Qwilt, a media delivery technology company, today is rolling out its new Qwilt Content Delivery Sharing (CDS), which it said uses a sharing economy model similar to Uber.
The company said CDS allows local service providers to be paid to use their own assets to deliver a service that is coordinated by a central entity, and that users get the benefit of on-demand, local service. OTT content providers’ content is delivered by local ISP edge computing assets instead of a CDN.
“In this new sharing model for content delivery, Qwilt, like Uber, serves as the overall coordinator, instantly matching consumer requests for OTT content with local ISPs who are ready to deliver,” the company wrote in a news release.
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Qwilt said its new service is intended to address a content delivery capacity gap being created by the proliferation of streaming services, increased availability of higher resolution content and supporting devices, and “the increasing capacity of access networks, both mobile and fixed broadband, which prompt consumers to expect broadcast quality when streaming.”
The company said its CDS service will rely on architecture based on edge computing where edge servers are deployed deep in ISP networks, and a sharing model in which Qwilt’s edge software and cloud services act as the control plane, matching requests for content delivery with edge delivery nodes close to consumers.
“Qwilt’s Content Delivery Sharing leverages the Open Caching specifications developed in the Streaming Video Alliance over the last five years,” said Dan Rayburn, principal analyst at Frost and Sullivan, in a statement. “There is an important dimension to Qwilt’s approach, which can help create needed content delivery capacity as streaming demand grows. Qwilt’s CDS model means ISPs have a direct role in the content delivery value chain because they purchase, deploy and operate the CDS edge delivery infrastructure. Because this is based on Open Caching, ISPs can have confidence this architecture and operational model has industry support.”