Help Varnish win a Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Award!

Varnish Software has been nominated for Streaming Media’s 10th annual Readers' Choice Awards, recognized in the media server category.

It will not come as a surprise to Varnish enthusiasts that Varnish helps support seamless, scalable video streaming solutions. The award nomination inspired us to share more with you about how we facilitate the great wave of streaming that permeates the content distribution landscape today. (And, of course, we will shamelessly ask you to help us clinch a win: Vote for Varnish as your favorite media server here.)

How is Varnish a media server?

Varnish can be used as a standalone component for serving video as an efficient way to scale out your platform. It also enables serving massive amounts of content/traffic from a single location efficiently (high-volume VOD). Varnish is often deployed as an “origin shield” when used with CDNs. And, in fact, you can build your own DIY distribution network with Varnish as the caching engine. This flexibility - combined with the famous Varnish performance - have made Varnish into a media server/streaming solution that not only delivers content fast and scalably but also enables considerable savings to the bottom line.

We have helped our customers globally to build and deploy advanced, scalable and fast streaming and media-serving solutions on their own terms throughout the whole software lifecycle: design, feature development, implementation and optimization. Some of these customers include Surfline, SFR and waoo, among many others. (Daily Motion has explained in their own words how they use Varnish for streaming.)

The creative ways in which Varnish is used...

We’re always excited to work with customers as they implement Varnish Plus as a media server because it never ceases to surprise and amaze us to see how creatively they use the software. Surfline, for example, operates the world’s largest coastal HD cam network, and its sophistication, uptime and comprehensive overview of marine events makes it the go-to platform for news networks during major weather events. Who would have guessed? Meanwhile, SFR, a leader in the French telecommunications market, turned to Varnish when they wanted to reduce the high cost of handling as much web traffic as they do. SFR built and manage their own content delivery network with Varnish Plus, which helped them cut costs, bring control in-house and then offer their content delivery solution onward to their customers to bring in more revenue.

Bottom line: Varnish is really flexible, and now more than ever, flexibility is a big factor in ensuring that content delivery/media streaming is not only reliable and seamless but does what you specifically need it to. The aforementioned customers have “voted” for Varnish as a media server by using Varnish - but now’s their - and your - chance to recognize Varnish by voting for us in the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards.

Meanwhile, we invite you to learn more about Varnish and streaming media by downloading the white paper on HTTP Streaming with Varnish.

P.S. Again - we would appreciate any votes for the aforementioned Readers’ Choice Awards that you could throw our way. Voting opened on August 15th and will run until September 26th. Please do vote for Varnish Software in the media server category.

Photo (c) 2008 Andy Karmy used under Creative Commons license.