Video has become a vital tool for business making it easier to communicate, learn and carry out research. But the growing use of video in the workplace has also caused difficulties for many networks. The average internet user now watches 182 videos a month, consuming large amounts of bandwidth and slowing things down for your users.
Caching is the obvious solution, but online videos are not as straight-forward as other content – unintelligent caches run into problems:
- Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) – many video sharing websites store the same content at multiple URLs. This confuses many caching solutions into treating each URL as unique content and not, therefore, serving content from cache.
- Rule changes – even if a caching solution can handle CDNs, websites like YouTube often change the rules for presenting their content so that caching no longer works.
- User behaviour – changing video resolution, skipping forward or using other video controls can confuse a cache into storing multiple segments of a video that are not likely to be requested again.
- HTTPS – some popular video sharing sites deliver content using secure HTTPS connections. This makes it difficult for a cache to access the video content.
While many solution providers simply ignore these problems, ApplianSys has overcome them with CACHEBOX’s intelligent video cache extensions and automatic updates.