What Does CDN Mean In Money?
The video streaming market continues to increase its popularity with CDN (content delivery network). The CDN industry is expected to continue its growth in the following years. Many businesses now prefer CDN solution to deliver a quality video experience to their viewers.
Are you planning to start or level up your streaming business? If yes, this article is for you. If you offer streaming services, you should use the best technology to make the best of your business. One way to do this is by implementing CDN.
What is CDN?
CDN, or content delivery network, is a system of geographically distributed servers for transporting media files. Such networks can eliminate the bottleneck of traffic, leading to distributing content using a single server by delivering image, text, and video data to different locations in the world.
Why should you use CDN for streaming?
You should use CDN for your streaming platform for the following reasons:
? Quality. CDN is beneficial to enhance the quality of the experience of users. It can reduce delays and buffering by utilizing speedy superhighways for sending streams to a wide audience all over the world. If your local or ISP network can slow delivery down during the first and last leg, CDN can bypass any traffic in between.
? Scalability. It is among the best advantages of using CDN. It can be a reliable tool to deliver your content to your target audience in a fast and dependable way. It can accommodate viral viewership spikes.
? Security and reliability. CDN can also give you an additional layer of protection through redundancy. With the CDN solution, you can avoid DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service), which can happen if the resource or site is flooded by multiple simultaneous attempts to breach it.
? Speed. CDN can distribute content fast to edge servers. It is ideal for video on demand, AVOD platforms, and live content since it can distribute cached content in just a click.
? Wallet-friendly infrastructure. If you’re looking for an affordable solution for your streaming platform, investing in CDN is a good decision. It allows you to outsource maintenance and infrastructure costs while gaining similar global delivery power.
Choosing the right provider
If you’re planning to opt for a CDN solution, you should choose the right provider. The following are the factors you can consider to get the best provider for your streaming services.
? Live streaming support
One factor to get the right provider is if the CDN can be integrated with your streaming service or server to distribute live streams to your audience. Keep in mind that not all CDNs are providing live streaming delivery. You can prefer a CDN with documentation and technical support on streaming.
? Feature set
You should check if it has support for adaptive bitrate streaming. It should also include sophisticated security measures such as digital rights management as well as multi-protocol delivery across different providers. Make sure that the CDN can meet your specific needs.
? Proximity
Your CDN solution should transfer content from your servers to your audience. RTT (round-trip-time) between the viewers and their local CDN point of presence (PoP) can affect the speed of content delivery. If you want excellent coverage for the areas you serve, you can choose CDN with the right proximity.
? Pricing
Most CDN can charge you a fee per gigabyte (GB). You can get one that suits your needs and budget. The cost of CDN can depend on the provider.
Top CDN providers
If you’re looking for the best CDN, the following is a list of the top CDN providers.
Fastly
It is an innovative alternative to legacy telco-based CDNs. It was an edge cloud platform that could provide CDN services to the biggest players in the streaming market, including Spotify, Twitch, and Amazon.
Akamai is considered the biggest CDN. It has comprehensive coverage all over the world. It supports different streaming protocols and codecs.
Amazon CloudFront
The Amazon CloudFront can be the best CDN for your streaming platform. It is a good choice if you are already hosting and storing your streaming resources with the cloud. This CDN can support the delivery of DASH, HDS, HLS, and Microsoft (News - Alert) Smooth Streaming.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is perfect for businesses that already store their files or run their streaming servers on the Azure platform.
KeyCDN
Another excellent CDN provider is KeyCDN. It can deliver on-demand and live streams using HLS. It has an affordable pricing structure. It is limited to geographic reach. The video CDN of the KeyCDN can be integrated with a streaming platform like Wowza (News - Alert).
Benefits of CDN
Using CDN for your business can provide many benefits. These include the following:
Improve website load times
With CDN, your streaming platform can provide your viewers with faster page loading times. It can improve the amount of time that visitors spend on your site and minimize bounce rates. The faster loading times, the more money your business can get.
Enhance website security
CDN can enhance website security by offering enhanced security certificates, DDoS attack mitigation, and other optimizations.
Lower bandwidth costs
Bandwidth (News - Alert) consumption is among the main expenses for your website. Luckily, CDN can lower the amount of data the origin server should provide. With this, hosting costs can be reduced.
Improves content redundancy and availability
Hardware failures and big traffic amount can interrupt the website’s normal functioning. With the distributed nature of CDN, it can manage more traffic and resist more hardware failure than other origin servers.
With these CDN benefits, the technology can be a good investment for your business. Meanwhile, CDN comes in different types. These types include Peer-to-peer network CDNs, Private or Peering Model, Origin Pull CDNs, and Push CDNs.
Conclusion
To sum it up, a CDN solution can be the essential technology that can help you with your streaming services. It can be a good partner to make your streaming services more profitable. You can choose the right type of CDN that will help your business grow and provide your viewers with the best experience.