Content Providers and CDNs

Delivery can refer to a few different things. You can deliver a joke or a punch if the aforementioned joke was offensive (talk about a punchline…). However, this post is not about those kinds of deliveries. And no, this doesn’t have anything to with your Amazon order.

We are talking about delivery architecture for live streaming media. Rather, our CEO Chris Allen addressed this at the recent Content Delivery Summit in a panel discussion with Jason Hofmann from our partner Limelight Networks, Rob Dillon of Tribune Media and Dom Robinson of id3as.

Quality Scaling and Cost Efficiency

They cover the differences in the US and European market regarding network availability/net neutrality and how that affects content operators. Obviously, there is a need to scale up to meet user demand, but in some ways, it is even more important to control costs by scaling down.

Along these lines, they examine the conflict (or not) of operators looking to drive down costs and a need to deploy things on their premises and CDNs vs content providers wanting to retain end-to-end control while maximizing quality.

The Big Question

What is going to push the industry to use the carriers as a primary delivery service rather than using CDNs?

Chris has an optimistic answer:

Everybody needs to lower their costs. It’s not going to be profitable for a CDN to run if they can’t do so. Businesses themselves who are delivering the video, or have these video experiences, they need to control their costs too…Everybody is going towards this: how do we optimize the system and make it better and cheaper?