What’s The OCM (And Why It’s Needed)

Content delivery is becoming increasingly complex as content providers seek more capacity, broader geographic reach, and lower delivery costs. The Open Capacity Marketplace (OCM) aims to simplify this challenge by creating a standardized marketplace where content providers, CDNs, ISPs, broadcasters, and other network operators can buy, sell, and exchange delivery capacity through automated, standards-based workflows. By combining Open Caching, blockchain technology, and smart contracts, the OCM seeks to make content delivery more efficient, transparent, and accessible.

TL;DR

• The Open Capacity Marketplace (OCM) is a platform that enables content providers to request delivery capacity and allows CDNs, ISPs, broadcasters, and other operators to offer it through a common marketplace.
• Built on standards such as SVTA Open Caching, the OCM allows diverse capacity providers to appear as a unified delivery footprint within a content provider’s architecture.
• Blockchain technology and smart contracts enable permissionless participation, automated verification, and settlement without requiring a central intermediary.
• The OCM helps reduce operational complexity by automating the process of discovering, procuring, and managing delivery capacity across multiple providers.
• By connecting content providers, CDNs, ISPs, broadcasters, and future delivery technologies, the OCM creates a foundation for a more open, efficient, and scalable content delivery ecosystem.

What Is the OCM?

The OCM is a technology platform that enables three things:

• Capacity requests. Through the platform, content providers can make requests for capacity according to their business requirements. This can include both traditional capacity, such as a commercial unicast CDN, or non-traditional capacity such as ATSC 3.0 data channels.
• Capacity selling. Capacity providers of all kinds, from commercial CDNs to broadcasters to mobile operators, can include their capacity in the marketplace. This is enabled by standard interfaces like Open Caching.
• Permissionless participation. Through the use of Blockchain (verification, smart contracts), all relationships between CPs and capacity providers happen without anyone in the middle.

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Using standard interfaces, like SVTA Open Caching, CPs can see capacity as one footprint when they incorporate the network details of those capacity providers they choose into their delivery architecture.

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You can read our whitepaper to get more detail on the architecture and how transactions happen within the marketplace.

So…Why OCM?

When content margins are so tight, CPs are looking for anything to save money. Reducing complexity saves money. Increasing efficiency saves money. By moving the manual process of finding, securing, and engaging with capacity networks (which may be dozens at the end of the day, especially as ISPs want their piece of the action) into an automated technology platform. This is the vision of CDN Federation…only better.

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But the OCM is more than that. It’s also about giving ISPs an opportunity to participate in content delivery revenue. They are ultimately responsible for delivering the traffic because they control the last mile. Why shouldn’t they have an opportunity to capitalize on that?

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Because the OCM is built on industry standards, it really is the glue to connect the three constituents — CPs, ISPs, and CDNs — together in a way that allows for future methods of delivery (and capacity types) to connect. Consider ATSC 3.0 broadcasters. As receivers become integrated in more devices, those broadcasters will want to find a way to generate revenue from that channel. But they aren’t CDN providers. They don’t have a sales staff to sell their capacity. And what about when capacity networks start incorporating multicast? Content requests could include any capacity in selected geographic regions that include multicast (which further reduces CP content delivery costs).

A Marketplace To Unite The Industry

While CIsco made a valiant effort to bring the industry together under emerging industry standards (CDNi), the technologies didn’t really exist to enable the kind of exchange they imagined. What’s more, it didn’t address what has become an even bigger issue — ISPs wanting their fair share of the revenue. Now, though, the combination of industry standards like Open Caching (which continues the work of CDNi), Blockchain and smart contracts, and content steering, have provided a means by which to create a technology platform that can finally unite the industry in a way that enables multi-party, complex business relationships to be handled, and settled, in an automated fashion.

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Welcome to the future of content delivery.