What is Bandwidth and a CDN?
Table of Contents
In this article I will find out what a CDN does, what bandwidth is and why you need it for your Internet TV site, and the difference in what web hosting is.
What's the difference of Web Hosting, Bandwidth, and CDN?
It’s like your phone company giving you “unlimited” long distance – they would stop you if you ran a telemarketing business from home. Video has real bandwidth costs that hosting companies can’t ignore. Bandwidth costs money.
There are three key ingredients for the backend of an Internet TV station.
First, your shared web hosting only holds your website files. For example, your graphics, your HTML code, or your contact us form, those are the only things that your web hosting account holds. Your video files are going to be very large. It is common for many Internet TV stations to have a lot of videos stored. These videos aren’t saved on your website’s hosting account. Instead, you need to use a CDN.
A CDN keeps your videos stored. It sends them smoothly to your viewers. There will be no pauses or stops. A CDN has the proper server set up and configuration for video play out and delivery.
Your bandwidth is what people are using to watch your videos.
For example, if you have 100 viewers viewing your Internet TV station at the same time and your video is, let’s say, 500 MB long, each of those viewers is watching that video at a certain bit rate. Let’s say 256 kbps; to properly display a video for all 100 customers at the same time, a certain amount of bandwidth must be used.
People naturally think that the bandwidth is coming from the viewer’s Internet service provider. Well that’s true but the video also must be delivered to the Internet service provider. In other words, there is a server doing the upload providing the video upload and then the viewer who is downloading the stream.
The importance of CDN & Server Configuration
If you do not have a proper CDN and server configuration then the upload of the video content to those 100 simultaneous viewers will not take place, or if it does take place it will cause most of the viewers player to buffer continuously until they just close your site.
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