Nicola Micali is back on home territory after 20 years in the United States. He spoke to Julian Clover about the CDN (Content Delivery Network) market, piracy and changing demands from broadcasters.
Broadband TV News. After 20 years in the United States what experiences have you brought back to Europe?
Nicola Micali. I worked all my life in the US and came back to Italy for MainStreaming. I worked for one of the biggest global CDNs in the US [Akamai] with some of the biggest global customers.
BTN: As streaming services have taken hold have you noticed a change in the expectations that the customer has in the robustness of the CDN and how it’s able to perform?
NM: Yes, that’s changed, for better or worse for CDNs. Usage has increased heavily and in general all broadcasters have to perform at a higher level. Their subscribers demand a level of service based on new laptops, new TVs, new types of resolution … and, you know, the subscription payments they must pay are going up and up and up. So, as the end users are forcing or pushing for new levels of satisfaction, they are pushing their vendors to the same sort of level, to the same level of QoE [Quality of Experience] and of service robustness.
BTN: Is the move toward live broadcasting complicating the streaming environment?
NM: Absolutely, the old supply chain of all the components in a streaming, especially live environment, is extremely complicated. We have seen what happened in the most recent live event that happened recently. The Netflix boxing event was a clear example that this, even in 2024, we can say 2025, this is a major challenge for any content creator, broadcaster, or OTT providerm to actually go live to a big audience with a high QoE and in a robust way.
And that’s why, you know, there is still a big need for CDN to innovate in the field to be able to support this growth of our customers.
BTN Does this mean other streamers will face similar problems in the future?
NM: Yes, I would say that Netflix is one of the few, services out there that tries to do everything themselves. It’s incredibly difficult, especially when it’s really not their line of business. If you’re a broadcaster, your line of business is content and your viewers, all the backend work, like CDNs, is dealt with by other companies.
BTN: Is MainStreaming’s focus just on streaming or other types of content delivery ac?
NM: I would say all the focus for MainStreaming is mostly around the streaming services. But that doesn’t mean just streaming, but there are also many other types of products that go with that, like our anti-piracy, and our analytics with CMCD+.
And I want to really stress that because, we approach it differently from other CDNs that try to span across multiple type of needs of the customer, but then lose focus on the difficulties within the streaming component.
BTN: Operators must deal with subscription tiers, the requirements of the rights holders and the threat of piracy. How do you help them through that?
NM: It needs to be as part of the workload. So, detection and action, actually automatic action based on the intelligence of our AI engine behind the scenes. Instead of having a broadcast operation centre that needs to analyse all of it, the plan is to have all of it automated like any other sort of cyberattack. The same would be true for anti-piracy, automatically blocking piracy, or even better, disrupting their service.
BTN How are you achieving that?
NM: We’ve solutions where you disrupt their service, you start to ruin the experience, so it’s not possible to consume it properly, either for themselves or re-streaming it for others because they will not have a QoE that will be even close to something acceptable.
BTN: And it’s foolproof, you’re not going to inadvertently switch off a legitimate subscriber on the way?
NM: No, no, it’s very, I would say, robust against false positive and false negatives to respect both the users that are paying for it and the regulators that want this to be in place.
BTN: What’s the ideal architecture for streaming at scale?
NM: Operators must prioritise a robust origin infrastructure because it often becomes the primary bottleneck during large-scale events with high traffic. To address this, MainStreaming offers solutions such as our Origin Shield, a component designed to protect the origin by limiting bottlenecks and ensuring its health under heavy loads. However, our true differentiation lies in our Smart Edge architecture, which is purpose-built for video streaming and represents our core offering in the market.
Unlike traditional solutions, our Smart Edge platform optimises content delivery from the ground up, ensuring ultra-low latency, high reliability, and exceptional scalability tailored specifically to the unique demands of video streaming. This approach enables us to offer a superior experience, particularly in environments that require real-time adaptability and seamless redundancy.
While many in the industry provide origin shielding as a standard feature, MainStreaming’s Smart Edge architecture sets us apart by integrating these capabilities into a comprehensive, intelligent ecosystem designed to handle the challenges of modern video delivery at scale. Additionally, we recognise the growing importance of a multi-CDN strategy with redundancy at every layer, ensuring uninterrupted service and optimal performance for end users. MainStreaming fully understands this approach and it is how we have grown and then expanded our business with customers who rely on excellent QoE with their audiences.
BTN: I can imagine that broadcasters, obviously we’ve got streamers now, but there’s broadcasters, public service broadcasters, BBC, RAI, whoever they might be, who are streaming, but they are looking to a world when they’re streaming more and more.
NM I don’t think that in 10 years from now if we talk again, we’re going see any satellite or on-air type of transmission or it’s going to be very, very limited. Everything is moving to streaming over the internet. Resources are always finite. And like any type of resources, the internet resources are not going to be different.
This is also one of the reasons why I’m in the streaming business, it’s the innovation of the solution, the ability to make more with less and still give the perfect QoE or the QoE that the customer expects within a predictable cost model and using the minimum resource possible to still guarantee those two first components.
I think we are very well positioned to do so because we were able to really take the latest technologies to create our product and we are not anchored by any old technology like some other CDN could have been based on, you know, built 20 years ago.
BTN: Is it the same scenario for both large and small broadcasters?
NM: I would say yes, I would say in general the QoE is what drives our business mostly for as a priority number one. For example, one of the solution that MainStreaming offer is the availability to have different technical models from business models that go and mix what is our private offering, public offering, and the hybrid offering that actually take advantage of both solutions.
For smaller broadcasters or bigger broadcasters, the QoE doesn’t change.
They still need to deliver at that level, but they might benefit from focusing less on combining multiple solutions and more on finding the one that truly fits their needs, as it remains a top priority.
