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This customer is considered to be one of the largest e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, with over 350 million monthly visitors. Its services cover Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Poland. Additionally, the customer has cross-border business offices in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. In 2021, the total order volume of the customer’s end users reached 6.1 billion, with a year-on-year growth of 116.5%.
In the second quarter of 2022, the customer’s business maintained its rapid performance growth, with gross monthly volumes on the customer’s e-commerce platform reaching $19 billion. All told, the customer is realizing 2 billion E-commerce orders annually, with year-on-year growth of 41.6%. Among these data, live commerce contributes the most to the order conversion rate, of which the underlying architecture is live streaming technology.
The customer launched its first live commerce (live streaming) feature in 2019. The platform is designed for viewers to directly engage with sellers, learn about products, and ask questions in real-time. With this feature, customers can also purchase items online without having to leave the live stream. The customer’s app is ranked first in total usage time and second in the average monthly live number of users looking for global shopping apps in the Google App Store. This presents significant challenges to our customer when it comes to handling dynamic content distribution requests through live streaming, instant chats, posted comments, sharing pictures, account/password verification, and financial payments, as well as handling static content distribution requests via web page, images, and on-demand video.
The customer’s challenges reached a fever pitch on September 9, Southeast Asia’s “Super Shopping Day” (also known as “9.9”), when the number of concurrent live streaming viewers exceeded 550 million. Robust caching and content distribution capacity are essential for improving end user browsing experiences, winning their good impressions, and improving user stickiness.
The customer’s key challenges can be summarized as follows:
When it comes to streaming media content, there are two well-known protocols: HLS and RTMP. HLS has been designed to stream media over the HTTP protocol, while RTMP streams content via TCP or UDP protocols. RTMP, with its characteristic low latency and superior audio and video synchronization features, was well suited for our customer’s live commerce business, even though most content delivery network (CDN) vendors do not have the ability to distribute RTMP streams on a large and stable scale.
As business volume and content iteration grew dramatically, the customer requested certain product features to be customized to meet its unique requirements. In addition, the customer needed media-processing capabilities, such as transcoding, transmuxing, and Live/VoD Screenshot to address its disparate audience. Given the customer’s high degree of business complexity and numerous types of content, it was crucial for the customer to be able to control content management quickly and easily.
In particular, the customer wanted to control and evaluate its live streaming content to make sure it complied with local laws, regulations, and legislative requirements. For non-compliant live streams, our customer demanded the ability to immediately forbid content streaming to minimize risk.
With numerous business scenarios involving dynamic and static acceleration of web pages, storage, VOD, and live streaming, a one-stop management platform offers a unique economy of scale that significantly reduces total cost of ownership. Adopting such a platform requires CDN vendors to offer full platform products and solutions that can maintain service reliability and stability under the most onerous cross-ISP transmissions and multi-network integrations.
The customer’s audience is widely distributed throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America, where complex network transmission routes support enormous numbers of end users. Billions of requests are generated, which puts a lot of pressure on the customer’s live platform and the availability and stability of their origin server. This is especially true during promotional days and times when the company sponsors large-scale events, which can spawn unexpected bandwidth bursts, cause interruptions in services, tarnish the customer’s brand, and endanger customer loyalty.
After expanding its business layout and performing continuous upgrades to its system architecture, quality issues such as video stuttering, network delays, slow request responses, and other anomalies began to appear. These irregularities were most notable during Super Shopping Day, Singles Day, and other times when the customer sponsored “hot events.” As a result, our customer strongly demanded a solution that offered stable 7×24 business operations. At the same time, the customer was sensitive to the service operations and maintenance capabilities offered by CDN vendors.
The RTMP protocol is a priority-streaming protocol that is well suited for low latency and good real-time performance for both web and apps. With over 20 years of experience in the media-streaming industry, CDNetworks’ cutting-edge Media Delivery tuning engine boasts unmatched scalability to countless viewers, with high-quality video that can be played back seamlessly without causing the spinning ball of death.
To achieve large-scale and stable RTMP streaming, CDNetworks made the following optimizations to address the customer’s multi-regional audience and complex local network environments.
CDNetworks proactively addressed the customers’ changing needs and quickly implemented a number of customization requirements. In addition to addressing high-efficiency responses, we provided one-stop media processing solutions and management schemes. We also supported multiple codecs and protocols for editing content and provided a rich set of transcoding/transmuxing features to convert videos and streams to any bitrate at any resolution in any format. This includes, but is not limited to, Live Screenshot or VoD Screenshot, Live Recording, ABR, and Porompt Stream Forbidding. By supporting these features, CDNetworks empowered the customer with all the controls needed to easily manage videos and streams to suit a variety of scenarios while being sensitive to, and preventing the dissemination of, unlawful content.
CDNetworks fully integrated the CDN solutions with all our media-delivery capabilities to create a holistic one-stop media delivery acceleration solution. In addition to convenience, the solution offers unparalleled speed, security, and reliability for the rapid delivery of web, application, and media-streaming content. Our flexible Web Performance and Media Delivery products are well-suited to the customer’s web pages, storage, VOD, and live streaming business. Given the positive results derived from RTMP ingest and streaming, this fully integrated solution provided a comprehensive strategy that addressed all of our customer’s needs while slashing third-party system interconnection complexities and total cost of ownership. For these reasons, the customer decided to migrate their web pages, storage, and VOD business to the CDNetworks platform.
CDNetworks’ industry-leading CDN solutions combined with our global scale built-in native 2,800 PoPs in more than 70 countries and regions, enable us to provide businesses throughout the world with a fast, reliable and secure web/streaming experience. Through self-developed global load balance scheduling system and intelligent routing , along with robust global interconnectivity that span regional ISPs, CDNetworks ensures all end users are served by the optimal CDN PoPs using the fastest route available. Our live streaming acceleration platform supports ecommerce activity to millions of concurrent users effortlessly, while avoiding server overloads and service interruptions to widely distributed cross-national transmission.
CDNetworks provides 365/24/7 multi-lingual technical support, with local expertise and infrastructure for regions serviced. VIP customers also benefit from dedicated technical support engineers that deliver personalized professional services. Our dedicated support team regularly visits customer sites and conducts comprehensive inspections that include PoP logging analyses and report generation to keep customers aware of any operational issues and keep operations working at peak efficiency. For major events and programs, CDNetworks prepares adequate resources in advance, and sets up a special task force to safeguard customer business and ensure the best performance, speed, reliability, and security.
With CDNetworks’ proven reliable and comprehensive Media Delivery capabilities, customers can deliver a smooth, stable, and high-quality live ecommerce experience to their viewers. After all, a better user experience inevitably brings additional revenue.
CDNetworks attaches great importance to the successful, long-term business operations of our customers. We take pride in developing deep customer relationships to create more opportunities for partnership.
Our unique capabilities empower us to rapidly onboard customers to meet their media processing and content management requirements without forcing them to incur high costs. Our vast global networks meet the need for large-scale and stabilized RTMP stream distributions, while our one-stop integrated solutions improve business efficiencies and system reliability. These features are backed by our top-rated professional services team, which responds quickly to any challenges that may arise.
CDNetworks continuously optimizes its CDN infrastructure and systems to give enterprises an unprecedented advantage with their real-world multi-platform, high concurrency, and bandwidth-intensive use cases. The results are seen in optimized operational and cost efficiencies. It’s that simple.