Israeli company Qwilt, which develops video streaming technology, announced a partnership with multinational technology giant Cisco and VC firm Digital Alpha. The partnership sees Qwilt’s streaming software integrated into Cisco’s network as a SaaS offering for the American tech conglomerate’s vast customer reach. Furthermore, it was announced that British Telecom will become the flagship customer of the new service.
Open Cache for better streaming
I don’t need to tell you, but video has changed over the years. As we enter the 4K era, only to discover the 8K era hot on its tail, streaming capabilities need to cover an array of viewing possibilities over a variety of different devices including the pending domination of AR and VR technologies, and much more. This drives network capacity demands, with consumer internet video traffic expected to comprise 82% of all (consumer) internet traffic by 2022.
“Streaming video may be the killer app for the internet, but it doesn’t have to KILL the internet,” said Jonathan Davidson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mass Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco. “With streaming video expected to represent north of 80% of traffic flowing through service provider networks in the coming years, content delivery is the first of potentially many services they can deploy from within to monetize their edge footprint in the 5G era. Marking this milestone together with Qwilt and Digital Alpha to enable edge cloud services for service providers, we can change the economics of the internet for the future, partnering with customers like BT to help them manage video traffic more effectively.”
Resulting performance requirements are accelerating the shift away from traditional content delivery models, opening up the opportunity for service providers to use their edge assets to deploy their own distributed content delivery network (CDN) capabilities and become more active participants in the streaming media delivery value chain. By pairing Qwilt’s content delivery platform based on Open Caching, with Cisco’s edge compute and networking infrastructure, the streaming alliance will be able to provide the solution as-a-service to service providers of all sizes around the world.
“The way we consume video has changed, and content delivery must change with it,” said Alon Maor, CEO and Co-founder of Qwilt. “Our shared vision is to help service providers enable Open Caching in their networks and leverage edge computing as a fundamental component of their architecture. Together, we are helping many customers such as BT to accelerate their digital transformation in the UK and establish a content delivery platform that will serve as a foundation for today’s applications and new experiences coming in the future.”
Founded in 2010 by Alon Maor and Dan Sahar, Qwilt’s Open Caching and Edge Cloud products deliver the streaming video alliance a platform that manages the content delivery infrastructure deployed deep inside service provider networks, into a global CDN with open APIs for content publishers. It is designed to help service providers easily deploy an edge CDN footprint, offering them more control over content flows. It also caters to the needs of global and regional content providers for more capacity, consistency in content delivery and performance assurance.
British telecommunications giant BT recognizes the growing demand for higher quality viewing. With the COVID-19 crisis keeping people at home and glued to the screens, reliable streaming has become the name of the game. As content providers battle for our attention, they require a scalable solution that’s also cost-effective but also has the technological superiority to deliver high-quality streaming video to meet the increasing content demand of the present and future.
“At BT we connect for good and streaming video has never been more important than in today’s challenging times,” said Neil McRae, Chief Architect, Managing Director for Architecture and Technology Strategy at BT. “Our mission at BT is to ensure our customers have the best experience every time and with record levels of streaming we needed to disrupt the status quo. Qwilt’s pioneering open caching platform together with Cisco’s cloud infrastructure gives BT the first 5G MEC capability in the UK to deliver premium quality video and on demand services.”
“Our domain background and expertise lets us structure this innovative outcome-based model to support global service providers deploying their own CDNs with zero capex and limited risk. Working with our partners in conjunction with the leading content providers, we are committed to scaling this platform to service providers globally in the months ahead,” said Rick Shroti, Co-Founder, Managing Partner, Digital Alpha.
