this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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The real reason is boring: CDN logistics.
This will be a grossly oversimplified explanation. Streaming platforms mirror their files across dozens - sometimes hundreds - of server farms. However, it's not efficient to mirror everything in every location. For instance, if a YouTube channel has a viewer base that is 99% located in the UK, it wouldn't make sense to waste the bandwidth to transfer those files and the storage to keep them on servers in the US, in the off-chance an American clicks on that channel's video. So when you try to play a video that isn't already cached on your regional server, you have to fetch it from a farther-away server, which results in degraded stream quality as you're literally accessing a file from a physically farther location. But a larger channel with a more widespread audience is more likely to have viewers in farther regions, so those files are more likely to get mirrored to other server locations.
Ads, however, are smaller files, and are generally going to be locale-specific, so it makes sense to keep those cached in all the local servers. So you never have to reach far to pull an ad, but you may have to reach far to pull the content you actually want to see.
Wut. Quality has absolutely nothing to do with distance to the cdn server. That makes no sense whatsoever.
It absolutely does...
It's called latency or ping. There's relays and routers that pass data where it needs to go. Everything in between the request device and the supply device adds to it. Furthermore, data is still a physical object that requires time to travel. The longer the distance, the more time it takes to get where it's going. That's simple physics.
latency and ping has absolutely nothing to do with video quality. the quality as it's received by the client is going to be the exact same. You're not losing data in the process. it's not like a container ship that's traveling across the ocean and for every 100 miles it travels it loses a container. If you're getting buffering then sure, maybe you're calling that 'quality' but it absolutely is not what anyone else means when they say quality.