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The purpose of capacity planning is to ensure that your content can reach all of your users without delays or interruptions. A streaming media network that has been properly planned and configured will improve response time, data throughput, content availability, and reduce the data error rate.
Capacity planning is based on three variables: audience volume, type and size of the content, and the number and speed of the servers. In most cases, capacity planning is used to determine the server requirements necessary to provide a given amount of content to a selected audience, although you may choose to plan for any of the variables under certain circumstances.
You can estimate your required network capacity by using the following equation:
Required network capacity = Content bit rate x estimated number of clients
There are several steps involved in capacity planning. The topics in this section introduce the steps and give an overview of the concepts involved. This section contains the following topics: