Streaming Media, CDN and Cloud Computing

Streaming media is a generic term for streaming audio and streaming video from server. For smooth performance buffering is widely practiced method. This article has three parts – the basic concept of Streaming Media, Streaming Media and Cloud Computing and lastly Streaming Media and CDN.

Basics of Streaming Media

Streaming media is there since the mid-20th Century. During the late 80s were computers powerful enough to a variety of Streaming Media. The primary requirements to receive streams, were a powerful CPU and a sufficient bandwidth.

Now there are streaming protocols such as the Microsoft Media Server protocol (MMS) and Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP),for improved picture and sound quality. Typically a software is required as addon for receiving Streaming Media.

So from the technical points, Streaming Media  :

• Will be better with a good Server with redundancy
• Streaming Media is Static Content
• Can perform better if Geographically distributed through CDN
• Good Network Speed

Expect network speed or bandwidth of the end user, the other network and hardware components of Streaming Media fully depends on the provider, thereby can be optimized to perform better.

Streaming Media and Cloud Computing

From the point we noted above, Streaming Media needs a good fail proof server. This can be easily achieved by using a Cloud Based Server as origin. If there is more load, more computing power can be provisioned. So directly Cloud Computing has relationship with Streaming Media.

Streaming Media and Content Delivery Network

Although Cloud Servers are redundant, the possibility of a sudden huge load on any good setup and failure can not be ruled out. Even if we take that the Cloud Server is actually an excellent setup of redundant nodes, the cost of bandwidth is much higher of a Cloud Server than if the Streaming Media can be delivered from a CDN.

Furthermore, as the Content of Streaming Media, may be video or sound, is becoming served from the geographically closest location, in case of Content Delivery Network, the performance of Streaming Media will be entertaining to the end user.

Summing up Streaming Media

Basically the above mentioned combination is actually used today by bigger repos of Streaming Media, including YouTube, SoundCloud etc. As the older technology was a system of buffering, so that the user feels a seamless Streaming Media experience, some still uses a buffer.

But today some of the Streaming Media needs no buffer at all. The play and pause action is immediate, thereby the end user actually can save bandwidth with newer technologies applied for Streaming Media. With the newest technologies, practically a Live Broadcast can be served as Streaming Media.