Intercast Networks innovative Multicast-to-Storage™ (M2S) video delivery technology enables the distribution of massive amounts of personalized, high quality and on-demand video content over IP infrastructures.
This is accomplished by leveraging IP multicast technology, which efficiently distributes video titles over the network by passing only once at each network delivery node to be replicated only at the outermost point on the network (usually the DSLAM).
Video titles are delivered to storage and in accordance to each user’s personalized preference and consumption profile. Users' enjoy a PVR-like viewing exprience and are able to consume their personalized videos whenever they like, even when they are detached from their network connection.
Addressing the Challenge
Unicast centric technologies like internet streaming, P2P and VOD are highly personalized as users can pick and choose the content titles they want to consume, however because of bandwidth constraints Unicast is not scalable to support users’ growing bandwidth demand and increasing concurrency ratios for TV consumption.
Multicast on the other hand is scalable and provides broadcast-like distribution efficiencies; however the delivered content is not personalized and therefore cannot cater to diversified consumer tastes or broadcast the expanded offering available in today’s content libraries.
As such network providers are caught in a dilemma - unicast is personalized but not scalable and multicast is scalable but not personalized.
Intercast’s M2S technology disrupts the existing Internet paradigm as it personalizes IP multicast delivery and overcomes bandwidth limitations to empower a profitable and highly scalable video content distribution technology, personalizing the delivery process down to the individual user level and without straining the exisiting IP infrastructure.
M2S Benefits
M2S empowered networks provide a multitude of benefits to network providers by:
Delivering an order of magnitude more content without additional network investments
Tailoring content delivery to the individual user level while still retaining network-wide scale and optimization with high SLA (Service Level Agreement) levels
Leveraging the rapid price decline of customer premises equipment (CPE) storage to ease off on peak time bandwidth constraints
Optimizing content distribution on a network wide scale
Maximizing content delivery on any given constraint
Dramatically lowering the cost point of content delivery thus allowing profitable and flexible business models to enable new wholesale and consumer retail services
M2S is the underlying technology of VideoXpress - Intercast's flexible video delivery platform. Click here to learn more about VideoXpress
