How does Phenix compare with technologies such as CMAF?

The combination of CTE (Chunked Transfer Encoding) with CMAF (Common Media Application Format) promises to deliver content with lower latency than with typical delivery of CMAF-encoded and packaged content. The CMAF+CTE examples that have been deployed have all been demonstrating 3 or more seconds of latency, which is significantly longer than Phenix's less than 0.5-second latency.

In addition, no CMAF + CTE (Chunked Transfer Encoding) deployments have demonstrated the ability to deliver content at scale. Phenix has proven scale both vertically - serving clients with 200,000+ concurrent viewer events every day - and horizontally - serving clients streaming 1000 channels simultaneously.

The technology fundamentals of the CMAF+CTE approach prevent it from providing a stable solution with high quality video at less than one second. CMAF+CTE is built on HTTP and TCP which are designed for reliability of data transfer vs. real-time. The Phenix Interactive Transport Protocol (ITP) is built on top of the W3C standard called WebRTC (built on top of UDP instead of TCP), which is designed for real-time communications. This difference is necessary in order to gain the flexibility to handle network events like packet loss and jitter and maintain real-time latencies.

CMAF + CTE does not provide a mechanism for audience synchronization. The Phenix solution does provide audience synchronization, allowing the audience to interact with one another, as everyone watching the same thing at the same time.