What Is a CDN Edge Node? How Edge Caching Works for Video

A CDN edge node is a server near your viewers that caches copies of your content, so most requests never travel back to the origin. A cache hit serves instantly; a miss fetches from origin and usually keeps a copy. Who runs those nodes differs a lot between CDNs.

A video CDN is the same idea tuned for large, segmented video files, and a P2P CDN lets viewers share those segments with each other. This guide covers all three, then shows where AIOZ Stream's operator-run DePIN nodes fit.

TL;DR:

• An edge node answers requests from its cache. On a hit it serves the file at once; on a miss it fetches from origin and keeps a copy until its TTL runs out.
• A video CDN caches HLS and DASH segments, shields the origin from bursts of identical requests, and is judged on cache hit ratio, startup time and rebuffering.
• A P2P CDN adds viewer-to-viewer sharing over WebRTC, with the CDN kept as the seed and the fallback.
• Classic CDNs run company-owned sites: Cloudflare lists 348 cities. AIOZ's DePIN network counted 329,940 operator-run nodes on Oct 29, 2026.
• AIOZ Stream's docs describe P2P retrieval and distributed caching on decentralized edge nodes, and every video gets HLS, DASH and MP4 URLs.

Updated Oct 29, 2026: new sections on what a video CDN is, origin shielding, multi-CDN and P2P CDNs, a labelled delivery diagram, a "How AIOZ Stream handles it" section with the docs' asset URLs, links to every post in this pillar, refreshed Cloudflare and AIOZ node counts, and shorter sentences throughout.

What does a CDN edge node do?

An edge node sits closer to your viewer than the origin server does, and it answers as many requests as it can from a local cache. When a request arrives, the edge checks for a valid cached copy. If it has one, that is a cache hit, and it serves the file straight away.

On a cache miss, the edge fetches the file from origin, sends it to the viewer and usually stores a copy for the next request. Each cached object carries a time to live (TTL). Once the TTL runs out, the copy counts as stale and the edge re-checks or re-fetches it.

You measure how well this works with the cache hit ratio: hits divided by all requests. A video glossary from Enveu calls a ratio above 90% a reasonable target for VOD. The same hit-or-miss logic applies when a CDN sits in front of a storage bucket, as our guide to CDNs and object storage shows.

An edge cache finds content by its URL. IPFS finds it by a hash of the bytes, which is the split between location addressing and content addressing. On the IPFS side, an IPFS gateway plays the edge role and serves content-addressed data over plain HTTP.

What is a video CDN?

A video CDN is a CDN built for streaming: it stores and delivers live and on-demand video from servers close to your viewers. Fastly separates it from a general CDN by the load it carries: much larger files, sustained high bitrates, adaptive bitrate streaming and, for live, tight latency.

Here is what happens when your viewer presses play, in Fastly's five steps. Your video is encoded and packaged as HLS or DASH, which splits it into short segments at several quality levels. The origin holds the master copy, and a viewer's request goes to a nearby edge. The edge serves the segment from cache or fetches it from origin first. Then the player keeps asking for the next segment at whatever quality the network allows, which is adaptive bitrate streaming.

VOD vs live delivery on a CDN

If you stream both, on-demand and live video stress your cache in opposite ways. A VOD segment is encoded once, so the CDN caches it once and reuses it for many viewers. A live segment is brand new every few seconds, which leaves little time to pre-cache it. When thousands of viewers ask for that new segment at the same moment, the origin can drown in identical requests.

What is origin shielding?

Origin shielding is how you protect the origin from that rush. Fastly describes it as a mid-tier cache, a "shield" point of presence between the edges and the origin. When many edges miss on the same segment at once, the shield merges those misses into one origin fetch and hands the result back to every edge that asked.

Which metrics tell you a video CDN is working?

Fastly lists the numbers to watch: time to first frame, rebuffering ratio, the bitrate and quality delivered, cache hit ratio, startup failures and, for live, latency. If you only track one, track rebuffering, since that is the stall your viewers notice. Our guide to QoE in video streaming covers how those numbers add up to viewer experience.

Multi-CDN: more than one network behind one player

A multi-CDN setup sends your viewers to two or more CDNs from one origin, with a steering layer picking the CDN for each viewer. You get failover when one network has an outage, and you can route by performance or price. Fastly lists DNS-based steering and Layer 7 traffic management among the ways to build it. Fora Soft adds that HLS and DASH Content Steering can switch CDNs in the middle of a session.

What is a P2P CDN?

A P2P CDN lets viewers who watch the same video share segments with each other, so fewer requests reach the CDN. In practice it runs as a hybrid, and you keep the CDN in place. The CDN stays the seed source and the safety net, and a viewer who cannot find a peer simply fetches from the CDN as usual.

The open-source P2P Media Loader library is a working example. It uses HTML5 video and WebRTC in the browser, plugs into hls.js and Shaka Player, and needs no plugin on the viewer's side. Its README says it supports both live and on-demand video. It also notes that for 1,000 to 2,000 simultaneous viewers, public trackers alone can connect the peers.

The trade-offs are practical. Sharing only helps you when enough viewers watch the same segments at the same time, so a long-tail catalog gains less than a big live event. Each viewer's upload capacity also limits how much they can pass on. And a viewer-to-viewer mesh is a different thing from a WebRTC call topology, which our post on WebRTC mesh, SFU and MCU explains.

A DePIN network gives you a third option. The nodes there are not viewers' browsers but devices that independent operators run all the time, which the AIOZ DePIN model explains in depth.

Company-built edges vs operator-run nodes

When you buy from a traditional CDN, you rent an edge it built as a capital project. The company leases data center space, installs its own hardware and grows city by city. Cloudflare listed 348 cities across 8 regions when we checked on Oct 29, 2026. The upside is control: the company sets hardware specs, peering and uptime, and can publish where every site sits. The ceiling is cost, because each new city is a facility the company has to fund.

AIOZ's DePIN network grows the other way. Independent operators run nodes on their own hardware and earn AIOZ tokens for contributing storage, transcoding and delivery capacity. AIOZ's live DePIN page showed 329,940 total DePINs on Oct 29, 2026. Growth does not wait for AIOZ to fund a data center; it needs an operator, anywhere, to switch a node on. Whether that saves you money depends on your traffic, which when decentralized delivery costs less than a CDN works through.

Reactive vs predictive caching

Most CDN caching you will meet is reactive. An object gets cached because someone asked for it, then stays until its TTL ends or it is evicted to make room. AIOZ describes a different design in its smart caching post. There, a deep learning model predicts which content will be requested and pre-positions it, using content popularity and viewer mobility as inputs.

Treat that as AIOZ's stated design rather than a measured benchmark. We have not seen independent numbers on how it performs in production. The direction is still a real difference: it tries to fill the cache before the request arrives instead of after.

How AIOZ Stream handles it

AIOZ Stream delivers video from its DePIN network rather than from a single company-owned CDN. Its adaptive streaming concepts page says storage, bandwidth and compute "are provided by decentralized edge nodes, reducing egress cost and improving locality for segment fetches." It adds that "P2P retrieval and distributed caching improve robustness during traffic spikes and long-tail geographies."

You do not configure that layer yourself. Each processed video comes back with ready-made playback URLs. This excerpt is from the video object in the Video API reference, where video_id stands in for your ID:

"assets" : {
  "source_url" : "https://api.aiozstream.network/api/media/video_id/source",
  "thumbnail_url" : "https://api.aiozstream.network/api/media/video_id/thumbnail?resolution=original",
  "hls_url" : "https://api.aiozstream.network/api/media/video_id/m3u8",
  "dash_player_url" : "https://embed.aiozstream.network/vod/dash/video_id",
  "mp4_url" : "https://api.aiozstream.network/api/media/video_id/mp4"
}

Player settings sit on the same CDN layer: the players reference notes it "may take up to 10 min" before a new player configuration is available from the CDN. What the docs don't cover yet: a node map by region, cache TTLs, or an uptime SLA like the ones classic CDN contracts include. If your workload has a hard regional latency or uptime requirement, ask about those directly.

Next step: read the AIOZ Stream adaptive streaming docs.

In this pillar: video delivery, CDN and decentralized networks

• What Is AIOZ DePIN and How It Powers Video Delivery: the operator-run node network behind AIOZ Stream
• Is Decentralized Video Delivery Cheaper Than a CDN?: delivery costs by traffic pattern
• Decentralized Storage vs Centralized Cloud Storage for Video: the same contrast applied to where your files live
• What Is a Web3 Streaming Platform?: what makes a platform web3 beyond its node network
• AIOZ DePIN 4.0: Transcoding for Video on Demand and Streaming: the 2024 release that moved transcoding onto the network
• AIOZ Network's File Storage Distribution Optimization: a 2021 technical post on how files spread across nodes

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a CDN edge node and an origin server?
The origin holds the authoritative copy of your content. An edge node caches a copy closer to viewers, so most requests never reach the origin.

What is a video CDN?
A CDN built for streaming. It caches HLS and DASH segments near viewers, shields the origin during live spikes and is measured on startup time, rebuffering and cache hit ratio.

What is a P2P CDN?
A delivery setup where viewers' players share video segments with each other over WebRTC, while a regular CDN stays the source and the fallback.

What is a good cache hit ratio for video?
Above 90% is a reasonable target for on-demand video, per Enveu's glossary. Live video runs lower because each segment is new.

What is origin shielding?
A mid-tier cache between the edges and the origin. It merges many simultaneous misses for the same segment into one origin fetch.

How many edge locations does a large CDN have?
Hundreds of cities. Cloudflare listed 348 cities across 8 regions on Oct 29, 2026.

How many nodes does AIOZ's network have?
AIOZ's live DePIN page showed 329,940 total DePINs on Oct 29, 2026.

Does AIOZ's network use the same caching logic as a traditional CDN?
Not exactly. Traditional CDNs mostly cache reactively with TTLs. AIOZ describes a prediction-driven design that pre-positions content, per its own smart caching post.

Related Reading

• One DePIN, Three Workloads: how the same node network handles storage, compute and streaming
• AIOZ Stream Explained: the full upload-to-playback path this delivery layer is part of
• How Video Segmentation and M3U8 Manifests Work: the segments and playlists a video CDN caches
• What Is a CDN and How Does It Relate to Object Storage?: the same caching layer in front of object storage, on AIOZ Storage
• What Is Content Addressing? IPFS vs Location Addressing: URL-based versus hash-based retrieval, on AIOZ Pin
• What Is an IPFS Gateway? How a Request Gets Resolved: the HTTP edge for IPFS content, on AIOZ Pin

References

• Fastly: What is a video CDN?: definition, delivery steps, live vs VOD, origin shielding and metrics
• Fastly: Multi-CDN strategy and traffic steering: DNS-based and Layer 7 steering
• Fora Soft: Multi-CDN architecture: steering options including HLS and DASH Content Steering
• Novage: P2P Media Loader: an open-source hybrid CDN and P2P library for HLS and DASH
• Enveu: What is edge caching in streaming?: the cache hit ratio target for VOD
• AIOZ Stream docs: Adaptive streaming: decentralized edge nodes, P2P retrieval and distributed caching
• AIOZ Stream docs: Video API: the assets object with HLS, DASH and MP4 URLs
• AIOZ Network: AIOZ DePIN live statistics: the 329,940 total DePINs cited above
• AIOZ Network: Smart Caching: the prediction-driven caching design
• Cloudflare: Global Network: the 348-city count cited above