Our Technical Systems
Apollo-11.tv uses one of the most technologically advanced state-of-the-art technical systems in the web industry. Our aim is to provide the highest-quality, most user-friendly experience possible to users anywhere in the world. By design, we can also accommodate any size audience, even at peak periods. Our technical systems feature:
- An advanced Content Management System (CMS) supporting web pages that are fully responsive to work optimally on all devices; both desktops and mobile
- Cloud-based online storage system for video masters and distribution files
- Globally-distributed content delivery network for media with 53 distribution points located all around the world
- Globally-distributed content delivery network for page content with 152 distribution points located all around the world
- Web application firewalls (WAFs) that protect our page and media content from unauthorized use and bad actors with malicious intent
- Cloud-based encoding technology
- Entirely new and expanded encoding profiles based on our tens of years of real-world experience with this type of video content
- New security and encryption technology for protecting our video assets
- New transport technology for both video-on-demand and live events
- New embedded video players for all of our videos with better cross-platform capabilities and advanced features such as closed captioning, multiple audio tracks for foreign-language dubs and commentary tracks, screencasting to Chromecast devices and social sharing.
- Expanded HLS streaming that will support more devices such as almost all desktop browsers, Apple iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads and Android smartphones and tablets.
- Adaptive stream technologies that provide our featured content in 11 different speeds and sizes that will adaptively and dynamically adjust to the speed and congestion of a wide range of end-user networks anywhere in the world.
Our entire system is optimized for the delivery of large amounts of high-quality video content.
Our Content Management System
Our content management system (CMS) is an enterprise-class system that provides the intelligent management of large-scale websites. It is professionally-hosted in a large NYSE-listed cloud hosting organization. It is also monitored and managed 24x7x52 by a Network Operations Center with "smart hands" engineering support continuously standing by to handle any issues.
Our Media Player
We use the licensed version of the JWPlayer Ad Player for our media player to embed video content onto our pages. JW Player is the most popular video player on the web — it’s also the fastest HTML5 player so our content renders reliably and beautifully on every screen on almost every device in common use.
Storage Cloud
We set up a cloud-based storage system that is high-redundant and geographically distributed for fail-over protection. The system is highly survivable for protection against loss of a stored file. The storage system is also highly secure and can only be accessed by our administrators and the content delivery network (CDN). The storage system stores all of our master files as well as encoded distribution files.
Cloud-Based Transcoder
When we finish editing a video, we make a high-bit-rate master file using an intermediate master file format. We then upload the master file to our cloud-based storage system. These masters are very large files, and we use gigabit-per-second fiber connections to make the transfer. From the master repository, the master file is available to our cloud-based transcoder that is composed of thousands of individual encoder instances working in concert. The transcoder farm uses our master files as source material and encodes our Adaptive Streaming distribution and manifest files. The control of the transcoder farm derives from a set of encoding profiles that are highly technical and have been custom developed to meet our needs. Jobs are loaded into a production pipeline and queued for processing. As each job finishes, the encoded files and manifest files are written back to their assigned storage location in our storage cloud.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Media
When each individual user requests to view a video, the content delivery network determines which of the CDN's node location would best serve the end user requesting the video. Currently, the CDN can choose any of our 53 node locations from all over the world. Once the serving node is selected, the CDN downloads the video to the serving node (at multi-gigabit-per-second core network speeds.) The video files get cached in the node from our storage cloud and play them out to the end user requesting to see the video. The video files will live in the cache for 24 hours to serve any replay to the original requesting user and any other nearby user that comes during the 24-hour period. This feature allows us to serve a large portion of the population of the planet as if they were all local.
The locations of our CDN nodes are:
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United States
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South America
Europe
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Asia
Australia
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The CDN not only allows the best possible performance, but it also allows extreme availability. In the unlikely event that any one or more of the 53 data centers were to totally fail, the other remaining nodes simply absorb the load in fail-over mode.
The resulting design also provides extreme scalability. Since the 53 data centers are distributed close to population centers and serve as forward-deployed caches, we can serve large numbers of users from each location. If one data center becomes too heavily loaded to provide optimal performance, the excess load is load-balanced to another data center. The total capacity of the system is extreme.
Without exaggeration, the CDN can serve millions of simultaneous users with a high degree of reliability and performance.
In addition to its core features, the CDN also allows us to stream both RTMP and HLS transport streams. Further, the CDN supports AES encryption technology and key management for all of our video streams.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Page Content
In addition to specialized data centers for media, we have an entirely separate CDN for page content. Our CDN for page content is separate to provide increase redundancy in the overall system as well as to meet the specialized requirements for serving this type of data. Like our CDN for media, our CDK for page content greatly reduces page download times regardless of with our visitors are located and greatly increases our overall capacity to handle any visitor loading. Also, our CDN for page content provides an extra layer of security to elegantly deal with any potential distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, unfortunately all too common with high-visibility websites, even from attacks of great scale.
We currently have 152 nodes distributed around the globe. Our goal for 2018 is to end the years with data centers in 90% of the counties on the planet.
The locations of our CDN nodes are:
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North America
Latin America & the Caribbean
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Europe
Africa
Middle East
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Asia
Oceania
China
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