CDN Support

April 2024

What’s changing

MK.IO has added support for rapid Content Delivery Network (CDN) endpoint creation. Content delivery networks are an essential part of any video delivery application. MK.IO allows you to set up a new Streaming Endpoint with a fully integrated CDN in a matter of seconds.

Once you configure MK.IO CDN, egress transfer costs from your Streaming Endpoint to the CDN will be set to a region-specific preferential rate. This is often, but not always, $0.00. Egress from the CDN to your clients will be billed at our published rates, typically an order of magnitude lower than normal egress.

If you would prefer to bring your own CDN, that is still possible. Simply create a normal streaming endpoint and configure your CDN provider to consume content from our origins.

Why you would use this / Why it matters

CDN allows you to deliver video traffic all over the world with lower latencies and lower overall costs compared to directly serving content from your Streaming Endpoint. MK.IO CDN requires minimal effort to set up, while conferring significant cost and performance benefits to your application.

CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a distributed network of servers positioned across various geographic locations to deliver content more efficiently and reliably. CDNs position content in local "points of presence", or POPs, so that clients all over the world can connect to a nearby server to retrieve content. The POPs retrieve content from your Streaming Endpoint, cache the content at the edge, and serve it to all of the clients who connect within the region served by the POP.

Because clients are connecting to a local server instead of a remote one, connection latency is lower. When lots of clients are all requesting the same content, that content will remain cached at the edge and be delivered to clients with a lower time-to-first-byte and higher overall bandwidth. This means that clients who are geographically distant (far away) from your Streaming Endpoint will enjoy higher quality playback and faster startup times.

Getting started

You can create a new CDN-enabled Streaming Endpoint by checking the Enable CDN box upon creation. This will:

Create a Streaming Endpoint for your content
Configure our CDN provider to retrieve your content from your Streaming Endpoint
Return a base URL to deliver content

The entire process takes about 15 seconds. More details in the Streaming Endpoint page.

Additional details

CDN caches content streamed from a Streaming Endpoint (origin) per representation, per streaming protocol, and per encryption/DRM when common encryption is not used. So you'll see traffic to your Streaming Endpoint commensurate with the complexity of your content. If you make significant changes to your content all at once, such as modifying an Account Filter, you might invalidate all of your CDN caches simultaneously, which may result in a large amount of traffic back to your Streaming Endpoint.

While using CDN reduces overall traffic to your Streaming Endpoint, you are still responsible for scaling your Streaming Endpoint commensurate with the total amount of traffic you are receiving. We acknowledge that this responsibility is next-to-impossible to uphold in an efficient way using the operational data MK.IO provides today.

This feature is enabled for the following streaming protocols for live and on-demand streaming:

HLS CMAF
DASH

Existing streaming endpoints cannot be converted to CDN streaming endpoints.

CDN is available for dedicated streaming endpoints only.

Availability & rollout plan

Akamai CDN support will be available in all MK.IO regions, effective very soon.

Meters & pricing

CDN is a pay-as-you-go capability. You will be billed for your traffic that is delivered via the CDN. If you anticipate delivering high volumes of content, please contact our sales team.

CDN pricing is described in detail in the Video Streaming Pricing Table