What is a Content Delivery Network? How is it beneficial for video/image delivery?
Written By — Rishabh Gupta (https://guptarishabh309.medium.com/)
Today it’s not about how good your content but it’s a step further. The overall experience of viewing your content decides your audience’s feedback. A lot of things have been developed over years in order to facilitate this experience. CDN could be considered ace from that pack.
Content Delivery Network, popularly known as CDN refers to a highly distributed platform of servers that helps in minimizing delay in loading web page content. They are a geographically distributed group of servers that work together with the aim of providing fast delivery of content. It reduces the physical distance between the server and the user.
Content Delivery Network helps in faster loading of internet content that includes HTML pages, images, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. Users can view high-quality content at a very quick speed and all of it is because of CDNs. They use caching servers to store and deliver cached files, which speeds up webpage loading times and reduces bandwidth consumption. CDN services are becoming increasingly popular, and CDNs now serve the majority of web traffic, including traffic from major sites such as Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.
CDN was created nearly 20 years ago in order to channelize the massive amount of data directly to users and has developed drastically over the years. There are dedicated researchers and developers working to enhance the overall user experience and improve the services provided. While a first-generation content delivery network was built in the 90s, it was focused majorly on dynamic and static content delivery. Second generation CDN was a bit more advanced and was developed while keeping streaming video, audio, and video on demand in mind. This generation also saw the use of P2P and cloud computing techniques, as well as the clearing of a path for delivering website content to mobile users.
We are currently witnessing third-generation CDN which is already being incorporated at an extremely rapid speed. These are extremely modeled for the community. Today content delivery networks are a step ahead from just delivering content, they provide a wide variety of options to streamers to make their content user-friendly. Self-configuring, as well as self-managing and autonomic content delivery, are developing to be the new technological mechanisms.
How does Content Delivery Network work?
More than half of today’s internet traffic is served through CDN. The major aim of CDN is to reduce latency- time taken between submitting a request for a web page and then loading it completely on your device. It does that by reducing the physical distance that request has to travel. For example, assume someone living in India, requesting content that originates at America based server. Due to massive physical distance, users would witness long loading periods. This is where CDN comes in they store cached versions of your website content in multiple geographical locations. Which are known as “points of presence” (PoPs). These PoPs have their own caching servers and are responsible for delivering content to end-user.
Why should we use CDN?
CDNs provide an easy way to boost a website’s speed while also lowering latency. As a result, they are critical for delivering content to users all over the world in a timely, efficient, and secure manner. This content is not limited to website content; it can also include 4K and HD-quality video, audio streams, apps, games, and operating system updates. With website visitor attention spans shrinking by the day, it is critical to delivering content as soon as possible.
With the internet reaching remote areas and businesses going online, the world is using the Internet to shop, connect, and share. Content providers face an increasing number of challenges, including delivering different types of content, adjusting the content for different device types (device detection), and securing data and their end users’ online presence. Because of the inherent capabilities of a content delivery network, CDN providers are uniquely positioned to assist businesses in overcoming these diverse media delivery challenges.
When it comes to images, CDN is more useful than you think. It’s not just caching and storing content but CDNs can help you automatically optimize your images. There are certain image CDN that can automatically select the most suitable format for images. CDN can convert images to WebP and compress them to 40% without affecting quality. They can compress every image depending upon what they are meant for and help you achieve perfect balance and size.
Many people prefer Content Delivery networks because as it optimizes their pages as per user experience. CDN sends responsive images to all devices dynamically making changes to format, quality, pixels, density etc. CDNs can also improve on google search rankings as google appreciates faster websites and rank them higher. Another benefit out of a faster website is the increased conversion rates as fewer people tend to bounce out when the website is fast.
Streaming is another domain where Content Delivery networks can do wonders. Live streaming requires a strong bandwidth as generally live streaming videos are large in size. Along with that, the camera quality is bound to deteriorate. As per reports by the State of Streaming, nearly 63% of live-stream viewers have cited buffering issues. This is where CDN comes in, they send video to servers rather than directly to viewers, and servers distribute videos accordingly. CDNs also compress videos and thus it’s easier for viewers to stream.
Mogi’s Proprietary Mulit-CDN Tech
CDN, as good as it is, comes with its own pitfalls, even after being the fastest way to deliver content. The heavy reliance on CDN’s mean tha tin case of outages, a huge chunk of the internet goes down.
Multi-CDN is a new strategy that is gaining traction across the industry to create redundancies in order to mitigate the affects of CDN outages. Mogi’s innovative multi-CDN solution helps you mitigate this at scale, without the cost pitfalls of multiple CDN’s
Mogi I/O (www.mogiio.com) is an AI enabled Video & Image Delivery SaaS that helps Content Platforms to Improve Customer Engagement by enabling Buffer free Streaming Experience for the user through a patented multi-CDN upstream architecture called Mogi Streaming Engine, Enhanced experience through quality enhancement and compression of up to 50% both during transcoding itself and Deeper user insights through Advanced Video Analytics.
The Mogi Streaming Engine basically jumps between CDN’s based on performance, cost and latency, both on a user level and on a client level. This enable the best experience for your customers and along with it you get a highly compressed output with the same or higher quality. This means not only your contractual pricing is low due to competitive pricing, your bandwidth consumption reduces, and user experiences increases multifold. It’s a win win for all of us (Users, Clients, Mogi).
Mogi’s solutions are available end-to-end (Video Transcoding + Video Player + Mogi Streaming Engine (Multi-CDN delivery) + DRM + Video Analytics) or you can use individual products from the entire suite like just the Video Transcoding. Mogi also provides white label end-to-end plug n play solutions for OTT and EdTech Platforms, with Web, Android and iOS apps as well as a dedicated CMS for OTT and LMS for EdTech. The transcoding architecture’s result includes a highly compressed video of up to 50% with no loss in quality, and if you choose quality enhancement, a 40% compression with enhanced video quality, available in multiple bitrates.
If you want to partner with us and access our products, reach out to susheel.srinivas@mogiio.com