HESP Alliance blog by Gcore – June 2023 - The needs and requirements of viewers are always growing. Everyone expects high-quality video streams and low-latency broadcasts for various reasons, whether it’s live sports betting, making sure online bids are recorded on time, hosting virtual events such as webinars or conferences, or simply holding a live stream on social media. The biggest challenge of the video streaming industry that still remains these days is live low latency at scale.

Gcore recognizes the trends and needs of the video industry and is further improving its services on an ongoing basis. Gcore’s latest achievement towards this goal is that its CDN is HESP-ready.

This means that the G-Core CDN has successfully passed the HESP Alliance verification process and can now officially distribute HESP-based workflows across its global CDN POPs, delivering high-quality real-time video, while easily scaling to thousands or millions of viewers. It also supports other HESP benefits such as fast channel change, important for leanback TV and multiview experiences.

Gcore’s streaming infrastructure is equipped to handle the demands of large-scale video delivery, ensuring that viewers always receive seamless, high-quality video content. Whether you’re building a video sharing platform, a virtual event service, or a video-on-demand app, our technology is versatile and adaptable to your needs.

Opportunities Provided by HESP

Who will benefit from this?

Everyone from developers or small-scale startups to large enterprises will benefit from this solution. Many businesses strive to minimize latency and optimize costs when it comes to video broadcasts. The following industries in particular stand to benefit:

• Esports and gaming: Via HESP–based workflows, we can deliver video content to end users faster than standard HLS or MPEG-DASH protocols. This makes it ideal for the fast-paced and dynamic world of esports and gaming.

• Sports: With HESP–based workflows, sports events can be streamed almost in real-time and even faster than on TV, making it perfect for broadcasting sports events.

• Auctions and online casinos: It’s essential to minimize delays and maintain high video quality in these industries to give viewers a closer look at what’s happening on the screen. HESP can help achieve this at a lower cost.

• Online education: Interactive events with large audiences can be held without any restrictions and without having to use any expensive external applications, making HESP ideal for online learning.

• Telemedicine: HESP ensures that doctors can communicate with a large audience without resorting to any third-party applications, which can help significantly reduce financial costs in the telemedicine industry.

• OTT and TV broadcasting: Combining IPTV and OTT solutions at the highest quality

Higher quality at a lower cost

HESP specifically excels in real-time streaming at scale, including for events with big audiences of more than 1 million simultaneous viewers around the globe. As HESP is an HTTP-based protocol, it can scale over standard CDNs (now including the Gcore CDN!) with global points-of-presence to deliver real-time video worldwide.

This is in contrast with WebRTC based scaling, where each client requires a persistent connection with the back end, and scaling takes place through spinning up additional server instances, which is complex and expensive. On average HESP-based streaming is 2-5 times more cost effective than WebRTC-based streaming.

Moreover, HESP also provides for a higher viewer quality of experience, thanks to its fast channel change capabilities, and thanks to TCP delivery. The latter makes sure that there are no frame drops, something which can occur with UDP delivery through WebRTC.

About G-Core Labs

Gcore is a European provider of public cloud and edge computing, content delivery, hosting, and security solutions. Gcore is headquartered in Luxembourg and has offices in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Cyprus, Serbia and Georgia. It provides infrastructure to global companies in an array of industries, including Luxembourg’s national agency eSanté, TEDx, Wargaming, Orange, Sandbox Interactive, Avast, and others. The company has been awarded 25+ industry-leading accreditations. Andre Reitenbach has been the CEO at Gcore since 2014. 

Gcore manages its own global IT infrastructure across 6 continents, with one of the best network performances in Europe, North America, Africa, and LATAM, according to the independent analytical services provider, Cedexis (a Citrix company). Gcore delivers an average worldwide response time of 20−30 ms, although in several regions it dips below 3−5 ms. Gcore’s network consists of 140+ points of presence around the world in reliable Tier IV and Tier III data centers, with a total capacity exceeding 110 Tbps.