The mission:
CDN4 is primarily designed to provide low latency video streaming services with much higher video quality options than the industry standards and make these services more easily accessible to individuals.
The problem:
All major streaming services including this one either limit the quality of, or compress the video users stream to the service.
This makes it extremely challenging to present high quality and/or fast paced content to audiences.
This is simply because bandwidth is extremely expensive for service providers.
Consider, that a typical live stream on most services may be about 5mbit/s.
The standard ethernet port like the one from your home router is usually 1000mbit/s.
So if someone is running a livestream with 80-100 viewers watching, this would use nearly half of a typical ethernet port.
This quickly becomes expensive for service providers before we even consider higher bitrates.
As such, most providers have stringent limits on video quality.
Our take:
We want to be able to provide the highest video qualities reasonably possible.
So we must take a different approach compared to a traditional "cloud" or "distribution mesh" style streaming provider.
Our solution dynamically allocates streams to available servers within our network.
Thus any entire stream and all of it's viewers are handled by a single server.
By doing this we can dynamically shift usage around our network.
This lets us keep our costs relatively low as we get up to the economy of scale, and con create further custom solutions.
Additionally, this reduces the effect of an outage within our system, as the system will just reallocate a stream to a different server.
It also leaves additional bandwidth available, allowing us to enforce our limits as soft caps, instead of hard limits.
This means if a stream starts using more than it is supposed to, we can handle it for a brief period, instead of limiting or stopping a stream when it goes over the limits.
What sets us apart:
CDN4 can offer much higher quality options than most services, while keeping our latency low and all while offering competitive pricing.
We also don't punish users for going over the limits.
Our system allows streams to go over the stated bitrate limit of the service for a brief period of time without any service interruption or degradation.
Even if the bitrate of a stream stays over the stated limit of a service, our system will just drop segments from a stream.
This may cause stuttering in a stream, but it allows a user to change their settings live, without having to fully stop and restart a stream.
