Agile Content deploys CDN Director with Telenor Sweden

Source: Agile Content

TV and streaming technology provider Agile Content has deployed its Agile CDN Director tech with Swedish service provider Telenor Sweden.

The company said Telenor Sweden’s adoption of its technology continues a decade-long partnership to drive efficiencies and better manage utilisation of Agile Content subsidiary Edgeware’s content delivery network.

Edgeware’s CDN architecture is divided into a session control layer and a delivery layer. Agile Content’s new CDN Director product introduces new features, such as real-time cache or network switching and an integrated real-time server quality of experience monitoring function.

According to Agile Content, implementing Agile CDN Director enables Telenor Sweden 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 optimise the peak performance capacity of its own CDN and 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, according to Agile Content.

Marielle Lind, Telenor Sweden’s technical architect for TV back-end systems, said: “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.”

Battle against piracy

Agile Content said that its CDN Director is also contributing to the battle against piracy by transmitting only to authorised users. The tech provides visibility into 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, it said.

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.

“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. 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,” said Lind.

“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,” said 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.”