Lumen help
Here you will find answers to some frequently asked questions for our products.
Web integrations can be as simple as adding a few lines of code to the player, while mobile SDKs generally take up to a day to fully integrate. We generally recommend the following timeline:
Our integration team is at your disposal to assist you across the integration, testing and rollout phases.
Client code is released on a quarterly basis. Hotfixes can be released at any time.
Web: update of the code is automatic as assets are generally loaded dynamically when you're using our CDN delivery.
Native: the customer needs manual action to upgrade the libraries.
We suggest customers to upgrade regularly to get the latest features and best performance. More information on updates can be found here.
Yes, each platform has its own integration. Our expert integration team is at your disposal to assist you in that process.
Yes. For our products’ data privacy sheets and information on processing of Personally Identifiable Information (PIIs), please visit our trust center for more details.
The following table provides a non-exhaustive list of compatible workflows.
Encoding |
Security |
CDN |
Web Players |
Native Platforms |
SSAI |
Analytics |
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Any |
Widevine |
Any |
Vimeo |
Dash.js |
Android & Android TV - Exoplayer |
Yospace |
Conviva |
Playready |
Bitmovin |
Hls.js |
Android & Android TV - THEOplayer |
Google DAI |
Youbora |
||
Fairplay |
Kaltura |
Video.js |
iOS, tPadOS, tvOS - AVPlayer |
Ad Insertion Platform |
Luna |
||
BuyDRM |
Brightcove |
Shaka Player |
Roku | AWS Media Tailor |
Bitmovin |
||
AES 128 |
JW Player |
Flowplayer |
Universal Windows Platform (UWP) |
Mux |
|||
THEOplayer |
Clappr |
Comcast RDK |
Cedexis |
||||
Castlabs |
Radiant Media Player | Google |
|||||
Comcast |
Mpx | Fastly |
|||||
Azure Media Player |
Akamai Adaptive Media Player |
Lumen Technologies acquired Streamroot in 2019, which led to renaming of our products. Please refer to the following table for clarification on the name changes:
Name |
Abbreviation(s) |
Alternative Name(s) |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
Lumen Mesh SDK |
|
Mesh SDK, Streamroot SDK |
The native SDK for Mesh Delivery |
Lumen CDN Load Balancer SDK |
|
|
The native SDK for CDN Load Balancer |
Web SDK |
|
Streamrooter |
The web SDK for both Mesh Delivery and CDN Load Balancer |
Delivery Client Key |
dcKey, srKey |
Streamroot Key |
The unique security key assigned to you |
Lumen Delivery Client |
LMDeliveryClient |
DNA Client |
The runtime object instance at client-side |
Peer-Agent |
|
|
The P2P core library for Mesh Delivery |
Connections between peers are done via a secure webRTC Data Channel (DTLS encrypted). Segments integrity is checked via checksum to avoid content tampering.
SRTP (Secure Real-Time Transport) is used for the transport of video and audio streams. SCTP (Stream Control Transport Protocol), is used for the exchange of application data.
Mesh Delivery is agnostic to DRM, as it operates at the network level. Packets are transferred as-is.
If you run many DRM providers at the same time, the content URLs must be different for peer-to-peer to work correctly (clustered per DRM provider).
It is configurable via the dashboard. Customers can decide to enable or disable peer-to-peer for viewers on mobile network or Wi-Fi.
While we are not an analytics platform, our dashboard displays basic metrics such as CDN offload, traffic volume, sessions, concurrent viewers, bandwidth and rebuffering. Splits and filters are also available.
You can schedule automatic reports on any metric to be sent to a configurable list of recipients.
If you encounter the following message after displaying the Mesh Delivery graph, it means that Mesh Delivery is not activated on this specific webpage.
There are several reasons you may see this message:
If you are unable to connect to any Mesh Delivery sources, i.e., after displaying the Mesh Delivery graph, you see Sources: 0, check the following to troubleshoot.
Open the developer tool of your browser and navigate to the 'Network' tab. Filter requests by host "backend.dna-delivery.com" and examine the following requests.
https://backend.dna-delivery.com/<AZ>/distributor/<VERSION>/config/web
https://backend.dna-delivery.com/<AZ>/secure/[...]
If either of these two requests fail, please contact cdnsupport@lumen.com.
Please note that some custom configurations may show a different host than the default backend.dna-delivery.com
. The path remains the same.
Mesh Delivery matches together viewers in real-time according to many criteria. The algorithm’s goal is to connect together viewers that can provide the highest CDN offload.
Matching criteria include:
During the PoC phase, we adapt the matching configuration to satisfy customer needs. For example, it is possible to restrict the peers’ connection within an ISP, to reduce the Mesh traffic going through ISP peering or Internet Exchange points.
In addition to this, our client-side module can dynamically adapt to network conditions and promote seeding peers which demonstrate the best performance and demote the ones that generate connections errors or demonstrate slow network speed.
Any video P2P solution relies on two groups of users:
In any of the two cases, if the segment in the P2P cache is not complete when the media engine requests it, Mesh Delivery fallbacks to a request to the CDN, in order to avoid rebuffering. Mesh Delivery doesn’t do new segment requests to the CDN by its own; it completely relies on the player’s logic.
To induce the player to request more segments from the CDN in advance - so that they could be shared in the P2P network before the leecher’s player requests it - we leverage the player’s APIs to increase the player buffer target levels. Especially in live use-cases, seeders are set with a “high player buffer target”, whereas leechers with a smaller one. The player buffer target should not exceed the latency (a.k.a. distance of playback to the live edge).
We operate on the vast majority of network topologies. In some particularly complex cases we might need some adaptations, in which case our dedicated team can support you on tweaking your configuration.
High QoS for the end user is our priority and we tune our configuration to achieve this and not impact end-user experience.
We track many QoS metrics via our powerful internal analytics platform; this allows us to tune the peer-to-peer module configuration towards the highest possible levels of QoS and offload, tailored to each customer need.
In addition, the peer-to-peer module adapts in real-time to the device’s capabilities (CPU, RAM, battery) and network speed, in order to guarantee the same levels of QoS of a vanilla player.
Lastly, by loading the peer-to-peer module asynchronously, we make sure the video startup time is not affected as well.
Mesh Delivery for Enterprise adds:
All other features are equivalent to Mesh Delivery for Streaming.
The platform comes with basic tools to enable auto location isolation such as isolating peering over ISPs, and it is also possible to isolate by public IPs, subnets, and IP masks.
Calculating the Global CDN score
CDN Load Balancer bases its selection and switching decisions on a "global" score. In practice,
Global score = business score * QoS score
The global score is based on:
After the beginning of the session, quality is calculated locally. This prevents CDN Load balancer from becoming a single point of failure; during the session, CDN Load Balancer only connects to the backend to send quality statistics to be ued in initial scoring for future sessions.
Practical Example
A broadcaster uses three CDNs for delivery on the West Coast of the US. CDN A is its primary delivery network with CDN B and CDN C as backups. It assigns each CDN the following business scores:
CDN A: 8 CDN B: 4 CDN C: 2
In this case, CDN A will be chosen except when CDN B's quality of service is more than twice as high as that privded by CDN A. In practice, this means significantly lower bandwidth or prevalent errors. By the same token, CDN C will not be used unless its QoS is more than twice as high as CDN B, and CDN A is not available.
The business score for a CDN can be changed at any time and is reflected on new and already running sessions less than a minute after the update in the dashboard.
For example, this allows you to modify CDN priority if you reach one of your CDN commits during the month.
Explore CDN Mesh Delivery