burst.com Technology-Understanding Faster-Than-Real-Time: Page 2

Optimizing Bandwidth Makes Video Delivery Affordable

Bandwidth costs money. Networking environments that provide bandwidth due so by virtue of routers, wires, and other costly infrastructure. A well- designed data delivery technology must optimize bandwidth usage and scale well to the number of users, to get the most "bandwidth for your buck".

A key cost-saving measure is to use bandwidth when it is available, rather than letting it slip by unused.

Typical Network Behavior: Bandwidth Demand Rises and Falls
On a typical network, demand for video rises and falls. In real-time streaming architectures, bandwidth usage and video demand rise and fall at the same rate. When graphed, bandwidth demand and video usage appear as a series of peaks and troughs.

Streaming Architectures Waste Resources
To ensure that video demand is met, streaming architectures allocate resources for peaks only; they must reserve enough video bandwidth to meet the worst-case demand. This approach, however, can be very wasteful. Video data can vary considerably and demand fluctuates over time, as illustrated in Figure 3. Bandwidth is wasted when video demand does not require all of the allocated bandwidth. The light grey area in Figure 3 shows the video bandwidth wasted when demand falls short of the peak.

Burstware® Uses Time To Conserve Resources
Bursting, by contrast, averages outs peaks and troughs using intelligent buffer management, replenishing buffers in anticipation of client needs at rates Faster-Than-Real-Time™. When video bandwidth is available, Burstware® provides current clients with more data, filling their buffers. When demand for video bandwidth is high, these clients can play out of their buffers, reducing demand on the network and server.

Burstware®'s approach uses the video bandwidth that was wasted in real time, as illustrated in Figure 4. With these bandwidth savings, the Burstware® architecture can support the same number of clients with less bandwidth and its associated hardware costs.