Consumers demand immediate access to content, whether it’s streaming live sports, watching a season finale on demand, shopping online or reading breaking news. They could be anywhere in the world, on any device, and they all expect instant, latency-free web and media experiences.
Heavy traffic affects performance and can cause downtime, meaning that content providers need advanced solutions for handling rapidly increasing demand, scaling to match audience sizes while minimizing latency and avoiding spiraling bandwidth costs. Companies are already operating in a streaming-first future, in which:
- Live video makes up 17% of all internet traffic by 2022
- 80% of consumers prefer live streaming video to reading
- 67% of streamers cite quality as the most important factor when live streaming video
- OTT platforms with lower-quality videos risk of losing about 25% of their revenue
Varnish Software solutions are here to help. Varnish combines open-source flexibility with enterprise robustness and support to speed up media streaming services, accelerate websites and APIs, and enable global businesses to build custom content delivery networks (CDNs), unlocking unbeatable content delivery performance and resilience. Since 2010, Varnish’s powerful caching technology has helped the world’s largest content providers to deliver lightning-fast web and streaming experiences for huge audiences without downtime or loss of performance.
Balancing content control and scale
Any business relying on content delivery performance and availability knows the steep cost of latency and downtime:
- 85% of viewers give up streaming if their content is taking too long to load; some figures place this at 2 seconds
- 75% will abandon a service altogether if they experience buffering issues several times
- 90% increase in bounce rate when web page load time goes from 1 to 5 seconds
These statistics are accepted standards in the industry and illustrate how critical web performance is to the bottom line: gaining, retaining and satisfying customers and users, whether they are making a purchase online or streaming the most popular video.
The challenge for many content-driven organizations is that they have existing content delivery approaches that are inflexible or completely rely on commercial CDNs and cloud services. Issues arise with both. On one hand, these solutions can be difficult to scale. Adopting commercial CDNs and cloud technology make scaling easy but make it difficult to predict costs and almost impossible to scale back.
Taking control of delivering content with caching and private CDN software
Achieving high-performance content delivery depends on caching, optimizing infrastructure and making content available as close to end users as possible. This is where companies can seize control, make maximum use of intelligent caching and edge computing, and customize content delivery for the needs of their audience.
With Varnish solutions, companies can choose their own path and control their content delivery. Organizations can augment their large-scale commercial CDN solution for greater resilience by adding a private CDN for origin shield. They can also build a multi-CDN strategy to serve growing global audiences to optimize for unique use cases, unpredictable traffic, and geographical needs. In addition they can set up 5G edge CDN nodes to facilitate enhanced video (4K, 8K video), live streaming of events, gaming, augmented and virtual reality, and much more. This is all done taking a software-defined approach on bare metal, in the cloud, or on Kubernetes that eliminates vendor lock-in.
Powering high-performance content delivery and reducing data center footprint
Varnish Enterprise is designed specifically for these increasingly complex and demanding content delivery challenges. With uniquely flexible web and API acceleration, private CDN/origin shield and streaming solutions, designed for helping content providers of all kinds stay competitive at scale and provide great web and streaming experiences to huge audiences, all day, every day. At the same time, Varnish innovation strives for ways to push technology to meet future demand while balancing costs and the carbon footprint. Being able to achieve 500 Gbps throughput per server, as Varnish has done with partner Intel, demonstrates the viability of pursuing high-performance content delivery solutions that can significantly reduce the data center footprint in an increasingly environmentally-conscious world.
Varnish Software is one of the newest members of IABM
Varnish Software has recently rejoined the IABM network, with the aim of sharing our experience and expertise in sustainably optimizing and customizing content delivery for virtually every use case. We have focused on ensuring unrivaled performance since 2005 when we first launched the open source Varnish Cache project, which is used by over 18% of the world’s top 10,000 sites. We have continued to innovate, adding a full commercial private CDN software stack so that organizations of all sizes can have granular control over the end-user experience while controlling costs. As consumer expectations continue to grow, we will continue to offer flexible solutions for ensuring that these media streaming and content delivery expectations are exceeded. To learn more visit us this year at NAB in the West Hall at booth 7706 (W7706). We welcome the opportunity to discuss unique content delivery challenges across industries.
Read more: www.varnish-software.com
