Dynamic Content Steering Services

The video service providers commonly employ multiple vendors, each operating independent Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), to deliver video content to end-users 1. To address this growing trend, known as the multi-CDN strategy, the technical communities responsible for developing prominent streaming standards, including HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), have devised a system where every end-user regularly contacts with a central manager, known as the content steering server 3. On each interaction, end-users receive instructions on which CDN to retrieve the content from. From the end-user feedback and the collected global metrics, the steering server implements a load balancing strategy, which finds a trade-off between long-term business logic and short-term Quality of Experience (QoE) maximization.