An Aragonese engineer from Telefónica I+D, Jorge Hernández Pablo, designs and coordinates from the Walqa Technology Park, in Huesca, the development of TCDN, the company’s television content distribution network, in which professionals from the five centers participate of Telefónica I+D of Spain. This network has hundreds of servers deployed in different countries (Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and the United States). These servers are strategically distributed in each country to optimize quality, deliver content closer to users so that they can enjoy formats such as HD or UHD and improve their experience.
This network is currently used exclusively for Telefónica’s TV services, such as MovistarPlus+ in Spain, VivoPlay in Brazil or MovistarPlay in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru or Ecuador, “but the intention is to also offer it to other providers who want to provide the best experience to their users who connect within the Telefónica network,” says the company. To do this, it participates in an international consortium (Streaming Video Alliance), which through the Open Caching initiative pursues the interconnection of CDNs.
Streaming has facilitated the viewing of video on mobile phones, tablets, computers, SmartTVs and decoders, but, unlike traditional broadcast mechanisms such as DTT, the content is delivered individually to each device. Jorge Hernández Pablo, manager of the development and deployment of TCDN, explains: “Today, distribution and delivery must be close to the user and must be carried out efficiently, avoiding replicating the entire catalog of series and movies on each server.”.
In addition to guaranteeing the efficient distribution of content, among the future challenges that the TCDN team is working on is facilitating the operation and monitoring of such an extensive network of servers, the protection against attacks or hacking of users, the substitution of advertising, reduction of signal delay or deferred delivery of content.
TCDN was born as an innovation project more than a decade ago, has more than a dozen patents and it has matured in recent years as a commitment by Telefónica, both to offer the best TV service to its users and to optimize investments in its own network, since TCDN reduces the necessary bandwidth in the operator’s backbone infrastructure.
The Telefónica I+D center in Huesca is one of the five in Spain. The others are in Madrid, Barcelona, Granada and Boecillo (Valladolid). Walqa employs 25 telecommunications and computer engineers, of which more than half are Aragonese. It began its activities in 2003 and, during the first 10 years, it has worked on development projects in advanced areas of telecommunications, directed by the European Union, in collaboration with other companies, institutions and universities, both national and international.
Since 2011, the center has been specializing in the development of entertainment services within Telefónica’s digital home strategy. More and more users in Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany and Latin America use services co-designed by Walqa’s Telefónica I+D team.
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