U-NEXT: Streaming video to millions with a modern CDN

Google Cloud results

• Configured Media CDN in a few hours
• Reached a 98.3% cache rate
• Automated monitoring frees up 60%+ of an engineer’s time

U-NEXT is a popular Japanese streaming service and digital content platform. Since 2007, U-NEXT has pioneered video distribution services in Japan and has substantially grown its market share and the number of titles handled. Its mission of “developing an easy-to-use service for everyone and answering every subscriber’s needs by providing a wide range of content” has served the company well. Today, U-NEXT has more than 2.5 million subscribers watching its movies and shows.

In the business of video streaming, a seamless viewing experience means everything—slow load times or playback problems could cause customers to abandon the platform. But even with high internet connectivity in Japan, some U-NEXT customers encountered issues like slow time-to-last-byte (TTLB) rates. From that point on, the technology team decided the best solution was running multiple content delivery networks (CDN) to enable redundancy and faster TTLB times for all its customers. A CDN is a group of geographically distributed servers that speed up the delivery of web content by bringing it closer to where users are. While U-NEXT was already working with two CDN vendors, the team went looking for another CDN that could deliver a high cache rate and low TTLB.

We needed to have a modern CDN

For the small U-NEXT team, the CDN product had to be easy to maintain, with monitoring alert systems that wouldn’t call for building the entire backend in house. "We needed to have a modern CDN that didn’t require dedicated engineers to review weekly tech reports," said U-NEXT Chief Technology Officer Rutong Li. "If we had to have lots of interactions with the CDN to keep it working, we would never use it."

After a few cases of customers saying YouTube was streaming while U-NEXT was having playback issues, the team decided to learn more about the infrastructure that powers the biggest online video platform worldwide. U-NEXT discovered Media CDN, the network behind Google streaming. Both YouTube and Media CDN share the same Google Cloud infrastructure. As a standalone solution, Media CDN delivers global scale and reach, with edge caches—servers that store content in strategic locations to take the load off origin servers—directly connected to nearly every major end-user Internet service provider.

Configuration made easy—Media CDN is up and running in a few hours

When U-NEXT reached out to Google to learn more about Media CDN, Li said it was an easy decision for his team to move forward with a proof of concept (POC). "We decided really quickly to go with Media CDN because we realized this was a product built for engineers, by engineers," he said.

Soon after those initial conversations, U-NEXT developed a POC that had live traffic in less than 14 days. The speed was due, in part, to the easy configuration of Media CDN. Unlike other CDN products, Media CDN does not require extensive tuning to achieve high offload. In fact, using the command line tool, it only took the U-NEXT team a few hours to set up a working configuration. "The clear domain designs—with different origins for different routes and policies—made it really convenient for us to patch the system quickly," Li said.

After three days—60 hours to be exact—the team’s POC had achieved a cache rate of 97% while keeping the origin server under 10 gigabytes per second even during peak traffic on the platform. That confirmed Media CDN could deliver a super fast and seamless experience for U-NEXT subscribers.

Following the successful POC, the team ran Media CDN in production where it has since reached a 98.3% cache rate, making sure U-NEXT’s origin server isn’t overloaded with user traffic, which could lead to slowed video streaming. "We’re very comfortable switching between CDNs because the Media CDN caching is so efficient that we know there won’t be a huge impact on our origin," Li said.

A modern CDN that does the heavy lifting

Perhaps the best time-saving feature for U-NEXT is the automated monitoring and logging. Instead of wading through mass amounts of system alerts, the team can surface relevant notifications and metrics because Media CDN with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring enables them to set up dynamic filtering. And because the logs are served up in near-real time (less than one minute), U-NEXT engineers can act fast to update their configuration and make sure customers aren’t affected. "It’s really easy to filter out those error logs, so we pay less," Li said. "Then we can write a small routine in the backend to the log to react to those errors."

All told, the automated monitoring frees up two-thirds of an engineer’s time, Li said. "We see Media CDN as a modern CDN—one that uses infrastructure as code for fast configuration and makes intelligent decisions to alleviate the burden on our team," he added.

To capture all its Media CDN logs, U-NEXT set up pipelines to BigQuery. "We just click a button in the configuration and the logs are delivered to the common Google logging system very quickly," Li said. BigQuery also houses U-NEXT’s data mart, which powers the company’s customer analytics.

Looking ahead, U-NEXT plans to expand its partnership with Google Cloud and the team is excited to connect Media CDN to more of its infrastructure.