Guides for buyers and operators
Engineering Notes
Engineering notes for media delivery.
Practical guidance on bandwidth, streaming, media servers, IPTV, CDN origin design, and the limits that matter before buying infrastructure.
Guide topics
Articles
Current guides.
Sizing worksheet
How much bandwidth does a CDN origin need?
Use origin bytes and a delivery interval to budget for cache fills. Compare a minute average with a ten-second burst.
Streaming Infrastructure
How to size bandwidth for live streaming
A practical method for estimating streaming bandwidth from bitrate, concurrency, overhead, and headroom.
Media / IPTV
Direct play vs transcoding
Why media servers need different sizing when streams are passed through directly versus re-encoded for each viewer.
Networking
When bandwidth pooling makes sense
How shared contracted capacity helps multi-server streaming fleets when traffic moves between nodes.
Need a product path?
Use the guides to size the workload, then compare the server path that matches your peak traffic.
View recommended serversQuestions & answers
Using the engineering notes
Browse all topicsWhich guide should I read before sizing a streaming origin?
Start with bandwidth sizing for live streaming. If the application also changes codecs or resolution, read the direct-play and transcoding guide before choosing hardware.
Are the calculations published benchmarks?
No. The guides explain planning methods. Substitute your own bitrates, cache behaviour and peak traffic, then test the workload on the intended configuration.
Which guide helps with a library of mixed video formats?
Read the direct-play and transcoding guide. Compare the client codecs and subtitle formats in your library before assuming you need a larger port or an accelerator.
Which guide covers multiple servers peaking at different times?
The bandwidth pooling guide explains why simultaneous demand matters more than adding the highest number from every server.
What measurements should I bring to a configuration review?
Bring peak concurrent clients, delivered bitrate, storage reads and CPU or GPU load from the same time window. This makes it easier to identify what became constrained first.