Help fans watch the experience – CDN behind the World Cup

On November 20, the 2022 Qatar World Cup opened. Although there was no Chinese national football team, “China is everywhere”. According to the data released by Global Data, at this year’s Qatar World Cup, Chinese enterprises became the largest sponsor of this World Cup, and sponsored a total of US $1.395 billion for the Qatar World Cup, more than US $1.1 billion. A total of four Chinese enterprises were included in the official sponsor list: Wanda Group, Hisense Group, Mengniu Dairy and Vivo.
On the opening battle of the cartel against Ecuador, Hisense Group’s “China’s first, the world’s second” large Chinese character advertisement on the sidelines attracted the attention of the world, but also received domestic attention through CCTV.
I believe that there are many small friends who watch the ball all night like Xiao Bian. They are sorry for Argentina and Messi, and happy for Japan’s victory over Germany. Every day, stories on the rooftop are rumored everywhere~

Technical challenges of World Cup broadcasting
Every live broadcast of popular sports events, especially the wonderful moments of global events such as the World Cup, will bring the peak of traffic. In fact, you can watch high-definition real-time live broadcast of the World Cup, which involves many technical challenges:
1、 Content concentration. The core content of the World Cup is CCTV5. With the commentary channel, there will be more than 10 live broadcasts on multi-angle channels. If the source station has problems, then all live broadcasts will have problems.
2、 High concurrency. There are tens of millions of concurrent online users watching the World Cup, and the number of users has increased significantly. Assuming that the live broadcast platform has a short failure, all users may re-request or request other systems, which will also put great pressure on the system.
3、 Security. The World Cup is a world-class event. If there is a safety accident in the middle, the impact will be very large, and the platform side will also have an unshirkable responsibility.
Under such challenges, in order to maintain the stability, smoothness and security of the World Cup live broadcast, there needs to be a set of complex schemes and logic behind it. The most critical and important part of this logic is CDN technology. It is with the support of CDN technology that we can have a high-definition and smooth experience in watching the World Cup live broadcast through video websites.

Application of CDN in live broadcast
The full name of CDN is Content Delivery Network, which is content distribution network. CDN is a content distribution network built on the network. Relying on the edge servers deployed in various places, through the load balancing, content distribution, scheduling and other functional modules of the central platform, users can obtain the required content nearby, reduce network congestion, and improve user access response speed and hit rate. The key technologies of CDN mainly include content storage and distribution technology.
In short, CDN provides network acceleration. The basic idea is to avoid bottlenecks and links on the network that may affect the speed and stability of data transmission as much as possible, so as to make content transmission faster and more stable. Application on video websites is mainly to let us watch videos without getting stuck. CDN acceleration is used because the number of visits a server can bear and the bandwidth it can provide support are limited. Whether it is a video website or a picture website, CDN should be used to divert and reduce the load on the server.

The following is a brief introduction to the technical application of CDN in live broadcast:
Because the most original signal is likely not to be used by the cloud platform, such as the signal with very high bit rate, which is not suitable for transmission, generally there will be a link produced by the source for coding to provide a source station service. The second part is the video cloud center. The whole live broadcast platform architecture is the center architecture. All the functions required for live broadcast, such as transcoding, screenshots, recording, watermark, are completed in the center. The third part is CDN. CDN is a link that really carries the user pressure of the whole World Cup live broadcast. Tens of millions of users are running on the CDN. In cooperation with OSS dual writing, CDN also supports two OSSs. According to real-time detection, the good slices are pieced together. Any abnormal or slow OSS writing will not affect the content transmission. The fourth part is the client, which is the port for our users to watch the live broadcast.
Because the CDN architecture is distributed, considering the scale of the World Cup, the central master and standby are adopted. If there is a problem with the CDN center, it will immediately switch to another one. In addition, multiple L2 nodes will be placed in each region. If there is a problem with L2 at a certain time, it will immediately require other L2 nearby to access. It will not affect the quality of service because of the different places. The load balancing and CDN scheduling optimization scheme within the node can ensure smooth business.
Fire umbrella cloud CDN live broadcast acceleration function
Based on large-scale real-time streaming media computing cluster and powerful audio and video signal processing algorithm, Fireumbrella Cloud video live broadcast acceleration provides fast, stable and safe end-to-end acceleration service for live broadcast customers, and provides “clear, smooth, low latency, high concurrency” audio and video live broadcast service.
In the process of live broadcast acceleration, Fireumbrella Cloud uses the CDN node acceleration technology to use the intelligent load balancing system to locate the user’s live broadcast access to the best node. The live broadcast information and data transmitted through the best node can largely meet the user’s demand for live broadcast acceleration and obtain a smoother video experience.
Fire umbrella cloud CDN live broadcast acceleration can be widely used in various live broadcast application scenarios. Whether it is the live game you watch everyday, or the large-scale live TV broadcast like the World Cup, it is also applicable to manufacturers and overseas enterprises under various live scenes, such as: live show, live game, live conference, live teaching, live broadcast with goods, etc; At the same time, for enterprise customers with multi-person voice, multi-person video, instant messaging, online karaoke and other related use scenarios.
Umbrella Cloud Convergence CDN covers more than 25000 service nodes worldwide, covering major mainstream operators around the world. Easy access, support RTMP push and pull flow, and speed up the configuration. It is safe and reliable, providing URL authentication, HTTPS and referer anti-theft chain and other protection mechanisms to reduce the risk of eavesdropping.