Introduction

We are proud to present the newest production ready version of Hive WebRTC v1.3!

This release features great improvements in peering, delivering improved quality of experience, and loosening of previous limitations.

As is the nature of WebRTC technology, there are some restrictions as well. Read below to learn more.

Hive WebRTC v1.3 is suitable for

• Customers that do not want or can't install Hive Agents on all or some devices
• Existing customers with a lot of Stats only viewers with a significant amount of WebRTC compatible browsers

Notable New Features and Improvements

Site Information No Longer Required for Usage

With new improvements in peering and locality detection, site information for a customer network is no longer required when using WebRTC v1.3

Like all Hive Agents, complete and accurate site information will still have a positive impact on distribution and performance. However, due to the nature of this implementation, having no site information sometimes yields better results than having partial site information depending on the customer's network set up.

This concept is presented in the table below:

1. A standard network is one where machines are logically and geographically grouped into subnets, and offices. (i.e. Machines marked as coming from an office in Stockholm are physically there)
2. Non-typical networks are any that deviates from the standard. Most commonly seen when machines having the breakout point in a different physical location (i.e. users in India are connected to a proxy in Stockholm and therefore would show up as Stockholm)

Significantly Improved Quality of Experience

• Changes in the peering algorithm resulted in significant improved QoE at a potential minor cost of savings
  • Peering Calculation: Using the ratio of P2P successes and failures that this connection has, the bandwidth estimation between 2 peers is now calculated to determine whether requests will fail or not. Clients will then decide to go to the CDN or fetch from P2P given this new information
  • Peer Preference: No longer 'greedily' seeking P2P connections over CDN - this results in potential poorer savings, but results in a very notable QoE improvement
• Removed repeated acknowledgement pings from a requester machine to a peer machine resulting in notably decreased latency

Version 1.0 results in a large network


Version 1.3 results in the same network

Summary

UPDATE - 25K Concurrent Viewers (across all customers)

We have improved the maximum concurrent viewer limit from 10k to 25k. This means the size of webcasts needs to be somewhat restricted and well coordinated to ensure that there is never more than 25k concurrent WebRTC users at once.

UPDATE - Bitrate up to 3.5 Mbit/sec

This release has increased the certified bitrates up to 3.5 Mbit/s. Although this is a significant increase from the previous release, it is important to note that if higher bitrates are used, savings will be lower and buffering may still occur.

Requires WebRTC compatible browser

Hive WebRTC uses the web browser library WebRTC. In addition Hive WebRTC requires that the browser supports a sub feature of WebRTC called RTCDataChannel. See Hive WebRTC Device Requirements for details.

Silent Testing only if Hive Java is installed

Since Hive WebRTC only runs when a viewer has a video player opened in their browser, we can't conduct Silent testing. However, in hybrid setups with a mix of Hive Java agents and Hive WebRTC viewers, the Hive Java agents can be used to start specialized Hive WebRTC silent tests.

Unable to peer with Hive Java

Hive Java and Hive WebRTC uses different P2P protocols and can thus not peer with each other. See "Who peers with who" at Hive Clients

Unable to use low Priority P2P Traffic

The WebRTC library doesn't currently support low priority traffic. So unlike Hive Java, Hive WebRTC will use TCP like network priority for all P2P communication. This means Hive WebRTC is not as network friendly as Hive Java, but this should rarely be an issue to the customer.

Does not support remote configuration

This means none of the more advanced configuration behaviours in Hive Java is available in Hive WebRTC v1.0. This includes site configurations, disabling site-to-site traffic, limiting bitrate as so forth.