Disney and Lumen Technologies partner for CDN metadata standardisation push

Disney has announced a partnership between its streaming division and Lumen Technologies to standardise CDN configuration metadata and application programming interfaces (APIs) for the streaming video industry.

The ambitious partnership aims to standardise metadata, which the companies say will allow content providers to use a common metadata model and a single API to publish CDN configurations to vendors.

The current situation sees organisations required to separately model and publish metadata within each CDN vendor’s proprietary API or management portal, a cumbersome exercise should that publisher be partnered with multiple streamers. 

Disney and Lumen have contributed to the Streaming Video Alliance’s (SVA) technical specifications document that will serve as the streaming industry’s guide for standardisation, with version two expected to be completed by the end of 2022.

Michael Fay, vice president, software engineering, Disney Streaming, said: “We believe all streaming providers will benefit from standardisation across commercial CDN providers and the Open Cache industry, which is why we’ve led the charge, working alongside companies like Lumen, on evangelising this important work. 

“Hundreds of millions of subscribers already engage with Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+, and as demand increases for our direct-to-consumer platforms, we believe standardization will be a key driver in maintaining our reputation in delivering a high-quality viewing experience for subscribers at scale.”

Pierre-louis Theron, Lumen vice president of product management for content delivery services, said: “Lumen operates one of the largest CDNs in the world via the Lumen Edge Platform, which provides unmatched performance and speed for latency-sensitive, data-intensive applications and content. Developing standards that reduce complexity for our media customers is key to our shared success, now and in the future. We will continue to contribute significant work and insight to the standardisation effort, relying on the deep expertise we have gained from years of experience building and operating our own CDN.”