FLAME has been outlining the main platform benefits as part of the initial work needed to develop and deploy a Future Media Internet delivery platform starting in 2018. The main target is to provide a significant leap forward for media delivery supporting personalized, interactive, mobile and localized (PIML) workflows.
The FLAME platform provides this leap through capabilities for low latency distributed computing as well as content over a 5G-enabled programmable infrastructure, providing the user with faster access to media and services, lower latency and higher personalization of the experience through closer media processing. Through the platform’s fast and dynamic service request routing capability, media service providers will have fine-grained control over load and therefore costs across the network. This offers the potential to significantly reduce the overall costs while ensuring fast availability of services towards end users.
Furthermore, the FLAME platform will provide the capability to cheaply broadcast content to multiple users without any need for adopting clients and services to specific multicast protocols, significantly reducing the predicted cost increase for video delivery. Through its innovative network-level indirection capability, media service providers will be able to create simpler media services that can rely on the network capability to find suitable content resources while reducing or even removing the need for costly and inefficient content synchronization. This will give end users instant access to local content while retaining efficient access to all information held in other locations.
Security and privacy will also be improved by enabling secure data replication, with private data being more secure with less chance of being exposed to unauthorized access. Through reinventing the realization of content delivery networks of today’s Internet via secure content delegation, access to content can still be encrypted while retaining the performance benefits of such specific content delivery solutions. The flexible service chaining capability of the platform will also allow for highly adaptive media services, using advances in infrastructure-embedded function virtualization to react to changes in demand from the user side through the insertion of transcoding, storage and transformation services into the delivery chain towards the user.
Work throughout 2017 will focus on the specification of the solutions to realize these capabilities, with alpha components planned to be tested and integrated for an early 2018 availability.