Revenues from over-the-top (OTT) TV episodes and films for 22 countries in the Asia Pacific region are expected to reach US$54 billion by the end of 2026, which is up by 90% from the US$29 billion they generated in 2020.
At the same time, the pandemic has accelerated the need for higher availability, speed, and consistent access to video streaming OTT services, and several other applications in media and entertainment, e-commerce, online gaming, education, telecommunications, and healthcare. This is boosting the demand for best-in-class Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions in the region.
Asia Pacific: Why the pressure is on content delivery network companies
CDN solutions providers in the Asia Pacific region today must contend with crucial questions around speed, capacity, resilience, and scaling, given that online content consumption behaviors have dramatically changed over the past two years. Speed is only as good as the CDN’s ability to maintain high uptime; degradations and outages are, of course, huge risks to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Meanwhile, digital content providers in the region are under pressure to successfully scale capacity and reliably serve the increasing numbers of online customers, even as revenues face downward pressure, especially from flat or declining advertising sales. You also need to extract maximum value from existing investments in CDNs, while ensuring that the performance requirements of the increasing numbers of consumers are adequately met.
Regulatory bodies in the region, especially in Australia, are committed to reducing network congestion, even as they require service providers to cut the cost of content and application delivery. The key challenge is to make content and application delivery more efficient while maintaining very high uptimes.
For many companies, the solution to these challenges includes maintaining a multi-CDN vendor strategy, as well as negotiating more flexible commercial agreements. Multiple CDNs boost overall performance and help drastically minimise, if not prevent outages.
What CDN companies in the Asia Pacific region are doing
CDN companies in Asia Pacific have their work cut out for them in helping clients deliver unique, rich, and sustainable consumer experiences. To answer the complex challenges of content and application delivery, Lumen has significantly increased its regional presence in CDN infrastructure and dramatically augmented capacity.
To support the tremendous growth in demand, Lumen has expanded its services in the Asia Pacific region, including Japan. We help clients deliver rich content experiences to audiences around the world through Lumen’s global delivery network, object storage, and edge-based service offerings.
Lumen has also added new CDN Points of Presence (PoPs), in addition to augmenting our existing CDN capacity. We offer content delivery solutions such as Media Transformation Services and CDN Mesh Delivery to support the evolving consumer experience requirements,
It is also worth noting that to meet the modern-day requirements of low-latency use cases such as mobile and online gaming as well as the Internet of Things (IoT), Lumen has rolled out more application delivery infrastructure nodes. In line with Lumen’s ongoing commitment to higher content and application delivery infrastructure investments in Asia Pacific, we have launched a CDN PoP in New Zealand with up to 280 GBPs of capacity.
Moreover, Lumen is introducing further innovations to help organisations reduce complexities in content and application delivery. For example, Disney and Lumen led the efforts to produce much-needed standardisation in streaming metadata and APIs for the video streaming industry.
As an outcome of this collaboration, content providers can use a common metadata model and a single API to publish content metadata to vendors. For large organisations with multiple brands, the Lumen-Disney collaboration helps circumvent the challenge of proprietary APIs that are inefficient, error-prone, and costly, leading to inadequate customer experiences.
Lumen and Disney seek to leverage the common requirements of open caching systems and commercial CDNs on defining and publishing configuration metadata. In this case, it is of course important to identify a set of drivers that benefit all industry players. These include standardising feature definitions and supporting DevOps-friendly automation. Our ultimate goal is to help technology vendors to differentiate.
Content Delivery Network for businesses in Asia Pacific: Why Lumen?
Lumen’s content and application delivery value proposition is based on the fact that our CDN capabilities are built upon a robust, worldwide IP backbone that has more than 120Tbps of IP capacity and is globally the most deeply peered network. This enables us to provide you a low-latency, high-performing, and resilient content and application delivery foundation.
In addition, Lumen actively monitors and mitigates security threats 24/7 across our global network to augment a comprehensive, layered security strategy. Keeping in line with today’s content delivery needs, Lumen’s CDN solutions are built to support a multi-CDN vendor strategy.
The multi-CDN strategy means Lumen’s solutions can be easily and seamlessly integrated with your existing infrastructure, helping you share traffic between two or more providers. This, in turn, helps you mitigate risks such as micro-outages and peak-hour performance degradations that increase with a sole CDN vendor strategy. In short, Lumen plays a vital role in ensuring that consumers of your content and applications can indeed sustainably access rich experiences.
What’s next?
If you’re ready to get started on your CDN journey, Lumen can help.
Lumen is continuously strengthening its CDN service capabilities in cities across Asia Pacific to cater to growing demands from global broadcasters. Expanding our physical network footprint in APAC while enabling performance improvements in hard to reach markets with our mesh delivery solution can help provide Lumen clients a true competitive advantage.
In 2019, our company was named a Leader in IDC MarketScape’s first Worldwide Commercial CDN Vendors Report for both the scope and scale of its deeply peered global network, but also for its technology innovation, notably in its acquisition of industry-leading mesh delivery provider Streamroot.
For a deep dive into CDN, download and read our white paper on scaling OTT delivery to world class live streaming events or watch the Lumen webinar on how multi-CDN can mitigate risks, how cloud encoding can facilitate content transformation, and how modern security can help protect each layer in your stack.
Alternatively, you can contact us and have a one-on-one consultation with one of our technical experts.
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