At long last, we are happy to announce the beta version of our new Bitmovin CDN Streaming storage!
Great, how does Bitmovin’s CDN Streaming storage help me?
In the past, using the Bitmovin encoder meant you needed to provide your own output storage for your encoding jobs and then configure your own CDN for streaming delivery. Now, we can handle all of that for you! Your encoded content will be hosted and automatically distributed around the globe, enabling fast and efficient delivery to all of your viewers without any additional effort. If you don’t want to worry about CDNs or managing and securing storage, then this is exactly what you’re looking for! For our users who do want and need full flexibility and control of their own storage and CDN accounts, this new feature will still make it much easier to build quick prototypes and test new features and workflows.
What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
Content Delivery Networks or CDNs are used to distribute most of the content you consume on the internet, including this blog. They are mainly used to reduce load times and latency, but in the case of video, they’re also needed for scale, both in terms of concurrent viewers and geographic coverage. Without a CDN, having too many viewers trying to access your content at the same time can bog down your server, slowing delivery to a crawl, resulting in constant rebuffering and unwatchable video. Requests from viewers around the world and the video packets sent back to them will have to traverse the congested public internet, resulting in poor viewing experiences for anyone accessing the content very far from where it’s hosted. CDNs solve those problems by distributing your content on internal, private fiber networks to servers in multiple locations at the “edges” of their network. Each viewer then receives a copy of your video stream from the edge server closest to them, delivering the quickest playback and best quality of experience.
What does (beta) mean for Bitmovin’s CDN?
We have made the feature available to every Bitmovin Trial, Starter, and PAYG (pay as you go) user, although there are still some limitations. For instance, currently, the first time you use our new CDN output, it may take up to 5 minutes after encoding is completed before CDN distribution is ready. As with any beta product, you should tread lightly with production usage and expect that some things may change during the beta period. Over time, we will continue to develop the functionality and add more features, depending on your feedback.
How much does it cost?
During the beta phase, the use of our CDN streaming storage feature is free! That’s right, free! We hope you’ll take advantage and explore the new possibilities and potential workflows this can open up. Official pricing will be announced once we are ready to move to General Availability. While we’re not charging anything during the beta period, we do have a fair use policy which means there are some restrictions, so if anyone gets too excited and starts abusing the feature, we will contact them directly and put additional limits in place.
Where can I use Bitmovin’s CDN Streaming feature?
Right now, the feature is only available for VOD (Video on Demand) and can be used when creating a new encoding job in our dashboard UI (Choose CDN in Step 5)
It’s also available through the Simple Encoding API which now becomes even simpler with a single value “outputs” section :
"outputs": [ { "type": "CDN" } ]
What’s next?
More encodings than you’ve ever done before! Joking aside, we’re going to let the beta run for a while to gather feedback and get a feel for what features you’d like to see added to the current offering.
Until then, you’ll then be able to easily embed your videos into our player and watch the content right away from anywhere around the world.
Have fun encoding today with our free trial, so sign up now and give it a shot! We’d love to see and hear how it performs with all types of content, so please share your results or post any questions you have to the Bitmovin Community! 🙂
