Google Cloud opens up Media CDN to publishers

Google's move to open up its streaming infrastructure network to media and entertainment publishers could bring significant opportunities for advertisers.

At the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit in Las Vegas on Monday, Google Cloud announced the general availability of Media CDN (content delivery network), the same platform that serves streaming content to more than two billion YouTube users over the past decade.  

In a blog post explaining the move on Tuesday, Google Cloud's vice president and general manager of networking, Shailesh Shukla, contends that this will provide "unparalled scale and intelligence", allowing media and entertainment customers to more efficiently effectively stream to viewers around the world.

The impact of more widescale higher quality streaming, in turn, could have a direct impact on monetisation and advertising. 

"While global distribution is critical for a high-quality end-user experience, it’s only one piece of delivering a world-class platform for immersive experiences," Shukla says. "Media CDN offers additional capabilities to enable this transformation: ad insertion, ecosystem integrations and platform extensibility, and powerful AI/ML analytics for interactive experiences. Streaming providers can improve monetisation through integrated ad serving via the Video Stitcher API, which allows  manipulation of video content to dynamically insert ads." 

Google argues its decades of investment in network capacity across more than 200 countries and 1,300 cities around the globe is its "foundational advantage" in delivering a more stable stream with higher bitrates and reduced buffering.  It also claims Media CDN is "developer-friendly" with automation and tracking tools built in for media companies "under pressure to develop and deploy innovative experiences at a furious pace."