Video and audio streaming occupied the large part of the global traffic nowadays. Thanks to such services as Vimeo, YouTube and SoundCloud, it became an integral part of modern users life. Meanwhile, video content delivery takes a dominant place.
One of the most important decisions for companies, which are going to use video delivery, is to choose the most suitable video hosting. By services, which hosting companies provide, they can be divided in three groups:
- Web hosting companies, which provide advanced streaming capabilities.
- Companies, which do not permit streaming at all.
- Web hosting companies, which offer streaming with some limitations.
The second group becomes smaller nowadays. Web hosting companies tryto offer at list minimal streaming services. That is why the third group becomes bigger. To choose between the first and the third group, it is important to understand what amount of streaming will be necessary. It should be remembered, that web-hosting companies in the third group could have some pretty hefty limitations.
Now more and more businesses, which work online, use content delivery companies (CDN) to improve their effectiveness. Such companies work by the principle of technological proximity of content to end users. Due to this principle, the part of content, which company wants to deliver by the content distribution is transported and stored in the multiple servers over the globe. Content distribution also uses caching principle to store data. That means that delivery servers will store only a popular data. When the first request for a specific data comes, user gets the content from the origin server. When the same request will appear again, it will deal with content distribution servers. This technology repeatedly proved its efficiency. There are more than twenty noticeably big video streaming CDN companies now days. Most of them – Amazon CloudFront, CDNsun, CacheFly, Akamai and others, – offer a big range of services. However, there are some companies, which are specialized only on media content delivery (for example Streamzilla).
Authoritative content distribution companies usually provide two ways of streaming – re-stream customer’s streaming server source, or stream directly from customer’s Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder (for those customers that do not have the streaming server). It is important to choose a company, which can deliver streaming to end users from technologically close distance. For example, CDNsun has more than 25 streaming CDN locations over the globe. The other important thing is to ensure, that content delivery company supports popular formats and protocols, as well as devices (PC, Mac, Android, Apple, BlackBerry, smartphones, set-top boxes). Here can be mentioned protocols RTSP, RTMP/RTMPE, MPEG-TS, HLS, HDS, Smooth Streaming and formats MP4, FLV, MOV, WMV, AAC, MP3, WAV.However, it is important to use such free services as YouTube and Vimeo parallel to own video streaming. There are also some services like Vimeo Pro (Vimeo CDN option), which can be really useful for video streaming.