Compare
What actually differs.
Ten questions worth asking any multi-CDN product, including ours.
The right-hand column describes the approaches these products commonly take — DNS weights, in-path switching, rules set in advance. No company is named: the differences are architectural.
| The question | vidNT | The common approach |
|---|---|---|
| When can the routing answer change? | ✓Every segment, for every viewer, while the session is playing. | ✗At the start of a session, or when a DNS record expires. |
| Can a viewer who is already watching be moved? | ✓Yes. Mid-stream, on a segment boundary, with no restart. | ✗Rarely. Once a session is committed to a CDN it stays there. |
| What is the decision made from? | ✓What the player reports about its own session, what the CDN reports about its own responses, and our own measurement. | ●Synthetic probes and rules set in advance. Some read client QoE. |
| How specific is one decision? | ✓One viewer, on one network, at one moment. | ✗A region, or a percentage split across a whole audience. |
| Does your traffic pass through the vendor? | ✓No. Answers are published ahead of the request; video goes CDN to viewer. | ●Varies. In-path switchers answer the viewer’s request themselves. |
| What happens if the vendor goes down? | ✓Delivery carries on with the last published answer. | ●Depends entirely on whether they sit in the path. |
| Does anything go into your player? | ✓No plugin, no SDK. Only standards the player already speaks. | ●Often a client SDK, or a proprietary manifest. |
| Can you audit a decision after the fact? | ✓Yes. The chosen CDN, the score, each component, and why a switch was held back. | ●Usually a dashboard of outcomes, not a log of decisions. |
| Does the same company also sell you delivery? | ●Yes — and we say so. We sell CDN capacity too. Steer is bought, deployed and run without it, and the decision log shows exactly what the routing favoured. | ●Often yes. Worth asking, when the router picks the seller’s own network. |
| Where does it run? | ✓In your own cloud account, or managed by us. Your choice. | ●Commonly the vendor’s SaaS only. |
We will demonstrate every one of these on your own stream, on a call, before you commit to anything.