Scalability of Digimeld's Grid-streaming Solution

DigiMeld's Grid-streaming solution is extremely scalable, and is guaranteed by its unique and patented architecture. Different from competitors like Octoshape, Velocix/RawFlow and Live Station, DigiMeld has central-controlled grid networks, which means the peering behavior of the viewers are managed by the grid control servers, not by the viewers themselves.

Due to limited physical resources (CPU computation power and memory capacity), each Grid Control Server can manage up to 20,000 concurrent viewers. To manage more concurrent viewers, DigiMeld simply adds more Grid Control Servers. For example, 100,000 concurrent viewers require five Grid Control Servers and one million concurrent viewers require fifty Grid Control Servers. Compared to CDNs, whose servers may only manage 300-400 simultaneous viewers, DigiMeld's Grid-streaming solution is more flexible, scalable and more cost effective for streaming live events.

All the Grid Control Servers will report their network topology to a single Central Control Server, which in turn knows the whole topology of the entire grid network and enables the possibility of “cross domain peering.” For example, the Central Control Server may determine that viewer X (managed by Grid Control Server X) should have the best efficiency to peer with viewer Y, which is managed by Grid Control Server Y.

The DigiMeld architecture can provide higher scalability because as the number of concurrent viewers grows, the network becomes more robust. By using this mechanism, DigiMeld successfully streamed to more than 100,000 concurrent viewers during the rebroadcast of World Cup 2006 games using only five servers.