Digitally Imported (DI.FM) is an online radio destination for electronic music fans around the world. Founded in 1999 with a single channel, DI.FM today offers 90+ specialized channels via the Web, mobile applications and third-party streaming partners. Through a vast catalog of 100% human-curated electronic music, DI.FM ensures a superior listening experience with authenticity, originality, and depth.
The Challenge
DI.FM sought a global delivery and performance platform they could trust to reliably serve streaming media worldwide from their colocated origin servers. Further, they wanted to achieve this without paying high rates for storage, data transfer from their origin to their content delivery platform, and final distribution to end-users (many cloud vendors impose additional fees for each step in this pipeline).
This is where the Bandwidth Alliance came in: by pairing Backblaze's affordable and reliable object storage with Cloudflare's global cloud platform, including its best-in-class CDN, DI.FM found a path to a modern and resilient media streaming solution that integrates well with their hybrid infrastructure — while achieving major cost savings.
The Bandwidth Alliance Solution
Streaming media is at the core of DI.FM’s business, and without a global cloud platform to handle distribution — their product doesn't work. They need a partner with transparent and predictable pricing and enough capacity to serve their global customer base.
As DI.FM initially evaluated potential partners, they optimized for a balance of pricing between their origin and CDN, and then again for the cost of transferring between the CDN’s points of presence to end users. Many of the vendors DI.FM evaluated billed excessive rates for these transfers, used complex bundles to extract additional tolls, and lacked the global coverage DI.FM needed.
The Bandwidth Alliance proved to be the answer. By migrating to Cloudflare, DI.FM was immediately able to deliver content from Cloudflare’s global network, spanning over 330 cities in 90 countries worldwide. Now, listeners who previously had to deal with the latency of streaming content from remote servers are seeing a vastly improved experience, with tunein latency (the delay between pressing play and audio starting in their client) improving by as much as 300ms.
In addition to using Cloudflare to stream media and distribute its web content, DI.FM also leverages Cloudflare’s robust security protection to keep DI.FM’s site and APIs safe, including obfuscating the location of its origin servers.
Meanwhile, DI.FM began using Backblaze’s B2 storage, which is active object storage similar to AWS’s S3 at a fraction of the cost. Because Backblaze and Cloudflare are both partners in the Bandwidth Alliance, they waive the egress fees that other cloud vendors typically charge — meaning that DI.FM doesn’t have to pay to move its content from Backblaze’s storage to Cloudflare’s global network.