The Digital Concert Hall has, quite possibly, the highest demands of any OTT (over the top) video content provider in the world. No other service provideslong form HD video to their viewers in every country on the planet for on-demand and live content in three different transport formats (Flash/HDS (HTTP Dynamic Streaming), Apple/HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) and eight different bitrates up to 2.5 mbps. Not even YouTube does that.

All CDNs assume that a sufficiently large number of users are requesting a sufficiently small number of objects.

​While most large CDNs (content delivery networks) are excellent at dealing with the complexity and the scalability of video delivery, they all assume that a sufficiently large number of users are requesting a sufficiently small number of different objects (files, video fragments, etc.) Their caching mechanisms are pull-based, meaning the first user to request a specific object has to download it from the origin – in our case Ireland. Only the second user benefits from the CDN's edge cache. No matter how much these CDNs try to optimize to their customers' needs – multiple Origins, higher TTL (time to live), cache pre-warming or multi-tier caches – they all operate under the same basic premise: the first user is the pawn.

​Through all the chat about the Digital Concert Hall let us not forget that she has an older sister, albeit somewhat nerdier: www.berliner-philharmoniker.de. While it would seem obvious that all our past experience with the Official Website of the Berliner Philharmoniker would inform our decisions on how to build the Digital Concert Hall website, more and more, the first born is learning from her little sister.

Unlike the information portal that is www.berliner-philharmoniker.de, the Digital Concert Hall is under a lot more pressure to attract a paying audience. You can experience a great concert in the Philharmonie regardless of whether the website sucks or not. The same can not be said, however, about watching concerts in the Digital Concert Hall. Regardless, it was our expressed goal while restructuring our online department that we can apply all learnings from all online properties to one another and to hold them both to the same high standards.

​If you thought running one Magento Commerce instance back in 2008 at version 1.1 was hard, try running two. With different templates. And different payment providers. And different fulfillment processes. And different customer support teams.

Such was the case when we upgraded the Berliner Philharmoniker’s online shop from xt:commerce to Magento Commerce 1.2 after successfully having launched the Digital Concert Hall on a separate installation of Magento Commerce 1.1.6. Both projects were too disparate in their organizational structure and too uncertain was the future of the Digital Concert Hall that anyone was willing to share one e-commerce backbone… even though that prospect was one of the key reasons for choosing Magento Commerce in the first place...

​Today we launch our greatest update to Sony’s Internet TV platform to date. Thanks to the newly gained live streaming functionality found in Sony devices from 2011 onwards we can finally offer all the live concerts of the Digital Concert Hall. This new support for the HLS protocol (HTTP Live Streaming) will also allow us to offer on-demand content in multiple quality bitrates that should adapt seemlessly and dynamically to the available bandwidth at home.