How NPO Achieved High-Throughput, Secure Video Streaming Running NGINX on Modest, Off-The-Shelf Hardware

Dick Snippe, Hosting & Streaming Engineer at NPO

When demand on a video‑streaming platform grows from tens to hundreds of gigabits, some scaling issues are likely to crop up. In his session at NGINX Conf 2018, Dick zooms in on three topics:

• Load balancing – How can you write your own load balancer in your language of choice to steer the video traffic with as little overhead as possible?
• Content protection – How can the NGINX OpenResty Lua module be used to protect against copying of deep links by third parties?
• Optimizations – If your site uses HTTPS, it's a good practice to use HTTPS for streaming content too, to avoid warnings from the browser about mixed content. What does it take to serve 20 Gb of HTTPS traffic per streaming server?

NPO hosts the video‑streaming platform for the largest news and sports network in the Netherlands. At peak times – for example, during important soccer matches or significant news events – the NPO platform serves approximately 450,000 concurrent viewers, which translates to 450 Gb of network traffic.