Video

Video can be a complex and rewarding aspect of online marketing. However the complexity can bog down your company if not managed properly.

Streaming and downloading requires keeping server connections open for a long time, unlike the burst traffic of traditional web media.

You would hope that a modern server could handle around a thousand concurrent streams, so that's the first point you have to look to scale at. A thousand streams of TV-quality video is going to require around 1500 Mbps of bandwidth. Add in the complexity of delivering that data to multiple locations worldwide at low latency and you can quickly hit scalability issues at small numbers of users, never mind tens or hundreds of thousand of users.

In reality, the best option is to go with one or more CDNs. They can offer large amounts of bandwidth, and massive numbers of geo-located servers, which are all available in a elastic way to help you deal with peaks and troughs. They typically offer download and streaming options, and will cache your files.

A CDN will only get you part of the way, though. You're still dependent on equipment and network connections downstream from the edge servers, and this is where there is currently plenty of companies offering techniques such as adaptive bitrate and technologies such as last-mile caching to ISPs.

Researching the cost and time needed and your objectives will help you to create a video experience that is pleasant and most importantly, stable.