1. It can reduce costs
Operating a server comes with a tonne of costs such as server fees, backup fees, software licenses, and even your own technical staffing requirements to manage all of this infrastructure.
With simplified operating costs, video in the cloud makes it really simple to plan your costs, customer packages and pricing margins. Your customers will also appreciate a simplified fee structure.
Our case study on how the cloud will reduce your costs shows that when streaming up to 3 TB of data per month, cloud video is the least expensive option. As your business grows with on-premise, so do requirements for additional software licenses, servers, redundancy, backups and especially staff. This can be mitigated with cloud video hosting as costs are simply linear with data usage; there are no surprise costs and your business overheads are simplified greatly.
2. Performance, Scalability & Redundancy
Performance in the cloud is reliable, fast and unmatched no matter how big you grow; from 10 viewers to 1 million or more, the result will be the same reliable and fast platform
With Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery CDN, your broadcasts are replicated across thousands of edges around the world which means it is always available at the lowest possible latency no matter where your viewers are located. On the contrary, a virtual or dedicated server is subject to regional network issues, increased latency when distance is involved and slow downs when the system becomes busier.
A video engine installed on-premise a server has limited Scalability, typically it involves growing the capacity of a single server holding hundreds of customers which becomes a huge data liability. Scaling horizontally with multiple servers is tricky, inefficient, and also expensive.
If you do manage to scale with multiple servers, how do you reliably ensure that your streaming services are accessible all the time and ensure redundacy? Having one server go down and another take over is one thing, but what happens if the network between continents is disrupted? Video in the cloud ensures reliable delivery throughout the entire globe.
3. Simplifying Support
Traditionally an on-premise solution would require support from the MediaCP, Wowza or Flussonic, and your Data Center. When a problem arises, which vendor do you contact? Are you sure you have contacted the right vendor to solve your problem?
Dealing with multiple vendors typically means finger pointing between vendors and drawn out resolutions to critical problems. Operating your Video Stream Hosting business in the cloud means dealing with 1 vendor for support instead of multiple.
