Google wants to open YouTube CDN for third parties

Google’s network is also suitable for streaming videos – which is proven day by day with YouTube. Until now, Google has only used this service itself; but that is about to change.

Nearly 700,000 hours of video per minute

Google’s in-house Content Delivery Network, i.e. the network that provides the content, is used to deliver all videos that are accessed via YouTube. And that’s no small number: Around 700,000 hours of video are streamed every minute. The network must be correspondingly powerful. Google itself states in this regard that it has capacities in 1,300 cities spread over 200 countries. This ensures that there are only minimal latencies and dropouts. The CDN is also powerful in other respects: it supports the latest protocols such as TCP successor QUIC and BBR.

Opening for third-party offerings

At the NAB Show Streaming Summit, Google has now announced that it will no longer use these capacities exclusively in the future. Other companies should also be able to benefit from Google’s network. Google also wants to make an API available that can be used to integrate advertising into video streams – and thus offer potential new customers the opportunity to easily monetize their video streams processed via Google’s CDN. The offering also includes a live stream API, which – as the name suggests – facilitates live streams.

Great competition

In this market, which Google entered relatively late, the group is joining enormous competition. It has so far been dominated by providers such as Cloudflare, CDNetworks, Fastly, AWS or Akami. It remains to be seen whether Google will be able to assert itself with its offer.