BIDI is the BBC’s own content distribution platform and is responsible for delivering media directly to the BBC end users in the UK. The clients are always presented with a ‘CDN mix’ from which they can fetch the media they are interested in. BIDI is part of this mix, alongside the commercial CDNs.
One of the biggest technical challenges that we have to solve as a content provider is delivering video and audio streams to a geographically spread out audience. At peak times, many hundreds of gigabits per second of data have to be transferred across the internet.