What is streaming, and how does it work?

Video streaming apps

What is video streaming?

Streaming is the process of using the internet to watch videos or listen to audio, such as podcasts or TV shows. You receive a small portion of the file at a time rather than the entire file, allowing you to begin viewing or listening nearly instantly.

How does video streaming work?

Streaming is similar to downloading a movie in segments over the internet to your computer or mobile device. Your video player puts these components together to display the movie. The movie begins when there are sufficient scenes.

The majority of websites that stream movies send these components via TCP/IP since it is effective at ensuring that each component arrives accurately and in the right order. Because UDP is a faster protocol, some websites use it instead. Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Netflix all use TCP/IP. YouTube transmits videos more quickly by using both TCP/IP and UDP.

Examples of video streaming: YouTube & Netflix

With over one billion regular users since its launch in 2005, YouTube has quickly emerged as the industry leader in online video content. The Google-owned website gained popularity by enabling users to share their videos with people all over the world, whether it is an entertaining clip of their pet or a video of them dancing in their living room.

The main factor contributing to YouTube’s popularity is how easy it is to use.

YouTube has also aided people in launching their careers. For example, pop sensation Justin Bieber was discovered for the first time when a headhunter came across recordings of him singing on the internet, and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan is assisting students all over the world via his YouTube channel. Due to the fact that YouTube keeps a portion of the fees paid by businesses to play advertisements before or after your videos, you can also make money directly from the site.

MySQL was the starting point, but you most likely saw YouTube rise to some level of popularity before Google did. At that time, they were experimenting with various methods to scale write/read execution using database apportioning, among other things. After Google acquired YouTube, it continued to use Python, C++, C#, and other programming languages but switched to Google’s internal large table database and distributed document stockpiling.

Every video uploaded to YouTube is stored on at least one of Google’s fourteen global server farms. These enormous buildings house a staggering number of servers, which are powerful PCs that manage the billions of Google searches that are performed every day and also store your recordings. To ensure that the hardware operates smoothly, monster cooling towers maintain the internal temperature at a constant 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit). Additionally, every piece of data is stored on at least two servers for added security. In order to transfer data between them, the server farms can converse with one another. Your video will be stored at the server farm nearest you when it is transferred, but when someone needs to watch it, it will be sent to the server farm nearest them for quick access. This also suggests that the data is routed to a different server farm so as to maintain availability in the case of a fire or other disaster.

With their incredibly efficient CDNs, Netflix reigns supreme in this regard. These CDNs are sophisticated systems that run BIRD, Nginx, and FreeBSD and are capable of serving large amounts of data. These are essentially machines with packages and piles of plate drives dispersed at various elevations across the globe. There may be a server farm with two or three racks that contains the entire Netflix library in one location, and then there may be another server farm somewhere that contains maybe 80% of the most popular content. In the unlikely event that a customer is watching a very noticeable video, it will be routed to the closest CDN. This suggests that you have to go farther to get the content the further you are trying to watch the tail content. This means that having excellent CDNs is essential to having a good app for binge-watching videos. I unquestionably wouldn’t give rolling a shot your own in the first place. Unless you have a considerable measure of building power and different assets to save,.