Frequently Asked Questions

While it offers the greatest value for enterprise platforms with global audiences, growing OTT businesses can also benefit as they expand into new regions or experience higher traffic volumes.

Traffic management systems continuously monitor CDN health. If one provider experiences degraded performance or an outage, requests are automatically redirected to another healthy CDN with minimal impact on viewers.

It can introduce additional operational complexity, but intelligent routing often optimizes bandwidth usage, improves efficiency, and reduces the business impact of downtime, making it a worthwhile investment for many enterprise platforms.

Vodlix provides a scalable OTT platform with enterprise-grade capabilities including global content delivery, adaptive streaming, DRM protection, analytics, live streaming support, Smart TV applications, and infrastructure designed to deliver reliable streaming experiences worldwide.

Multicast sends a single stream of data that is shared by many users simultaneously (one-to-many). It’s efficient for many viewers watching the same live content. Unicast, in contrast, sends a separate, individualized stream to each viewer. This enables personalization (such as quality adaptation, ad insertion, user-specific DRM), on-demand playback, and works over standard HTTP/CDN infrastructure.

Unicast is becoming the norm because modern viewers expect features like on-demand streaming, personalized ads, low latency, cross-device playback, and global content delivery. Most ISPs and CDNs are optimized for unicast traffic. Multicast has limitations in flexibility, scalability, and infrastructure compatibility.

Some of the key limitations include poor support for on-demand content, difficulty implementing personalization (ads, language, subtitles), lack of compatibility with many ISPs and CDNs, higher complexity for global delivery, and constraints on analytics and content security mechanisms.

A proper CDN helps reduce latency (by bringing content close to users), supports adaptive bitrate streaming to adjust video quality based on the user’s connection, enables secure delivery (DRM, token-based access, geo-blocking), supports personalization (ads, subtitles), and offers scale to handle many individual streams. It also helps with reliability and availability via multi-CDN strategies.

It’s time to shift if your platform is expanding globally, you want to serve content across multiple types of devices, you need features like ad insertion, DRM, analytics, and personalized content, or you aim to improve viewer experience with lower latency and fewer buffering issues. For most OTT or growing streaming services, making this shift around 2026 is advisable.

Yes, unicast generally uses more bandwidth since each viewer receives a separate stream. However, with modern CDN architecture, efficient adaptive bitrate streaming, edge caching, and scaling strategies (multi-CDN), this overhead can be managed effectively. The trade-off is worth it for the flexibility, quality, and features unicast enables.

Vodlix is designed for unicast from the ground up. Features include built-in multi-CDN delivery, adaptive bitrate streaming, DRM and content protection tools, support for personalized ad delivery, cross-device playback (web, mobile, smart TVs), and the ability to deliver both live and on-demand content with high quality and low latency.

Multicast may still be viable in closed or controlled network situations (e.g. within enterprise LANs, hotel networks, or some IPTV deployments where users are watching identical live content), especially when infrastructure is optimized for multicast. But for public internet streaming, large-scale OTT, or when flexibility and features are required, unicast is almost always a better choice.

If you use an OTT provider, they typically handle encoding, CDN integration, and delivery. Otherwise, you’ll need third-party services like AWS MediaConvert, Cloudflare, or Akamai.

A content delivery network distributes video across geographically dispersed servers so content is served from a location close to each viewer. This reduces latency and buffering and keeps playback smooth regardless of where the audience is.

Not necessarily. White-label solutions such as Vodlix bundle the CDN, transcoding, DRM, and cloud scalability into a managed platform, so content owners can launch without assembling and operating each component themselves.

A webhook is a real-time notification sent by a payment gateway to update the OTT system about payment events.

They ensure instant updates for subscriptions, payments, and user access.

Yes, when implemented with signature verification, HTTPS, and authentication.

Most systems retry the webhook automatically until successful delivery.

It ensures that duplicate events are processed only once.