Short Video CDN for Instant Playback

Move ingest to the edge. Creators connect to the nearest PoP rather than a central region, and the long haul runs inside our backbone. Files are split into 4-8 MB chunks uploaded in parallel with recorded offsets, so a dropped connection resumes from the last good chunk. On weak networks the client lowers concurrency, extends timeouts and retries only the failed chunks. Large uploads typically finish in half the time.

No, there are four levers. Ship a full rendition ladder and start on a low one so playback begins instantly, then step up as the buffer fills. Drive switching from measured throughput rather than a fixed threshold, so it does not oscillate. Enable QUIC so packet loss does not stall the whole connection — the gain is largest at evening peak and on mobile. Finally cut RTT by serving segments locally instead of across a region boundary.

Almost all of it comes down to hit ratio. We align caching to segment boundaries and fetch by range so the same chunk is reused across nodes, keep hot content resident at the edge, and funnel long-tail requests through a mid-tier so thousands of nodes do not each pull from origin. Most short video customers reach an edge hit ratio above 95% and cut origin egress by 30-50%, depending on how heavy the long tail is.

Use three layers. Referer and user-agent rules block the simplest embeds. Signed URLs with a short expiry — optionally bound to an IP — make a copied link useless within minutes, and signing the manifest and the segments separately stops a stolen playlist from pulling media indefinitely. Then rate-limit per token and per IP so bulk scraping is throttled. Access logs let you identify the source and keep evidence.

Separate slow start-up from mid-stream stalls. Slow start-up usually means a distant entry point or DNS sending users the wrong way; anycast plus proximity-based scheduling brings connection setup down to tens of milliseconds. Mid-stream stalls usually mean fetching across an ocean, so place cache capacity in the target market and pre-warm new releases there. With 3,000+ nodes and 300+ direct interconnects we can land locally even in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.