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VDI for Video delivery

I had a chance to meet Senior Telcom Executives. There was a healthy discussion about the first/last mile challenges.

The conversation lead to challenges faced by ISP's due to growth Video streaming and download traffic.

The Problem statement:
- Bandwidth consumption of on Conumer network due to video traffic both due to streaming and download

Detailed Description:
There was a discussion about how consumer business is negetively impacted due to the popularity of Online Video. Added to this, The Content providers are not willing to colocate the content with the SP. there are consumer who consume gigabytes of bandwidth from residential customers due video download services such as netflix.

Technical background:

HD Video takes anywhere between 1 to 20 Mbps bandwidth for streaming the video(MP4,MPEG2, SD, HD) . the current experience is jerky with wait times to accomadate for the download capability and congetion. The video rental sites have a different behevior due to the need to downbload to rights managment appliance(roku/PS3/WII) to be played on tv.

Proposed Solution:

The Advent of Virtual Desktop infrastrucutre is gaining popularity in the enterprise. the is huge body of knowledge being built to address Bandwidth Video quality and audio quality issues.
There Several Remote Display Protocols such as:
1. RDP - 7 from Microsoft
2. ICA - Citrix
3. PC-over-IP - TeraDici

Promising but lesser known products:
- Wyse TCX extension for RDP
- Quest RDP optimization Pack
- HP RGS standard.
Most of these protocols take under 100+KB to 1 MB.
Due to the low bandwidth requirements we are proposing a Cloud based VDI instance for Broadband subscribers to allow them download movies or stram movies using a VDI instance.
This in turn means the service provider is able to terminate HD on a Free Cloud based VDI and deliver it using VDI stream protocol.

This approach can be using anyone of the above methods.
-As the adoption increases, the Downstream last mile network bandwidth pressures are reduced due to lower predictable traffic profile which can further be optimized by traffic optimization solutions

- Centralizing and containing Video traffic of the Content Provider traffic to single cloud environment compells content provider co-locate to Service network to control cost and complexity.

- Influencing Road map thin client vendors to incorporate newer optimized protocols to provision them as client access nodes in consumer networks.

After some testing we came to a realization that VDI approach better for downloads(like iTunes - Movies/podcasts or P2P downloads) than the streaming(Youtube-Flash or Netflix-silverlight)

Conclusion:
Although there are newer video standards, VDI based Video Standards are simpler to impement, easier to scale and secure to operate the time has not yet come to deploy them in scale.

The key inhabitors of this approach are the video quality and sound synchonization over VDI.

The Answer may be in creating a simpler network with high bandwidth between Home and CO with distributed VDI residing at the edge along with protocol and codec optimization for High quality interactive Remote Audio/Video Experience.

References
Bandwidth - http://www.icf.at/en/6000/how_much_bandwidth.html

VDI Protocols -http://searchvirtualdesktop.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid194_gci1353748,00.html#

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