Bilibili is one of the most popular video platforms in China. Its services span a wide range of fields, such as video on demand (VOD), livestreaming, gaming, and e-commerce. Bilibili is home to enthusiasts of Anime, Comics, and Games (AGC) and creative content uploaders, averaging 324 million monthly active users and 4.1 billion daily video views.
To retain such a massive number of users, interesting content and a premium video experience are essential for the growth of Bilibili.
One of the proven innovations created by Bilibili in the virtual-real media field is the Phantom Star, where streamers can interact with their peers as virtual beings in real time.
The interactions are not confined to streamers. Their followers can also use the virtual images on the cloud to interact with streamers in different scenarios. Such virtual-physical fusion would be impossible without imaginative virtual content creation. This is exactly where Huawei Cloud MetaStudio, a digital content production pipeline, can come into play. Powered by the graphics engine and spatial engine, MetaStudio helps you create virtual humans, perform virtual livestreaming, and build 3D enterprise spaces to connect the virtual to the real.
One of the pain points for the VOD of Bilibili is how the Content Delivery Network (CDN) hit ratio was below expectations.
Due to the service model and recommendation algorithm of Bilibili, most videos need to be requested by users, resulting in a CDN hit ratio of just 78%. Video retrieval from the origin server or OBS pseudo-origin server needs to pass through the public network, driving up bandwidth costs. To solve these pain points, Huawei Cloud offers a VOD solution that concentrates less requested streams at the edge. This approach delivers a downlink CDN hit ratio of 90%, reduces CDN retrieval costs by 10% and public network bandwidth costs by 72%.
Livestreaming is another important service provided by Bilibili. During the 2022 League of Legends World Championship, Bilibili streamed 91 games, with the last game watched by more than 310 million people.
Such high-concurrency livestreaming was smoothened by Huawei Cloud's distributed livestreaming solution, which deployed Bilibili's proprietary media processing services, such as live transcoding, video recording, and snapshot capturing, on seven Huawei Cloud Regions. With distributed regional live centers, the pushed streams were transcoded and recorded at the edge in real time, which eliminated single points of failure that frequently occur at the origin server for more stable and secure streaming. Coupled with Huawei Cloud Container Engine (CCE) that is capable of scale-out in seconds, Bilibili's livestreaming service can remain stable even when there are 5.12 million concurrent viewers.