China Central Television is the biggest television network in mainland China; its online portal CCTV.com hosts a mega-scale video database and streams content 24/7 to a huge online audience base across the globe. During large-scale live events like the National Day Parade, the number of concurrent online users on the CCTV broadcast platform can reach as high as 11.06 million.
In order to provide the best video, audio and interactive experience to its audience, CCTV.com has adopted advanced technologies like automated big data platform, 5H encrypted video broadcaster and intelligent video editing; but one challenge remains: how to ensure a stable and uninterrupted streaming experience for such a large number of concurrent viewers? The Internet traffic surge during these large events can congest the network and lead to compromised end user experience and eventually decline of viewership.
The content delivery network, backbone and “express highway” of the internet, plays a critical role in solving this problem. Since 2017, Baishan has been providing live streaming and video-on-demand acceleration services to CCTV.com and its affiliated apps for a number of large-scale events such as the Spring Festival Gala, The Two Sessions, the National Day Parade, the World Cup, etc.
Empowered by its extensive global network resources, Baishan is able to accommodate traffic surges during mega-events (dozens of times higher than daily traffic peak) and ensure seamless video streams across the entire network. Leveraging its highly agile, loosely coupled architecture, Baishan offers CCTV.com a one-stop, highly customizable video streaming solution that supports multiple streaming scenarios. During a live streamed basketball game, for example, users can drag the progress bar and switch the bitrate at ease; they can replay their favorite moment in a chosen resolution while the event is still live. Baishan’s live streaming service not only provides end users with fast playback, low buffer rate, and highly available viewing experience, but also meets the ever-evolving business needs of different video streaming platforms.
Baishan now has 400+ high-quality Point of Presence(PoPs) around the world and its CDN platform processes more than 300 billion user requests per day, peaking at over 7 million requests per second. Other than live-streaming and VOD, Baishan also provides bespoke services to a variety of scenarios such as web page acceleration, software download acceleration, application acceleration, etc. Since inception, Baishan has been recognized by Gartner and IDC for its service performance and quality; earlier this year, Baishan also received the highest Trusted Cloud Service rating from CAICT (China Academy of Information and Communications Technology) for its CDN services.
Going forward, Baishan will continue to provide high-quality content distribution and acceleration services to CCTV.com and in a concerted effort with China’s largest television network, explore new streaming possibilities enabled by artificial intelligence, 5G and advanced mobile technologies.
