Video has quietly become the dominant traffic class on the internet. For many platforms, it already represents the majority of outbound traffic, and its share continues to grow. But it requires special infrastructure – a CDN for video.
Ideo is not just “more data.” It behaves differently, stresses infrastructure differently, and exposes weaknesses that remain invisible when you’re delivering small, static assets like images.
Users can tolerate a slow-loading page for a moment. But they won’t tolerate a video that takes too long to start or stutters. Startup delay and seek latency directly translate into abandonment. Each extra second before playback begins increases the chance that the viewer will simply leave.
The core issue is that video simultaneously stresses storage, networks, and capacity planning. It demands low latency at the beginning, sustained throughput during playback, and stability under sharp, unpredictable spikes.
CDN models designed around small, cacheable web objects were never built for this combination, and adapting them after the fact only goes so far.
Why traditional CDN assumptions fail for video?
Classic CDNs were designed in a different era. Their model assumes that content consists of many small objects, images, scripts, and stylesheets that are fetched linearly and reused often.
Video breaks these assumptions in several ways:
- Small-object caching vs. large sequential media. Video files are larger than typical web assets. Caching a few megabytes of JavaScript is trivial; caching hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of video content is not. The bigger the video library, the bigger the issue.
- Non-linear access patterns. Video players do not read files from byte 0 to byte N. They seek, resume, change bitrate, and request ranges. Different parts of the same file can have very different popularity profiles, which does not align well with “cache the whole object” logic.
- Cache-on-first-request becomes counterproductive. In video delivery, a cache miss on a small range can trigger the download and storage of an entire large file. That inflates storage usage, increases churn, and pushes out genuinely popular content.
- The long-tail problem. Real video catalogs are large. Tens or hundreds of terabytes of content may exist, but only a small fraction is watched frequently. Naively caching long-tail content at the edge evicts hot files, lowers cache hit ratios, and increases origin traffic, the opposite of what a CDN is meant to achieve.
The hidden economics of video delivery
These problems are not only technical; they are structural.
- Disk tradeoffs at scale. SSDs provide the IOPS needed for high concurrency, but are expensive. HDDs are cost-effective for capacity but suffer from higher latency and limited performance under load.
- Throughput vs. IOPS reality. Video delivery is sustained-throughput-heavy, not IOPS-heavy in the same way as transactional workloads. Architectures optimized for the wrong metric waste money and still underperform.
- Overprovisioning at PoPs. Traditional “serve where the request lands” designs require a large reserve capacity at every location to survive spikes. Most of that capacity sits idle most of the time, driving costs up without improving viewer experience.
- Why “edge everywhere” inflates cost. Placing massive storage and excess headroom at every edge node sounds appealing, but it scales poorly. Costs rise faster than performance.
- Bandwidth is cheap only if you can use it efficiently. High-capacity links are valuable only when the architecture allows safe, high utilization. Poor placement and routing waste bandwidth just as effectively as congestion.
Video is latency-sensitive first — throughput-sensitive always
Video delivery has two distinct phases, and confusing them leads to bad design decisions.
- Startups and seeks are latency problems. The first segments must arrive quickly. Any delay here is immediately visible to the user.
- Sustained playback is a throughput problem. Once playback stabilizes, modern transport protocols can deliver high, steady rates even over longer distances as long as the path remains uncongested.
This creates an opportunity. Distance matters most at the beginning, and far less once the stream is flowing. Architectures that rely on static routing or passive anycast placement fail to exploit this. Intelligent, per-request steering does.
An infrastructure-first approach to video CDN design
At Advanced Hosting, our Video CDN is built around a simple principle: separate decisions from delivery.
- Separation of logic and capacity. A lightweight decision layer handles routing logic, geography, node health, and live load without pushing large volumes of data. The delivery layer focuses purely on moving the filesefficiently.
- Lightweight, resilient routing decisions. Routing traffic is cheap compared to delivering video. Keeping this logic fast and independent improves resilience and failover behavior.
- Delivery nodes optimized for sustained load. Edge nodes are designed to run at high, safe utilization, delivering stable throughput rather than reacting to bursty cache behavior.
- Ownership changes the equation. Owning hardware, transit, and interconnections allows us to design for real capacity, not abstract limits. We are not constrained by opaque platform rules or shared-resource side effects.
Demand-driven placement instead of blind caching
Large video libraries make one thing clear: caching everything everywhere is wasteful.
- Popularity is uneven and dynamic. A small subset of content generates most views, and that subset changes by region and over time.
- Regional demand matters. What’s hot in one market may be irrelevant in another. Placement decisions must reflect this reality.
- Replication must be earned. Content is replicated closer to viewers only when demand proves its value. Cold content remains centralized until it justifies additional copies.
- Availability without excess. This approach improves startup time for popular content without burning storage and bandwidth on assets that do not earn their place at the edge.
What a video CDN handles and what it doesn’t?
Modern video delivery is built around streaming protocols such as HLS and MPEG-DASH.
- Manifests and segments. Players fetch a small manifest, then request short media segments over HTTP.
- On-the-fly manifest generation. The CDN can generate or adapt manifests dynamically to point players to the best delivery nodes.
- Repackaging vs. transcoding. Repackaging restructures existing media into segments that can be streamed. Transcoding creates new encodes. These are fundamentally different tasks.
Delivery is not an encoding pipeline. Our Video CDN integrates cleanly with existing workflows: you produce your encodes, and we focus on delivering them efficiently and reliably.
Operational features that reduce video overhead
Beyond raw delivery, real systems need practical tools:
- Time-based clipping for previews and excerpts without storing extra files
- Multi-range playback to assemble highlights dynamically
- Track selection for audio and subtitles without duplicating assets
- Access control using signed URLs and hotlink protection
These features exist to reduce operational friction, eliminate glue code, eliminate duplicate files, and simplify pipelines.
Why infrastructure ownership matters for video?
This is where infrastructure-first design makes a tangible difference.
- Predictable bandwidth costs without usage surprises
- High utilization without instability
- Fast hardware replacement from on-hand inventory
- Direct control over routing and capacity
- Human tuning, not black-box automation
For video workloads, control and transparency are not luxuries but requirements.
Video CDN should be built for peak days
Video delivery fails on its worst days, not its best ones. Architectures optimized for average traffic inevitably crack under spikes, large catalogs, and unpredictable demand.
A video CDN built for real-world workloads must:
- separate routing from delivery
- place content based on demand, not assumptions
- and be backed by infrastructure designed for sustained throughput.
That is the foundation of Advanced Hosting’s Video CDN and why it performs when it matters most.
