A live stream lives or dies on the delivery layer. This category tracks multi-CDN strategy, edge compute, origin caching, HTTP/3 and QUIC, low-latency HLS and DASH, and the performance monitoring tools that catch problems before viewers do.
Fastly announced that its Compute platform, which uses a WebAssembly (Wasm)-based architecture, is not vulnerable to the recently identified 'Copy Fail' (CVE-2026-31431) security flaw. This vulnerability primarily affects shared Linux environments. Fastly highlights that its architectural approach inherently avoids the risks associated with this specific security issue.
Telefónica is expanding its edge computing infrastructure beyond Spain, with Andrea Folgueiras stating the company is actively working on deployments in new markets. This move aims to enhance network performance and potentially support new services leveraging distributed computing.
Wowza published an explainer on contribution and delivery protocols in video streaming workflows. The article distinguishes ingest protocols such as RTMP, SRT, RTSP, RTP, and MPEG-TS from delivery protocols such as HLS, DASH, low-latency HLS, low-latency DASH, and WebRTC, and describes how media servers convert between them in a typical live streaming workflow.
Synamedia and Telxius announced an integration that brings Telxius’ carrier-grade CDN into the Quortex Switch multi-CDN management platform. The collaboration is intended to let content providers switch viewers between CDNs in real time based on QoE and cost, while supporting end-to-end traffic control, scalability, and disaster recovery.
Backblaze has released its Q1 2026 network statistics, analyzing traffic patterns from its B2 cloud storage platform. The data, from its B2 Overdrive program, shows a decrease in traffic to 'neocloud' processing partners and an increase in traffic to CDNs. The report also introduces a new geographical analysis of the network data.
Fastly has introduced new Compliance Audit Reports to help customers streamline their audit processes. These reports provide evidence for various compliance standards including SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and ISO 27001, making it easier for customers to demonstrate adherence to regulations.
The article highlights the critical role of robust optical fiber infrastructure in enabling 5G networks to deliver ultra-low latency and gigabit speeds, essential for high-quality content delivery and edge computing in streaming. It emphasizes how advanced fiber optics overcome traditional network limitations and support the demands of services like high-definition streaming and cloud gaming. The piece underscores the necessity for intelligent, automated optical management to handle dynamic traffic and maintain consistent, reliable high-speed connectivity for both industrial and consumer applications.
ACI Communications is integrating its Infinity broadband amplifiers into Harmonic's cOS Amply ecosystem, a platform for managing broadband networks. The joint solution combines ACI's 1.8 GHz amplifiers with Harmonic's cloud-native software to provide operators with centralized network monitoring and control. This partnership is intended to offer a more cost-effective upgrade path to DOCSIS 4.0 without requiring full infrastructure overbuilds.
This article provides a technical overview of the WiFi 7 wireless standard, focusing on its Multi-Link Operation (MLO) feature which allows devices to use the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands simultaneously to improve speed and reduce latency. According to the article, real-world tests have demonstrated speeds of up to 1.7 Gbps on a laptop, with controlled tests using hardware like the UniFi AirWire reaching over 3 Gbps. The piece positions WiFi 7 as a significant enhancement for demanding applications such as 4K streaming and cloud gaming, while also noting challenges like hardware costs and compatibility.
IdeaNova and Cadami have partnered to create a software-based system that turns aircraft cabins into local content delivery network (CDN) hubs. The solution combines IdeaNova's Inplay Edge caching technology with Cadami's STACHUS distributed storage platform to improve onboard streaming performance by caching content across passenger devices. This approach aims to reduce reliance on limited satellite bandwidth for both licensed in-flight entertainment and OTT streaming.
An opinion piece by Rene Van Koll of Big Blue Marble argues that disaster recovery (DR) for large-scale live streaming is now mission-critical and must move beyond traditional CDN failover. Citing recent high-profile failures with UFC/ESPN and Viaplay's Formula 1 coverage, the author states that modern DR needs to address the entire interdependent workflow, from ingest to playback. The article highlights the importance of multi-CDN delivery, geo-redundant infrastructure, and cloud-based models to ensure service continuity as audience tolerance for failure diminishes.
Analysys Mason reports that access to the satellite constellations market remains limited despite high demand. Vendors are advised to align their strategies with national priorities and focus on scaling production. This trend focuses on the infrastructure development around satellite-based video delivery.
Hydrolix disclosed a reference solution built with Amazon Web Services that connects Hydrolix CDN Insights to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to enable natural-language querying of long-term quality-of-experience metrics using full-fidelity CDN data. The solution is positioned as an AI-assisted observability/analytics workflow for operations teams, with supporting documentation shared via an external blog and a GitHub project, but no commercial details or customer metrics were provided.
Boston low-power TV station WCRN-LD has launched 5G Broadcast operations under an FCC experimental license, following sister station WWOO-LD, described as the first 24/7 5G Broadcast station (launched September 2023). The article describes 5G Broadcast as an over-the-air method based on the 3GPP standard to deliver live TV and emergency alerts directly to compatible mobile devices without Wi-Fi or a cellular data plan, with commercial smartphones and receiver equipment targeted for Q3 2026.
Castanet Corporation announced a commercial-ready hybrid ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast Internet pilot network in Las Vegas at the 2026 NAB Show, following an earlier Silicon Valley pilot with Major Market Broadcasting. The company also opened its C5G Interactive Live Sports second-screen platform to the public and reported progress on VoDoS, a Video-on-Demand-over-Satellite consortium aimed at one-to-many satellite CDN distribution for D2C and wholesale use cases. Castanet says the system aligns with FCC regulations, can leverage LPTV spectrum, and its spectrum-owner consortium covers roughly 60% of the U.S. population.
Cloudflare discusses the evolving challenges to traditional bot detection methods due to AI assistants and privacy proxies. The company advocates for new accountability models, emphasizing client control and an open ecosystem of anonymous credentials. This approach aims to preserve user privacy while simultaneously protecting web origins from abuse.
Fastly's privacy-preserving edge infrastructure is supporting Google Private AI Compute. This integration enables secure and private access to Google's Gemini models. The collaboration focuses on leveraging Fastly's edge capabilities for AI computations.
Fastly's Threat Insights Report indicates that 49% of all web traffic consists of bots, with 99% of these bots being unwanted. The report suggests that organizations need to evolve their bot strategy to manage security and costs more effectively. The article provides insights into the nature of bot traffic on the web.
Fastly discusses Media over QUIC (MoQ) as a technology aiming to deliver real-time media with both low latency and scalability. The article posits that MoQ could achieve this by replacing traditional streaming segments with a more efficient delivery model. This technical development is presented as a potential solution to a long-standing challenge in streaming.
The article reviews updates to Google Media CDN over the past year, including a reported tripling of delivery capacity since early 2025 by combining Media CDN and YouTube capacity, with a focus on handling live-streaming traffic spikes. Google added caching/routing options such as Flexible Shielding with new shield regions (South Africa, Middle East, U.S.), expanded origin compatibility (HEAD support, larger max segment size, multi-part range requests), and introduced monthly savings plans for more predictable costs. It also launched a Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) offering aimed at providing real-time, event-focused operational visibility from origin to end-user metrics.
Fastly announced the redesign of its Control Panel homepage. The update provides users with a centralized, dynamic view to access actionable insights on performance, security, account health, and spend alerts.
Wowza outlines Media over QUIC (MoQ), an in-development IETF publish/subscribe streaming protocol built on QUIC/WebTransport that targets sub-second live video delivery at large scale, positioning it as a potential single protocol spanning ingest and distribution. The article compares MoQ with RTMP, HLS/DASH (including low-latency variants), and WebRTC, and highlights MoQ’s relay-based fan-out, tracks/groups/objects data model, and browser support via WebTransport/WebCodecs. It also notes MoQ’s current limitations, including evolving drafts, interoperability/tooling gaps, limited hardware encoder support, and the need for hybrid fallback delivery, and states that Wowza has joined the OpenMOQ consortium to help advance implementations and testing.
Fastly has identified CVE-2026-23869 as a high-severity denial of service vulnerability affecting React Server Components. The company is providing information on the impacts, affected versions, and solutions for immediate protection, including a virtual patch.
Fastly advocates for the use of technical precision over indiscriminate IP blocking as a method to combat piracy. The company states this approach helps protect an open internet without causing collateral damage.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) describes its development work on “Oracle Video @ Edge” (OVE), a multi-tenant live and premium video delivery service using Media over QUIC (MoQ) to address peak-concurrency live event delivery and “thundering herd” behavior. The architecture includes multi-protocol ingest (e.g., HLS over CMAF and SRT) normalized into MoQ object streams, a cloud-native relay fleet for regional fanout/autoscaling, and integrated telemetry aligned with standards like CMCD/CMSD, with edge egress that can convert MoQ back into CMAF segments and dynamically generated HLS manifests. The post positions OVE as moving from beta toward general availability, with stated next steps including broader CDN/ISP interconnects, player ecosystem support, capacity modeling, dynamic ad delivery, and DRM-based content protection.
AWS documentation describes Amazon CloudFront as a global CDN that accelerates delivery of static and dynamic content via edge locations, retrieving uncached objects from defined origins. It outlines core configuration concepts such as CloudFront distributions, origin options (including Amazon S3 and AWS Elemental MediaPackage), caching/expiration controls, and a choice between standard distributions and multi-tenant distributions for SaaS use cases. The page also summarizes CloudFront’s usage-based pricing model centered on data transfer out and request volume, with origin-to-CloudFront transfer free when using AWS origins.
This NAB Show 2026 preview outlines how IP-based and cloud-distributed media operations are increasing operational exposure for broadcasters and streaming platforms, elevating monitoring, security, and resilience to executive-level priorities. Sources from TAG Video Systems, Telestream, Broadpeak, the RIST Forum, Veset, and Tuxera highlight challenges including end-to-end visibility across layered IP networks, piracy/credential abuse during high-value live events, disaster recovery via cloud playout, and emerging content authenticity needs tied to synthetic media and provenance tools.
A Google Research paper presented at USENIX NSDI 2023 describes HALP, a heuristic-aided machine learning eviction policy for YouTube’s CDN DRAM cache aimed at improving cache efficiency with low CPU overhead. The authors report HALP has been running in YouTube CDN production since early 2022, reducing peak byte miss by an average of 9.1% with about 1.8% CPU overhead, and introduces an “impact distribution analysis” method to measure deployment impact under production noise.
Satellite broadcasting is evolving into a high-capacity distribution network, integrating with telecom services and leveraging advanced digital media formats like 8K to bridge the digital divide. It maintains its value for Direct-to-Home (DTH) in remote regions and is adopting hybrid models combining broadcast signals with internet connectivity for interactive features and Push VOD. Modern satellite systems are also being integrated into Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for pre-positioning content at the edge and ensuring high-quality UHD/HDR delivery.
Fastly announced new Compute pricing based only on requests and vCPU usage, designed to reduce costs and carbon footprint through efficient code. The service is available for self-purchase and includes free tiers. This update aims to incentivize more efficient software deployment on their edge platform.
The article discusses BISS-CA as a solution for securing live sports contribution feeds. It highlights that BISS-CA provides open and interoperable conditional access to prevent piracy at the source.
Bitmovin and Cloudflare demonstrated Media over QUIC (MoQ) playback at NAB 2026, showcasing an emerging IETF standard for sub-second latency live streaming at scale. Bitmovin integrated MoQ into its Player Web X as an isolated plugin, while Cloudflare deployed open-source MoQ relays across its global network, emphasizing an open infrastructure approach for the new standard.
Broadpeak summarizes a discussion with JioStar CTO Akash Saxena on engineering and operating live cricket streaming in India at very high concurrency, citing IPL peaks of 32M (2023), 63M (2024), and 55M (2025) streams and planning scenarios approaching 100M concurrent viewers. The article highlights a hybrid delivery approach combining public cloud CDNs with infrastructure deployed within telecom networks, along with in-house SSAI at scale, anti-piracy enforcement, and increasing operational automation for live-event reliability.
This article provides a detailed technical explanation of MPEG-DASH, an ISO-ratified adaptive bitrate streaming protocol, covering its architecture, how it delivers adaptive bitrate video, supported codecs, DRM via CENC, and comparisons with HLS. It also highlights Ant Media Server's implementation of LL-DASH via CMAF, multi-protocol ingest, and scaling capabilities for various use cases.
Red5 describes progress on its Media over QUIC (MOQ) implementation and says it plans to go live on Red5 Cloud with globally distributed MOQ relays running on CacheFly. The post also introduces a proposed new live media delivery approach called MOCK (Media Over Conjectural Kinetics), which conceptually models media fragments as "kinetic particles" and uses predictive reconstruction (including GPU-accelerated inference via NVIDIA CUDA) to target extremely low latency and reduced buffering behavior. Red5 says it is exploring how MOCK could integrate alongside existing MOQ and WebRTC workflows and intends to release early research/implementation under an Apache 2 license.
A consortium including Neutral Wireless and broadcasters such as BBC, France Télévisions, and RAI is urging mobile network operators to enable interoperable, cross-network control of 5G performance for live broadcast production. The group calls for implementation of CAMARA Quality on Demand (QoD) and QoS Profiles APIs via the GSMA Open Gateway/GMSA Fusion initiatives to allow dynamic prioritization of critical video, audio, and control flows in congested environments. Target availability is requested beginning in the UK (Q4 2026), followed by Italy, France, the Netherlands, and the USA, with pilots planned after go-live dates and an IBC showcase slated for September.
The article describes a UK-focused overhead network concept using a linked array of tethered high-altitude aerostats with antennas to extend 5G broadcast coverage and enable rapid deployment of private 5G networks for live production, including in low-coverage areas. After eight months of proof-of-concept trials, the project has received government-level planning approval and is slated to go live later this year, with interest from outside broadcast teams for summer live events.
The article summarizes an SVTA draft standard, CMSD-MQA (Common Media Server Data for Media Quality Assessment), which defines how encoder-generated video/audio quality scores (e.g., VMAF, PSNR, SSIM and composite MQA-VIDEO/MQA-AUDIO) can be carried through the live streaming delivery chain as standardized metadata via CMSD/CMCD headers and, where needed, H.264/H.265 SEI messages. Workshop demos from Norsk and Touchstream showed per-segment quality-aware monitoring and origin switching between redundant live pipelines based on these scores, plus use cases spanning contribution selection, manifest signaling, origin-shield routing, player-side auditing (including ad quality), and analytics aggregation. Adoption is described as early, with Norsk/id3as and AWS Elemental MediaLive/MediaPackage v2 cited as early adopters and broader uptake expected after formal SVTA publication.
Comcast says its DOCSIS 4.0 rollout is now available to “millions” of homes, expanding beyond the ~1 million homes passed and ~10 markets cited in 2024, as it upgrades its HFC footprint with digital nodes and Full Duplex amplifiers. Executives also described AI-enabled network monitoring using Broadcom silicon that they say improves impairment detection accuracy and reduces repair minutes and trouble calls, alongside continued deployment of vCMTS across HFC and FTTP options and an edge AI initiative with Nvidia.
The article promotes BlazingCDN's Video CDN offering for video streaming workloads, including VOD, OTT, and broadcast delivery. It claims the service enables high-quality, low-latency video delivery to global audiences and positions it as an enterprise-grade solution.
Synamedia introduced ContentArmor Edge Watermarking, a forensic watermarking solution that inserts session-specific watermarks directly into the compressed stream at the CDN edge to help detect and disrupt piracy. The company claims the approach halves watermark insertion and extraction times versus A/B watermarking and reduces origin-to-edge and cache bandwidth, targeting an end-to-end disruption time of under five minutes. The solution is positioned as avoiding A/B dual-asset caching by encoding once at the headend and inserting unique identifiers per session on the fly at the edge despite constraints like limited CPU and lack of DRM keys on edge servers.
CableLabs and Zoom completed a pilot validating CableLabs' Quality by Design (QbD) framework, which enables broadband networks and applications to exchange real-time performance telemetry (latency, jitter, packet loss) to identify and resolve quality issues automatically. The pilot incorporated Zoom's "Client as a Sensor" capability (introduced in Zoom 6.1.0) to feed application-level metrics into QbD, and CableLabs plans a next phase with Meta to extend experience measurement to applications that cannot share real-time telemetry via network monitoring and scoring methods.
Aurora Networks and Huber+Suhner are collaborating to support Vodafone Germany in upgrading its cable network using Distributed Access Architecture, including Remote PHY devices and a virtual CMTS. The project is positioned to enable multi-gigabit services and expand Vodafone’s HFC network by shifting processing closer to end users and using COTS server-based vCCAP/QAM video capabilities for centralized provisioning and monitoring.
Fastly has been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Forrester Wave™ for Edge Development Platforms. The company received perfect scores for performance and developer experience in the report.
Synamedia and Spanish consultancy/systems integrator MoMe launched a streaming-optimised CDN service in Spain, built on Synamedia Fluid EdgeCDN and offered via MoMe subsidiary Argos Technology Services. The companies say the service is designed to meet Spain/EU regulatory, operational, and performance requirements, with deployment across eight Spanish data centres and edge locations aimed at low-latency delivery. MoMe also plans to offer multi-CDN delivery outside Spain, including integration with Synamedia Quortex Switch.
Fastly is showcasing new advancements in application security and bot management at the RSAC 2026 conference. These advancements include the Adaptive Threat Engine and ATO Deception, designed to help organizations protect against rising and increasingly sophisticated bot traffic.
LTN expanded its technology partnership with Harmonic to offer an integrated IP-based channel distribution solution aimed at helping broadcasters and networks migrate away from satellite distribution amid expected FCC-driven C-band changes. The combined offering integrates Harmonic’s VOS360 Media SaaS and XOS Advanced Media Processor with LTN’s global IP network to support IP delivery to MVPDs, vMVPDs, and local stations, including workflows for video processing, targeted ad insertion, and channel deployment. The companies plan to demonstrate updated IP transport stream distribution and content customization workflows at NAB Show 2026.
Vecima Networks detailed its expanded role in Charter Communications’ multi-phase HFC network upgrade, including planned deployments of Vecima’s DOCSIS 4.0 remote PHY devices (Entra ERM422) and expanded use of its remote OLTs (SF-4X) supporting both 10G-EPON and 50G ITU PON. Charter’s phased plan moves from 1.2GHz high-split upgrades to distributed access architecture with virtual CMTS, culminating in DOCSIS 4.0 and 1.8GHz upgrades intended to enable multi-gig downstream and at least 1 Gbit/s upstream across its footprint. Charter expects the upgrade to be 50% complete by end of 2026, and has indicated it will fast-track DOCSIS 4.0 in Cox territories post-merger close, while other suppliers (e.g., Harmonic) are also participating.
Caretta Research, in partnership with Zixi, released a white paper reporting that broadcasters and sports organizations are shifting live video distribution and contribution from satellite and fibre toward IP- and cloud-based workflows. The report cites drivers including US C-band satellite spectrum reallocation and broader cost and streaming-demand pressures, and highlights use cases such as scaling live sports production, adding camera angles, and distributing to more affiliates and platforms with monitoring/orchestration tools.
Fastly announced an upcoming webinar featuring Michael Breed to discuss the importance of speed, precision, and performance in technology, drawing parallels from golf. The webinar will focus on how repeatable mechanics and low latency contribute to elite performance. This event highlights Fastly's expertise in delivery and performance aspects relevant to streaming.
