This past week as a chairman of this years 2016 SMPTE IP Entertainment Summit in the Silicon Valley, we had a lengthy discussion around a science project that started at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) a few years ago in managing intelligently the delivery of media content, after all SMPTE stands for Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers.
The discussion was centered around trying to make sense of the incredibly positive, but huge shift from linear to IP delivered TV – OTT, SVOD etc. In fact, it has become very difficult to fathom due to ALL of the demand now on the networks in the routing and delivery of IP entertainment, media, TV, Video, with new offerings, models and interest.
There was/is CDN’s, SDN’s. There’s even what is probably one of the smartest shifts that took place almost a year ago, UEN’s (unified edge networks). The UEN is designed to take advantage of getting the ‘calls’ closer to the content. Attempting to accelerate access to the repositories/libraries. A whole, critical category of the industry is required to serve all of this. However, it is dated in its thinking so the efficiency of the rest of the ecosystem becomes critical.
That’s why we have high-speed backhauls/transports, broadband, fiber networks and the routing of the request becomes paramount especially in providing what everyone’s become used to in the delivery of television and channel change.
So, as all of our information, banking and entertainment becomes digital – from video and audio to print and money – hundreds of millions of new devices and people are coming online almost every day, certainly every year.
Yet the Internet was designed as a communications network, not a media distribution network. These limitations impact every part of the ecosystem – from carriers to publishers, across wired and wireless communications with a need to find economical ways to solve these problems beyond basic evolutionary improvements on existing solutions and tools.
This is where the Content Centric Networking comes in from PARC.
A CCN emphasizes content by making it directly addressable and routable.
Endpoints actually communicate on named data instead of IP addresses.
That in its own right is a major shift.
A CCN is a basic exchange of content request messages (called “Interests”) with return messages (called “Content Objects”). It is considered an information centric network architecture.
The goals of CCN is to provide a more secure, flexible, fast and scalable network that will make it simpler and potentially improving the IP network current requirements for secure content distribution on a massive scale across an almost liquefies to a broad range of devices.
CCN embodies a security model that secures individual pieces of content rather than securing the connection or “pipe”.
It provides ease of use by actually using names instead of IP addresses.
Additionally, the named and secured content then resides in distributed caches n the edge network ready to automatically populate on demand requests.
When requested by name, a CCN delivers named content to the user from the nearest cache, traversing fewer network hops, eliminating redundant requests, and consuming less management resources overall
A CCN combined with a UEN really positions the global delivery of media/entertainment content in a whole new light.
With new OTT networks, new VaaS (Video as a Service) offerings popping up, the need for a fast, efficient means of identification playing off of IPv6 is paramount.
CCN’s could be the next milestone for our industry to provide some sanity in receiving quickly and easily what we ask for.
