The latest report from Heavy Reading, OTT Video: Service Providers Face A Gathering Storm, is very relevant for us (Oversi is one of the companies analyzed in the report.).

In the face of growing competition, service providers are looking for the most cost-effective ways to deliver high-quality video to their customers, "caught between the need to satisfy customers and managing the cost of bandwidth expansion".

That's exactly where we come in. Oversi's video cache enables operators to deliver the best QoE performance, and save on bandwidth costs, without having to invest in extra pipes. Here's an example taken from a commercial Oversi OTT caching system in a large operator installation.

The blue line (the "sky") in the graph indicates the Cache Output over a period of a week. Notice the daily fluctuation of demand for video; the maximum is the evening, and the minimum is the early morning (an interesting pattern and worth a blog entry of its own). The green line (the "grass") indicates the Cache Input, which is extremely minimal compared to the Cache Output. The ratio between Cache Output and Cache Input is defined as the Cache Gain - somewhat like a "bandwidth amplifier" or "content accelerator". A higher Cache Gain indicates higher cache efficiency. In this example, the Cache Output is about 10.6Gbps, the Cache Input is about 400Mbps, and the Cache Gain is a whopping 25-fold!

The operator saves on costs by localizing bandwidth direct from the cache and offering QoE (Quality of Experience). The users enjoy faster download times and a smoother Internet experience with no interruptions.

Or in more poetic terms, in terms of overcoming the "Gathering Storm", if the blue line is the "sky" and the green line is the "grass", one could say that OverCache enables operators to keep costs as low as "grass" while providing the users with "sky is the limit" content and quality.....

Oversi Blog 2.0
March 2nd, 2010

Let me introduce myself. My name is Gilad Peleg and I’ve taken over the       marketing and BD reigns at Oversi. It's certainly an exciting time to be in the    caching industry, with online video becoming so dominant in our daily life.

Tier 1 operators have joined other service providers evaluating video caching for improved QoE and bandwidth savings. This is an important milestone for us. From early on, Oversi aimed to be a Tier 1 oriented company, supporting the growing needs of large ISP customers. That's one of the reasons we developed a highly scalable cache system based on flexible, out-of-band architecture. We've also geared up the company to support and service our global customers, spread throughout the Americas, APAC, EMEA and now even Down Under (see the latest announcement).

I look forward to updating you on developments at Oversi and market trends affecting our industry. I’ll also use this platform to comment on other topics which interest me, and will be happy to hear your feedback – This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Gilad

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May 11th, 2009 

Online Video Reaches New Heights: The Impact for ISPs

Online video continues to grab the headlines. The Susan Boyle clip on YouTube has broken new records generating more than 100 million views in the first nine days. In addition, according to the latest research from comScore, the average US viewer watches 5.5 hours of online video per month, representing an increase of 11 percent over the previous month. The premium video service, Hulu, has become the third most popular video site in the US with 380 million videos viewed in March alone.

With YouTube going widescreen as well as signing new deals with major Hollywood studios, what impact will online video consumption have on service providers having to supply the extra bandwidth? Will ISPs reach gridlock as subscribers view more and more HD premium video online?

ISPs have various options for dealing with this phenomenon, apart from expensive infrastructure upgrades. Caching systems, for example, supplement the extra bandwidth on demand without clogging up the network. With the video passing through the entire network once only, there’s no increased load on the ISP backbone, metro and access network.

Here's an example from Oversi’s customer base. The cache (blue line) delivers the extra bandwidth for Internet video users at peak times during the week, assuring a constant high quality Internet experience.

Video Cache Performance (average week)

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April 7th, 2009

There have been various reports about the decrease in P2P traffic. Ipoque recently concluded that web and streaming are outgrowing P2P even though P2P still generates most traffic in all regions. This trend was also reported last year by PlusNet which found streaming usage on the increase with P2P traffic actually 8.75% lower per day than it was the year before.  

There’s no denying that video sites, such as YouTube and Hulu, are gaining massively in popularity but is P2P really in decline?

What’s the real story? Most of these reports are based on users of DPI equipment. Could P2P traffic simply be escaping detection through the use of encryption and obfuscation techniques? With encryption, bandwidth-heavy P2P applications avoid being blocked by incumbent DPIs/traffic shaping systems.

Could encrypted P2P actually be on the rise as more and more ISPs deploy DPIs to control bandwidth usage worldwide? P2P users see encryption as an effective way to ensure uninterrupted file sharing. And the more people using it, the easier it is for P2P users to get those torrents from other encrypted users.

Generally we see a rise of encrypted P2P in our own installed base. For example, at one of our customer sites, a significant proportion of P2P traffic is encrypted (as much as 50% for Edonkey and 25% for BitTorrent) – numbers which can’t be ignored. It’s also a trend reported by other carriers.

So is it too soon to predict the demise of P2P traffic? Sandvine, for example, which included encrypted P2P traffic in their 2008 Analysis of Traffic Demographics in North American Broadband Networks, concluded that “P2P file-sharing traffic, despite some recent media reports, continues to increase in absolute terms”. 

If, in the past, encrypted P2P was not an issue, the latest data seems to show that things have changed.

From early on, we made it a priority for Oversi’s caching platform to support encrypted and obfuscated P2P traffic. I believe that this was the right decision….

Eitan Efron

February 3rd, 2009 

Caching in the Downturn Economy

There's no doubt that the world has hit a global recession. However, caching is going against the trend. Since the beginning of the downturn, we are finding that demand for caching has actually increased. In the last quarter of 2008, we succeeded in closing key deals with leading ISPs in Asia Pacific and Latin America and actually saw a rise in RFPs from large operators. Overall, we have tripled the number of customers and received many repeat sales from existing customers.

The reasons are clear to us.  Caching offers a tangible way for ISPs to reduce OPEX and CAPEX while increasing customer satisfaction at a time of shrinking budgets. In addition, our technological edge has helped to strengthen our market position and provide the best service to our customers.

With the substantial growth in video over the net and P2P, ISPs are in constant need of systems which can deliver the additional bandwidth. I'm happy to say that our scalable grid design can be upgraded easily without impact on the network. Many of our customers, which started with smaller systems, are now adding new capacity to their caching deployment to meet the increasing Internet media user demand.  

In this global financial crisis, operators are going "back to basics", which basically means savings on their bottom line.  We’re happy that that Oversi  seems to be in the right place at the right time.

Eitan Efron

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November 6th, 2008

Introduction to NetEnhancer

I've just returned from a trip to the US, which included my participation at the DCIA's P2P and Video Conference in Santa Monica. The DCIA conference was highly informative and stimulating, raising many of the issues facing the industry today. I was honored to receive the DCIA Trendsetter's Award after my presentation, representing a great endorsement of Oversi's technological leadership and innovation. Many thanks to the DCIA for the industry recognition.

The Award coincided with the announcement of our new NetEnhancer™ P2P network management tool, which complements the P4P advances of the P4PWG, NetEnhancer received tremendous feedback at the conference and in the broader marketplace. We're excited by the potential and are starting discussions with our partners on joint offerings.

Marty Lafferty, DCIA's CEO, presenting me with the DCIA's Trendsetter's Award

P4P solutions, such as ours, are attracting a lot of attention as service providers look around for new ways to manage the P2P load without hurting users' QoE. This is of course in the light of the recent FCC Comcast ruling, which continues to create ripples in the market. Operators are having to change their existing traffic management solutions to adapt to the new reality.

The DCIA conference included presentations from leading players in the market, such as Comcast, Pando, Abacast, and Move Networks. I particularly appreciated the presentation given by Barry Tishgart, VP of Internet Services at Comcast, who addressed the importance of P4P for today's service providers and the challenge of meeting users' demands for High Definition video. Barry highlighted Comcast's commitment to DOCSIS3 and P4P. Comcast is committed to providing its customers with a much faster user experience and download time, for example, delivering HD downloads within a few minutes. He also presented the results of Comcast's P4P trial, the first over a cable infrastructure. Comcast found that P4P optimized inbound/outbound traffic with over 80 percent improvement in performance and a superior users' experience. This corresponds to our own tests with NetEnhancer, which optimizes service providers’ network resources to accelerate content delivery and provide the best Internet experience for end-users.

P4P is definitely leading the way in P2P management today; we're pleased to play a role in taking the theory into practice .

Eitan Efron

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September 11, 2008

The renaissance of caching

More and more service providers, and partners, have been contacting us over the last few months about integrating caching as part of their network solutions. This is very encouraging and a great sign for the caching business.

Trying to figure out the reasons for the new market trend, I can think of several reasons:
1. The FCC ruling into network neutrality;
2. The continuous surge in demand for Internet video and P2P (see Cisco's recent study);
3. The introduction of caching as part of the new evolving P2P standardization by IETF and the DCIA P4P Working Group (Oversi’s an active member of this working group).
4. Of course, it could be the combination of them all.

Whatever the reasons, we definitely see a shift in the market. With more and more Over The Top (OTT) video flooding their networks, service providers are looking for intelligent new solutions that can manage the growth in demand for bandwidth while being sensitive to users' Internet video experience. All this without exposing them to negative public opinion and to lawsuits from users, for not providing the promised service levels, or from content owners for hurting their OTT service (net neutrality).

This is good news for companies like Oversi, which provide intelligent caching platforms for both Internet video and P2P services. Our caching platform not only speeds up the time it takes to download video from the Internet, it also prevents service interruptions, so users enjoy a much improved Internet service = happier customers. At the same time, caching relieves the network gridlock and reduces bandwidth consumption, so the operators themselves benefit from substantial savings on their OPEX.

As a user of one of the operators that installed our caching platform, I can definitely feel the difference. Almost every site I visit includes short clips/videos, whether it’s a news site, social network or Vblog. For me video is “The Internet Experience”. Until a few months ago I had to wait for these short clips to download, sometimes for several minutes. The experience was awful as the video download kept being interrupted and stopping halfway through. Since the operator installed the caching system, the videos are downloading instantly in 3-7 seconds and there are no interruptions to my viewing experience. For ME it’s a whole new Internet experience!

Apparently I am not alone…Our customers are reporting a noticeable drop in support calls to their call centers since the caching system was introduced into the network, reflecting their customers increased satisfaction with their Internet service.

Taking in mind the fantastic user experience, the positive effect on the operators’ network and relief of net-neutrality issues, caching may well hold the key for many of today's service provider challenges….

Eitan Efron

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May 5, 2008

The Internet is constantly evolving in line with the growing popularity of online video. These are exciting times in terms of new over-the-top (OTT) applications. With ever growing types of content available online, and with increased quality and higher bitrates, more and more people are shifting their TV viewing habits to source it directly from the web - when and where they want it. And soon it will be in High Definition as well. Although exciting for consumers, this is a major issue of concern for service providers. 

Can service providers meet the growing amounts of unicast, over the top videos flowing through their networks without bringing the network to collapse? Can their existing business models sustain the growth? With these changes and trends I am excited to share with you the new Oversi web site, which includes new materials, and presents new ways for services providers to handle the changing Internet. With the Oversi solutions, OTT content can be controlled without spending a fortune on continuous network upgrades and without hurting the customers’ quality of experience, so important in today's video age. We believe that our solutions bring new opportunities for service providers, not only to better cope with this new type of traffic but also to provide new monetization opportunities.

In the last few months we have been working on new exciting products specially designed to help service providers deal with the over the top phenomenon.

I am also happy to report that we have dozens of customers worldwide which have already installed these solutions and given us tremendous feedback. For me as a systems and solutions provider, there is no greater satisfaction than that.

 Eitan Efron