Running a Web TV company, we’re bombarded with content delivery network firms every day: Akamai, Limelight Networks, you name it, they pitch us day in and day out. Eventually, as our traffic grows, I know we’ll have to go with one to ensure that from Kabul to Kansas, Buenos Aires to Beijing, you can watch belly dancing experts, interviews with preachers and guitar riffs smoothly.
2006: Year of Online Video, Welcome Back CDNs
2006 will definitely go down in the history books as the year of online video, and as such, CDNs saw a resurgence: Akamai’s stock rose from $15 to $50, Limelight secured $130 millon in financing from heavyweight backers like Goldman Sachs. It is thus no surprise that other companies have been working hard to improve the CDN market: enter privately-held Grid Networks, which, according to their press release is:
A leading developer of streaming media technology and services, offering the revolutionary GridCast Platform, a new system that provides instant-on, full-screen, DVD-quality video to broadband-connected viewers worldwide. The GridCast Platform was specifically designed to meet the security, scalability and cost requirements of content owners, distributors and digital media device manufacturers, overcoming the challenges faced by both content delivery networks (CDNs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software solutions. While other CDNs can provide secure distribution of content, their hardware-based delivery systems are expensive and fail to offer the delivery speed or scalability required to provide a reasonable alternative to conventional broadcast distribution. P2P solutions offer an inexpensive way to move complete video files, but fail to provide on-demand streaming, speedy file delivery, or a content security model video asset owners desire.
I spoke to CEO Jeff Payne, who has worked in along with VP Bo Wandell on Spry’s “Internet-In-A-Box” in 1995 which allowed consumers to connect to the Web. Over the years he has also worked at Real Networks.
The instant the P2P label comes out, Payne is quick to point out that they are “not a Bit Torrent,” who views Limelight and Akamai as “the low cost leaders in the CDN space, who have been Walmarting bandwidth but who offer a fundamentally limited, hardware-driven proposition.”
How so?
“We want to offer instant on-demand stream delivery system. You cannot be rebuffering an entertainment program,” states Payne. The problem does “not lie with video encoding or rendering, but rather, the delivery vehicle.” And until the cost of high quality video falls considerably, broadband video will remain nascent.
“A major media company I was speaking to recently said that from their perspective, ‘broadband will arrive’ when we can attain a 1-share,” which refers to having 1 million concurrent users tuning in to a show.
“How could Akamai and Limelight offer that when they peak at a quarter of that, and that quarter is consuming different media?” continues Payne, who says that players like Akamai and Limelight currently define the market, but not are direct competitors, rather, he views these as licensees of Grid Networks’ product.
What is stopping either Limelight or Akamai to enter the P2P space and compete head on with GridNetworks? “We have been working hard for a long time, over 2 and a half years, focusing on something new and different.” Most of what is out there are ”repurposed file exchange systems and provide low bit rate solutions, for high bit rate solutions, they would turn to Grid Networks,” continues Payne, who at Real Networks helped developed the Real Broadcast Network (RBN), billed as “the first global Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Internet audio and video.”
The privately funded, Seattle-based company holds 77 claims across 4 “broad, leverageable” international patents and is currently privately held and employs 17 people, but if Akamai’s stock price and Limelight Ventures funding is any indication, it won’t be long before institutional money pours into the company: “it’s eerie how little serious work” has been done in this space,” concludes Payne.
I asked Jeffrey to compare two clips, one being a clip we published on WatchMojo.com, the other being a clip run on Grid’s network. Note: to view Grid’s clip, you have to download its software.
Personally I am wary of anything that wants to download onto my computer, and I made it a point to mention this to Jeffrey, but it is not their intention to “distribute the software directly to consumers. Think of the grid as a virtual content delivery overlay network. In order to join the grid, users must run the specialized software which manages the virtual connection, security and bandwidth management aspects of all grid end nodes. Rather, it makes more sense to us that content owners will want to distribute the end node software directly.”
But for the sake of the comparison, you would need to download the player. Naturally, I told Jeffrey that I was concerned with asking our readers to download something to compare the two clips in the event there was any adware, spyware, etc. To which he answered: “It’s totally clean of any adware, spyware, malware, surpriseware… and the uninstaller is designed with impeccable manners. That’s a great point though, I’ll make a point to our web guy to insert some text to that effect on our site.”
All right, enough talk, just watch.
To see the clip in question on WatchMojo.com, click here.
To see the Grid Networks effect for yourself, click here.
Enjoy, no, not the girls… the CDN.
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