HS Alliance
DENVER—Disney Streaming and Lumen Technologies announced that they are leading an effort to produce standardized CDN configuration metadata and application programming interfaces (APIs) for the video streaming industry.
The multi-year effort is carried out through the Streaming Video Alliance (SVA), a consortium of more than 100 video industry companies working together to improve the streaming experience for consumers.
The standardized metadata will allow content providers to use a common metadata model and a single API to publish CDN configurations to providers.
Without this standardization, organizations must separately model and publish metadata in each CDN provider’s API or proprietary management portal. For large organizations with multiple brands, proprietary APIs are inefficient, error-prone and expensive — issues that negatively affect customer experience, the companies said.
With contributions and leadership from Disney Streaming and Lumen, the SVA recently released the first version of the configuration interface specifications – the technical specifications document which will serve as a guide to the streaming industry for standardization. The second version is in progress and the work should be completed by the end of the year.
“We believe that all streaming providers will benefit from standardization between commercial CDN providers and the Open Cache industry, which is why we have led the charge, working alongside companies like Lumen, to evangelize this work. important,” said Michael Fay, vice president, software engineering, Disney Streaming. “Hundreds of millions of subscribers are already engaging with Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+, and as demand grows for our direct-to-consumer platforms, we believe standardization will be a key driver for maintain our reputation by providing a high-quality viewing experience for large-scale subscribers.
“Lumen operates one of the largest CDNs in the world through the Lumen Edge platform, which delivers unparalleled performance and speed for latency-sensitive and data-intensive applications and content,” said Pierre-louis Theron. , Lumen’s vice president of product management for content. delivery services. “Developing standards that reduce complexity for our media customers is key to our joint success, today and tomorrow. We will continue to contribute important work and knowledge to the standardization effort, building on the deep expertise we have gained over years of experience building and operating our own CDN.
“Commercial CDNs and open caching systems have many common requirements when it comes to defining and publishing configuration metadata,” said Glenn Goldstein, Lumen CDN product strategist and lead spec editor. configuration interface of the SVA. “We knew we could help the industry capitalize on these commonalities while helping each company achieve its own interests. We started by agreeing on a set of engines that benefited all industry participants. These included standardizing feature definitions, providing DevOps-enabled automation, and enabling technology vendors to differentiate themselves.