TeliaSonera Announces Managed CDN and Site Acceleration Deal With EdgeCast

Earlier in the week, TeliaSonera announced a deal with EdgeCast to do a large managed CDN and site acceleration deployment in 3-4 countries where they are the incumbent telecom and have built a specialized sales team of CDN professionals to sell the solutions. For EdgeCast, this is the second large managed CDN deal they have done this year – PT Telekom and now TeliaSonera.

See Amazon’s Latest Dynamic Site Delivery Product In Action at The CDN Summit

On Monday May 20th, at the Content Delivery Summit in NYC , (#cdnsummit) Amazon will show off the latest developments with their Dynamic Site Delivery offering. Amazon will demonstrate how you can use Amazon CloudFront to help architect your site to deliver both static and dynamic content. Attendees will also learn how they can configure multiple origin servers for their Amazon CloudFront distribution; use query string parameters to help customize their web pages for each viewer and how content owners can configure multiple cache behaviors, based on URL patterns on their website. Amazon’s goal is to make dynamic site delivery affordable, easy to configure and manage and provide  more options for content owners looking for reliable delivery of dynamic assets

Think Streaming Will Replace Cable TV? This Data On Streaming Quality Proves Otherwise

These days, many want to suggest that cable TV offerings will be “killed” or “replaced” by content services being delivered over the Internet using content delivery networks. While that’s not reality, those who make these suggestions speak as if the quality of the content delivered online is the same as what consumers get from cable TV. However, thanks to Conviva, we have data from some of the largest streamers on the web, that shows how difficult it really is to deliver video on the Internet, with reliability.

The Video CDN Business Is Flawed, YouTube Subsidizes Video Bandwidth On The Net

While many want to imply and insist that video delivered over the internet is going to one day rival or surpass cable TV as the main broadcast medium, which is an incorrect notion on its own, most are missing the bigger picture and ignoring the business side of the discussion. They want to argue about network capacity, improved compression algorithms, server deployments and other technology pieces without realizing or even acknowledging that the business model of delivering video does not work. Delivering video over the web, even at scale, isn’t profitable, unless you’re YouTube and you can afford to subsidize the bandwidth of nearly the entire Internet

Amazon Has A Shot At Disrupting Akamai And The Dynamic Site Acceleration Market

Nine months ago, Amazon launched their new dynamic content delivery service in beta and two weeks ago, I posted details on how their product is coming along and outlined new features they have added since launch. Every since Amazon announced their new service, people keep asking me if Amazon will disrupt Akamai’s DSA business and drive pricing down in the market as a whole. While Amazon still has a long way to go before that has the possibility of happening, make no mistake, they are gunning for Akamai, even though they won’t call out Akamai by name. Today, Akamai is still the undisputed king of the dynamic site acceleration industry and to date, no one has even come close to taking a large percentage of their web optimization business or knocked them from the top spot.

Amazon Adds More Functionality To Their Dynamic Content Delivery Platform, Lowers Pricing

Last May, at the Content Delivery Summit event I organize each year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced support for dynamic content delivery, also referred to in the industry as dynamic site acceleration (DSA). ( video presentation here ). Since the launch, Amazon has been pretty quiet on what they have been working on so I spent some time with the company to get an update on where their support for dynamic content stands. For those not familiar with DSA technology in general, dynamic site acceleration is a suite of technologies and products that deals with optimizing dynamically served content across a network. Traditional DSA services often include TCP optimization, route optimization, connection management, on-the-fly compression, SSL offload and pre-fetching functionality amongst other technologies.

Super Bowl Webcast Poor Quality, Player Broken, Bad Experience

Last year, NBC Sports failed in their execution of the first Super Bowl webcast and this time around, CBSSports.com isn’t doing any better. Tonight’s webcast has really bad video quality, lots of pixelation and a stream that looks to be encoded at less than 1Mbps.

Streaming Video Can’t Scale At Cable TV Quality, Will Never Replace Traditional TV Distribution

Almost five years to the day, the NYT published an article proclaiming that, “TV is becoming obsolete” and was joined by plenty of other media outlets claiming that within a few short years, streaming video could displace the traditional means of video distribution. While some in the industry still want to set false expectations that streaming media technology is somehow going to replace the primary means of delivering video to the living room, the fact remains that five years later, cable TV is here to stay and is still the primary way to get video into the home. While reading a post on another site on a similar topic, a reader left a comment saying, “streaming is still in its relative infancy”, a false statement I hear often.

AT&T Finally Gives Up On Their In-House CDN: Will Resell Akamai’s CDN Services

In August I reported that AT&T was planning to shut down their in-house CDN and re-sell CDN services from Akamai or Limelight Networks and that Akamai would probably win the deal since they were willing to guarantee AT&T more business than Limelight would. This morning, AT&T and Akamai made the deal official with an announcement saying the two companies will work to jointly sell CDN services in North America to start, expanding to outside the U.S. in twelve months. For AT&T, this signals what is almost a thirteen year effort to try to get their CDN business off the ground, dating back to 2000 when they launched their ICDS platform (Intelligent Content Distribution Service). While today’s announcement is good for Akamai, there’s not a lot of revenue attached to it.

Apple’s Live Webcast Fails, Akamai’s HLS Stream Dies

Apple’s live webcast of the launch of their new MacBook Pro and iPad Mini was a failure today after multiple users, including myself, had problems getting the stream to start or staying connected to the stream once it began. I tried the stream in the Safari browser at 1pm ET and got the spinning wheel with the player trying to load, but it took till 1:14pm for the stream to work. Once it did load, it worked for a few minutes before I lost all audio.

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