Content Delivery Networks

8Cultural Change

8.1 Traditional Broadcasters

Cultural resistance to change is a central issue to manage when designing and deploying a CDN. There are many stakeholders who are affected by a CDN deployment, and despite best intentions, not all of them will see the benefits. I aim to provide a little of my view on the psyche of some of the players in the various stakeholder groups.

In most recent conferences over the past two or three years there has evolved a sense that most technical challenges faced by CDNs can be addressed. However, there is a universal sentiment that the biggest challenge facing CDN and IP video platforms is in cultural resistance to change.

I still see some companies proclaiming the imminent “death of SDI.” Having myself spent 20 years delivering IP video, I had to go back to learn about this legacy technology, and yet there are many tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of TV broadcast companies that still run their operations with SDI as the backbone network technology. Those operators are, understandably set in their ways, working typically to a mantra of “it ain’t broke, why fix it.”

The intransience of others can be excruciating to live with, once you have yourself taken the mental step into the IP delivery paradigm. Even more so once you have gotten the service velocity advantages of microservices and the NFV models (which I discussed in detail in Chapter 7 above).

In my practical experience trying to proactively help traditional broadcast operators ...