Thursday at 2pm ET I'll be moderating another StreamingMedia.com webinar, this time on the topic of "Best Practices for Transcoding and Video Workflow In The Cloud". The cloud offers huge power for video publishers, but also specific challenges that require the right architecture to overcome. This webinar will give best practices for designing an efficient and cost-effective approach to the video transcoding workflow, whether the challenge is to stream a corporate event from a remote facility or transcode a library containing thousands of clips.

Three industry experts will briefly highlight the best practices for transcoding and video workflow in the cloud, with the majority of the time dedicated to the audience Q&A. While the event will cover the basics, it is geared towards a technically advanced audience. The webinar will cover:

• Benefits of using the cloud for video encoding
• Understanding the key differences between live and file-based transcoding workflows and requirements
• Encoding recommendations for multi-device publishing
• Understanding your target devices and defining the most efficient set of profiles for your audience
• Keeping costs down without sacrificing performance
• Key considerations in designing your live event and file-based transcoding workflows
• The need for scale, and potential for automation, of workflow
• Cloud based storage and transcoding as an integrated service

Register here and bring your questions for the presenters for the live Q&A portion of the event.

At the Content Delivery Summit, taking place Monday, May 14th in NYC, hear an overview of the context, ecosystem and strategy for Telefonica's recently released CDN offering, implemented across the fourth largest telco with direct access to 300M users world wide. Hear how they handle monetization and analytics across their CDN, the impact of QoS for their customers and an update on their current CDN activity. Presenter:

• Gonzalo de la Vega, Director, Business Development, Global Delivery Services, Telefonica

Readers of my blog can take advantage of special pricing by registering using the promo code of DRF01 to attend the CDN Summit for only $295. Taking a look at the pre-register attendee list we have carriers, telcos, ISPs, MSOs, content owners and vendors coming from all over the world. This is the event to be at if you are in the content delivery business. Twitter hash tag #cdnsummit

Traditionally, managed subscription services have been delivered via CDNs at the Internet edge, while unmanaged over-the-top content is delivered from transparent caches at the access network edge. Recent industry developments suggest that these two formerly separate approaches will become more coordinated, creating a unified delivery infrastructure that will bring both CDN-managed and OTT content to the network edge – improving end user quality and network economics.

At the Content Delivery Summit, taking place Monday, May 14th in NYC, this session will review the trends that are driving this transformation, and explain how these different delivery methods are converging. It will explore the technical and business benefits and challenges for content providers, network operators and consumers. Confirmed speakers include:

• Moderator: Mark Taylor, VP, Media and IP Services, Level 3
• Gilad Peleg, VP Marketing, Business Development, Oversi
  
• Alan Arolovitch, CTO, PeerApp
• Anshu Agarwal, Head of Product Management, Content and Media, Juniper Networks
• Hashem Ebrahimi, VP, Engineering, SuperLumin Networks

Readers of my blog can take advantage of special pricing by registering using the promo code of DRF01 to attend the CDN Summit for only $295. Taking a look at the pre-register attendee list we have carriers, telcos, ISPs, MSOs, content owners and vendors coming from all over the world. This is the event to be at if you are in the content delivery business. Twitter hash tag #cdnsummit

Many content owners are already using a content delivery network (CDN) to cache content closer to their visitors, but CDNs don't reduce the number of requests required to render each page, and they have no impact on browser efficiency. At the Content Delivery Summit, taking place Monday, May 14th in NYC, learn how Front-end optimization (FEO) picks up where CDNs leave off, transforming the content itself so that it renders as quickly as possible in the browser.

Joshua Bixby, President of Strangeloop Networks will enable attendees to see real-world examples of how leading e-commerce sites have combined CDN and FEO forces to reach new levels of performance for content-rich pages. Get real numbers on how quickly content-rich sites loaded pre-acceleration, then with just a CDN, then with a combined CDN/FEO solution.

Readers of my blog can take advantage of special pricing by registering using the promo code of DRF01 to attend the CDN Summit for only $295. Taking a look at the pre-register attendee list we have carriers, telcos, ISPs, MSOs, content owners and vendors coming from all over the world. This is the event to be at if you are in the content delivery business. Twitter hash tag #cdnsummit

CDN federation allows participants to offer a global CDN service by pooling and sharing resources amongst major regional players and at the Content Delivery Summit, taking place Monday, May 14th in NYC, we have an entire sessions devoted to the topic of "The Business of CDN Federation". The session will examine the business prospects of CDN federations, considering the market opportunities, enablers, challenges and timing. Confirmed speakers include:

• Moderator: Barry Tishgart, VP, GM, Wholesale Services, Comcast
• Tony Lapolito, Director of Product Management, IP Video Solutions and CDN, Cisco
• Peter Papavasiliou, VP, Marketing, Concentric Cloud Solutions
• Ditlev Bredahl, CEO, OnApp
• Hui Zhang, Chief Scientist, Co-Founder, Conviva

Readers of my blog can take advantage of special pricing by registering using the promo code of DRF01 to attend the CDN Summit for only $295. Taking a look at the pre-register attendee list we have carriers, telcos, ISPs, MSOs, content owners and vendors coming from all over the world. This is the event to be at if you are in the content delivery business. Twitter hash tag #cdnsummit

[Updated 5/22: In a blog post, Comcast says they are not prioritizing traffic, but Level 3 says they are.]

Last year, when Comcast acquired NBC Universal they had to agree to terms as set forth by the Department Of Justice and the FCC regarding how they would treat competitive content delivered over their network. One of the points in that document says that, "Comcast shall not prioritize Defendants’ Video Programming or other content over other Persons’ Video Programming or other content." While Comcast agreed to these terms and said they would not prioritize their video traffic over someone like Netflix, that's exactly what they are doing.

Based on details I have gotten from those who have looked at how packets are marked on their home broadband connections provided by Comcast, packets are in fact being marked with Quality of Service tags. Services from MLB, Hulu and Netflix are marked with CS1 tags and Xfinity is marked as CS5. In tests, the Xfinity traffic originates from servers inside Comcast's network and the other traffic originates on Level 3 and Akamai servers outside Comcast's network. All of these QoS tags are put on by Comcast.

According to the IETF the QoS tags have the following definitions;

• CS1: This service is the low class of service and effectively gets any bandwidth left after every other service has transmitted over the link. "The fundamental service offered to the Low-Priority Data service class is best-effort service with zero bandwidth assurance". This class gets any of the scraps left over after all other classes have had their packets forwarded.

• CS5: This service is considered a high class of service that gets processed such that it is ensured to get forwarded: "The Signaling service class SHOULD use the Class Selector (CS) PHB, defined in [RFC2474]. This service class SHOULD be configured to provide a minimum bandwidth assurance for CS5 marked packets to ensure they get forwarded."

All Internet traffic from at least the cable modem termination system to the home cable modem shares exactly the same path. There is no "private IP network" between those points. While I don't know how the Comcast servers that deliver the Xfinity traffic connect to the cable modem termination system, and while that part could be part of a private network, I think that's unlikely.

The part of the network from the cable modem termination system to the homes is usually the most congested and that equipment in the cable modem termination system is capable of acting on those QoS tags and so could treat the traffic differently. What I don't know is if they are treating the two tags differently, but the tags are there. If they aren't making use of them why are they adding them?

And if they are using them I think you could then make a reasonable assertion that the spirit, if not the letter, of the DoJ statement is being broken by Comcast. I've put in a request to Comcast to see if they want to address this and will update the post once I hear back.

Updated: If you'd like to do this testing for yourself, here is a PDF that shows you how to do it.

There are a lot of new and exciting companies entering the CDN market and at the Content Delivery Summit, talking place Monday May 14th in NYC, attendees will have to the chance to see some of these companies in action, including presentations from Qwilt, Yottaa, Fastly and DeepField Networks.

• The New Evolution of Transparent Video Caching: The presentation will cover best practices for network insertion of transparent caching solutions in order to maximize return on investment and will go through pre-deployment analysis and sizing strategies, demonstrating Qwilt's platform video analytics capabilities. The session will also provide some guidelines in sizing and comparing TPC solutions and what are the gotchas operators should look for. Presenter: Alon Maor, CEO, Qwilt

• Using CDN and Front-End Optimization To Deliver a Good Mobile Experience: In this presentation, learn how Mocospace combined Front-End optimization with CDN to deliver a great user experience for mobile apps and HTML5 games. Hear about some of the unique challenges of the mobile web including the differences between the desktop and mobile web, how last-mile latency is the primary opportunity, and how and why front-end optimization is a key ingredient for innovation and continued growth on the mobile Web. Presenters: Jamie Hall, CTO, Mocospace and Bob Buffone, Co-Founder, CTO, Yottaa

• The Economics of Building an In-House CDN: This presentation will cover the technology and economic factors when it comes to building your own CDNs in a private/hybrid model, for long tail user generated content. Fastly is the result of a build your own CDN strategy at Wikia and was spun off to deliver a service and custom-made CDN installations. Learn how to deliver very large libraries of small objects, with very flexible configuration language and instant network wide purges, all delivered from well-balanced high performance commodity boxes. Presenter: Artur Bergman, CEO, Founder, Fastly

• CDN and Over-The-Top Traffic Data: In one of the largest studies of its kind, DeepField Networks will report on growth in CDN traffic, over-the-top services and other sources of consumer video across multiple providers. Data will be presented from a study of a hundred providers around the world as well as their recent work analyzing traffic patterns across several million subscribers in North America. This presentation explores seismic, ongoing shifts in Internet traffic demands and underlying network architecture as well as a discussion of evolving provider peering and CDN strategies. Presenter: Craig Labovitz, Co-Founder, DeepField Networks

It's not too late to get a pass for the event and you can use the special registration code of DRF01 and get access to the keynotes, all of the sessions, presentations and networking events for only $295. Register here and put the code DRF01 in the box at the bottom. Twitter hash tag #cdnsummit