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Carrier Delivery option

What is content delivery?

Content delivery is the method of providing web-based media over a particular medium, such as the Internet or television broadcast channels. For any media consumed online, it must be delivered from a first server—the originating server—to a second server—the cache server. This includes music videos, webpages, television shows, videogames and all other online, web-based content. 

Online content delivery distributes information to duplicate servers to maintain web-based content. This is known as content caching. Content caching decreases loading time, enables efficient delivery and decentralizes data handling tasks. This prevents denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. 

Key takeaways

  • Content delivery works through three steps: web redirection, URL selection, and delivery.
  • Content can be delivered through downloading or streaming.
  • Different content types can be delivered in different ways to create a truly omnichannel experience. 
  • Content delivery networks (CDNs) can help decrease loading time, improve content availability and redundancy, enhance webpage security, and decrease bandwidth expenses.

How content delivery works

The acceleration and proliferation of Internet-based content have raised the importance of stable content delivery systems. This includes video-on-demand (VoD), downloadable content, streaming services and everything else provided online. To meet demand, ISPs have increased scalability, quality of services and network reliability.

Content delivery works through three steps. 

1. Web redirection

Cache servers are placed at major Internet access points worldwide. These secondary cache servers then use a special routing code to redirect the webpage request to the closest server. 

These special routing redirection codes include:

  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) redirection
  • IP redirection
  • Domain Name System (DNS) redirection

2. URL selection

The web user then selects a given Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that reroutes the request away from the website’s originating server and directs it instead to a secondary cache server closer to the user. 

3. Delivery

The secondary cache server then establishes which content is held in the cache, delivers that content and then obtains any non-cached content from the originating server.