Video CDN: Ensuring full (and seamless) accessibility of online video content

Introduction

An average consumer watches about 84 minutes of online video content daily. In the next two years, this number is expected to grow by more than 20 per cent. It will be equivalent to watching videos for 24 continuous days in a year. (Data source - Media Post)

This is a great opportunity for businesses to scale up their video production and engage the target audience more effectively. But this requires a comprehensive infrastructure that delivers a smooth and satisfying video-watching experience to the end-users. Imagine broadcasting poor quality videos with lags and glitches; if anything, you will end up hurting your brand value let alone keeping the audience around for longer.

This is where video content delivery networks (CDN) come into the picture.

So, let us run deep into video CDNs and how they benefit organisations and individuals alike.

Also read: 8 benefits of Content Delivery Network (CDN)

What is a video CDN?

A video CDN is a large-scale network of geographically distributed servers that transfers video content (via the internet) by caching them. These networks ensure that your focused audience across the world accesses your video files with minimum lags, optimum speed, and incredible reliability.

Three benefits of video CDN

There are many reasons why the biggest brands are now investing big in video CDN services. Here are some of the benefits of video CDN.

• Enables high-quality, lag-free video delivery 

CDNs can help organisations deliver high-quality video to their users with instant start-up time and near-zero buffering.  Companies need to select a content delivery network (CDN) that checks all the right boxes to stream video with minimal buffering. The chosen CDN should be able to deliver the appropriate video bitrate which enables the end-users to switch or down the video quality based on their connection speed, providing those users with the finest video consumption experience.

• Provides seamless content delivery across devices 

A CDN service can ensure that organisations can deliver content to all device types.  The chosen CDN solution can employ real-time transmuxing to convert the ingested video stream into as many different streaming formats as necessary – on the fly – for the different devices utilised by the consumers. It can provide support for multiple video formats and protocols including HLS, HDS, RTMP, RTSP and DASH. Lastly, the video CDN services can have the capability to transcode the original video files to align with varying bit rates and formats, supporting the whole gamut of end-user devices.

• Ensures a secure user environment

CDNs can ensure a disruption-free learning environment by providing integrated security controls to sustain uptime and performance with the help of DDoS attack protection. Customer information can be protected from cybercriminals by using a web application firewall (WAF) to secure web applications. Finally, CDNs with integrated DRM support and content tokenisation can help protect the proprietary video content generated by organisations.

How do video CDNs work?

When you search for anything online, you see results within seconds (if you have a good internet connection). However, a lot of background work occurs within those couple of seconds.

Video CDNs aggressively determine the nearest server – or the ‘edge server’ – to the viewer requesting to see the content and deliver it as per those calculations when the user hits ‘play.’ These edge servers communicate with the content's root server to provide cached content as well as new content that is yet to be cached to the viewer.

The edge servers narrow the distance that the video streaming traverses and the number of hops a data packet makes in between those servers – thus reducing packet loss, accelerating performance, and optimising the bandwidth. The final result is minimised latency, timeouts, buffer, as well as a better user experience. Further, during an internet outage, the video streaming hosted on the CDN server remains available to some viewers.

Level up your game with video CDN

Today, digital video represents the single most vital media format across continents. Owing to that, organisations are looking for ways to harness the power of videos with the goal to engage the key stakeholders and drive meaningful conversions.

This surging demand has implied more demand on video content providers’ infrastructure as peak times are now less foreseeable. They need to ensure their infrastructure is able and proficient as nothing triggers customers’ anger more than sluggish service.

Tata Communications feature-laden video CDN services offer a superior quality solution that’s trusted by the world’s leading brands. Now captivate millions of viewers from any device, no matter where they are located on the world map.

Want to know more about these services and Tata Communications technology? Talk to one of our experts today.