Working with a CDN

The CDN that Contoso Movies Online contracted with prestuffs all digital media content to the edge servers. It also prestuffs most of the Web content, such as Web pages and images. There are certain light files that are not cached at the edge, such as small text files that contain movie news and regularly updated information. These files are not cached because it can take time for content to propagate, especially if a CDN has thousands of edge servers. Therefore, if certain content must be changed frequently, it is hosted on the origin server. Late-breaking movie news and information can easily be hosted on an origin server if the data load is very light. CDNs provide systems, such as custom tags, for creating dynamic Web pages that enable you to choose the source of the content.

Many CDNs, such as Akamai, Speedera, and Conxion, provide interfaces that enable their customers to publish content to the servers and work with their publishing points. Customers can use an interface to copy content via FTP to the host server, and can create broadcast publishing points that source remote encoders. Customers can also create publishing points that source from playlists. For example, a customer can copy a server-side playlist to a folder on the host Windows Media server, and create a publishing point that sources from the playlist. Then the customer can modify publishing point properties if necessary, such as add authentication and authorization. Most CDNs also enable customers to monitor their content, and provide customers with logs that show details such as client usage and errors.

In this chapter, we saw how Contoso Movies Online produced a live event, and looked at how Contoso makes use of hosting services and CDNs. In the next chapter, Contoso adds the final touch to the movies online site: enabling the site to generate revenue with movie rentals. They do that by first encrypting the movies with Windows Media Rights Manager, and then sending licenses to those end users who pay the fee.