CDN Trends For 2020: Our Top Selection
2020 is here. For CDNs, technology has continued to expand and become more mature. The world is shifting increasingly online & more business than ever before are acknowledging the benefits of this technology.
Stepping into the new decade, we can foresee several interesting CDN technological trends on the horizon, which continue to evolve, presenting businesses with profitable opportunities.
Below, we are summarising the most significant trends that we believe will shape the CDN industry in 2020 and beyond.
Mobile Streaming – Video streaming is skyrocketing today. The market size is anticipated to reach USD 124.57 Billion USD by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 19.6% during this period. Mobile has become the main doorway to the internet and more than half of overall web traffic today comes from mobile devices. With the rise in demand for video streaming, it is becoming more important than ever to deliver a superior streaming experience on mobile devices. Businesses understand this and this is expected to result in an exponential growth in the content delivery network (CDN) market.
By 2022, 72 percent of all internet traffic will cross CDNs — up from 56 percent in 2017.
Mobile streaming, in its current state, suffers from certain challenges such as low bandwidth, high error rate, bandwidth fluctuations, bandwidth location dependency, limited mobile battery life, network access, and content protection.
Hence, if businesses want to take advantage of this new paradigm, they will have to invest in deploying their capabilities.
Innovations such as Dynamic Adaptation, where the streaming server delivers media adapted to the client’s mobile terminal and network, using proxies for caching data packets and optimizing the data transport over the wireless links will become crucial.
A CDN becomes so crucial here. Video streams will typically require heavy data transfers. However, it needs to be delivered at low-latency to users, who can be situated anywhere around the globe. Businesses can no longer rely on a single server to make seamless video streams across the world. You need a CDN solution to serve the content to users sprawling the globe.
If businesses want to capitalize on the mobile streaming trend, they must act quickly by utilizing reliable technology. By leveraging CDNs, businesses can deliver mobile live video streaming with scalability and speed. This will deliver an engaging user experience – with high sound and video resolution, minimal buffering and delays, and high reliability and availability.
AI for end-user content optimization – CDNs are being increasingly employed by online businesses to optimize content delivery to users. By predicting fluctuations in network speed and connectivity, CDNs can proactively route the traffic to the most appropriate caching server in proximity, leading to improved user performance. CDNs employing artificial intelligence technology to make smart routing decisions will become even more mature in 2020. The AI system can be used in other manners as well – making smart recommendations to garner higher user engagement and interaction. Today websites have become very heavy. But, the speed of delivery remains paramount for a satisfactory user experience. Therefore, it has become necessary to optimize the network. AI can help to route the traffic in real-time through the most effective network to improve the speed of content delivery via the optimized channels. It will help businesses encourage meaningful engagement online with rich user experience and seamless website performance. AI-driven CDN will help to optimize your network for seamless content delivery.
Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality – Virtual reality is growing in importance as more companies are adopting it into their website experience. For example, IKEA uses VR to give prospective buyers, an opportunity to experience how the piece of furniture will fit with their home setting before making the actual purchase. By helping them make better decisions, IKEA hopes to increase their brand affinity.
Augmented reality will require heavy data-streaming over the internet and CDNs will be the right fit, to help deliver a seamless user experience with VR/ AR. With the VR/ AR technologies, web service providers will need to come up with innovative technologies and solutions to deliver an optimal user experience while surfing data-heavy internet applications.
5G, Wearable Devices, IoT- IoT and wearable devices have been transforming industries.
Ultra-mobile and relentlessly connected devices will generate streams of data. Hence, CDNs will need to become more reliable and geographically aware than ever before. Wearable devices technology will require superior and reliable performance.
Content caching will need to be accordingly prioritized.
Significant investments into 5G infrastructure by wireless carriers will need to continue to reap bigger and better benefits.
Wearable devices will create large streaming data that need to be processed and analyzed in real-time to be effective. For the IoT devices, reliable connection to the APIs will be needed and this is where CDNs become so vital.
A severe interruption in services can happen if a critical router fails; a CDN will reroute the connection to another available server while the outage is being repaired. IoT and wearable technologies will demand high performance which will be satisfied by CDNs. With CDN, IoT devices can support continual streaming, large data transfers & scalability for growth.
The deployment of the 5G infrastructure will result in greater bandwidth, triggering demand for high-quality video services. CDNs will provide an efficient method to distribute videos geographically while delivering a high resolution and reliable user experience.
Online Gaming – The frontiers of gaming are experiencing foundations shaking as a result of the inroads made by cloud tech. Online games are the future of gaming. They offer tremendous ease of use and accessibility to consumers. With online game based subscription models, Users can log in to their subscription, fetch a game directly by surfing through a library of available games and start streaming the game right away.
Global technology giants such as Microsoft, Google, Sony have taken cognizance of the opportunities within this space. Game content takes up massive amounts of storage space, but the speed of delivery is going to be crucial. Hence, CDNs will be very important to deliver a superior online gaming experience. With CDNs, online gaming providers can host and provide online gaming, making it possible for users across the globe to have lower latency, faster ping times and consistent speed.
Wrapping Up
While these trends are interesting, businesses need to be well prepared for disruptions. Winners will continue to profit by innovating and by laying the right foundations for success.
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