Agile Content, a leading provider of Internet television and video solutions, has deployed its Agile CDN Director solution at Telenor Sweden, one of the largest mobile phone, television and broadband service operators in the country. This new product adoption continues a decade-long partnership to drive efficiencies and better manage utilisation of Agile Content subsidiary Edgeware’s content delivery network.
Taking into account the increase in piracy in the OTT sector, the importance of this type of technological solutions is becoming increasingly relevant. In fact, television piracy represents almost half (48%) of all access to infringing sites in the EU in 2022 according to a report from the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
Edgeware’s CDN architecture has long been divided into a session control layer and a delivery layer. Agile Content’s new CDN Director product is an evolution of the previous one and introduces new advanced features, such as real-time cache or network switching and an integrated real-time server quality of experience monitoring function.
By implementing Agile CDN Director, Telenor Sweden can improve the efficiency of the delivery of its next-generation television services. It allows the organisation to combine its CDN with the CDN of its sister company Telenor Norway. Telenor Sweden can easily use the resources of both networks and in case of loss of a site, there will be a system of redistribution between different countries.
Telenor Sweden can now optimise the peak performance capacity of its own CDN and seamlessly offload streaming capacity, as well as automatically scale its services using available capacity on Telenor Norway’s networks, or on a public network when necessary. This means that whatever the demands of either CDN, customers will never experience any interruption to their services.
Marielle Lind, Telenor Sweden’s technical architect for TV back-end systems, said of the Agile CDN Director: “As responsible for Telenor Sweden’s CDN and ensuring our customers get the quality of experience they expect on their devices, I have a long list of requirements I want from my network, some of which we couldn’t meet. But with Agile CDN Director now up and running, suddenly a lot more is possible. So far, I haven’t found anything that’s impossible.”
Another key advantage of Agile CDN Director that Telenor Sweden has found surprisingly effective is its ability to keep hackers out and transmit only to authorised users. Agile CDN Director provides greater visibility into everything happening in the CDN at any given time, including the use of common access tokens that prove that customer requests are coming from Telenor’s own back-end and not from external agents, including hackers trying to access a network.
This additional layer of security protects a CDN like Telenor’s Edgeware Network and ensures that only valid customers have access, which in turn frees up capacity and ultimately provides better network speeds for the TV viewing public.
Agile CDN Director provides a whole new level of security. “Our records show that we have blocked between 50,000 and 60,000 invalid requests each day that were trying to access the CDN and reach a streaming server,” said Marielle. “With Agile CDN Director, it’s easy to identify those invalid requests and deny them access. If we didn’t have it, the network would be much busier with traffic that shouldn’t be there.”
“Telenor Sweden has long been a customer of ours on Agile Content, growing significantly with their Edgeware CDN in place and it’s great to see the partnership continue with this latest deployment of Agile CDN Director to manage an increasingly complicated CDN landscape with multi-integrated CDNs,” commented Johan Bolin, Chief Emerging Business Officer at Agile Content. “The Telenor team has quickly seen a long list of benefits at their disposal, some of which we were not even aware of before their deployment. So we are looking forward to giving them back to the Agile Content team and provide many more customers with the same cost efficiencies, operational advantages and security measures.”
