As traditional cable, satellite, and terrestrial TV are challenged by over-the-top (OTT), internet protocol television (IPTV), and video-on-demand services — made even more challenging by higher-bandwidth, last-mile fiber, and 5G mobile network extensions — service providers are transforming their technology infrastructures to decrease lag time for viewers. Werner Gold, Red Hat’s emerging solutions evangelist for the telecommunications industry, discussed the issue with TelecomTV at 2018’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Increased OTT and IPTV traffic creates more congestion on aggregation networks, Gold explained. “We need to have more powerful, flexible content delivery networks that are also being virtualized, and new caches can be built at the network edge to host the content there to offload this kind of traffic from the aggregation networks,” he said. “But also the OTT traffic is competing with live linear TV… where we need to bring the content very fast to the customers as well.”