Giraffic Architecture
Crowd-Sourcing End User Excess & Idle Bandwidth to Accelerate Internet Video
All bandwidth and storage resources are aggregated and utilized from end-user computers and home devices, such as IP set-top-boxes, media, and gaming consoles, Internet-enabled digital video recorders, and mobile phones. Each user becomes a node on the network and communicates with other users upon demand. This occurs when the user either requests to view content, or serves content to other users.
Serving other users only occurs when the users' device is Idle and internet bandwidth in his area is abundant. A user's device never interrupts another activities the user might be performing at the time that require his bandwidth..
Giraffic’s end-user software can be packaged in content providers' existing offerings – such as high definition or exclusive content, or in existing players or toolbars on content providers’ Websites or in their Mobile Apps.
Giraffic’s network consists of end users and centrally managed servers.
The servers handle the secure connection and authentication of the end-users’ digital rights management, and control and monitor the network. No actual streaming or heavy media delivery is done from the servers.
Unlimited Scalability
More users = lower cost = higher performance
End-users’ last mile bandwidth is the only part of the Internet infrastructure which has proven itself as expanding at the same rate as the growth in consumption, content bitrates and volume of data being downloaded.
Giraffic’s fully distributed network is inherently scalable. The larger the audience of viewers is, the more resources are added to the network with the resulting ability to deliver more media.
That said, Giraffic's streaming algorithm will only utilize abundant or excess end-user resources in the network, so users with limited bandwidth or storage (such as mobile devices) will not be used for delivering media to other users, but can enjoy the accelerated video streaming from other devices in the network such as home PCs and Set-top-Boxes.
How is this different from Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery Networks?
Giraffic's technology and architecture enjoy some of the benefits of P2P such as virtually infinite peak-hour scalability and low bandwidth costs, but also have a substantial performance benefit to the end-user's streaming experience:
- Better Video Streaming Experience - users get more "Juice" out of their existing internet connection::
- Eliminating "Re-Buffering" Pauses and significantly improves streaming reliability, even compared to carrier class CDNs (X3 faster streaming and download speed and 70% less re-buffering pauses), hence reducing churn and increasing revenues from online video.
- High Definition Video - optimized to delivery of HD by overcoming most of the inherent internet bottlenecks.
- Distributed Adaptive Streaming - offers additional layer in the video player that improves buffer management, bitrate switching and guarantees effectively ZERO re-buffering pauses and higher resolution on the end-user's existing internet connection.
- Optimized for the New Media Age: Enables real-time, on demand, streaming from end-users in the cloud for "long-tail" content and from the first or second view, and not just for very popular content.
- Network Friendly: Helps relieve internet congestion, "flatten" network bandwidth peaks almost entirely, and reduce the amount of data required to deliver the average video stream compared to standard HTTP CDN based delivery.
- User Friendly: Utilizes only a small fraction (usually 5-10%) of end-users' uplink bandwidth and only when bandwidth is abundant and user's internet connection is idle.