Digital Plumbing: The Infrastructure Behind Cat Videos

Cat videos rule our online world—and that’s no joke. Since the early days of flip phones and social media, cat photos and videos have been wildly popular. And cat content isn’t just for our amusement. Research shows that it’s good for our health, helping people feel more energetic and positive, and reducing negative emotions.[1]

While there’s not much information on exactly how much internet traffic is dedicated to cat content today, we can assume it’s a lot. Tens of thousands of cat videos are added to YouTube daily. Not to mention the billions of cat videos on social networks. Cat videos outperform many other categories of video content. Internet-celebrity cats like Nala, Puff and Grumpy Cat each have millions of followers. The question is: Before the internet, did we even realize how popular cats were?

Many of us consume online videos daily, but few stop to think about the infrastructure required to support all that content. There’s physical hardware, software and a host of technology providers involved in the journey of one cat video, from creation to consumption. Of course, the same technology applies to other kinds of online videos—so if you’re partial to dogs, prefer tutorials and how-to videos, comedy or sports clips, the infrastructure operating behind the scenes is essentially the same.

Our new digital plumbing series is all about exploring the hidden infrastructure behind our everyday digital experiences—from streaming content to rideshare apps to digital payments and so much more. In this edition, let’s take a closer look at the digital plumbing behind the ever-popular cat video.

Creating and consuming video content: The user experience

The front-end process of social media video creation and consumption is pretty simple:

• A user records a video, usually on a smartphone.
• The video creator uploads it over the internet to a social media platform.
• The social platform processes and stores the video and then distributes for delivery, typically using a content delivery network (CDN).
• The CDN then makes the content available through servers located geographically close to the intended consumers.
• Users watch and share the video on their personal devices.

The journey of a cat video

When we watch and share cat videos—or any online videos—with our friends, family and social media followers, we experience a simple, streamlined process. It feels quick and easy: You click a link or open an app and watch your favorite content. As long as you have a digital device and network connectivity, videos should play flawlessly and you can like, comment or share them without a second thought.

A deeper dive into online videos: What’s happening behind the scenes?

Beneath these seamless digital experiences, there’s a lot of important IT infrastructure, software and services as well as a robust ecosystem of technology providers. These technologies and companies enable us to upload content onto a social network so it can be delivered anywhere in the world on demand.

The IT infrastructure

First, let’s talk about hardware and software. In addition to user devices like phones, tablets and laptops, there’s crucial physical infrastructure and software providing the foundation for digital experiences. While the internet often feels intangible, it wouldn’t exist without these hardware and software elements.

All the players in a video-on-demand ecosystem require physical servers, storage and networking equipment. Internet service providers (ISPs), mobile carriers, CDNs, clouds, and private and public data centers all need this equipment. CDNs, for instance, need servers and networking equipment in edge locations to establish network points of presence (PoPs) that allow them to distribute content globally, closer to end users to reduce latency and increase performance. The delivery of content also requires a vast network of terrestrial and subsea cables. To support the core physical infrastructure that enables lightning-fast content delivery, companies also need power and cooling equipment as well as environmental controls that ensure hardware functions optimally.

The technology ecosystem

Most people consuming a cat video have no idea just how many technology players are involved behind the scenes. The obvious ones are the social media platforms where users upload and download videos: Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok and others. These platforms encode and enhance the videos after they’re uploaded. They also employ algorithms to make recommendations to users based on their consumption and engagement patterns.

ISPs also play a role since most social media content travels over the public internet. ISPs provide network connectivity to transport video data. Unlike live streaming and real-time videos, social media videos typically don’t require high bandwidth. They can handle latency and some packet loss by buffering content before playback.

Content delivery networks are a very key part of the ecosystem that most consumers don’t know much about. CDNs like Akamai Technologies, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly and Google Cloud CDN store content such as photo and video files and deliver it to users around the world using globally distributed edge servers and PoPs. The CDNs are crucial in providing low latency delivery of content to users wherever they are.

Cloud service providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform also play a role, providing scalable infrastructure for storing, processing and distributing videos. In a vendor-neutral data center, CSPs can provide cloud on-ramps to accelerate traffic for all the cat videos.

Video transcoding service providers like Mux, Qencode, Gumlet and Brightcove convert video files to the correct format and optimize them for viewing. They often offer cloud-based solutions. CSPs may offer transcoding services too.

Data center operators like Equinix provide a neutral place for servers, storage and network infrastructure for storing and processing videos. Data centers are a place for players in the ecosystem to interact and exchange value. For instance, major cloud on-ramps, ISPs and CDNs might all have a presence in the same data centers.

The digital workflow of a cat video

The IT infrastructure and video-on-demand ecosystem come together in a workflow that each cat video must move through. Here’s what a typical social media video workflow entails:

1. Content creation, encoding and upload: A user creates content that is locally encoded and then uploaded to a social platform via the internet.
2. Video transcoding: A platform or software tool typically re-encodes and compresses the file into one or more formats to optimize the content for the intended delivery method. This is done by the social platform in dedicated hardware or in the cloud.
3. Content storage: The social platform stores content for access by origin servers, where authoritative versions of the content are kept until requested by the CDN. This could be in a data center or public cloud. Origin servers are accessed by the CDN via the internet or private connectivity.
4. Content distribution to users: When content is requested, the nearest CDN server requests it from an origin server and delivers it to the end user. The server also caches the content for a set period of time for subsequent requests. Content can be prepositioned within the CDN, making it available globally to users via distributed servers and network PoPs from private data centers, CSPs and/or colocation facilities.
5. Content consumption and sharing: End users view and share the video on their personal devices. In this step, the user clicks a link on the platform’s website or app, the device is provided a DNS name that resolves to the nearest CDN server and pulls content to the user’s device for playback.

Infrastructure and data centers are essential

As you can see, sharing a simple cat video involves quite a bit of digital plumbing. Data centers, the infrastructure inside them, and the interconnected ecosystem of technology providers hosted in them are all critical elements enabling the simplest of our daily digital experiences.

Many of the world’s most prominent companies, internet service providers, CDNs, mobile carriers and cloud on-ramps are among the 10,000+ enterprises hosted in Equinix data centers. In Equinix, these companies can connect directly to each other at larger bandwidth speeds, with fewer hops, allowing them to exchange value to drive better consumer and employee experiences—with cat videos and many other aspects of modern digital life.

Whatever famous cats you follow—we’re partial to Benedict and Mimosa—we hope you’ll remember the hidden digital plumbing that enables our everyday experiences. And if you want to learn more about the role of modern infrastructure at the edge, download our infographic on Four power moves to fast-track digital advantage.

[1] Jessica Gall Myrick, Emotion regulation, procrastination, and watching cat videos online: Who watches Internet cats, why, and to what effect? Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 52, 2015.