Fastly provides Atresmedia with a flexible and scalable solution for live streaming on Atresplayer

Fastly's edge cloud platform, Media Shield, has improved the quality of the user experience by reducing live streaming latency, even in the face of large traffic spikes.

Atresmedia, in addition to its linear channels, offers streaming through Atresplayer y Atresplayer Premium (the paid version with exclusive content and previews) all types of audiovisual content.

Since its launch, the group has been expanding its offering of streaming, which today represents a key business line for the company. In addition to VoD content, Atresmedia is committed to live streaming for the live broadcast of important events, such as sports finals or electoral events. These events register high audiences and users expect an experience equivalent to that of terrestrial TV, without delays or latencies.

In order to optimally serve the traffic generated on these occasions, it is vitally important to have all the infrastructure prepared and have a CDN that can support it, with the assurance that there will be no incidents or outages, regardless of how high the number of concurrent users is.

Since it has the edge cloud platform of Fastly, Atresmedia knows exactly and at all times the capacity required by its original infrastructure. Thanks to Media Shield it is only necessary request each object from the server once that stores the content, so bandwidth consumption at the source remains constant, regardless of the volume of connected users, their geographic distribution or how many CDNs are contracted.

Atresmedia chose Fastly as a CDN provider to respond to the main challenges of livestreaming: avoid latency y improve the quality of the experience of users; offer a reliable architecture y scalable capable of absorbing large and unpredictable traffic peaks; reduce the cost associated with the streaming platform; and have the CDN control to autonomously make quick changes using API or UI.

The solution

Fastly's edge platform has provided Atresmedia with a flexible and highly scalable solution for content distribution, which has improved the quality of the experience by reducing livestreaming latency, and guarantee its performance even in the face of large traffic peaks. Fastly's modern architecture provides greater caching capacity and works as an extension of your infrastructure. Thanks to this, it is possible to make changes instantly and have full control and visibility of key indicators and data in real time.

Fastly's technology, in addition to maximizing latency to improve QoE, guarantees a quality response and secures the source infrastructure with Media Shield. On the other hand, it makes it easier to do instant configuration changes, including rollbacks, tests and adjustments through a user interface and API as well as quick and easy changes to streaming settings using on-the-fly geoblocking.

The platform also provides real time statistics, compatible with other systems
measurement like Kibana.

Traffic spikes and cost reduction

Due to its modern architectural design, Fastly has greater capacity to store content in your cache, so that Atresmedia's origin servers only have to process the sending of information once. The following requests are served directly from the Fastly cache. Thanks to this, Atresmedia can predictably manage large numbers of concurrent users, with the peace of mind that the user experience will be optimal.

The audiovisual group has achieved have the management of large demand peaks under control, even in times of additional stress due to live events, and, thanks to Fastly, adjust your server infrastructure at the origin (on-premise and cloud), predict the necessary bandwidth and avoid preventive oversizing.

Atresmedia has also worked with Fastly to reduce the TCO of your geolocation service. Thanks to Fastly's CDN on-the-fly geo-blocking functionality, you only need to create one version of each streaming channel. With this, it has reduced by half the number of encoders required and the complexity of managing geoblocking.

Independence and flexibility

For Atresmedia, it is important that its CDN works as an extension of its infrastructure, so that it is possible to carry out developments on its own servers and in the cloud. Wearing VCL, the Atresmedia team can intervene directly when adjustments, tests and developments need to be carried out in seconds, without having to request the intervention of the CDN provider.

Fastly's network configuration allows you to offer very detailed logs in real time, which provide relevant technical and market information. Thanks to this, Atresmedia can monitor traffic, infrastructure performance and quality of service up to the second, and make immediate adjustments, if necessary. You can also have detailed knowledge of key aspects of the user profile and work with segmentations.

Carlos Santos, head of the Video Platform at Atresmedia, comments that "Fastly has helped us improve the quality of video delivery, and has also taught us that a CDN does not have to be a black box. Fastly is accessible and open."

“During the debate of the general elections in Spain [April 2019], we multiplied our expectations
of traffic and, in addition, we multiplied by two our previous record with the broadcast of the Champions League final. Fastly's response was spectacular. “We were pleasantly surprised,” he adds.
“Thanks to Media Shield, we have managed to reduce source access costs by 60%,” acknowledges Carlos Santos.

For its part, Oscar Gonzalez, responsible for Architecture and Back-end Development, points out that "one of the great improvements we have experienced with Fastly is the production time: we have gone from hours and even days to very short times. In the case of purging: previously they could last several minutes and with Fastly we barely notice the decaching times."