Video Can’t Kill The Cloud

By Jennifer Marsh

Jennifer Marsh is a software developer, programmer and technology writer and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.

As technology progresses, so does the clean, crisp and fast video-streaming market.  When video quality improves, the data size of the videos and complexity of streaming to the browser contributes to resource dependency. For this reason, companies using video technology to enhance customer engagement need to keep up with the technological times. In order to embrace the advancing technology to support videos, many companies might resort to purchasing new servers. However, buying new servers is expensive, but that expense can be reduced by switching to video streaming in the cloud.

How the Cloud Can Keep Up With Streaming Video Requests

In a regular one-server environment, each video request is streamed to the browser from the server’s resources. If the company gets thousands of requests a day, the server’s resources and network connectivity contribute to the streaming bottleneck. Visitors start seeing the “buffering” pattern in the browser, and the site becomes too slow to support thousands of users and keep them engaged in the content.

Using the cloud, this bottleneck is remedied in a variety of ways. First, the cloud offers data centers, which are clusters of servers that work together to provide resources. Instead of one server, the site is supported by several servers. This allows the company to host video streaming using the latest server technology, memory, CPU and network card resources are no longer an issue.

Additionally, a good, reliable cloud host has servers geographically dispersed. Instead of one server located in one geographic location, the dispersed servers send data from areas close to the recipient’s location. Even though data is transferred quickly, host servers closer to the recipient will offer faster response times than a server located at the other side of the globe. For this reason, any company offering international product through video technology benefits from cloud servers’ geographical locations.

Even if the company is just starting out with new video streaming support, staying ahead of the game will keep visitors engaged and will garner backlinks to the site. As links are shared, the site becomes more popular with search engines and the host must support a growing site. With hosting in the cloud, speed and up-time are never an issue. If the site’s video streaming is popular, there is never the need to upgrade servers and customers never have to buffer again.