High Bandwidth Applications:An Analysis of Strategies Employed by Video Hosting and Distribution Platforms to Handle High-Volume Traffic

Abstract

In the modern era, people all around the world utilize video conferencing and video streaming applications for their jobs, to see family, for school, for entertainment, and much more. This now ubiquitous technology accounts for more than 80 percent of all internet protocol traffic in the world, making broader understanding and further refinement even more crucial to further supporting the most burdensome application of modern telecommunication technology. In pursuit of enabling more video streams of higher quality, computer scientists and software engineers have taken the opportunity to optimize the video transmission process at every level. The predominant CODECs – video encoders and decoders – like AVC and HEVC have taken the first step by lowering the quantity of raw data required to deliver a video or video segment. Traditional video hosting platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video utilize these CODECs across their services to both minimize the storage space required as well as network capacity needed to deliver the content. Video and voice conferencing platforms like Zoom and Discord have taken these compression techniques with a different approach, prioritizing the responsiveness of the video stream over the raw image and audio quality. Live streams and internet shows, distributed through platforms like Twitch and Facebook Live, take yet another approach by broadcasting a single live video stream to hundreds or thousands of viewers, which brings yet another set of technical challenges to the table surrounding managing the traffic originating from one specific source at a moment in time. This paper seeks to explore the challenges of each application and some of the distribution strategies taken by each to improve their performance and minimize their costs.

Keywords: Content delivery network, High bandwidth applications, Video streaming.

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