The term CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. To understand what a CDN does, you have to first understand how traffic moves across the internet. When you visit a website and watch a video, your computer connects to a “server” — which is simply a computer that is designed to deliver (“serve”) content to other computers.
The server then sends chunks (packets) of data over the internet to your computer, which reconstructs the data and plays back the video. The same server, in fact, may be connecting to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other computers. Too many requests, and it may become overloaded. That can make it crash or slow down. This is where a CDN comes in…
A CDN is a service utilized and provided on your behalf by a streaming company like ours, that deploys a network of servers located in various data centers around the world. When we use a CDN to distribute your video content, that data is first sent from our encoder at your event venue, to the CDN network. From there, the stream is duplicated and sent to many different servers around the world.
This means that the load from a large audience is distributed among many different servers, rather than being concentrated on one or a few of them. Additionally, viewers will be connected to the closest and fastest server based on their geographic location. This speeds up delivery and minimizes any problems like buffering or freezes. Plus, this process automatically scales up as your audience size grows.
We use one of the largest CDN’s in the world called Akamai.
Akamai is the originator of the Content Delivery Network.
They created the entire concept, and remain today the market leader based in their Massachusetts headquarters. While they are one of the more expensive services available today, the reason we depend on them is because they are a premier CDN service, who built their infrastructure specifically to deliver media reliably and at a huge scale, make the Internet work better and to allow smooth and reliable streaming of Live Video.
The Akamai CDN network consists of more than 240,000 servers located worldwide. Each server runs the Akamai Intelligent Platform. This software package uses algorithms to analyze traffic and congestion, and intelligently process and route data requests. All of this allows the Akamai CDN to deliver data where it needs to go, fast.
Akamai serves as much as 30% of all internet traffic at any given time—more than 3 trillion interactions. Major customers include Apple, BBC, the Olympics, Microsoft, ESPN, Hulu, Adobe, IBM, Sony, and Yahoo. They are also the leader in live content, delivering massive quantities of live streaming video each day.
To learn more about how we utilize the power of CDN’s to provide a smooth stream for your Live Events, visit us at Mediastreams.ca or give us a call at 604.970.5055