What Is a CDN and Why Does Your Video Need One?
You may have wondered why video streaming hasn't really taken off — not just in Iran, but globally. The answer comes down to technical complexity and a chaotic market. Plenty of companies use video as part of their marketing efforts, but only a handful have actually moved toward video streaming.
When you upload a video to YouTube, Vimeo, or Aparat, you don't have to worry about the technical side — but if you want to get rid of YouTube's branding or Aparat's logo and name, you're in for a real battle.
Setting up video streaming is no simple task. At a minimum, you need three separate services: (1) one to encode your videos into a streamable format; (2) another to deliver that content over a CDN; and most importantly, (3) a service to provide a proper player that works across different platforms. Video encoding alone can be a painstaking, time-consuming process given the sheer range of devices out there — so while building a dedicated streaming service isn't impossible, it's far from a wise move when you consider the costs we'll get into below.
Encoding companies charge based on CPU usage, which scales with the length, quality, and number of formats you need for streaming. CDN services price bandwidth by region and country. Stack those on top of dedicated player providers that bill you per view, and you've got a combination that can drain your budget fast — which is exactly why so many people give up on these services altogether.
But that's not even the whole story. Many companies that grudgingly rely on third-party streaming services end up frustrated with the results. A common complaint: many of these services don't compress videos at all. There's no technical justification for this — compressing video speeds up delivery and benefits everyone, both the viewer and the provider. But as someone who previously worked at a CDN company told us, the reason for skipping compression isn't technical at all.
It's purely economic. Compress the video, and these services make less money — since they charge based on traffic. So they either avoid it entirely or make it unnecessarily difficult to do. On top of that, some CDN services limit content delivery to specific geographic regions — the ones with higher per-byte rates — just to squeeze more money out of customers.
As you can see, the video streaming market is messy and deeply unfair — and that's exactly the problem Kavimo was built to solve. A service that meets global standards without any of these headaches, so users can tap into the real power of video streaming for their marketing goals without breaking the bank.
Simple, Integrated Workflow
How does Kavimo work?
Our top priority was the technical experience and ease of use. So we built Kavimo to give users encoding, delivery, and a dedicated player — all in one place. It's as easy to use as YouTube: upload your video, publish it, and enjoy a beautiful, fully customized player that reflects your brand. No trace of our name or logo anywhere. Everything is yours, tailored to your taste.
The next big thing for us was treating customers fairly with transparent, reasonable pricing. Kavimo is built on a win-win philosophy — we need to sustain ourselves as a service provider, and our customers need to genuinely benefit too. Kavimo's plans are designed to flex around each customer's goals.
Rather than overwhelming you with a tangle of different billing parameters, we simply charge based on how much your audience actually watches. That rate covers all three components — encoding, delivery, and the player — so you're not paying separately for each. It's a fair approach that works for both sides.
By default, we compress every video we host. If a new codec comes along tomorrow that delivers better quality at a smaller file size, all videos will be re-published with that codec at no extra cost to our customers — and higher quality video will never mean a higher price.
The Next Generation of Video Applications
It's no secret that video still hasn't found its rightful place in the business world. Too many products launch without ever leaning on what video can do for marketing. We hope that by clearing the path, we can help change that and see video get the adoption it deserves.
Our goal is to grow the number of people using video streaming from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands — so that the next entrepreneur doesn't have to stress over megabits per second or video formats, and can instead focus on marketing their product to the world with a great streaming service behind them. And so that teachers, students, and instructors have the right tools to share their knowledge without ever getting tangled up in the technical side of things.