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With the continuous growth of interactive live streaming opportunities, the need for ultra-low latency is more important than ever. CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) have significantly enhanced the streaming experience, but creating seamless real-time experiences remains a tricky issue, especially for interactive events. In this article, we explore the world of CDNs, the efforts to minimize latency and improve experience, as well as why we built our own delivery network to tackle these challenges and deliver the best experience for interactive business applications.
Table of contents
Understanding CDNs and Their Role
Content Delivery Networks have become an indispensable part of the digital landscape, supporting various online activities like shopping, video streaming, and social media.
Adopted by businesses worldwide, CDNs were designed to improve user experiences by minimizing the geographical distance between users and website hosting servers. This optimization involves balancing loads and scaling for multiple requests, ultimately enhancing loading times, rendering speed, network latency, and overall performance. Such networks rely on origin and edge servers, where ingest servers pick up the source content and playout servers are connected to the audience, providing geolocated access and load balancing across different regions.
As you can imagine, the content delivery network (CDN) serves as the backbone of any live streaming platform. It’s the powerhouse behind online video, ensuring seamless content distribution worldwide and accommodating audiences of any size. This is especially crucial for interactive video applications with a global reach. Let’s explore some real-world examples:
Online Gambling and iGaming:
In today’s digital gambling landscape, players no longer need to step foot in physical casinos to enjoy their favorite games; they can have an equally immersive experience from the comfort of their homes or on the go. However, for this global presence to thrive, along with the demand for 24/7 operations and real-time interactivity, a robust content delivery network is essential. It ensures that all players not only can participate but also enjoy a flawless gaming experience.
Live Commerce and Real-Time Auctions:
Imagine you’re an auctioneer based in the US looking to expand the reach of your upcoming art auction to attract bidders from Europe and beyond. Real-time video based on a strong CDN is imperative to facilitate the required interactivity and to ensure seamless delivery and reliability. It ensures that the video reaches every bidder, creating a fair and engaging auction experience.
Town Halls and Live Events:
With remote work becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide, the need for social interaction and events remains paramount. Corporate events serve as an excellent example of interactive use cases, especially as employees are scattered across the globe. Events like town halls or shareholder conferences can now be broadcasted globally, offering a seamless experience to participants regardless of their location. This is made possible by leveraging a robust CDN, ensuring reliable delivery and uninterrupted engagement.
Is a Traditional CDN Enough For Interactive Use Cases?
Even though global reach, stability and robustness are key for interactive live streaming, enabling seamless live video experiences requires not only several other tech pieces but also services and the knowledge to piece them all together. Here are some key factors other key facts to be taken into consideration:
Latency: The #1 requirement of any interactive use case. The latency challenge is complex and can’t be narrowed down to just one aspect. End-to-end latency, the time between content capture and delivery to your audience, involves various components such as encoding, CDN, and streaming protocol. Latency can creep in at any stage of this process. Tackling latency requires not only the right technology but also the right expertise and time to integrate it effectively and maintain it tech-proof.
Reaching Any Network: While CDNs can bring your content to a global audience, ensuring it can be played seamlessly on the go and in areas with unstable internet coverage requires additional features like live transcoding and ABR (adaptive bitrate) playback. These technologies ensure that your content can adapt to varying network conditions, minimizing interruptions and buffering.
Security: Content protection is crucial for many use cases. For example, in iGaming, illegal stream replication can violate regulations, while in corporate events, confidentiality is paramount. Stream protection mechanisms are required to ensure the expected service level and protect against unauthorized access or content theft.
Insights: Analytics is the golden mine of streaming, offering valuable insights that can help teams make better decisions. End-to-end visibility is essential for gaining comprehensive insights into the service and viewer behavior. This requires a complete live streaming platform where the CDN, player, and analytics are in sync, allowing for accurate and actionable data analysis.
Addressing these factors is essential for delivering the best possible interactive streaming experience. While traditional CDNs play a crucial role in content delivery, they may not offer the specialized features and capabilities required for interactive use cases. Moreover, integrating a CDN with all the necessary components demands expertise and time, which can be both time-consuming and expensive, pulling focus from your core operations. This is where innovative solutions like nanoStream Cloud shine, offering a tailored approach to meet the unique demands of real-time interactive streaming.
Going Beyond A Low Latency CDN: A Comprehensive Approach With nanoStream
Unlike conventional CDNs, nanoStream Cloud tackles the complete challenge of enabling seamless interactive experiences globally, delivering it as a comprehensive service so you can stay focused on your core business operations.
With over 25 years of experience in the AV industry, we’ve been pioneering ultra-low latency streaming since 2016, specializing in interactive use cases. Working closely with industries like iGaming, Auctions, and Live Events, we understand the critical need for a reliable, always-on system for interactivity. That’s why we’ve crafted a solution that, as our customers say, “simply works”!
So, how do we do it? Here’s an overview of what sets us apart:
Sub-second Latency: We prioritize audience engagement, offering a complete end-to-end approach to ensure lightning-fast interactions.
Self-managed Global Content Delivery Network (CDN): Recognizing the need for top-tier service quality, we built our own CDN. With over 1000 servers worldwide, including emerging regions in Africa and LatAm, our network boasts 100% uptime and continuous 24/7 operations. Our low-latency CDN guarantees high availability with no interruptions, enabling users to engage from every corner of the globe seamlessly.
Live Transcoding Real-Time ABR Player: Our easy-to-embed player combines seamless playback with sub-second latency, exceeding all your viewers’ expectations.
Advanced Analytics: Gain end-to-end visibility into your streaming workflow. As we manage the complete workflow, we offer insights at every stage, empowering you to enhance your service and audience experience.
Stream Security: Protect your content with a comprehensive stream security system, including playback tokens, ingest webhooks, and advanced data analytics for active stream protection.
Flexible Integration: Easily integrate your RTMP, SRT, WebRTC, WHIP Live Stream supported by our APIs and Dashboards with global live streaming, accelerating your product’s time to market.
Reliable Support: Our experienced team maintains full control over the workflow and is always available to ensure your event runs smoothly. This means you don’t need to juggle multiple providers who might point fingers at each other.
Why delay? Try nanoStream today!
