You can host live streams for up to 100,000 people with Google Meet’s Enterprise Content Delivery Network (Meet eCDN). With Meet eCDN, you can stream your big events with up to 95% less bandwidth and still maintain quality and low latency.
Learn about hosting live streams with eCDN
eCDN is built into Meet and starts up automatically during live streams after an administrator sets it up. End users don't have to do anything.
Meet eCDN has monitoring and analytics capabilities. For more details about the Meet Quality Tool (MQT), go to Track statistics for live streams using eCDN.
Learn how eCDN works
With Meet eCDN turned on, live stream viewers within a local network can share live-streamed media with other peers in the network. This is called P2P sharing. Most devices will receive the live-streamed media from nearby peers and won't have to fetch it from Google's servers. This drastically lowers the total bandwidth used for viewers of the live stream while maintaining ultra-low latency.
Without eCDN, Meet's media backend sends the stream to all viewer devices individually. With eCDN set up, the backend will send media to a much lower number of devices in that network.
Devices receiving media directly from the media backend are called root nodes. They use the eCDN technology to send the stream with very low latency to other viewer devices in the network, called child nodes. The first child nodes that receive the stream will continue to forward the media to another set of child nodes. This continues until all viewer devices have access to the stream.
Devices stay connected to Meet eCDN throughout the live stream to get regular updates for optimal streaming.
Learn about eCDN topology
The precise way devices are connected and share data is called the eCDN topology of the network, also called network rules. Admins configure the eCDN topology in the Admin console for their own organizations.
An eCDN tracker server enforces the eCDN topology the administrator sets for their network. The tracker also manages the sharing of media between devices and continuously measures the performance of all peers to ensure that peering is effective.
You can set eCDN policies at the organizational or organizational unit (OU) level. There are no settings on the individual user or device level.
Learn what info Google needs to optimize traffic
Meet eCDN uses IP ranges the admin stores in the admin console to connect devices. Meet eCDN also needs to know which devices can’t connect or should not be allowed to connect.
Google also sees:
- The user’s personal Workspace ID and organization ID
- The timestamp for when the token was created
- Meet eCDN-related configuration data
Learn about safety measures Google takes with your data
Google uses strong security measures to protect your data both in transit and at rest.
- All user-related data is encrypted when sent over a network
- Users are identified by their Google Workspace account
- All digital tokens, IDs, or cookies generated by the authentication process expire to prevent theft
