Friday, September 17, 2010

Opanga Offers Store-and-Forward Video Delivery

Opanga's "NetRover Mobile" offers a way for mobile service providers to optimize the delivery of video content in non-real time (essentially store and forward) to alleviate the strain streaming places on mobile network bandwidth.

The solution allows operators to cache content on a device, in order to avoid service degradation during busy times on the network, and to avoid adding to network congestion.

If you think about a consumer digital video recorder as a device that captures real-time video for non-real-time viewing, Opanga is a way of capturing non-real-time video for real-time viewing.

It would also seem to be using a "bandwidth management" technique that does not obviously run afoul of potential network neutrality regulations that would prohibit any bit prioritization. Using the Opanga approach, there is no "prioritization," simply delivery at times when the network is lightly used.

Opanga likely will encounter the typical issues that have limited the use of "store and forward" approaches historically. By definition, it doesn't help with real-time or on-demand video. The concept requires some amount of local storage, probably limiting the use of most phones, and even most smartphones.

That said, Netflix historically has proven that non-real-time video delivery can be successful.



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