Abstract: the 2018 Asia-Pacific CDN Summit was grandly held in Beijing. In the morning of April 12th, Zhang Shibo, senior technical expert of Ali Cloud Edge Computing team, delivered a keynote speech titled “Non-delay Live Broadcasting Scheme Based on PCDN Technology”. This is the content of the speech. When it comes to live streaming, people are generally surprised at the scale of development of live streaming in recent years. In particular, from 2016 to 2017, the growth rate of live streaming users reached 22.6%, the total number of users has reached 420 million, and the revenue has reached more than 30 billion YUAN. The development trend is very encouraging.


The 2018 Asia-Pacific CDN Summit was grandly held in Beijing. On the morning of April 12, Zhang Shibo, senior technical expert of Ali Cloud Edge Computing team, delivered a keynote speech titled “Non-delay Live Broadcasting Solution Based on PCDN Technology” at the operator forum. This is the content of the speech.


When it comes to live streaming, people are generally surprised at the scale of development of live streaming in recent years. In particular, from 2016 to 2017, the growth rate of live streaming users reached 22.6%, the total number of users has reached 420 million, and the revenue has reached more than 30 billion YUAN. The development trend is very encouraging.


In 2017, there were two waves of craze, the first wave is to catch the baby and the second wave is to answer questions, both of which pushed live video to a new height. Meanwhile, live video also has a very broad space for development. We can see that live video has gradually been deeply combined with vertical industries from the original pan-entertainment. From entertainment to e-commerce, online education, media and other aspects of national economy and people’s livelihood.


In the broadcast at the same time, the development of the market to the user’s experience, performance and cost is also put forward higher requirements, I think as a PCDN this technique, we can in terms of cost and experience contributes an own strength, especially in the development of the future, we think live delay ability very affect the use of the user experience. Therefore, in today’s sharing, I will introduce the non-delay live broadcast scheme based on PCDN technology.


Content sinks and traffic localization is the future


PCDN is a kind of based on P2P technology, the use of the edge of the network of idle resources to fully tap their ability, thus has formed our low cost and high quality distribution network, we have this kind of distribution network will greatly cut down the consumption of backbone network traffic between, so as to promote our flow depth of sinking and the trend of flow localization, Thus, the resource utilization of edge network is greatly improved and the distribution speed is increased.


In general, before the CDN deployment mostly in first – and second-line cities such as, China mobile’s experts also said just now, we are now into three lines, four lines even five or six lines in the deployment, but we are deeply agree with this point of view, we think to good services to our clients in the future, we must be sinking depth, the content of the flow localization is also a trend in the future.


In fact, PCDN is deeply integrated with CDN. We can use THE TECHNOLOGY of PCDN to make use of a large number of advantageous resources of the third, fourth, and fifth tier cities, and distribute such capabilities through a flexible system. Finally, video resources and live broadcast resources flow in the network between cloud, CDN and PCDN. And we are different from ordinary connection, we are a multi-point multi-path method, can achieve a higher success rate of fluency.


PCDN positioning: Extend the boundaries of CDN to bring content closer to you


We believe that PCDN is a Paas product in the edge computing matrix, which extends the boundary of CDN and enables content distribution to reach the user community or even the user’s home.


PCDN’s support for live broadcasting has obvious advantages. Firstly, at the scheduling end, Ali Cloud has the ability to manage hundreds of millions of nodes. Through resource optimization, it can allocate the most suitable nodes for consumption points. At the same time, there are many algorithms on the terminal, such as sub-streaming and fragmentation algorithms, as well as multi-point and multi-path connections, which can better support live broadcasting. Single programs can support millions of online programs at the same time.
In fact, P2P still has a point, we choose so many nodes with different characteristics, it is very big difference in cost. By taking advantage of these characteristics, through our scheduling algorithm and connection service, we can finally achieve a high sharing rate. At the same time, because the node is very close to the user and the distance between the user and the node is very close, PCDN has close to zero delay in live broadcast delay.


PCDN is both a cloud product and an end product. In terms of the end, PCDN has accumulated a complete end system after years of technical accumulation and in-depth integration and polishing with customer business.


Because end products are oriented to different kinds of end, especially the heterogeneity of end, such as device heterogeneity, platform heterogeneity, software heterogeneity, player is also different, PCDN adopts the universal processing mode, to achieve a maximum compatibility. Therefore, PCDN has achieved a very comprehensive state in terms of media protocol support, media format, platform support and terminal support, and the live broadcast and vod programs it provides are mature and comprehensive.


According to the principle of “quality first, cost” reasonable proportion
PCDN can select high-quality nodes for transmission based on background scheduling. For the unified management of all kinds of nodes and devices distributed on the network, PCDN adopts the model of unitary processing of three capabilities, such as computing capability, bandwidth capability and storage capability, so as to realize the scheduling of the whole system in a consistent way.
At the beginning of live broadcast, the first batch of high-quality nodes optimized by PCDN can quickly connect terminals to these nodes and quickly get the premiere data, so as to achieve a good output effect. In the process of playing, we use our own intelligent algorithm to find those nodes with higher cost performance and gradually add them to make this ability stronger and stronger, so as to achieve a good balance between playing experience and cost.


Easy to use guarantee powerful
In the process of technology and product development, in addition to relying on their own continuous pursuit and iteration of technology, they are also often educated and guided by customers. A good product, from the customer’s point of view must be simple and convenient, easy to use, support perfect, these points are also the driving force of our research and development. We have done a lot of work to make the INTERFACE call of SDK easier and provide complete and detailed documentation and after-sales support.


In customer business scenarios, tracking and monitoring of business layer data is very important. Relying on aliyun’s data processing capability, aliyun can monitor all kinds of online situations in real time and carry out automatic repair and danger warning.


Another point of concern for customers is the ability to troubleshoot and locate single points of failure. In this aspect, PCDN utilizes the underlying technology at the end to analyze and report various features of the network, and at the same time, perform hierarchical operation on the whole link to achieve value-added services such as extracting user portraits and other features that customers care about.
The above is Zhang Shibo’s description of the characteristics of PCDN non-delay live broadcasting solution from the technical perspective.


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