Online Video Without the Fuss
Delivering Media with Content Delivery NetworksFounded in February 2005, YouTube is an online video-sharing website, and is now one of the most popular online destinations with over 20 million unique visitors each month. According to Alexa, it even surpasses the big Internet heavyweights such as The New York Times and CNN in terms of sheer amount of traffic. YouTube also recently announced that they are delivering well over 100 million video downloads per day, which translates into some hundreds of terabytes of bandwidth each day. Very impressive numbers for a company that’s less than 2-years-old.
What’s interesting about this is that while online video is nothing new and has been around for a long time, it is only recently that online videos have seen a huge surge in popularity, largely because of video sharing sites such as YouTube. What YouTube did right was make it dead simple for people to upload, share, and view videos. Gone were the different screens asking people to install and/or configure a media player plug-in, correctly set their bandwidth settings, or update a number of different obscure Internet options such as proxies or port settings. With YouTube, videos just simply worked without fuss and that was that.
While the easy-to-use software and graphical user interface of YouTube contributes to a large portion of its success, the backend content delivery network is equally just as important, if not more so. YouTube has millions of visitors downloading millions of videos adding up to hundreds of terabytes of bandwidth each month. Without some sort of reliable infrastructure to deliver their videos, their site would literally become useless. Videos need to download reliably and consistently; people shouldn’t need to (and simply won’t) wait 10 minutes for a 5 minute long video to download. Indeed, videos on YouTube begin to play almost instantaneously without any of the buffering or preloading messages that used to plague online videos.
YouTube realized the importance of content delivery for their success and recognized that while a single server (or even a cluster of servers) might work well for a high-traffic website, it would be unable to handle the massive load brought on by millions of users downloading millions of large video files. A content delivery network is really what’s needed to handle such a massive load, which is basically done by spreading out copies of all the videos on servers physically located all over the world. When a user requests a video, they are actually downloading a video from a server that is geographically closest to them, thereby eliminating any potential traffic jams. The importance of a content delivery network can be seen in the fact that YouTube is reportedly paying out a million dollars every month to Limelight Networks, a company that specializes in content delivery, just to ensure people can download and watch their videos quickly.
In many situations, what is not seen is often forgotten or given lower priority, and it can be all too easy to just focus on pretty graphics and what’s immediately visible. A slow and unresponsive site is one of the surest ways to drive away traffic and is a recipe for disaster. You can have the most easy-to-use website in the world with cool videos and other media, but all that is useless if you can’t get your content out reasonably fast. While most websites will never even approach the popularity of YouTube, a content delivery network is still necessary for medium-sized websites that produce and deliver any sort of audio or video content. Fortunately, there are many different content delivery network companies out there for all types of websites. With the rising popularity of online video, bandwidth costs are coming down so that it is affordable for organizations of any size to use a content delivery network.
Here is a short list of content delivery network companies worth checking out:
