What is a CDN and Why it is Crucial for Video Streaming

Video streaming is skyrocketing, triggering an exponential growth in the landscape of Content Delivery Networks or CDN. A recent study suggests that by 2022, approximately 72% of all internet traffic will cross CDNs, a rise of 56% over the last three years. Nonetheless, the CDN market is estimated to double to $30 billion by 2025, at a compound annual rise of more than 16%.

The increased need for offering latency-free quality video experiences to users is driving this augmented surge, resulting in more and more businesses pitching on built-in CDN streaming platforms. In this article, we are going to discuss the value of CDNs for video streaming and why is it essential to implement them.

What is a CDN?

CDN or Content Delivery Network is a system of geographically distributed servers that are used for transporting media files. This eliminates the bottleneck of traffic that could result from single server delivery streams. CDN helps minimize the loading web page delays and virtually reduces the distance between the server and the user, which allows faster access to content and removes latency.

CDN functions by distributing the content over several servers all over the world. When a viewer seeks content, the nearby server responds to it in place of the origin server. This minimizes the significant load and traffic on the origin, thereby, diminishing the chances of failure in case of extremely high traffic. 

On the user’s end, CDN facilitates the delivery of high-quality content in the minimum time frame, enhancing viewer experiences. Hence, a win-win situation for both viewers and content providers.
Also Read: Watch Out For These 5 OTT Streaming Trends

Why is a CDN essential for video streaming?

CDNs make it simpler for you to provide a superior and premium experience to your users, resulting in optimum business growth. Here are some of the benefits of opting for a good CDN for video streaming solutions.

• Quality: Content Delivery Networks use multiple servers for content delivery across the globe, reducing delays in loading and lagging. They bypass any traffic in the middle, resulting in better and faster streaming experiences. 
   
• Scalability: CDNs are the fastest and the most effective way to stream your content to numerous viewers. They can accommodate the sudden and unexpected surges in traffic and seamlessly manage viral viewerships, thereby, helping your video streaming platform scale and escalate. 
   
• Boosted Performance: CDNs enable you to bring your content closer to the viewers by caching content in PoPs worldwide. It reduces latency and data loss, thus boosting the website loading speed and improving the overall video streaming performance.
   
• Reliability: Streaming content through Content Delivery Networks helps in preventing DDoS or distributed denial of service attacks, which arise due to the multiple breaching attempts simultaneously. CDNs increase the platform’s reliability by enabling switchover with an array of access points.
   
• High Security: With the proliferation of media and digital activities, the probability of digital fraud has also increased. To tackle this issue, CDNs keep all your data and sensitive information secure by archiving the content with authentication and encryption. A trusted CDN has up-to-date security attributes to tackle unexpected cyber threats.
   
• Increased Availability: CDNs ensure that the delivery of your content to the viewers is carried out irrespective of their geographical locations. In scenarios of excess user traffic, CDNs dispense the load to several PoPs to eliminate the outages of the origin server. It, therefore, ensures the all-time availability of your content to the viewers. 
   
• Reduced Abandonment & High Conversions: Before the UI/UX is put under the microscope, it is the latency of the platform that determines whether the user will leave or stay. CDNs help shrink the time, ensuring an immersive experience since the beginning. It ultimately leads to increased conversions and reduced abandonment rates.

Final Thoughts

By connecting global servers, CDNs create superhighways that truncate the overall time it takes to cast video streams from the origin to the viewers. Sharing the workload over a range of networks and servers increases the scalability as the viewership elevates.

With more than a decade of expertise in building and powering video streaming solutions, we provide businesses with the most reliable and extensible video streaming development services paired with industry-leading CDNs. For further information, speak to one of our experts!