This year’s March Madness basketball tournament has been among the most exciting in recent history. If you talk to the sports pundits, it’s because schools like Florida Gulf Coast told the classic Cinderella story with plenty of style. But if you talk to your friendly neighborhood tech geek, you’ll hear a different message – “It’s all about the technology behind the content delivery.”
I mean really, who’s watching for the basketball? The exciting part is that anybody can hop on the web and watch any game, live, in high definition. It doesn’t matter if you are the office, walking the dog or sitting on the couch – if you have a web-enabled device, you can capture the excitement of college basketball’s most storied event. That’s something to get pumped up about.
A realistic look at CDN use for March Madness
Ok, like most people, you’re probably watching March Madness because of the basketball and storylines, not to gawk at the excellent performance of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributing the games over the web. But the CDN could be having a legitimate impact on your excitement. The difference, simply, is that fewer people have to miss any of the action. If you can’t be in front of the TV, you can grab a smartphone or tablet and watch the game. Thanks to CDNs, one of the world’s most popular sporting events is more accessible than ever.
What can businesses learn from this?
There is incredible value in high-quality accessible video, for your employees and customers. If you want to get your workforce excited about a new technology or initiative, they are probably going to be more interested in watching a well-directed video about the solution than in reading a long email detailing its features.
The same goes for customers. Video traffic is skyrocketing on the web, and the trend toward video as an effective communication tool is clear. However, not many people will tolerate video that takes too long to load, runs at low resolutions or has to stop and buffer periodically. Both businesses and consumer users are more likely to turn your video off if it doesn’t perform well.
A CDN can alleviate this burden. As one of the most popular sporting events in the country, March Madness generates a lot of attention and plenty of page visits. Using a CDN allows content providers to stream content to a large number of users without worrying about performance problems. This is made possible by reducing the load on origin infrastructure and maximizing data transit speeds.
To learn more about how CDNs can help deliver high-quality video content, read our CDN Overview.
