About CDNs | Streaming | Other Documentation | WebTV Solutions

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CDN

CDN = Content Delivery Network.

What is a CDN?
A CDN is a high performance and high availability network of servers that is capable of delivering content to a huge number of users, simultaneously.

When should you use a CDN?

A conventional hosting has its limitations, even a dedicated server.

If the number of users that visit your WebTV is small, you probably don´t need a CDN. But if your WebTV receives lots of daily visits (which is very good...), it is possible to have many simultaneous users connected at the same time. This situation causes a real problem to your server, because it is not able to satisfy all the requests and to serve all the requested video files at the required speed, thus causing playback interruptions and affecting the user experience.

What are the advantages of a CDN?

At the contrary of a conventional hosting, where there is only one computer that serves the files and could collapse once reached its full capacity, a CDN is made up of several servers (hundreds or thousands in some cases) connected to different points of a global network.

Each server in a CDN contains a copy of the files and in the moment a file is requested, it is served from the nearest, avaliable, server of the network respect the user; this allows that, for example, a video file can be played back by a virtually unlimited number of users, simultaneously, depending on the capacity of the CDN. For the case of live broadcasts (Webcasts) the video stream is distributed using the same criteria as video on demand files.

WS.WebTV + CDNs

WS.WebTV has been designed to work with or without a CDN for video playback.

The StreamClip extension of WS.WebTV allows the WebTV to use almost any CDN to playback video content. Additionally; WS.WebTV Professional allows a full integration with CDNs that support file upload through FTP, or with Amazon S3/CloudFront.

Streaming Video Bandwidth Calculator

Calculate the bandwidth required for video streaming.
NOTE: Publishing (upload) is also accounted for the bandwidth (traffic) calculation, thus it is the equivalent to add one additional. Therefore, if you want to estimate the traffic for 100 users, you should enter 101 users.