According to Telecompaper, Econet Media, the company behind Kwesé TV and Kwesé Play, is seeking to build more Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) in Africa. Through Liquid Telecoms, they have already built CDNs across Sub-Saharan Africa, some in South Africa and another at Africa’s largest Internet eXchange Point based at Teraco (NAPAfrica).
Kwesé Play is a streaming service which is bringing global entertainment channels from the likes of Netflix, YouTube, and iflix. For you to enjoy such streaming services, a reliable and high-speed internet connection is required hence the company has at this time already built a fibre optic network which spans more than 50 000km and covers nine countries across Africa.
A Content Delivery Network is simply a group of connected computer servers that store the pages, videos, music or other content that is to be delivered to you when you try to use a service like Kwesé Play or Netflix. CDNs are able to make the delivery of such content faster as they deliver it based on your geographical location, the origin of the web page and the CDN server.
So for example, if a CDN is located in South Africa and you’re trying to stream some videos on Kwesé Play from Zimbabwe, you will get the content at a much faster speed as you are closer to SA than if you tried to access the same content from the same CDN but you were located in Tanzania. In building more CDNs across Africa, Econet Media will ensure that regardless of where you are in Africa, you will get the content at fast speeds since you’ll be always close to a CDN.
Given how the minimum broadband speed needed to run Kwesé Play content is 4Mbps but for optimal viewing, 10Mbps would be required, hopefully, with more CDNs, people streaming video on Kwesé Play will be able to do it optimally even at slower speed. At the moment, Kwese Play is only available in South Africa and given how Kwesé TV is currently being broadcasted in Zimbabwe, maybe Kwese Play will also make it to us here.
Let us know what you think about this. Do you use streaming services like Kwesé Play, Netflix or Showmax? What problems have you faced using these services and what would you like to be improved.
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It would have been great if we could get the CDN built in Zimbabwe as this would spar tech growth and create more jobs.
Naturally, CDN are very expensive to operate even in a stable normal working country economy, thats why a lot of it is run on AWS. I can understand why if Econet refuses to build one in Zimbabwe but it will such a shame.