Is the era of "cheap, all-you-can-watch content” (for consumers) ending? This is the contention of a recent Guardian article examining challenges telcos face. Connecting the dots between writers’ and actors’ strikes, booming broadband use, increasing infrastructure costs and streaming, the article taps into the old adage: ”Nothing in life is free”. The notion of ”cheap” really depends on where you sit in the value chain and how you can leverage the resources available to you.From the telco perspective supporting the boom in streaming use is not “cheap” but there are strategies that can be applied to regain control.

First, it’s important to understand the economic drivers for streamers and telcos/service providers. The consumer is the source of revenue either directly in the form of subscriptions (for streaming services and broadband) or indirectly from advertising. For now let’s just focus on the supply chain players or the cost of sale elements from the streamer and broadband provider perspective.

As a Solutions Architect, Web Developer or Performance Engineer, you have many ways to deliver web pages, applications and content over HTTP/S. But as you are aware, the level of complexity exponentially grows as the type of data, data source, clients, and client locations increase while performance, reliability and budget requirements become more stringent. Two of the solutions, both available as open source and commercial software, employed by many to solve these challenges are NGINX and Varnish. There are various resources available that cover the differences, however, many are written from a very specific web serving point of view. This article will briefly define the differences between both solutions then define the 1) underlying architectural approaches and their benefits, 2) ideal characteristics of cache-centric use cases, and 3) the future of cache, content and edge delivery. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are six months away. However distant this may seem, wheels  across the entire e-commerce industry have begun to turn, shifting their focus from projections and forecasts to tactical decisions on how to improve operations within budget.

With this in mind, here are a few things you can do right now to get ready for this year.

Quality content drives valuable action. Whether that action is a download, install, view, subscription or purchase, quality content is the compelling reason to act. Content can mean a document, an image, audio, video, software or just about anything that can be digitally delivered. But it’s not just the content itself that affects the end user’s perception of quality. The way digital content is aggregated, displayed, recommended, transacted and delivered plays a critical role.