Video CDN for Global Delivery

This page covers delivering video you've already stored — the playback side, not encoding. Video is the most bandwidth-hungry, latency-sensitive content you serve: viewers abandon a clip that buffers, and a 200 MB MP4 pulled from a single origin halfway around the world will buffer. A video CDN caches the file at edge locations near viewers so playback starts quickly and stays smooth. files.link delivers from 450+ edge locations and supports HTTP range requests, which is what makes a browser's native MP4 player able to seek and progressively download instead of waiting for the whole file.

The practical setup is delightfully boring: pre-encode an MP4 (H.264/AAC is the safe universal baseline), upload it through the REST API, and reference the resulting CDN URL directly in an HTML5 video element:

<video controls preload="metadata"
  src="https://cdn.files.link/your-video-id"></video>

The browser issues range requests against the CDN URL, the edge serves the requested byte ranges, and the viewer can scrub the timeline without downloading the entire file first. Because delivery comes from the nearest edge rather than your origin, a tutorial recorded in Berlin plays smoothly for a viewer in São Paulo.

The important honesty: files.link is delivery + storage, not a transcoding or adaptive-streaming platform. It does not transcode your uploads, generate HLS/DASH renditions, or do per-title encoding the way Mux or Cloudflare Stream do. If you need adaptive bitrate streaming (multiple renditions that switch with the viewer's bandwidth), produce the HLS/DASH segments yourself with ffmpeg or a transcoding service, upload the segments and the playlist, and let the CDN deliver them — an .m3u8 plus its .ts/.m4s segments are just files.

For straightforward on-demand video — course lessons, product demos, marketing clips, webinar replays — progressive MP4 over the edge is simpler and avoids per-minute transcoding bills. Delivery is drawn from prepaid credits with no separate per-GB egress line, which matters a lot for video since one popular clip can move terabytes. For the at-rest side, see video storage; for replays specifically, webinar recording hosting and StreamArchive VOD replay storage for long-tail libraries of archived broadcasts delivered from the same edge network.