Edge Delivery¶

What is Edge Delivery?¶

Edge Delivery by System73 enhances content delivery by dynamically routing users to different content delivery networks (CDNs). This helps to improve performance, increase reliability, and optimize costs. While collecting data about performance from users' devices, Edge Delivery applies your configuration to determine CDN for each player. This ensures better load balancing, reduced downtime, and greater control over your content distribution.

Improve efficiency and user experience with Edge Delivery.

Info

Edge Delivery supports both HLS and Dash specifications of Content Steering.¶

Dash Specification: Dash Content Steering

HLS Specification: HLS Content Steering

How does Edge Delivery work?¶

The player initiates CDN selection by requesting a prioritized CDN list from the Content Steering server. The server's response, based on customer-specific configuration, contains the available CDNs and their priority. The player can be configured to operate in a mode where it uses a default CDN designated by the server, allowing the server to always maintain control over the CDN selection process.

The Sequence Diagram

Why choose Edge Delivery?¶

Traditional multi-CDN and DNS-based multi-CDN solutions come with several challenges that impact cost, performance, and reliability.

Multi-CDN: While offering flexibility, it can be complex to manage, increase costs, and lead to integration difficulties, inconsistent performance, and capacity/geographical limitations.
DNS-Based Multi-CDN: This approach lacks real-time performance optimization since players don’t report real user metrics (RUM). It also suffers from delayed routing updates, longer DNS propagation times, and increased infrastructure costs due to global server replication needs.

Content Steering overcomes these limitations by dynamically connecting all players to a specialized server. This enables faster response times, real-time routing adjustments, and improved performance whenever configuration changes - ensuring a more efficient and reliable content delivery experience.

This section was last updated 2025-02-27