凤凰 Wants to Stream to a Billion Viewers—And Says It's Halfway There

The technology hasn't yet been built to live stream next February's Super Bowl—reliably—to 110 million viewers , NFL通常的电视观众都应该转到网上吗. 是这样吗?? 流媒体系统开发人员凤凰 reckons its platform has the unique capability to deliver global, 高质量的, 今天在广播规模上同步观看.

“我们准备好了，而且规模空前。. Stefan Birrer是这家芝加哥初创公司的联合创始人兼首席执行官.

"We dream of streaming the Olympics opening ceremony to a billion people worldwide in real-time, 这是其他流媒体技术无法实现的任务,Birrer说。.

在最近的 article 适用于流媒体, executives from several streaming and CDN companies concluded that the internet, 就目前而言, 不能允许大规模的直播.

根据Birrer的说法，不是这样的. 凤凰 claims to be the only company offering a genuine real-time streaming experience to customers at scale, 在这样的信条下运作，如果它是直播的, 太迟了.

While most services are either HTTP 在线直播 (HLS) or WebRTC, 两者都以规模换取延迟, 凤凰的平台提供了完整的高质量软件包, 小于1/2秒的延迟, 潜在的无限数量的并发用户.

它的整套技术, 从零开始, 叫做PCast, which includes algorithms designed to eliminate unnecessary idle server capacity and to provision resources only when demanded. A "Flash Crowd Elasticity" provisions resources "in seconds" to handle large crowds joining popular streams "without interruption to the platform;" and an Interactive Transport Protocol optimizes packet delivery for each unique connection environment (3G, 4G, LTE, Wi-Fi)和可用带宽.

“我们的平台使用横向扩展架构, 哪里的容量随着百家乐软件的增加而线性增长, 负载被分配到有可用容量的节点,Birrer解释道。. "Our microservices layer is designed to deal with various load levels to prevent overloading components at any time. Each of our 13 points-of-presence (POPs) can handle several million concurrent users, and the system can scale even further using CNAME or anycast IP load balancing."

出生了, "APIs allow our customers to build any type of application involving interactive broadcasting, 这是否是一对多的广播, 一对多的组播, 或者群聊. 这些api是企业级的, WebRTC标准兼容, 支持所有移动设备(iOS和Android), 电脑桌面, 移动PC, 平板电脑), 网络浏览器."

PCast在公司自己的云服务器上运行, 在谷歌云平台上运行的, but 凤凰 is seeking other vendors so it's not reliant on Google (as good as it is).

在这个服务器辅助的类似cdn的平台之上, 凤凰 creates scale with a Proximity Multicast technology claimed to decrease operating bandwidth costs up to 80%. 这家公司以前叫凤凰P2P, but being aware of peer-to-peer's negative connotations (illegal sharing for one), they prefer the term peer-assisted delivery and have dropped the "P2P" from the name.

Birrer对P2P略知一二. 他有个M.S. 和Ph值.D. in computer science from Northwestern University with a special focus on researching P2P streaming algorithms. 凤凰团队的首席科学家法比安·布斯塔曼特(Fabian Bustamante)也在其中, 西北大学计算机科学教授.

“使用同伴辅助分娩, applications require less bandwidth from the backend and consequently reduce the total cost for delivering content,Birrer说。. "Peers utilize nearby peers to offload some or all of the bandwidth demands from the back-end to the network. Our peer-assisted technology scales naturally with the number of participating peers."

在2013年成立凤凰之前, Birrer worked for Chicago software and financial management company SempiTech where he designed and developed a social video chat application for Rabbit Inc and worked on applications for trading and messaging systems—experience that gave him the insight to develop a video streaming technology that would have a latency in the milliseconds.

“互联网的下一波浪潮是实时的. Back when we started 凤凰, the delay was in the minutes," he says. "Quality of video has improved since, but lag is still a major issue. There needs to be a better way when the younger generation wants everything now, and not a live stream sports experience ruined because friends or neighbours gets the result a minute before you."

在类似的场景中，梅威瑟vs. 麦格雷戈，Showtime流, Birrer suggests some issues could have been allayed with a technology such as 凤凰's, 当平台超载时，哪个是“意识到”的.

"If you project for 4 million users and you have 5 million coming on board in a few minutes, the platform must be able to react to this and scale capacity accordingly. 大多数系统都没有意识到这些限制. A fundamental approach to our platform is that with advanced monitoring and control algorithms, Proximity Multicast instantly adapts to changing network conditions."

Each POP is certified for 300,000 concurrent streams today, he says. 这, 虽然, could readily be scaled to 5 or even 8 million per data center if an event like the Super Bowl should come calling. 在这种情况下，凤凰将在美国设立30个pop.他说，每家公司都可以扩展到500万用户.

“因为我们白手起家, we have a very deep knowledge about it and we can do some options that many other can't. You can have two encoders doing the same thing in parallel and exchange one signal for another if one stream fails. 目标是端到端冗余."

它有10个付费客户, 有些是两年, including a "billion-dollar Asian company" and another 20 to 30 testing proof of concept. 这些公司包括社交媒体公司, 新闻, 和电子, 同时也是欧洲的体育转播商. 没有提供姓名。.

凤凰筹得3美元.5 million during its Series A funding round last April, bringing the total raised above $5.自推出以来已达500万美元.

Coming soon to Pcast is edge insertion of advertising to avoid ad blockers. The company is also looking to expand into international markets, notably China.

"Even 虽然 we already deliver a super-fast stream we are still looking to make it faster and cut out a couple hundred milliseconds. We want to build technology that can stream the Olympic opening ceremony globally. 这就是我们的野心."