STREAMING AND VIDEO DELIVERY
Why are your viewers buffering when your origin is fine?
Public CDNs weren't built for video. Live video is high-concurrency and latency-sensitive: a difficult challenge to solve when sharing capacity and CPU on shared infrastructure. VOD catalogs can be too large to stay warm in a shared cache, where content gets evicted just before someone else watches it again.
Ora Streaming is a fully managed, private CDN-as-a-service built for high-concurrency live events and demanding VOD platforms. It runs on dedicated bare-metal infrastructure, so your traffic never has to share.
Why shared CDN infrastructure fails live and VOD
Streaming exposes infrastructure weaknesses that standard web delivery doesn't see.
Concurrent demand is instantaneous and massive (Live)
Shared infrastructure is sized for average load. A live event pushes every viewer to hit play in the same few minutes, and every other broadcaster on that CDN is drawing from the same edge capacity as you, at the same second.
→ The fix: dedicated bare-metal capacity reserved for your streams, so someone else's peak traffic never becomes your latency.
A content drop creates its own spike (Live and VOD)
It isn't only live events. A new episode landing at midnight sends every subscriber to the same handful of segments within the same hour. Generic caches treat each simultaneous request as a fresh event and let the wave skip straight to the origin.
→ The fix: request coalescing; one fetch serves every viewer asking for that segment, and the origin only ever sees the first request.
Large libraries don't stay warm (VOD)
A shared cache sized for the most popular titles evicts everything else to make room. Every eviction becomes a future origin trip, and a full node restart means rebuilding warmth across the entire catalog from scratch.
→ The fix: persistent local storage sized for your actual catalog, so long-tail titles stay cached and a restart doesn't mean starting the whole library cold.
Extra hops add latency (Live and VOD)
Public CDNs are general-purpose platforms. Token verification, manifest manipulation, and geo-blocking usually can't run inside the CDN itself, so each one becomes a separate service call out and back before a viewer's first frame plays.
→ The fix: run that logic natively inside the edge process, so verification and manifest rewriting happen inline, with no external hops.
Does this sound familiar? Whether it's a live event or a title from deep in your catalog, this is what Ora Streaming is built to fix.
How does Ora Streaming solve video challenges?
Live: During a live final, your stream competes for shared edge capacity, and viewers see it as stutter and a dropped bitrate.
VOD: A shared cache already evicted an old video title that becomes popular, so thousands of new requests hit origin storage at once.
Put Ora Streaming in front of either scenario, and none of that traffic is shared. Every node is dedicated to your workloads alone, sitting one network hop inside the ISP your viewer is already on, with enough persistent local storage to keep your actual catalog warm, live and VOD both.
01
Dedicated bare-metal edge capacity |
Every node runs your workloads exclusively, with all CPU, memory, and network capacity reserved for your streams. No noisy neighbors, no contention at peak load. |
02
On-net deployment inside Tier-1 ISPs |
Nodes sit inside Tier-1 carriers and local ISPs, one network hop from the viewer, so latency is low before a single segment is served. |
03
Request coalescing for segment delivery |
Simultaneous requests for the same new segment or VOD file collapse into a single origin fetch. Every viewer is served from that one response, live or on demand. |
04
Persistent local storage for full catalogs |
VOD libraries and live segment caches persist on local storage, so long-tail titles stay warm and a restart doesn't mean rebuilding the catalog from origin. |
05
Inline edge logic |
Token verification, manifest manipulation, and geo-blocking run natively on the edge node, with no extra hops or external calls slowing down the startup path. |
Why can't this be fixed by configuring public CDNs?
Challenge 1
Reserved capacity add-ons on a public CDN
You still share the same physical hardware and network path as every other tenant on that node. Reserving a minimum doesn't remove the contention from the rest of it.
Challenge 2
Multi-CDN failover
Failover routes around the problem but doesn't prevent it, and it adds complexity at the most challenging times.
Challenge 3
Standard cache eviction policies on shared CDN tiers
Clears out anything that isn't trending, so your long-tail catalog becomes a guaranteed origin hit the moment someone requests it.
Challenge 4
Tuning edge configuration
This can reduce cache misses at the margins, but it can't add dedicated hardware or move your cache physically closer to the viewer.
The numbers
Viewers stop buffering. Origins stop crashing.
<0.5ms
100%
50%+
"We were able to leverage a homegrown Varnish build-out to mitigate performance concerns, monitor granular CDN, origin, and encoder performance as well as end-user QoE across many million concurrent viewers"
Director of Product - Video Platform
Global streaming service
Ora Streaming
Dedicated private capacity. Exceptional QoS. Total control.
Ora Streaming combines high-density bare-metal hardware with the Varnish Enterprise caching engine, run as your private delivery network. The entire infrastructure is managed 24/7/365 by Varnish engineering, under a predictable, capacity-based pricing model.
Resources and media
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Using synthbackend for live video streaming
Every time you need fast access to ephemeral content, this concept provides a quick and efficient way to deliver it.
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Benefits of a dedicated CDN: Interview with MUX & Varnish
Captured live at IBC 2025. Varnish sit down with MUX, to discuss MUX’s CDN journey.
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Video prefetching with Varnish Software
Content prefetching is a powerful technique used to optimize web performance by proactively loading resources before they are explicitly requested by a user.
Next steps
Talk to our team today to learn more about Ora Streaming.
