28.09.18
5 Min read
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As the global demand for online video continues to explode, enterprises must find new media streaming solutions in order to provide the video streaming services that this growing online audience demands. In this article we’ll discuss modern video streaming challenges and how you can overcome them, to deliver the best possible end-user experience.
Despite the massive advancements in streaming technology over the past two decades, there are specific hurdles that the industry continues to face. In particular, bandwidth limitations, latency issues, and device compatibility challenges prevent viewers from experiencing seamless video streaming.
In addition to a growing selection of services, the convergence encompasses advances in streaming video devices and TVs, fast and reliable Internet connections, the popularity of watching TV on smartphones and tablets, and a growing supply of high-quality movies and series for every imaginable viewing preferences.
User expectations are growing daily: audiences want to be able to access the highest quality video on any device, in any location – without waiting.
Streaming providers require solutions that enable them to:
And they need streaming media solutions that will get around the realities of latency, congestion and packet loss on the Internet, because users won’t tolerate slow page loads or interrupted videos.
These are the key characteristics of video streaming:
Video streaming can’t be done without without a CDN with a streaming support. If you have breaking concerns news or live events, you’re probably going to want to live stream it.
Outages, slow clouds, and CDN issues — what looks like buffering or stalled screens to viewers —is the thing that will annoy users and it will probably cause user abandonment and loss of revenue.
As audiences grow, content distributors need a way to ensure seamless, high-quality delivery. To scale globally while improving customer satisfaction, you need a way to optimize traffic management intelligently with user-by-user, second-by-second granularity.
Real user measurement (real-time pulse of user experience, even in sparsely-served regions), real-time server health, and third party metrics (to guide and monitor efficient use of bandwidth resources) give you an essential level of control.
Online video and audio streaming is made possible through a wide range of technologies:
There are multiple variables to consider on which CDN to go with:
Traditional CDNs all work the same way – they deploy lots of HTTP servers throughout the world and cache (or store) content (images, text, videos, etc.) on these servers. The idea is to move the content physically closer to end users (no matter where they are in the world) so that the content can be more quickly downloaded to such end users. However, no single CDN can guarantee 100% uptime.
By using a multi-CDN approach you get 100% guaranteed uptime (if one CDN provider has downtime issues, you use another one).
GlobalDots’ Adaptive Media Delivery is optimized for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming to provide a high quality viewing experience across the broad variety of network types – fixed or mobile, at varying connection speeds. Built on the GlobalDots Intelligent Platform™, Adaptive Media Delivery provides superior scalability, reliability, availability and reach.
Reliability, Capacity and Scale: GlobalDots‘ is a trusted partner for content providers streaming the world’s largest online events – events that have established benchmarks for online streaming capacity and scale. This capacity and scale is a critical element of an online streaming strategy, because is impossible to predict when and where your content will go viral. When a streaming event or Over-The-Top (OTT) service must succeed, the world’s most successful brands turn to GlobalDots Media Delivery Solutions.
Quality through Technology, Innovation, and Experience: Adaptive Media Delivery leverages the latest ABR technologies and more than 15 years of GlobalDots expertise to offer a smooth, high quality viewing experience for your audience. Since 1998, GlobalDots’ CDN market success has supported continuous investment in network capacity and software innovations, to stay ahead of online audience demand.
Proximity: Even the highest quality networks are subject to the Internet’s realities of latency, congestion, and packet loss, which can significantly limit online video quality. GlobalDots’ broadly deployed network of edge servers, with more Points of Presence (POPs) than other global CDN providers, minimizes the impact of network congestion, for consistent viewing experiences. In addition, our partnerships with the world’s leading service providers, allows our edge servers to be located deep within over 1,500 service provider networks – closer to the audience, for the lowest latency and highest quality.
As we’ve seen in the previous chapters, streaming and VOD technology is evolving at rapid pace. Content producers, publishers, broadcasters, consumer electronics manufacturers and consumers demand greater quality, faster download speeds and new platforms.
At GlobalDots, we are proud to be able to provide the best possible technologies to stream and deliver these new experiences to your audience, anytime, anywhere.
If you have any questions about how we can help you deliver your content to users worldwide through our Streaming Platform, contact us today.
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