Have you ever been working on a Flash video that worked just fine on your workstation but slowed down dramatically once it was deployed to the production web site? The problem is related to bandwidth and/or server load. We won't get into the details of bandwidth, bps, mbps, etc, in this article. We will discuss the power of content delivery networks (CDN).
As video on the web becomes more popular, we have been implementing lots of web applications that leverage CDNs and their APIs. If hosting a video on YouTube is not an option, hosting it on a CDN is a definite must for any prominent web site. To see a prime example of how video should stream, visit Staccato Creative. All of their video content is hosted on a CDN.
The traditional and most basic method of offering a video on a website is to just upload the content to the web server and place the Flash embed tag in the HTML. Hosting video on a web server can drain your bandwidth resources and give your visitors the wrong impression.
Hosting proprietary video content on a CDN offers your visitors the most fluid video consumption experience while saving your web server resources for the dynamic number crunching and script rendering it was built for.
Different CDNs use different techniques to spreading out content across the Internet. Typically, content is uploaded to the CDN and from there it is distributed to key points across the Internet and made available for quick download.
EyeMagine offers Content Delivery Network API integration services as well as hosting services. Contact us for more details or complete our online Request for Proposal form.
