learn how integrating the Akamai Distributed Cloud into your workflows can help you save significantly.
The CDN Exodus – Why Multi-CDN is now critical
Recently, the industry has witnessed an unprecedented exodus of companies leaving the CDN business or at least struggling to make it profitable. In August 2023, StackPath/Highwinds quit the CDN business, followed by Lumen/CenturyLink/Level3 in October 2023. Almost a year later, in September 2024, Edgio, the entity that CDN veterans Limelight and Edgecast merged into, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And Fastly, which we consider the technically most sophisticated CDN in the media space besides Akamai, went from being investors’ darling to loosing more than 60% of stock market value over 12 months. This shift has created opportunities for smaller, focused CDN vendors like Bunny, Mainstreaming, or CDN77.
As customers are unlikely to place all their media workloads on a single CDN, we see a growing interest in Multi-CDN setups. G&L has been active in the CDN space since 1999, and we understand the immense effort CDNs invest in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and security of their delivery platforms. Building and maintaining an architecture that surpasses what many CDNs offer is no easy task, and we’ve encountered more poor Multi-CDN implementations than successful ones.
If you’re considering Multi-CDN – and there are compelling reasons to do so – let us help you avoid the common pitfalls that many companies face.
Smarter Video Quality Monitoring – Touchstream dVQA
Most of our customers don’t just purchase content delivery and media processing services from us – they also rely on us to continuously monitor their 24x7 workflows. A key part of this is video quality analysis, where we observe streams for issues like black screens, freeze frames, or audio loss.
This is a highly resource-intensive workload, so we’re pleased that our partner, Touchstream , has introduced dVQA. This distributed, cloud-based quality monitoring solution leverages existing data from Touchstream’s ABR monitoring and uses a machine learning approach to predict potential video quality issues.
If you need to monitor your 24x7 streams for technical compliance and quality, and want to reduce costs compared to expensive legacy solutions, talk to us about Touchstream dVQA!
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Log Magic – Streamlining Large-Scale Log Management with Hydrolix
All IT systems generate logs, and CDN delivery in particular can produce billions of log records in a very short time. For years, we relied on a widely-used system to store and process these logs for our customers, but as data volumes grew, the associated costs became unsustainable. To avoid compromising on log aggregation and retention, we looked for a more efficient and scalable solution.
With Hydrolix , we found a partner who provides a solution that efficiently compresses log records, decouples ingest from query resources and compute from storage, and allows for the use of cost-effective S3-compatible object storage instead of locally attached storage. This enables us to economically store all the logs we are interested in, with retention times of years and months instead of weeks and days. Visualization is implemented in Grafana, a recent addition to our growing partner portfolio.
If you’re struggling with storing and analyzing large-scale log data – whether for media, security, or other purposes – consider letting us assist you.
New Era for Content Authenticity – C2PA and Watermarking
C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) , tackles the spread of misleading information online by creating a standard to certify the source and history ("provenance") of media content. It brings together efforts like the Adobe-led “Content Authenticity Initiative” (CAI) and “Project Origin”, a Microsoft- and BBC-led initiative to combat disinformation in digital news.
In March 2024, G&L began focusing on C2PA and recognized its potential for our broadcasting and news customers. G&L joined C2PA in April 2024 and attended NAB in Las Vegas, where the rapidly growing relevance of this topic became evident.
We partnered with C2PA steering committee member Truepic to resell and integrate their proven SDKs for content signing and validation to broadcasters and news agencies in Europe. At IBC, we contributed to a PoC with our long-term customer WDR , who presented a C2PA workflow at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) stand. With help from our partner netTrek GmbH und Co. KG , we also prepared our own demo using Truepic’s SDK and Bitmovin ’s web player. In addition, it’s worth mentioning that our DRM partner, EZDRM , also showcased advanced media verification, focusing on content integrity and video provenance.
In fact, a significant share of our meetings and discussions at IBC ended up being about C2PA, and we are now planning additional PoCs and production workflows with customers. Alongside Truepic, we are adding watermarking services to our portfolio to offer a quick path to C2PA for our clients.
If you intend to increase the trust in your digital assets, let us show you how we can enable C2PA for you.
Media over QUIC MoQ Workshop, 14 November, 9 AM EDT / 3PM CET
IBC may be over, but we continue to keep you posted on the latest in streaming media technology! Join G&L’s last online workshop of the year focusing on the new MoQ protocol, led by industry leaders Will Law (Akamai), Mike English (Norsk), and Alexander Leschinsky & Tobias Drees (G&L Systemhaus).