VIDEO CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORKS
Delivering video over the web and on hundreds of mobile devices is a challenge these days. There are so many options and no standards. In fact, we’ve written a few articles in our blog about embedding video on your website and the status of HTML5 video. Regardless of the complexity in displaying videos, you still need to focus on where your video content is hosted.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are an important component to delivering your videos online. CDNs essentially improve the speed of data delivery by duplicating content on servers all over the world. By duplicating content in various places, CDNs have the ability to deliver data based on your proximity. So, if I’m in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. and I want to watch a video online, then I’d probably have the data delivered from a server that is close to the area….ultimately improving the speed.
In addition to speed, many CDNs offer a number of other add-ons. Many content delivery networks provide the following:
- Video analytics and reporting
- Video players (HTML 5 compatible and Flash)
- Encoding
- Advertising
So, you’ll definitely need to evaluate each CDN and determine which service may be the best for your company. But, regardless of which CDN you choose, it is definitely a key part to effectively delivering video online. As always, we’ll keep an eye out for trends in the CDN market and share our thoughts in our blog. For now, you may want to take a peak at a new CDN just launched….vid.ly. We’re going to give it a test drive and see how it performs.