March Madness: How CDNs help you watch college basketball at work

Dear Bosses of College Basketball Fans,

An intense fever called March Madness is sweeping through workplaces across the country. Do not be alarmed if your employees gather around their computer screens to watch streaming media of NCAA tournament basketball games. This may result in random cheering, fist-pumping, hi-fiving and possibly crying tears of joy or defeat.

This week, college basketball fans will bring their school pride to their workstations and watch their favorite teams compete to become the next National Champion. This is why Bob from IT will come to work wearing a curly white wig and his face painted blue. Or why Susan from marketing will arrive in her college basketball uniform from 15 years ago. But did you know all this madness is made possible through the magic of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)?

You: But what is a CDN and how does it work?

Me: I’m glad you asked. Let me explain.

A CDN is an effective way to distribute large files and stream live or on-demand media to end-users anywhere in the world. With scalable storage and the ability to handle traffic spikes, a CDN provides a high-quality viewing experience even when large numbers of people are consuming live streaming events at the same time. Basically, this means your employees can stream live basketball games online all day.

Here at Internap, our global CDN helps reduce the load on origin infrastructure to provide fast and reliable distribution of media assets, resulting in low latency and high performance.

So, when you’re patrolling your office floor later this week and you happen to see a college basketball game on someone’s screen instead of that finance spreadsheet you need by 5pm, no worries. Thanks to CDNs, it probably wasn’t going to get done anyway.

P.S. To read more about Internap’s dependable global CDN and how it can handle your website’s demand surge, download our CDN datasheet.