Fastly for Streaming Media

Engaging online media audiences at the network edge

Streaming mediaOnline mediaContent delivery

Fastly is purpose-built to deliver outstanding customer experiences for live streaming and on-demand content. Learn how Fastly can support modern video workflow requirements to meet your expectations and those of your customers.

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Overview

Regardless of how and where they watch, read, or listen, consumers have come to expect stellar personalized entertainment experiences that can be delivered securely and at scale with little-to-no latency. Playback issues such as delays and buffering are likely to cause customer churn. A plethora of platforms, resolutions and devices add several additional layers of complexity surrounding the viewer experience.

For more than a decade, Fastly has helped the world’s leading content providers reliably deliver stellar live and on-demand streaming media experiences by providing granular control on a modern platform. We provide vital real-time visibility into the quality of delivery and our fully configurable edge cloud platform delivers your media faster, all while boosting your team’s efficiency. 

Fastly’s high-capacity global network improves user experiences with accelerated content delivery regardless of how and where viewers chose to consume online media. Minimize delay and increase viewer engagement by offloading encryption and authentication to the network edge. With Fastly’s media offering, you can reduce administrative overhead, storage, and delivery costs by dynamically personalizing your media for individual devices, thus resulting in agile and ultra-responsive applications. 

Why Fastly

Our industry-leading shielding of your origin from high-volume requests means you can spend valuable resources elsewhere. All while knowing your infrastructure will continue to deliver performant viewer experiences that set your business apart—regardless of audience size. 

Quickly respond to changing conditions

Gain complete control over your delivery to make timely iterative and data-driven decisions. 

  • Instantly adjust your configuration settings via an API and roll back changes as needed without having to reach out to Professional Services.

  • Our Layer 7 Load Balancer lets you define content-aware routing decisions while ensuring instant convergence and failover.

  • Cache highly dynamic content at the edge with the peace of mind that it can be purged from cache globally in milliseconds.

Increase viewer engagement with responsive online experiences

Built-in logic lets you provide stellar viewer experiences by tailoring content for individual devices, platforms, and capabilities.

  • Cache more content—both current and long-tail—with high-density Points of Presence (POP)

  • Provide faster playback times with low latency connections. Fastly peers with multiple providers in strategic regions for better performance, or you can initiate a private network for private data centers.

  • Accelerate time-to-first frame (TTFF). With Fastly’s progressive downloads, viewers experience near-instant playback while the additional segments are fetched.

Optimize your infrastructure and delivery with Fastly Media Shield

Solve technical complexity and reduce the total cost of your streaming infrastructure.

  • Save on egress costs. Fastly’s Media Shield acts as an origin and collapses simultaneous content requests from multiple networks into one, significantly reducing origin load. 

  • Maintain visibility across multiple CDNs. Attain otherwise lost glass-to-glass visibility by combining your real-time streaming logs with player-side data.

  • Avoid complex and costly infrastructure buildouts and reallocate valuable resources.

Atresmedia logo

"Thanks to Media Shield, we have managed to decrease the access costs to our origin by 60%."

Carlos Santos

Video Platform Project Manager

Secure content and interactions

Fend off online attacks and control access to your site, all while making sure content remains protected

  • Guard your publishing or streaming platform from account takeover attacks and other security threats with next-generation app and API protection that doesn’t impair performance.

  • Protect your apps wherever they live: on-premises, in containers, in the cloud, and at the edge. Fastly’s next-gen WAF is so effective at preventing false positives that over 90% of our customers use it in full blocking mode.

  • Safeguard content using token authentication, AES-128, and DRM. Detect VPN usage at the edge to block unauthorized access.

React before it’s too late with real-time logs 

Monitor infrastructure performance with Fastly’s real-time streaming logs. Paired with granular controls and immediate config changes, it’s possible to troubleshoot issues before they substantially impact QoE (quality of experience).

  • Uncover timely business insights with real-time logs streamed to the endpoint of your choice, where they can be parsed and aggregated.

  • Monitor the impact new changes have on KPIs in real-time

  • Employ self-healing, real-time fault detection, and mitigation to automatically address internet weather challenges

fuboTV

"With Fastly, I finally have visibility when things go wrong. Because Fastly gives us access to our logs, we can self-diagnose instantly—it’s much lower maintenance than with other providers."

Sung Ho Choi

Co-founder

Read the case study
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Fastly for Streaming Media

See Fastly’s complete portfolio for Media & Entertainment

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CDN Video Streaming: Built for performance

Provide broadcast-quality live and video-on-demand experiences on any device, anywhere.

Web Page
Fastly Media Shield - Significantly reduce origin traffic

Media Shield optimizes multi-CDN deployments while reducing the total TCO of streaming.

Video
Authenticate subscribers at the Edge

Cut response time, offload more origin traffic, and make smarter routing decisions at the edge.

Meet a more powerful global network.

Our network is all about greater efficiency. With our strategically placed points of presence (POPs), you can scale on-demand and deliver seamlessly during major events and traffic spikes. Get the peace of mind that comes with truly reliable performance — wherever users may be browsing, watching, shopping, or doing business.

353 Tbps

Edge network capacity1

150 ms

Mean purge time2

>1.8 trillion

Daily requests served4

~90% of customers

Run Next-Gen WAF in blocking mode3

As of March 31, 2024

As of December 31, 2019

As of March 31, 2021

As of July 31, 2023

Support plans

Fastly offers several support plans to meet your needs: standard, gold and enterprise.

Standard

Free of charge and available as soon as you sign up with Fastly.

Gold

Proactive alerts for high-impact events, expedited 24/7 incident response times, and a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantee.

Enterprise

Gives you the added benefits of emergency escalation for support cases and 24/7 responses for inquiries (not just incidents).