Video plays an integral part in 21st Century schools as an effective resource for keeping younger audiences engaged and rapidly transferring information. However, downloading video from YouTube and other providers consumes large quantities of bandwidth, costing you money and slowing things down for other users. A caching appliance enables you to store web content locally and serve it instantly to your users from inside the school. 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 most 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 a video’s resolution, skipping forward or using other video controls can trick 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 ‘sub-system updates’.