Online videos have exploded over the last decade, and the emergence of CDN video streaming solutions has made getting in front of any audience possible. It is not only due to the pandemic that online streaming has increased, but a study shows that it grew steadily by 60% even before COVID-19 hit in 2019.
With this rapid growth came options allowing many on-demand and live stream services to be available worldwide. The tolerance for unavailable content and spotty buffering performance is lower than ever, which means a client may quickly close your video if it takes too long to load.
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Suppose the end user’s preferred provider cannot provide a high-quality, reliable viewing experience; there are plenty of other options on the market for them to choose from.
Given the lower margin for error and the increased demand for video content, many streaming providers and OTT IPTV services improve their performance and reliability with multi-CDN strategies. If you already know the answer for “what is cdn?”, this article discusses the benefits of using CDN software and provides helpful tips on setting one up.
Multi-CDN Benefits
Choosing to switch to CDN software to manage your video deployment can be complex, but business goals usually drive the implementation.
Availability and Redundancy
The main goal of CDN is to decrease the latency between the requests of the browser and the responses of servers. Latency happens partly due to the geographical distance that exists between a server and a user. That is where CDNs go on stage, bringing the content closer to consumers.
However, the CDN can go down due to unforeseen circumstances. It can result in negative PR, angry customers, loss of revenue, negative brand reputation, or suffering a service outage which is something that no company wants to experience. You should be aware that there is no way that CDN software can guarantee 100% performance, which is why we recommend using multi-CDNs. If the primary one fails, there is at least one backup to serve the video content to your patrons.
Performance Improvements
Many CDNs can only offer lower latency, improved throughput, and faster start-up times on specific ISP networks or certain geographic locations due to infrastructure footprints.
Depending on where the end-users are based, this can be a huge problem if their country is not supported.
One of the best solutions for this is selecting a global CDN provider that can offer a high level of performance worldwide. Including multiple CDNs in your stack can direct users to the best server to retrieve your content. That is why it is crucial to use more than one CDN software when involved in the video streaming business.
Using multiple CDNs also ensures that the top-performing one can be used during or at the start of a video session. A CDN’s performance may vary depending on various factors, including server-side configuration, network bandwidth or congestion, DNS resolution, or various other factors.
When employing multi-CDN software, you can eliminate these issues by directing the client to a different CDN that delivers a more effective content delivery service at a particular time.
3 Tips for Implementing a Multi-CDN Software Video Strategy
Pick Providers That Collaborate Well Together
Avoiding any unnecessary headaches when a switch is made is part of the dynamic nature of a multi-CDN architecture. That means your switching strategy and configurations have to fit with one another if you want a smooth transition.
Furthermore, it also means consistency with customer configurations, security tokens, and headers when delivering your content. It’s good to note that each CDN must have the ability to generate a unique token for the different URLs provided to your viewers.
If set up correctly, it provides your clients with a seamless transition from one CDN to the next and allows your engineering team to remain on top of any hiccups in the system. When a CDN software vendor charges prohibitively or declines assistance with service configurations, that should be a red flag, so stay clear of these sorts of unscrupulous businesses.
You may also want to ensure that if your stack consists of multiple CDN software packages, they should be compatible with various advanced features, such as object storage, domain masking, origin shield, and more. Multi-CDN environments have minimal ordinary denominators meaning that if you switch from a complex service provider to a more simplistic one, you are going to lose the additional benefits that the feature-rich CDN software offers.
Architect a CDN Mix to Suit Your Needs
If you want to improve your operational efficiency and overall end-user experience, deploying CDN software is the correct thing to do. However, please note that adding many providers to your architecture can mess with your budget and diminish returns from a provisional standpoint.
Adding too many CDNs to your content library can decrease CDN cash efficiency by adding long-tail usage characteristics. That can lead to potentially increased egress costs, origin load, and degraded end-user performance.
Each company has a unique CDN mix and can vary greatly depending on the cost-benefit analysis plus use case. Do you mainly supply on-demand or live videos? Where are most of your users located? How much does a dip or micro outage affect your performance revenue? Would one-second improvements in start-up time benefit your business?
You and your team can answer these questions only, so consider the above before deciding how many CDNs to deploy.
Implement a Switching Strategy that Fits Your Video Service
The most crucial aspect of your multi-CDN software strategy is how to figure out balancing your traffic between the different providers online. That is primarily based on your budget restrictions, how your operation team is constructed, and end-user quality expectations.
How much effort and time committed to managing switching decisions is vital if you want an effective delivery system for your video content.
There are three primary criteria to base a CDN software switching decision:
- Performance-based rules
- Commit-based rules
- Static-based business rules
The rules mentioned above are determined by your company budget, marketing strategy, and the user-end experience you wish to provide. Assessing your company values and implementing one of these rule systems can help to improve your budget and delivery of content to end-users.
Conclusion
CDN software has changed the way companies can deliver streaming services to their end-users worldwide. Using a multi-CDN strategy can help protect your company from service outages and ensure that your clients can always access your content.
In this fast-paced internet world that we live in, supporting your customers no matter where they are in the world is crucial to maintaining your company or brand reputation.
