id3as: Streaming Tech Designed for When Things Go Wrong

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
id3as: Streaming Tech Designed for When Things Go Wrong
id3as directors Steve Strong and Adrian Roe have been in business together for 30 years. Roe began his career in retail and moved into fintech. He admits that they knew nothing about the media space until a decade ago when they joined forces with video tech specialist (and Streaming Media contributing editor) Dom Robinson.
"What became obvious when we looked at media clients embarking on streaming live events was that when things went wrong there was very little you could do about it," Roe says. "You were lucky if you had a log entry for a fall over.
"Since we came from dev background, we thought that we could make that pain go away and id3as came into being as a result."
The UK-based outfit set itself the task of delivering streaming solutions which are more reliable than any one link in the chain. The aim was to drive out costs associated with downtime, overcapacity, and undercapacity.
When Roe helped build online banks for companies like Northern Rock he did something similar by using back-to-back service level agreements (SLAs). "That isn't a viable way of doing it now," he says. "The approach needs to be that you construct a system so that if any single element of your system goes wrong nobody notices.
"There have been attempts to do this with generic containers and Kubernetes, but they're not really solutions on their own. Our technology can self-orchestrate or coexist within Kubernetes and Docker environments, and runs on nearly any chipset, OS, and platform. We use Erlang, a programming language developed 25 years ago to deliver Carrier Class telecommunications."
True high availability, he continues, is about accepting things will go wrong and making sure that when they do, it doesn't impact customers downstream.
"We're not interested in how well a solution is doing in lab conditions. We're much more interested when the s--- hits the fan."
The company developed a virtualised video pipeline that can be tailored and installed to deliver premium streaming models for broadcasters and operators
Advanced Video Pipeline (AVP) is a modular architecture that spans ingest through transcoding and enrichment to packaging and CDN. All functionality and data capture is exposed through published OpenAPIs. As such, AVP can be integrated into existing control and monitoring systems.
"We are not seeking to be the next Wowza or Unified or ATEME," Roe says. "We understand our niche and want to partner with a comparatively small number of high value enterprise customers."
For Intrado (formerly Nasdaq, formerly Thomson Reuters), id3as enables 75,000 live events a year. These are mostly financial fair disclosure events and a "perfect example of how we can help scale business and manage cost by looking carefully at where in practice things can go wrong."
In this case, Nasdaq was finding that phone calls were dropping out regularly during teleconference events. Roe says introducing AVP immediately took the impairment rate down by an order of magnitude and today, impairment levels are pretty much negligible. That even includes "nobody noticing" (in particular no Nasdaq customers!) when Amazon U.S. East was down for several days, despite 168 live events being delivered from there when it went down.
For DAZN, id3as provide both mezzanine encode and ABR ladder creation for a number of services, as well as a suite of rich audio manipulation capabilities. One of these is a remote commentary solution for DAZN's live event production which began half a dozen years ago and was one of id3as' forays into WebRTC.
"While we manage the super high-quality encode of the livestream, we could also do a decent quality low latency feed pushed to a commentator based anywhere else on the internet. This decreased the costs for DAZN of having to send multiple commentators to the event and increased the number of languages they could produce in."...

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
id3as: Streaming Tech Designed for When Things Go Wrong
id3as directors Steve Strong and Adrian Roe have been in business together for 30 years. Roe began his career in retail and moved into fintech. He admits that they knew nothing about the media space until a decade ago when they joined forces with video tech specialist (and Streaming Media contributing editor) Dom Robinson.
"What became obvious when we looked at media clients embarking on streaming live events was that when things went wrong there was very little you could do about it," Roe says. "You were lucky if you had a log entry for a fall over.
"Since we came from dev background, we thought that we could make that pain go away and id3as came into being as a result."
The UK-based outfit set itself the task of delivering streaming solutions which are more reliable than any one link in the chain. The aim was to drive out costs associated with downtime, overcapacity, and undercapacity.
When Roe helped build online banks for companies like Northern Rock he did something similar by using back-to-back service level agreements (SLAs). "That isn't a viable way of doing it now," he says. "The approach needs to be that you construct a system so that if any single element of your system goes wrong nobody notices.
"There have been attempts to do this with generic containers and Kubernetes, but they're not really solutions on their own. Our technology can self-orchestrate or coexist within Kubernetes and Docker environments, and runs on nearly any chipset, OS, and platform. We use Erlang, a programming language developed 25 years ago to deliver Carrier Class telecommunications."
True high availability, he continues, is about accepting things will go wrong and making sure that when they do, it doesn't impact customers downstream.
"We're not interested in how well a solution is doing in lab conditions. We're much more interested when the s--- hits the fan."
The company developed a virtualised video pipeline that can be tailored and installed to deliver premium streaming models for broadcasters and operators
Advanced Video Pipeline (AVP) is a modular architecture that spans ingest through transcoding and enrichment to packaging and CDN. All functionality and data capture is exposed through published OpenAPIs. As such, AVP can be integrated into existing control and monitoring systems.
"We are not seeking to be the next Wowza or Unified or ATEME," Roe says. "We understand our niche and want to partner with a comparatively small number of high value enterprise customers."
For Intrado (formerly Nasdaq, formerly Thomson Reuters), id3as enables 75,000 live events a year. These are mostly financial fair disclosure events and a "perfect example of how we can help scale business and manage cost by looking carefully at where in practice things can go wrong."
In this case, Nasdaq was finding that phone calls were dropping out regularly during teleconference events. Roe says introducing AVP immediately took the impairment rate down by an order of magnitude and today, impairment levels are pretty much negligible. That even includes "nobody noticing" (in particular no Nasdaq customers!) when Amazon U.S. East was down for several days, despite 168 live events being delivered from there when it went down.
For DAZN, id3as provide both mezzanine encode and ABR ladder creation for a number of services, as well as a suite of rich audio manipulation capabilities. One of these is a remote commentary solution for DAZN's live event production which began half a dozen years ago and was one of id3as' forays into WebRTC.
"While we manage the super high-quality encode of the livestream, we could also do a decent quality low latency feed pushed to a commentator based anywhere else on the internet. This decreased the costs for DAZN of having to send multiple commentators to the event and increased the number of languages they could produce in."...