Companies may use content delivery networks (CDNs) when delivering video content. CDNs are networks of computers and the CDNs replicate content such that the content may be geographically located near users that are requesting the content, which improves the delivery of the content to the users. If a company wants to use one of these CDN network providers, the company needs to provide the network provider with a file of the video content. Also, when the company wants the CDN to deliver multiple bitrates of the content, the company needs to deliver a file for each bitrates. Due to the small scale that most companies operate in delivering video to users (i.e., the demand is not large enough to overwhelm a single CDN), a company may leverage only a single CDN network provider to deliver the company's content. In this case, the company sends every video that is received to the single CDN network provider.
In some cases, a company may deliver a very large scale of content to users. This scale requires the company to use multiple CDNs to ensure that user experience is acceptable. For example, the company may want to add redundancy over multiple CDNs. The CDN network providers operate independently. Thus, due to the CDNs being independent, the company must then provide each CDN network provider a copy of the content. For example, when the company receives a new video, the company automatically distributes one or more files for the video to all of the associated CDN network providers.
CDN network providers often charge for the delivery service based on the bandwidth required to deliver the files and also for storage to store the files on the CDN. Thus, a company may be charged by multiple CDNs for both the bandwidth and storage. As the number of videos a company delivers increases, costs for bandwidth and storage increase immensely. For example, the company still pays for bandwidth and storage for existing videos while adding new costs for new videos that are added. To avoid the cost of using some CDNs, companies may build out their own CDN. However, a company still incurs costs associated with bandwidth and storage when operating its own CDN.