Q&A: Mainstreaming’s Chief Customer Officer Nicola Micali
December 16, 2024 11.21 Europe/London By Julian Clover


Nicola Micali is back on home territory after 20 years in the United States. He spoke to Julian Clover about the CDN 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], some of the biggest global customers, the CDN customers usually.

BTN: Have you seen any change in recent years, as streaming services have taken hold, 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. But I would say that better or worse for CDNs, it means that it’s actually increased heavily. I would say in general all broadcasters have to perform at a level for their subscriber. Their subscribers demand a level of service based on new laptops, new TVs, new types of resolution. And, you know, the subscription payments they have to pay that are going up and up and up. So as the end users are forcing or pushing for new levels to be able to get their satisfaction, they are pushing their vendors to the same sort of level, to the same level of QoE of 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 last biggest live event that happened recently. The Netflix boxing event was a clear example that this, even in 2024, we can say 2025, this still is a major challenge to any content creator, could be a broadcaster, an OTT, or whatever it is, to go actually 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 and 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: Yeah, I would say that Netflix is one of the few, let’s call them customers or anyway, OTT services out there that they try to do everything themself because it’s incredibly difficult, especially when it’s really not their line of business if you think about it, right. If you’re a broadcaster, your line of business is content and your viewers, all the backend, there are other types of companies like CDN that specialize in that sort of way.

BTN: Is Mainstreaming’s focus just on streaming or other types of CDN?

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 auxiliary type of products that go with that, like our anti-piracy and our analytics with the future of CMCD+.

And I want to really stress that because differently, maybe from other CDNs that try to span across multiple type of needs of the customer, but then they lose focus on the difficulties that is the streaming that is the most difficult piece of a CDN. Then you see cloud computing, sometimes you see cyber security, but then the streaming becomes just an afterthought.

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 scene. Instead of having a broadcast operation centre that needs to analyse all of it, the plan is to have all of it to be automated with like any other sort of cyberattack, know that you automatically block them, the same would be for the 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 their experience, so they are not able 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.

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 should have robust origin because that usually is the biggest bottleneck that you have during very big picks event. Another offering that comes within mainstreaming is what we call the origin shield. So it’s a component that helps to limit the bottleneck and to help maintain the health of the origin. And I would say in general, the world of today and is going to be even more in the future is a multi CDN world. So that redundancy, like there is redundancy in every point.

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 QA or the QA 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 back down, we are not anchored by any old technology like some other CDN could have 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 QA is what drives our business mostly for as a priority number one. sFor 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 average offering that actually take advantage of both solutions.

For smaller broadcasters or more longer broadcaster, the QE doesn’t change.

They still need to deliver that level, but maybe they take advantage of maybe less combination of the solution and more the solution that really fits them, but it’s still a top priority.