by Fred Dawson, Principal, Dawson Communications. Thursday, June 20, 2024 - 9:56 am Print This Story | Subscribe Story Highlights With the world stalled at the threshold of next-generation video transformation, it's reasonable to assume that anything that serves to accelerate escape from the limitations of one-way, high-latency streaming infrastructure will be a game changer. That's a safe-bet assumption when it comes to Red5's introduction of Red5 Cloud. By enabling automated activation and control of streaming infrastructures based on Red5's Experience Delivery Network (XDN) architecture, Red5 Cloud has disruptive implications everywhere video plays a key role in operations, from M&E, social media, betting and multiple other consumer use cases to surveillance, remote collaboration workflows and myriad other video applications in enterprise, institutional and government spheres of operations. A First in Real-Time Cloud Streaming For the first time, anyone aspiring to exploit the full potential of real-time multidirectional video can pursue their goals with touch-screen activation and control of massively scalable streaming infrastructure dedicated to their use alone in perfect alignment with their use case requirements. This frees users to focus on developing the applications they deem essential to business advancement without devoting time and staff resources to the complexities of constructing the supporting XDN infrastructure. All the unique aspects to XDN architecture that have long set the standard in next-generation video performance remain available to customers. As shall be seen in the discussion that follows, Red5 Cloud not only allows customers to quickly launch their own streaming infrastructures with the core transport performance benefits intrinsic to XDN architecture. It also gives them immediate access to the growing realm of pre-formatted Red5 TrueTime applications along with the opportunity to tap the vast range of additional applications that can be implemented with enhanced support from Red5 Pro server software and Red5 professional services All of this is possible because, unlike real-time video platforms that offer access to pre-built infrastructures, Red5 Cloud takes advantage of the dynamic resource orchestration capabilities of the XDN Stream Manager to spin up deployments precisely tuned to customers' strategies. They can immediately take ownership of infrastructure enabling high-functionality multidirectional video use cases with end-to-end latencies at or under 250 ms400ms from any point of video propagation to any receiver regardless of distance. Real-time content distribution can be scaled to reach millions of users with support for simultaneous interactive video engagement at all endpointsend points . With ongoing control over operations and modifications through the duration of their contracted engagements, Red5 Cloud users are freed from any concerns that their abilityfreedom to innovate will be compromised. This represents a stark contrast with shared resource environments where a process implemented for one customer becomes available to all. Moreover, because each customer is allocated exclusive use of the cloud resources dedicated to their applications, they can adhere to whatever government regulations or licensing requirements might apply to where those resources are located. If the rules require all content to be streamed in a specific country, that's where Red5 Cloud will set up the customer's XDN infrastructure. Red5 Cloud customers don't need to calculate any of the details respecting how resources are allocated to create the XDN infrastructure they need to accomplish their goals. All they need to do on the Red5 Cloud dashboard is respond to directions asking them to input information designating numbers of streams to be ingested and their bitrates, the destinations to be served, the scale of the receiving population, the scale of participants that will be generating video, and some other basic parameters. With that they will be able to begin operating over their own purpose-built XDN infrastructure in a matter of minutes. If at any time over the course of their usage they need to make changes in the terms of engagement and how resources are allocated, this, too, can be done on the Red5 Cloud dashboard with immediate results. XDN Architecture and Resource Orchestration Fundamentally, the automated instantiation of XDN infrastructures enabled by Red5 Cloud configures applications of XDN software across a dedicated hierarchical cluster of Origin, Relay and Edge Node servers. One or more Origin Nodes in a cluster serve to ingest and stream encoded content out to Relay Nodes, each of which serves an array of Edge Nodes that deliver live unicast streams to end points in their assigned service areas. The automated node configuration and routing capabilities of the XDN architecture enable servers in all node locations to be turned up as needed to provide support for streaming content in any direction. Thus, any node location can be equipped to provide Origin Node support for ingesting content from proximate users with routing executed from there across the most direct node paths to targeted destinations. As noted, set-up configurations and ongoing orchestration of all the nodes are performed by the platform's Stream Manager. The intelligent management system works in real time as it processes live stream information, applying automated scaling mechanisms to add or lower virtualized server capacity in response to fluctuations in traffic demand or the need to add new broadcasters and end users when requested to do so through the Red5 Cloud UI. Cluster-wide redundancy essential to fail-safe operations is enabled by the Stream Manager's autoscaling mechanism through platform controllers designed to work with the cloud provider's API. With comprehensive performance monitoring, the Stream Manager executes the load balancing essential to persistent high performance across the entire infrastructure without manual intervention. And in the event of a malfunctioning node component, it can instantly shift processing to another appliance in that node. No matter what the use case might be, the XDN architecture maximizes versatility across multiple transport modes in both the ingest and distribution phases of platform operations. At its core, XDN architecture relies on the real-time communications capabilities of the Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP), which underlies IP-based voice communications and is the foundation for both WebRTC (Real-Time Communications), originally developed for peer-to-peer video communications, and RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol), a one-to-many video streaming alternative to HTTP widely used in IP camera outputs and for video transmissions to as well as from mobile devices. Along with ingesting any content delivered via WebRTC or RTSP, the Red5 Pro XDN can ingest video formatted to all the other leading protocols used with video playout, including Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), Zixi Software-Defined Video Protocol (SVDP), MPEG Transport Protocol, and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). On the transmission side, the XDN selects the transport options best suited to reaching devices on a per-session basis. WebRTC is the most used transport mode owing to the client-side support provided by all the major browsers, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari and Opera, which eliminates the need for plug-ins or purpose-built hardware. XDN architecture has been designed to overcome the scaling issues widely associated with WebRTC, enabling real-time streaming at any distance to any number of end users. Alternatively, if a mobile device with built-in client support for RTSP is receiving the stream, the platform transmits via RTSP. The client-optimized flexibility of XDN architecture also extends to packaging ingested RTMP, MPEG-TS and SRT encapsulations for transport over RTP. This occurs when clients compatible with these protocols can't be reached via WebRTC or RTSP. And in the rare instances where these variations in real-time transport can't be used to reach a device, the XDN can be set up on the Red5 Cloud UI to hand off content for conventional streaming over HLS. Red5 Cloud customers can also stipulate avoidance of reduced bandwidth impediments to persistent throughput through activation of multiple adaptive bitrate (ABR) profiles in real-time XDN transport. This can be done through ingestion of the streamed content in multiple profiles produced by an external transcoder or with reliance on Red5's built-in transcoding capabilities at the Origin Node to generate the multiple versions dictated by the ABR profiles. Either way, the content is streamed in multiple bitrates to Edge Nodes, from which the content is streamed in profiles matched by node intelligence to each session in accord with client device characteristics and access bandwidth availability. Open Pathways to Enhancing Use Cases Along with the ability to apply all these capabilities to whatever use cases they've devised, Red5 Cloud customers can take advantage of the easily deployable applications Red5 has made possible through its TrueTime suite of application tools. For example, one application with significant implications for virtually all customers involves an approach to using metadata that eliminates the tedious, error-prone steps usually required to ensure metadata is precisely synched with the relevant content segments for streaming over WebRTC. The TrueTime DataSync toolset automates the entire process through activation of the SMPTE-formulated Key Length Value (KLV) protocol in the WebRTC standard-compliant data channel. KLV defines how metadata associated with the core video is formatted to enable automated, frame-accurate placement of data with the relevant content, whether the data is contained in the post-production flow or, in the case of time-sensitive data us
