How Optimizing Your CDN Helps You Meet Video Streaming Demands

Video streaming has risen greatly since the pandemic began. Not only have mainstream services like Netflix and Hulu gained subscribers, but new streaming platforms have exploded onto the scene. Additionally, live tv streaming has become more popular as restrictions on public events have been put in place.

Streaming increases have placed a heavier burden on all parts of a provider’s content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure. Edge and caching servers now need to be more widely distributed to keep up, or else providers may face the consequences of sluggish service. With people streaming more content from more locations, your organization’s CDN has never been more important.

Improve Your Streaming Quality of Service by Upgrading Your CDN

CDN technology helps you meet elevated streaming demands by placing data closer to users, improving latency, and increasing reliability. Consider five ways a CDN can improve your quality of service.

3. Reduce the distance between data and users. Many factors impact the optimization of your CDN’s video streaming capabilities, such as user location. By strategically adding edge and caching servers to regions with the heaviest streaming needs, you can ensure that your CDN is able to perform load balancing efficiently. Customers will ultimately get their content faster, improving their quality of service and overall satisfaction.
   
   
4. Improve the latency of your service. Live streaming CDNs further improve your video streaming speed by intelligently routing users to the best servers. This is important because, during a live event, your servers experience a spike in traffic as everyone is requesting the same content at the same time. During the event, your servers receive, segment, compress, encode, cache, distribute, decode, and play video content — placing an enormous strain on your infrastructure.
   
   Quality hardware is the foundation of a reliable CDN, and optimizing your servers to handle regular and elevated traffic needs is critical. A reliable hardware partner should provide the hardware and expertise you need to update your CDN and help you throughout the hardware lifecycle.
   
   
5. Bolster your streaming reliability. Failing to serve up content quickly is a data center engineer’s nightmare. A CDN insulates large organizations from this problem by leveraging techniques and infrastructure that allow load balancing, intelligent failover, and the ability to transfer traffic to a functioning data center in the case of a complete outage.
   
   
6. Improve infrastructure security. More of our lives are being lived online, making security essential for digital service providers. A reputable CDN provider will have security features in place, like DDoS mitigation, enhanced security certificates, and physical server security.
   
   
7. Increase content redundancy. Spikes in traffic, hardware failures, and DDoS attacks can impact your network. Due to the distributed nature of a CDN, it’s much more resilient to these failures. By routing traffic to different servers when one fails or is overloaded, a CDN ensures that service remains uninterrupted.

It’s more important than ever to seamlessly give customers the data they want. According to a 2019 study by Portent, the first 5 seconds of page load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. How can you improve your current CDN capabilities?

Intequus Understands CDNs and Hardware Lifecycle Management

As an organization, you’re focused on providing the very best content to your customers. A partner that understands both CDNs and logistics can help you better use your company’s resources.

Consider our team’s experience with Netflix. Netflix was looking for an experienced partner to help them design and deploy their new Open Connect Appliances (OCAs) for their CDN. The goal? Provide millions of subscribers with the highest-quality viewing experience possible.

In our work with Netflix, we helped them to create a cost-effective solution and manage deployment across its data centers. Our team continues to support future Netflix Open Connect Appliance needs with custom cost-optimized appliance solutions, high-quality manufacturing, personalized logistics, and technical support.

Stay Ahead of Your Customers’ Streaming Demands

Staying ahead of your customers’ streaming demands requires more than great content. You need to ensure that content delivery is fast, efficient, and stable. Implementing CDN and edge server technology is one part. It also requires that you partner with someone who can keep you compliant while helping manage your hardware strategy and supply chain globally. Do you need to optimize your content delivery network with additional edge infrastructure? If so, talk to one of our CDN experts today.