Eric Schumacher Rasmussen, VP & Editor-in-Chief of Streaming Media welcomes attendees to Content Delivery Summit 2021 and introduces the program chairman, Dom Robinson. Dom will set out the overall narrative for the day's discussions along with co-hosts Tim Siglin and Mark de Jong.

Eric Friedrich and Rob Colantuoni discuss the challenges of delivery architecture and orchestration using a multi-CDN mesh.

This session follows on the keynote and will focus on the real world availability of these fundamental infrastructure services that underpin all CDN operations, and the complexities to consider when deploying POPs around the world.

A discussion about carrier connectivity and IP network availability for CDN services around the US and the Global Market as a whole. This session will explore the current transit and peering market around the world, and look at optimal paths for varying scales of CDN deployment - including in-housing and out-sourcing bandwidth services.

Greening of Streaming is a members association established to focus discussion about sustainability and power efficiency across the streaming ecosystem. For those who have followed CDS for some years you will know that this association was born from discussions at CDS and it is now its own entity. In this, our first of three sessions involving multi-stakeholder industry groups in our sector today, Adam Curwin leads a panel of GoS members to talk about key issues and the plans to address them.

Silicon is a key element of any distributed compute strategy. In the CDN market, the option to offload ‘heavy maths’ to GPUs and FPGA is central to achieving low power requirements, and higher density. This panel will explore the options that are emerging and the applications that they can address in the CDN from video encoding to edge AI and VR.

Telcos are ever diversifying their video service offerings to consumers with constant innovation in the access networks. Cable is leveraging DOCSIS and Multicast ABR, 5G is gradually taking off and even the LEO satellite markets are all driving some significant strides in the innovation in the ISP and end user connectivity layer. We talk to several sector experts about these emerging technologies, what they are and how they work, and how they will drive new opportunities to work with, or ‘be’ the CDN to provide the last mile delivery to the consumer.

Picking a key player from our industry for an informal chat to hear their expert opinion and views on a range of topics that will be relevant to all those working in the CDN sector.

Alex Davies, Senior Analyst at Rethink.TV joins CDS Chairman Dom Robinson for a broad look at trends in CDN and associated sectors, and a bit of a deeper dive into a recent report he has recently published looking at emerging ‘Decentralised-CDNs’ .

Our regular afternoon catchup with the SVA activities provides a regular insight into where the industry is collaborating on engineering challenges, and focuses on how content publishers and CDNs can work together to ensure the best possible video delivery to the end consumer.

While CDNs assist with content delivery over networks, the service layer they bring to the networks adds value in providing ‘applications’ such as caching, media serving and increasingly more complex ‘compute’ capabilities. This session explores the ‘Application layer’ that CDNs are building and offering.

In this regular feature session at the heart of CDS we talk to some of the largest Global CDNs about their strategies, successes and challenges in meeting the ever growing demand for high quality video. This is always one of the most ‘holistic’ CDN sessions of the day, and the video emphasis is always very pertinent to our co-located StreamingMedia audience too!

Another key organisation that has emerged recently and been driven by CDS co-host Mark de Jong, the newly formed CDN Alliance is the CDN industry’s own association that has been formed to be the ‘voice of the industry’. In this session Mark introduces the CDNA and, together with his panel, outlines some of the broad challenges that the CDN Industry faces and how they are addressing them.

Today’s CDN infrastructure is coordinated and serviced by a complex distributed computing environment. This session will explore different ways that the orchestration and operation of these environments can be achieved.

Multi-CDN has been a ‘thing’ for a number of years now. Latency is also a hot buzzword, and ‘buffering’ remains the enemy of all of us (particularly our kids)! We talk to a group of experts who are focussed specifically on ensuring that Publishers, CDNs and telcos can provide the best quality of service to the consumer.

Five Trends Changing The Future Of CDN

Nowadays CDN tends to go beyond its originally purpose. All of us are facing the impressive growth of heavy content in many areas of our lives. 4K is replacing with 8K and VR videos. The sizes of game downloads and software updates are continuously increasing. As users we’re used to consume only well-made content in hi-res appearance. All these things demand a great bandwidth of caching network. But at the same time, the only content delivery is not enough to get customers satisfied. They are looking for a complex and constant-evolving solution with edge workers, advanced security options and much more

This session will explore how media production will make use of emerging 5G technologies. We will explore different 5G architectures and how their benefits and how they compare to current solutions in use today. Media creation has several key requirements that are challenging to deliver, these include high bandwidth uplink, low latency and timing and we will highlight these and look at how 5G may be engineered to support these.

The Content Delivery Summit chair and moderators join for a recap of the day's key takeaways and analysis of the top opportunities and challenges facing the content delivery space. They will also take questions from the floor to ensure that all delegates have had a chance to raise any topics of interest.

At the end of the panel, we'll transition to an open discussion and encourage virtual networking among attendees.