Navigating additional infrastructure challenges
Even with such a robust and specialized technology, consistently delivering top quality end viewer experiences doesn’t come without additional challenges. Challenges like compliance, security, keeping up with innovation, and finding reliable infrastructure partnerships, must all be balanced alongside low-latency requirements.
Compliance
Your streaming platform may be subject to compliance requirements that dictate how and where you deploy your infrastructure. For example, in some regions, data residency mandates require data to be stored and processed within specific regions, driving the need for localized server deployments. You may also need to comply with security standards that influence your system architecture and vendor selection.
For example, as a European based company based out of Berlin, GDPR is a key consideration for nanocosmos.
“We need to comply with GDPR. It’s very important for our corporate customers to have compliance in this area,” shared Oliver.
Ultimately, responsibility for compliance falls to you, but there is support available. As well as seeking guidance from your relevant regional authority, look to partner with infrastructure vendors that have specialist expertise supporting streaming platforms in your region and will work with you as part of your team to design a bespoke, compliant architecture.
Security
Security requirements will also shape how you design and host your live streaming infrastructure. User data protection requires encryption, strict access controls, and monitoring systems. To maintain availability, infrastructure must also defend against DDoS attacks (distributed CDNs, traffic filtering and firewalls all help with this) and continuous monitoring and incident response should always be prioritized.
For Oliver and his team at nanocosmos, it’s no different. “On a global scale we also deal with security threats. Everything from DDoS attacks to attempts to hijack content and re-stream it elsewhere. These are things we must identify together with our clients to protect them against misuse.”
Keeping up with innovation
In an industry like streaming, which is innovating at rapid pace, keeping up with the pace takes significant time, effort, and resource. It’s a challenge that Oliver and his team know intimately:
“We have always been driving change and building new innovations into our cloud platform. It’s a balance between creating new features based on what’s available on the market and effectively implementing this into our production platform to build an additional service.”
Today, innovation is centered around AI adoption and for streaming platforms that is presenting both massive opportunity and significant operational difficulty – especially when deploying out at scale.
“AI is big. It’s everywhere of course. It comes with a lot of opportunities, but when you want to implement that into a live streaming workflow it takes a lot of resources.”
For Oliver, trusted infrastructure partnerships have been key to successful ongoing innovation: “It’s important to have the right server infrastructure and the right partners in the AI space.” It means that despite the obstacles that come with integrating AI into live-streaming workflows, nanocosmos is striving ahead. Upheld by a reliable foundational infrastructure, the team have implemented AI services for live translation and transcription and are implementing AI technologies at the video level to improve picture quality and rendering.
Choosing the right partnerships
Knowing you need reliable, high-availability infrastructure is one thing. Finding the right infrastructure partners to deliver it is another. Finding a vendor or vendors that offer the ideal combination of performance, scalability, support, and geographic coverage isn’t always easy.
“There are a lot of challenges with making the video technology itself reliable. Then to bring that technology into a new production environment on a global scale requires great infrastructure,” said Oliver. “It’s important to have the right points of operation so clients can send us a live stream, have it at the right location as close as possible to production and then deliver it efficiently around the globe.”
Every live streaming platform will have a unique combination of these needs so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But knowing what to look for from prospective vendors is the best place to start. Key criteria include opportunities for customization and control, modern and redundant hardware as standard, efficient provisioning and reconfiguration speeds, a high-availability, redundant network architecture, automation and monitoring capabilities, and 24/7/365 human support.
