By Binu Balan, Country Manager – India at Limelight Networks
People in India and elsewhere are consuming more online content more often. Whether it’s surfing heavy, rich-media intensive websites or downloading software and games, or watching video, the amount of bandwidth needed to satisfy these online cravings is on the rise. This may be a challenge for most businesses today, but it’s good news for Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers. As companies generate, share and store ever-growing volumes of digital content, the market for CDN technologies and services is booming.
What’s the value add? CDNs act as distributed servers that deliver digital content such as web pages and video to the user based on their location. This method minimizes latency, or slow response times, and eases the traffic load on a customer’s own network. The closer the CDN server is to a user, the faster the content will be delivered. CDNs also provide protection against large traffic surges, such as when viewers check game scores online or watch a live streaming event.
In everyday content delivery, people make requests for content via their devices – for video, websites, games, etc. This request travels from their device through their Internet Service Provider (ISP) to the Internet. This is called the Last Mile. Once the request has travelled through the Last Mile, it has to travel across the public Internet to the server where that content is stored. This is called the Middle Mile. The problem? The request for that content may get bounced around between different networks on its way to the content origin, slowing things down. Then the request for content has to travel through the First Mile — the pipe that connects the Internet to the content origin — where it finally retrieves the content and starts its long journey back to the end user.
One of the key network challenges that users in India face is slow speed coupled with sporadic surges. The current infrastructure simply doesn’t provide good connectivity. Studies from Limelight and others show that just a 5 second delay in the start of a video turns off most users, for instance, who won’t come back for another look.
With a CDN, the journey for content is shortened significantly. The Limelight CDN, for instance, compresses the Middle Mile, turning it into a more direct journey via a system of strategically placed servers. Content is duplicated on several intermediate content servers and edge servers located closer to where the user is located. So when a user heads to a website, for example, the edge server closest to him or her is the one that delivers the content. This allows the data to travel the shortest distance possible, reducing latency (delays) and speeding up page-load times.
The delivery of audio and video content over-the-top (OTT) is a perfect application for a CDN. There are more than 66 million active OTT users across India today and most are mobile viewers and consuming content from a variety of places. And there are Indian expats in more than 120 countries as well. This presents a great opportunity for service providers to generate new revenue from video-on-demand, catch-up TV and interactive applications.
Viewers today in India are watching content from a variety of devices such as Smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and other devices. Delivering content to multiple devices is a “must do.” However, bringing and OTT offering to the market isn’t simple or inexpensive. Instead of investing in infrastructure and separate service providers, a global CDN may be the best option. It can eliminate the need to pay for costly foreign hosting and save your business a lot of money. A global CDN offers a single platform to handle all operations, working across many regions for a reasonable price.
