CDN Failover

When a user is playing video/audio and an error occurs we want playback to recover using different CDN.

When is it triggered?

Few reasons why errors can happen when playback is attempted:

  • Loss of network/low network
  • Loss of connection to a particular CDN
  • Missing segments in manifest
  • Device specific fatal errors

Note: CDN Failover is not attempted if the error occurs in last 60 secs of static (on demand) content

Standard Failover - On all devices/playback strategies

Buffering timeout Errors

Some potential causes:

  • Loss of Network
  • Internal error not reported by device browser

Errors at the start of the playback

  1. Bigscreen Player has been initialised and is in WAITING state
  2. CDN failover is attempted after 30 secs

Errors during playback

  1. Playback strategy reports waiting event
  2. Bigscreen Player is in WAITING state
  3. CDN failover is attempted after 20 secs

This can be replicated by network throttling. We usually use very low setting of 12 kb/s to trigger buffering.

FATAL Errors

Some potential causes:

  • Loss of CDN, unavailable CDN
  • Corrupted stream
  • Issue with the device browser
  1. Playback strategy reports error event
  2. Bigscreen Player is in WAITING state
  3. CDN failover is attempted after 5 secs

This can be replicated by blocking CDN in the inspect debug tool.

Seamless Failover - Only on MSE Strategy Devices

We provide dash.js with all the urls provided. dash.js will switch CDN 'seamlessly' if it detects an issue, which may not always result in a WAITING event being throw.

This can be replicated by blocking CDN in the inspect debug tool