Is your live streaming video often lagging or not playing smoothly? If so, you should probably use a live video CDN. a CDN or content delivery network consists of a network of servers located around the world. In short, these servers can help deliver content quickly, improve security, and have many other benefits.
Anyone with a limited smartphone data plan knows that streaming media can consume data quickly. Seventy-nine percent of global consumer Web traffic will come from video. This also means that streaming video can run into quality and bandwidth issues. Obviously, it’s important to consider the smoothness of video playback when creating your own OTT service, and using a video CDN is a great option!
Advantages of using a video CDN
There are very clear advantages to using a CDN for video streaming (live or VOD). Let’s take a look at a few of them.
- CDNs reduce the load on the Origin Server, and the faster response of the CDN ensures that the player can request high bitrate video blocks when its bandwidth is good, and that it will receive clips in time to prevent buffer underflow. Since most of the load is absorbed by the CDN, the infrastructure requirements for the origin server are reduced. In addition, this reduces the bandwidth consumption of the source server. Because CDNs distribute points of presence (PoPs), it is easier to serve large geographic areas or multiple disparate geographic areas.
- Cost savings by reducing bandwidth: With the ability to block one of the most common types of network attacks in the form of DDoS prevention, CDNs are indirectly responsible for saving costs and preventing unnecessary expenses and losses associated with server outages and compromised websites. But they also help reduce costs by limiting data transfers to optimize the bandwidth used by the business. If requests to a website are consistently high, this consumes a correspondingly high amount of bandwidth, which drives up costs, and CDNs help reduce bandwidth requirements on the source server, thereby reducing bandwidth and web hosting costs for website owners. In general, working with a CDN provider will help companies eliminate the cost of setting up infrastructure, hosting and servers on a global scale. Instead, they only pay based on the amount of traffic and requests, and some CDN providers offer you finer-grained cost control through self-service and optimization features to manage the cost of required performance.
- Security: CDNs also play a role in preventing DDoS attacks on the source server, as customers can set rules to drop requests from certain clients or IP addresses. Thus, CDNs can act as the first line of defense.
- Increase content availability: CDNs are able to absorb all this traffic and propagate it to their distributed infrastructure, allowing enterprises to increase their content availability regardless of load. If one server goes down, other access points (PoPs) can capture the traffic and keep the service uninterrupted. Some high-quality CDNs also have the ability to automatically sense availability and immediately redirect users and requests, also known as load balancing, to achieve 100% availability at all times.
- Scalability and Availability: The second major benefit of using live video CDNs is the increased scalability and availability. These networks have a large amount of built-in bandwidth, allowing them to intelligently route requests and manage large audiences. CDNs allow you to serve video to 10 viewers or 10 million viewers. Large audiences can easily bring down an in-house live server (or even a small server farm). However, building a CDN network can easily handle large daily loads. This also has a significant impact on content availability. CDNs use hot-swappable devices and built-in redundancy to ensure content is always available. Maintenance and equipment failures are automatically factored in, so content is always available when and where it’s needed.
Conclusion
User demand for video vod content is on the rise and is expected to continue in the near future. This is because audiences in this digital age love video streaming and they can respond better if you try to promote your product/service through it.
Therefore, it’s time to leverage streaming video CDNs to deliver high quality video at high speed and quality to your target audience, no matter where they are located on the world map.