Deliver exceptional on-demand video experiences
Video On Demand (VoD) Delivery
Whether you’re working with one of Fastly’s online video platform (OVP) partners, bringing your video-on-demand delivery in house, looking to improve your existing streaming delivery service or looking to go multi-CDN, the right partner can help you deliver the high quality-of-experience (QoE) viewers demand.
Rapidly deliver high quality video experiences
Boost performance and scale
Our network architecture with hyper-connected, high-capacity POPs and lightning-fast purging with Instant Purge™, ensures more content remains cached, improving performance, scale and user experience. Quickly scale for traffic spikes without interruption.
Protect your content
Fastly protects your video content with Edge authorization tokens, geofencing, media encryption, and integrating with multi-DRM providers for content protection. Our fully configurable platform allows you to set rules to detect when VPNs and proxies are being used to bypass content protection.
Get real-time visibility
With real-time streaming logs, you can monitor infrastructure performance. Paired with granular controls and immediate config changes, you can troubleshoot issues before they substantially impact viewers.
Features
Reduce origin traffic and costs
Fastly’s add-on Media Shield optimizes multi-CDN deployments while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of video streaming by significantly reducing your origin traffic and boosting performance.
Streamline content packaging
Fastly’s On-the-Fly Packager (OTFP) add-on helps organizations cut costs associated with duplicating content for different packaging HTTP streaming protocols (e.g HLS and DASH). OTFP is also feature rich with support for DRM partner integrations, content pre-conditioning for ad insertion, and trickplay support.
Play ads and track performance
Fastly supports Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) workflows through several features that provide more granular control over how your video is packaged. Timed metadata injection lets you embed metadata that signals a player to play ads and track performance or engagement at specific points in the video timeline.
Tailor content to different device types
Device detection allows you to write logic to tailor content for a variety of device types, improving delivery quality and user experience. This provides the ability for you to detect a handset, tablet, and more in order to deliver the correct mobile version of your content.
Content Delivery Network
Fastly's cloud CDN (content delivery network) improves your customer experience by accelerating the delivery of dynamic content and caching your website's unpredictable and event-driven content.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Fastly Video on Demand (VOD) streaming and how does it work?
Fastly Video on Demand streaming is a high-performance video CDN designed to deliver pre-recorded media with low latency, high availability, and global scale. It uses Fastly’s distributed edge network to cache and deliver media on demand content closer to viewers, reducing origin load while ensuring fast, reliable playback across devices and regions.
How does a Video CDN improve video on demand streaming performance?
A video CDN improves video on demand streaming by serving video segments from edge locations closest to the viewer, minimizing latency and buffering. Fastly’s CDN streaming architecture is optimized for large media files and adaptive bitrate delivery, enabling consistent startup times and smooth playback—even during traffic spikes or peak viewing events.
What makes Fastly a strong choice for CDN video streaming?
Fastly’s CDN video streaming capabilities are built for organizations that require fine-grained control, real-time configurability, and observability. Unlike black-box platforms, Fastly allows engineering teams to tune caching, routing, and delivery behavior, making it ideal for businesses that treat streaming as a mission-critical service.
How does Fastly help reduce video startup time?
Fastly optimizes video streaming performance by caching video segments at the edge and intelligently routing requests to the fastest available path. This reduces time-to-first-byte and helps ensure viewers start watching quickly—an essential factor for engagement and retention in video on demand experiences.
Can Fastly support large-scale media on demand libraries?
Yes. Fastly’s video CDN is built to scale efficiently for large Video on Demand catalogs, from highly popular titles to long-tail assets. Frequently requested content is cached close to viewers for low-latency delivery, while intelligent cache management and efficient origin retrieval help control costs and maintain performance across less-accessed content.
How does Fastly’s Video CDN differ from traditional video platforms?
Fastly’s video CDN is built to slot directly into modern Video on Demand pipelines, focusing on high-performance delivery at the edge. Teams keep control of origin storage, encoding, packaging, DRM, and players, while Fastly accelerates delivery, improves cache efficiency, and scales instantly for demand spikes. This delivery-first, modular approach gives developers flexibility, real-time control, and deep observability without the vendor lock-in of all-in-one video platforms.
Is Fastly suitable for enterprise and high-traffic video on demand streaming?
Absolutely. Fastly’s CDN streaming infrastructure is built for enterprise-scale workloads, supporting high concurrency, unpredictable traffic patterns, and global audiences. It’s trusted by organizations that require reliable CDN video streaming with strong performance guarantees and operational visibility.
What observability and controls does Fastly provide for video delivery?
Fastly provides real-time and historical visibility into key video delivery metrics across the entire path from edge to origin. Teams can access detailed logs, dashboards, and APIs to monitor performance, troubleshoot issues, and optimize delivery at scale, with alerting to proactively detect and respond to anomalies in production Video on Demand environments.