While Citrix is known for its expertise in data center networking, the Intelligent Traffic Management (ITM) service also serves billions of online video requests every month for a range of leading broadcasters and online video properties. Citrix ITM is unique in its ability to optimize the entire range of application and content use cases, including downloads, APIs, and streaming video, but we know that video architectures are highly varied and require an ecosystem of partners.
That’s why we’re excited to announce our partnership with Streamroot.
Citrix is an integral part of Streamroot’s new Compass service, and together we have created a complete multi-CDN switching solution that ensures our customers can provide the optimal video experience to their consumers.
What Is Streamroot Compass?
Streamroot Compass is an instream CDN load balancer that takes its feed from the video players on individual devices. It makes decisions based on real-time device QoS statistics, as well as the conditions of interest to the content distributor — geography, ISP-based rules, or business parameters. This helps it decide the best place to get the next chunk of video data.
While particularly important when applying a multi-CDN strategy, Compass can also multisource segments from both CDNs and peer-to-peer networks for content distribution, such as Streamroot’s own P2P delivery model, Streamroot DNA. Only Streamroot Compass is able to provide per-device, QoS-based decisions about where to retrieve video content most effectively in real-time.
Real-Time User Experience Data
Feedback from the individual viewer devices is an important part of making decisions about where to source content. The relevant statistics are not available at the start of a stream. While Compass builds a device-specific view of the best place to send requests for content, Citrix ITM, with its unprecedented visibility into internet blind spots and user experience, can ensure users are directed to the best original source.
Citrix ITM collates and analyzes up to 15 billion points a day from hundreds of millions of users across 40,000 ISP networks. This continuous data analysis means it can track the conditions of CDNs, clouds, and networks, and ensures users are shielded from service degradations and outages. So, when inquiries are made to ITM, it will provide details of the best destination CDN, or CDNs, for content retrieval for each individual user at any given time.
The flexible policy engine embedded in Citrix ITM empowers content providers to customize the decision-making algorithm to suit their business needs as they seed their video delivery.
Citrix and Streamroot — Better Together
With Citrix ITM and Streamroot Compass, content providers can add business metrics to their steering decisions, and, of course, video consumers benefit from the fastest video start-up times because ITM feeds the best responding sites to Compass.
During the session, Compass will build up the quality of service statistics relevant to each user and their device. These data will be used to guide subsequent requests for video content to the best CDN, switching mid-stream where necessary, to ensure that the ongoing video delivery is smooth, with no buffering breaks.
The joint solution also offers our customers the ability to carefully manage their bandwidth consumption against their contracted commitments, continuously assessing the trade-off between performance optimization and CDN/cloud delivery costs.
How Do I Get It?
Customers must have a subscription to Streamroot and Citrix ITM to realize the combined benefits. Citrix and Streamroot are working together to streamline the integration process and ensure it’s user friendly.
Video is the largest and a growing segment of internet content delivery, and it is an arena that Streamroot and Citrix ITM are committed to serve going forward.
