In an exclusive interview with Vijaya Cherian, Shahid CTO Dominic Farrell and Head of Digital Infrastructure Adriaan Bloem talk about what led MBC to install a private CDN and what it will mean for the streaming service in the months to come. "The private CDN is operated by Medianova as a managed service and this addition will help MBC provide much better video delivery" Medianova’s CEO Serkan Sevim steps in to explain that while 85% of content today is delivered with a multi-CDN approach making it the industry standard, “a private CDN should be one of the important delivery points for OTT”. “A private CDN PoP provides more control, better quality by not fighting for the cache space, and more agility by letting you run your own microservices at the edge,” says Sevim. “While we recommend that clients keep the existing multi-CDN architecture in place, we explain that a private CDN platform improves the quality of content delivered in the region and offers greater control on where to cache their valuable content. This platform can also be considered as a private cloud at the edge where OTT providers can run their own microservices such as packaging, DRM, real-time data analysis or machine learning applications. This way, the key data and operations stay in the region without going back and forth to Europe or other locations,” he elaborates. For MBC, which has a relatively reliable setup in place, the addition of a private CDN was meant to help make “the smaller incremental improvements”, says Bloem. “You want to start shaving off a second of the video startup time and increase the percentage of people that get our highest bitrates and video quality. We work closely with our CDN partners to achieve that, but having our own dedicated nodes makes it easier to steer on some metrics that are very particular to Shahid,” he elaborates. The team, therefore, wanted to have the ability to put nodes where they matter most to Shahid, explains Bloem. “That objective is not always aligned with the priorities of global CDNs that need to satisfy multiple customers,” he points. Unlike a global CDN, the addition of a private one will allow the team to scale up much more quickly, and with Shahid’s traffic levels peaking, this will be a more economical strategy for the team.