Giraffic Crowd Streaming™
A New Paradigm for Video Delivery & Acceleration
Giraffic has developed an innovative approach for content delivery - The Giraffic Collaborative Content Cloud:
With its extremely efficient and scalable fully distributed Collaborative Content Cloud, Giraffic delivers an unparalleled user experience and low delivery costs, regardless of the content's popularity and geographic location.
The Giraffic Video Accelerator end-user Application
Giraffic improves substantially end-users' viewing experience by enabling users higher quality over their existing Internet connection, by virtually eliminating any re-buffering pauses during video playback and by speeding up initial playback time, even in highly congested Internet peak-times.
Giraffic’s end user application is a thin, extremely secure browser plug-in, Mobile App or set-top-box client, which operates seamlessly in the background without impacting the user’s performance or bandwidth. Giraffic’s software is usually only utilized when a user is actively viewing rich media content online, or when his computer is completely idle.
Core-Technology
Giraffic's algorithms integrate redundancy and high availability into the data itself, before it is distributed, and can even retrieve data from very unreliable and low-end devices on the Internet (end users' computers and set-top-boxes).
Giraffic's acceleration is effective even when the total amount of a data in the network is very limited (for example, "long-tail" content), or the geographical location of the content source is very far from the consumer.
Every file stored on the Giraffic’s Fully Distributed Video Acceleration Cloud is split into frames. The actual length of a frame is variable and depends on the size and bit rate of the file. Each frame is then divided further into blocks, and encoded on-the-fly using Erasure Correction Codes. Giraffic’s implementation of these codes has enabled the variable block lengths and the most simple, fast and efficient encoding and decoding algorithms possible. Redundant data is either virally or pro-actively distributed to end-user devices using a smart selection algorithm that takes into account geographical factors, bandwidth abilities, availability, and other statistical data.
This patented pro-active distribution enables any one of millions of different files to be always available for instant playback by any end-user on the globe.
Congestion Control
Giraffic’s application manages and streams content items in a distributed manner utilizing ground-breaking congestion control which overcome Internet congestion, particularly during peak hours and for High Definition content.
Giraffic's congestion management can identify internet bottlenecks in real-time and adapt sources dynamically to guarantee always a seamless streaming performance.
Seamless Deployment
The Giraffic Video Accelerator can be seamlessly integrated into a content providers’ branded media player, or any other toolbar or light-weight browser plug-in.
Liberating Content Delivery from Popularity, and solving the "Long-Tail" problem
Giraffic’s technology enables streaming from the collaborative cloud peers (end-user devices) from the first or second view, and not just of extremely popular or cached content. Furthermore, it is unlimited in regard to the number of content items or quantity of storage space.
Giraffic offers content providers a robust solution, suitable for delivery of any type of content – regardless of popularity or the geographical location of the content origin and the end users.
Thus, Giraffic is optimized for delivery of long-tail as well as popular content, professional/studio content and user-generated content (UGC), and all data formats (video, image, audio, games or other software).
Consumers turn to the internet mostly for niche, long-tail content such as older movies, TV show reruns, user generated clips and other videos such as are available on leading websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Netfllix or Hulu. In today's new media age most of the video traffic in the internet is comprised of such "long-tail" content and not just the extremely popular stuff.
For popular content or live streaming CDN caching as well as Peer-to-Peer technologies have enabled scalable and efficient content delivery, because blockbuster content is, by definition, extremely viral and resides on thousands and sometimes millions of end-user devices. Hence, it is statistically probable that a user will find several sources for the data at any given time, and retrieve all the bits and bytes required to restore the full media content file.
However, long-tail content titles with low popularity behave in the opposite manner: most of the data is replicated a few times. This makes the use of any (current) P2P networks highly unreliable.
Giraffic’s technology encodes the data in a robust and redundant manner, and distributes it pro-actively throughout the network with a very small overhead. And it does so with a reliability and speed which is even greater than if the data were stored in centralized high-end servers or CDNs.
Asynchronous Streaming Acceleration
Giraffic's patent-pending streaming protocol is a resilient high performance and secure layer over standard internet protocols (such as HTTP, RTMP, HLS), which pools dozens and sometimes over 100 simultaneous content sources into a high-quality robust stream. Furthermore, the data streamed from these multiple sub-stream sources can be obtained by the viewer Asynchronously in random order and used to compute each and every frame of video during the required playback.
The asynchronism of this data retrieval, coupled with the dozens of small 40-60kbps sub-streams, is what enables the video acceleration: because no data is wasted or re-transmitted, and any data arriving can be immediately decoded and delivered to the video player, even if extreme packet loss or congestion has occurred on the network.
Giraffic's deployment results with millions of end-users to date now demonstrate a faster and smoother streaming performance, on average triple of that delivered by conventional CDNs and streaming protocols. This improvement is particularly evident during peak hour loads, for HD content, or for Adaptive Streaming.