Social Media Sites
The Challenge: Cost-effectively deliver Quality of Service (QoS) for both popular and long-tail user-generated Internet Video.
The Solution: The 8150 Distribution Base System, with 20Gb/s performance and 96TB capacity.
Today’s social media sites, originally dominated by user-generated videos and photos, are now delivering professionally produced rich media advertising as well. In addition, social networks are also being tested as distribution platforms for premium long-form commercial film and episodic content. Responding to the individual performance needs of each content title is a challenge to traditional storage and distribution systems.
Powering sites where massive amounts of user-generated content are posted and shared presents special challenges. Much of the content is long tail, and the appropriate system will pair significant storage capacity with the ability to support a large number of individual streams. However, there can be unexpected spikes and drops in activity and storage requirements as newly popular content appears, flashes to the head of the popularity curve, and then quickly fades back to the long-tail to be replaced almost immediately by a new title. Traditional caching systems are an inefficient choice to handle such frequent “tail-to-head” churn, as they force Social Media sites to choose between cost-efficient storage with insufficient delivery performance or high-performance distribution servers which create excessive distribution costs for less monetized content titles.
Blackwave systems eliminate the capacity-performance tradeoff. Blackwave’s unique grid architecture and intelligent software manage and provision content at the title level, automatically provisioning it based on real-time popularity, resilience, and integrity requirements. As a result, you can effectively and reliably engage a vast social community and its advertisers with Quality of Service never before possible, regardless of the size or popularity of the content being viewed.
Benefits for Social Media Sites:
- Cost Per Stream
Cost-effective video storage is particularly important when a significant percentage of content is not yet monetized. The 8150 Distribution System delivers the lowest cost-per-stream of any solution, cutting storage and delivery infrastructure costs in half compared to enterprise products.
- Easy to Implement
The 8150 Distribution System is a turnkey system that can be readily deployed without diverting IT resources from their mission-critical activities. The system’s unique management console enables you to securely configure and control massive amounts of content as well as delivery performance from any location at any time. The 8150 Distribution System utilizes web-based protocols to easily integrate into your content management system: standard HTTP PUTS for adding content, and HTTP GETS to read content.
- Performance
The 8150 Distribution System delivers performance based on your QoS requirements across the diverse mix of high-demand and long-tail content that comprises most social media sites. Its grid architecture and intelligent software respond to the real-time resilience, performance, and integrity requirements of each title, without rebuilding or disrupting the system. By treating content uniquely at the title level, the 8150 Aggregator System responds seamlessly to unforeseen spikes in demand for user-generated content without performance interruptions.
- Flexibility
With the 8170 Distribution System, you can independently scale storage and delivery in response to the dynamic needs of your customer base. This flexibility delivers a better return on investment, since you can adaptively expand to address growing library volumes, content types, file sizes, and audience demand.
- Flexible Scalability
The 8150 Distribution System allows you to independently expand to PBs of storage and Tb/s of delivery, when and where you need it. This adaptive scalability enables you respond to changes in content mix, such as increased in-stream advertising or emergence as a premium content distribution platform.