Sandvine Rates North-American OTT Services

HBO Now and  colleagues  on Apple TV

A recent post by Dan Deeth Sandvine's blog shows how the recent HBO recent OTT service, HBO NOW, did compared to the other popular services. "HBO NOW .. is distinct from HBO’s other streaming platform HBO GO in the sense that you can purchase an HBO NOW subscription without the aforementioned television package"

But first we need some DPI: ".. Even though the service went live in the middle of last week, Sandvine was able to provide our customers with a software update on Friday that allowed them to not only measure the service, but more importantly be able to do so in time for the launch for the new season of HBO’s most popular show Game of Thrones.

So what impact did Game of Thrones and HBO NOW have? Below is a snapshot of traffic mix from one fixed network located in the eastern United States taken at 9:30PM .. This is one network, on one day, and Internet traffic does fluctuate, so it is important to not take these figures to be representative of North America:

See "Sunday Night Streams – How Did HBO NOW Fare?" - here.

[GigaOM] Content, Service Providers and Caching Vendors Cooperate

Interesting report by Stacey Higginbotham [pictured], GigaOM, following "Content companies including Viacom and HBO have met with folks from Comcast, Qwilt [see "Qwilt Adds Live Streaming Caching" - here] and others to discuss transparent caching as a way to solve the problem of online video".

"One solution to this challenge [delivery of streamin video] is transparent caching, where operators buy software that allows them to manage and cache content inside their networks without the operator having to intervene in determining the cached content. A group of content providers, network gear providers and ISPs are evaluating transparent caching as part of an unannounced standards group seeking to improve online video delivery overall".

"Big content companies don’t want to pay a middle man to deliver their content, when they are delivering so much of it. That’s one reason for the Netflix and Comcast showdown [see "Comcast and Netflix - BFF ("no preferential network treatment") - here]. But vendors from Cisco [see "Cisco Partners with PeerApp" - here] to startups like PeerApp [see "[F&S]: 'PeerApp is the clear current market leader in the transparent caching industry'"- here] and Qwilt are experimenting with an alternative called transparent caching. Unlike traditional caches where the content lives outside the operator network and is managed by a more manual process of purging and refreshing caches at different intervals, transparent caching is deployed inside the ISP’s network and uses software to understand what content needs to be cached without human intervention".

Read more - "Will transparent caching reshape the future of video on the internet?" - here.