Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I understood, CDN is needed to lift the heavy load from the source servers. Without them you'd be hammered by heavy traffic, and not only that, the route to the end user will be most likely longer. DASH is adaptive streaming, and as such, when you select some stream from the client, CDN should support that in their infrastructure (including codecs and etc.). I don't know the details exactly, but it's far fr…
> DASH is adaptive streaming, and as such, when you select some stream from the client, CDN should support that in their infrastructure Adaptive streaming is essentially a client side technology, all the CDN needs to do is ensure that it serves up files with the right mime type (not actually a hard requirement, but many players choke if you don't). Which segment to play next is decided by the player based on current…
Twitch.tv does exactly that for their non-Flash streaming (MPEG2 .ts files delivered in pieces).