Live Streaming CDNs – What Broadcasters Need to Know [2022 Update]
Content creators and broadcasters who use live-streaming as their creative tool of choice know how hard it is to retain their audiences. Staying visible and relevant among the hoards of viewing choices today takes more than just engaging live streams.
Today’s live-streaming scene is highly comparative, with viewers spoilt for choices. That means minor inconveniences such as buffering or slow-loading videos can cause damage much greater than the sum of their parts.
Your viewer’s experience, on the whole, ultimately decides the popularity of any broadcaster. One thing that turns viewers off is lagging and buffering. In the era of instant gratification, the buffering wheel often prompts your viewers to switch to other live streams rather than waiting it out.
Constant interruptions and technique glitches can ruin the viewing experience for your audience. No matter how engaging and relevant your content might be. Live streaming CDN is one technology that works behind the scenes to ensure your viewers enjoy uninterrupted viewing. It’s vital to have a basic understanding of technologies such as real-time CDNs that make smooth content delivery possible.
No matter how extravagant and new his content, how many viewers do you think Mr. Beast would have had today if his content came rigged with glitches and needed buffering? Not too many, for sure.
Imagine this: you want to cook an authentic Chinese dinner but need ingredients such as Chinese five-spice. Regular supermarkets don’t carry these items. What would be the fastest way to get the specialty ingredients you need? Ordering directly from China or visiting your local specialty grocery store?
Live-streaming CDNs act as stores that carry local and specialty products. That’s how they help accelerate the video delivery process. Instead of waiting for your package to travel to you from China, they supply you with the needed products quickly, locally, and conveniently.
If you were to live stream from the USA, viewers wanting to stream your content live in Australia or any remote part of the globe would have to wait for the content to load. That would increase latency by a lot.
But when you use a streaming service with CDNs integrated into the platform, your live stream can jump to the server closest to your viewer. Resulting in smooth viewing of your content, no matter which part of the globe your audience belongs to.
A CDN is a group of geographically distributed streaming servers. They catch internet content, such as your videos, from a location closest to the person trying to view your content. That helps speed up the delivery process of your videos to your viewers.
There are many possible live-streaming solutions on the market that streamline online broadcasting, but you’ll also need to consider the technical elements of content distribution. Among these technical considerations is ensuring you can deliver your content quickly and effectively to a large audience.
In this post, we will discuss the value of CDNs for live-streaming before we compare 10 of the top live-streaming CDN providers on the market. We’ll wrap things up by looking at four video hosting platforms with reliable CDN partnerships.
What Is a CDN?
A CDN is made up of a network of servers located in various locations around the world.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers and data centers spread around the globe. They are essentially cell phone towers for video content. Each network location caches content, which is a fancy way of saying that they take your data, in this case, your video content, copy it, and store it at all their different locations.
Why does this matter? A CDN shortens the distance between your content and the end user. The shorter the distance your content travels between where it is stored and the end-user, the faster the content will get to them. A short travel distance also preserves the quality of the content.
The terms “content delivery network” and “content distribution network” can be used interchangeably.
Today, video streaming CDNs deliver a large portion of the data sent over the internet at any given moment. Businesses usually rely on CDNS for their content delivery needs due to the hefty cost of employing worldwide servers.
How CDN Works?
CDN delivers a range of content, not just video files. Content that is sent through CDNs includes
- Videos
- Images
- Text
- Other data
However, CDNs are most often used to distribute large files. A CDN uses a widely distributed network of live-streaming servers for your content.
Viewers who request content from a CDN are automatically routed to the closest server. This is called the “edge” server. A viewer’s IP address generally dictates the server to which they’re directed.
The further a user is from any given server, the potential for latency increases. A top-tier CDN reduces buffering and maximizes the quality of secure live video streaming.
The streaming speed is about more than just one’s internet connection speed. Content delivery speeds are also determined by the number of “jumps” content has to make en route. When content is hosted by an old or distant server, the content may load slowly no matter how fast the internet connection is at the destination.
A high-quality CDN can revolutionize and streamline the download process. That way, you can focus on creating high-quality content for your viewers!
What Are the Benefits of a Live Streaming CDN?
For a business that wants to live-stream video content, there are many benefits of working with a CDN. The main benefits of CDN live streaming are increased speeds and reduced buffering, the ability to create redundancy, increased resilience, and scalability.
Increased Delivery Speeds
With a CDN, your content gets to your end-user faster. With live streaming content, a CDN helps your end-user experience the event as close as possible in real-time.
Reduced Buffering
A little spinning buffering wheel brings one back to the days of dial-up internet. It’s frustrating and not something viewers will deal with for more than a few seconds. With CDN, buffering can be significantly reduced and, in some cases, eliminated for your streaming content.
Increases Engagement
As a broadcaster, you spend a lot of time and resources on creating interesting live streams and spend on SEO to make sure your content ranks high on search engines. Your website shows promising numbers, yet most of these viewers seem to drop off without engaging with your content.
That’s a somewhat familiar problem many broadcasters face. The culprit is usually slow-loading content. Even though you’re piquing the audience’s interest, they get discouraged by the slow speed and leave without giving you the views and engagement you work so hard for. By using a CDN video hosting platform for your live streams, you help reduce load time. That helps reduce the drop-off rate and prompt viewers to engage with your content.
Better Resilience
You don’t want your stream to go down while live streaming an event. When you work with multiple CDNs, you can increase the resilience of your content, ensuring that if one CDN fails, another is there to get your content to your viewers. Multi-CDNs can also increase the resilience and dependability of your VOD content as well.
Scalability
With CDNs, it’s easier to scale your content than if you were hosting the content on your own servers. If your content suddenly goes viral and starts using more bandwidth, for example, a CDN would be able to handle that increase in demand. Your small servers may crash if your content goes viral and demand suddenly increases.
Live streaming CDNs reduce costs and technical overhead. Building your global network of servers to deliver your content to users would require a great deal of expense (hardware, electric costs, maintenance, etc.) and a dedicated, round-the-clock staff.
You’re renting access to a global network of high-performance and professionally-built servers by choosing a streaming solution integrated with a CDN.
By integrating with a CDN, broadcasters can all gain access to speed, reliability, security, performance, and more without the attendant costs. That way, your business can focus on more significant problems instead of worrying about servers crashing if you create viral content.
Less Transit Time
In addition to reducing buffering and providing a better viewing experience for your global audiences, using CDNs reduces the time it takes for your content to reach your audience. CDNs help manage load and make transitions quicker by rerouting viewers to the closest server.
Business Specific CDN Benefits
Besides the main benefits mentioned above, using a CDN for live streaming has many more business-specific benefits. Here are a few:
- Speed: CDN delivers speedy content for the end-users.
- Customer satisfaction: The speedy delivery of content increases customer satisfaction and, in turn, can drive more sales for online businesses.
- Higher traffic support: Your business website can sustain higher traffic with a CDN’s additional server capacity.
- Audience segmentation: Segmenting your audience with the data gathered from your CDN network becomes easier once you know their location.
- Storage and security: CDNs offer secure storage capacity for content such as videos for enterprises, as well as archiving and data backup services.
Businesses can enjoy additional benefits from working with a CDN that are important to consider if broadcasting content is an essential part of your overall business strategy or structure.
Imagine you’re live streaming from a single server, and your content suddenly goes viral. All at once, ten thousand people request data from your server. This overloads your machine, causing it to crash. At this point, no one can access your stream.
This is a disastrous video distribution scenario, especially for monetized streams.
With a live-streaming CDN, the server network distributes loads like this across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of servers.
That means video content can be reliably delivered to thousands or even millions of viewers without service interruptions. For professionals, this sort of reliability is essential, especially regarding scalability.
You need a CDN to ensure that you have the support to consistently deliver high-quality videos to your end-user, no matter how many people are watching.
Live Streaming CDNs and Video Hosting
Watching video content through any website involves a server. Here’s how it works:
Your computer sends a signal to a server requesting content, which gets delivered to you. You know that a CDN comprises hundreds, if not thousands, of these dispersed streaming servers. The same thing goes for video hosting platforms. While you may not see a connection, there is.
While you can host videos online for free on YouTube, you’ll want a more professional streaming platform as a business. The dedicated online video streaming service you choose will provide a network of computer servers to store your video content. It also provides a robust network connection so viewers can easily access the videos without any network lag.
Businesses need the best options for remote video strategy. If you stick to the free public platforms, your growth will be limited. However, if you use a secure video hosting platform and CDN video streaming, your growth can continue, and there’s no stopping you.
Many top video hosting solutions use HTTP live streaming (HLS), which is supported on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, and almost every other modern platform. It doesn’t require a plugin but instead uses built-in HTML5 browser functionality. HLS streaming via an HTML5 video player is now by far the preferred method for video playback.
In 2019, over 79% of all global consumer web traffic came from video, most likely from HTML5. That figure will continue to grow in 2021. Given this trend, HTML5 and mobile-compatible live streaming are absolutely essential for businesses.
Mslive provides an HTML5 player that can be embedded in any website or app. This video player is white-label and fully customizable, which means you can add your company’s branding, colors, and more. To deliver your video, you can utilize the latest cutting-edge technologies and long-established standards.
How to Access a Powerful Live-Streaming CDN
While there are many options for CDNs, the best way to use a content delivery network is through the use of an online video streaming platform.
There are many different ways to access a live-streaming CDN. For one, you could set up a deal yourself. Large CDN streaming customers generally work with petabytes of data and spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth.
Alternatively, many CDNs now offer pay-as-you-go contracts for smaller users. These are usually billed for bandwidth on a per-GB basis. If you have video files on your servers, you can connect this server to a live-streaming CDN if you expect significant traffic.
However, this topic becomes more complex when dealing with live-streaming video distribution. The technical setup required to configure a CDN for live-streaming video is relatively intricate.
More CDNs have made it easier for businesses to distribute video content via live streaming over their network in recent years. Still, for ease of use, the best way to access a powerful live-streaming CDN is via a video streaming platform.
Finding the Right Live-Streaming CDN to Use
So, which live-streaming CDN is right for you? That depends on factors such as the traffic your live streams get and the part of the world your audience belongs to. The great news is that you have multiple choices available today. With the explosion of internet and online video content, many CDNs provide web infrastructure video distribution services today.
Each CDN has a different focus and strength. For example, some focus on specific geographic regions. Others specialize in different types of content.
As a business, you must choose the best CDN for video streaming based on the needs of your specific goals and business model. You have to consider features, reliability, and CDN pricing.
Choosing the Right OVP With a Top-tier Live Streaming CDN
For most broadcasters, the online video platform (OVP) they choose integrates a live streaming CDN into its platform. As such, working directly with a CDN for content delivery generally doesn’t make sense, unless you’re a larger-scale enterprise.
Instead, we recommend doing some research to choose the right video host that offers a single-service solution. A single platform with a monthly fee, like Mslive, can handle many or all of your needs in-house. These might include video hosting, video distribution, CDN services, API access, video player, monetization, and much more. Since you depend on a single service to do all these things, choosing the right video hosting platform goes a long way.
We recommend looking for a video hosting service that integrates a top-tier CDN. That’ll ensure maximum reliability and scalability for your online video distribution. Selecting the right online video platform is a big decision.
When evaluating CDN providers, you should consider the following questions:
- Are you planning to distribute live streaming, on-demand video, or both?
- Which file formats will you distribute the content in?
- How many user hours do you expect to require?
- How much do you expect to grow in the future?
- Do you need specific features for monetization or security?
- In which geographic locations do the majority of your viewers reside?
- What’s your budget?
Once you answer these questions, you’ll be well on your way toward deciding which platform makes the most sense for you.
Conclusion
Now you know the basics of live streaming CDN, how it works, and who some of the top players in the industry are. So you can make informed decisions for the uninterrupted delivery of your video and live-streaming content.
Live-streaming is a great way to share your content and experiences with the world, but it requires some technical knowledge to make things easier. A great video hosting platform is another must-have asset that’ll help you in your journey as a content creator.
That’s how you can ensure that you only need to work on improving your creative delivery while Mslive takes care of the technical side of live-streaming for you. So you’re always ahead of your competitors and consistently deliver the quality your audience expects from you.
Online video delivery doesn’t have to be challenging and complex. Using a live-streaming CDN can afford you peace of mind. It ensures that your content never encounters major speed bumps or service disruptions due to server overload.
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