All of the videos from last month’s Streaming Media East and Content Delivery Summit event are now online. Of particular note is Dan Rayburn’s presentation, “CDN Market Size and Pricing Trends.” Most analysts and research reports that cover the CDN space don’t share their research methods, nor do they really share detailed numbers and pricing information. In the video below, Rayburn does, and it’s worth watching.
We’re looking for an independent writer who’s familiar with the CDN space in Europe — the major players, the trends, the challenges, the opportunities, etc., as they relate specifically to the Europe market as distinct from other markets. Need someone to write a high-level article for the Autumn issue of the European edition of Streaming Media magazine. If you fit the bill, contact me directly.
CDNetworks announced today that it renewed its partnership with Toyota Spain to provide Flash streaming for the auto maker’s sales website. Normally, the announcement of a renewed contract wouldn’t be worth noting, but with CDNetworks’ recent merger with Panther Express, the content delivery network is making a push to become a major player in the European space.
Currently, CDNetworks has about 150 customers in Europe, according to VP of EMEA Robert Gribnau, with whom I spoke last week; he said the company hopes to double its European customer roster by the end of 2009. Right now CDNetworks has 17 data centers in Europe, but since some of those were Panther Express nodes, Gribnau said that number will actually decrease in the next few months to cut down on redundancy.
Gribnau also spoke to the challenges that the Korea-based company has faced moving into the European market after its successful entry into the U.S. market a couple years ago. “Most of the content generated in the U.S. has some general global appeal, whereas most of the content in European countries tends to be specific to that country, for language and cultural reasons,” he says. “So the challenge is that the market is so fragmented.” Beyond the language and cultural issues, he pointed to the differences in regulatory environments that mean a CDN can’t simply treat Europe as a single entity. “French labor law is different from British labor law, for instance,” he said, “and for security and confidentiality reasons, some content needs to be stored in and delivered to only the country in which it’s created.
We’ll be taking an in-depth look at the European content delivery space in the Autumn issue of Streaming Media magazine — get your free subscription here.
Considering how many telcos and carriers have recently entered the market it should come as no surprise that BT plans to offer a content delivery service of their own by the end of this year. It’s been widely known that for some time now, BT has been looking at the CDN landscape evaluating how best to enter the market and it appears they have decided on a strategy.
Based on an interview they did this week with Informa Telecoms & Media, BT said that, “We believe that we can build our own CDN as effectively as reselling others solutions.” While this built it yourself approach by BT does not surprise me, unless BT only wants to have a regional CDN footprint, I think it’s the wrong approach. It is possible that BT may just focus on building out a European based CDN which would be a lot easier for them than trying to deploy a CDN with a global footprint. But if they want to service content owners who need delivery to all regions of the world, BT is going to have a really hard time playing catch up in the market. You can’t just throw a bunch of money at the problem. It takes a lot more than deploying lots of boxes to have a real CDN offering in the marketplace.
If BT only focuses on Europe, or even just the UK to start, they could have an offering out sometime this year that could be fairly well received. BT has a deep customer base to sell to and already has loads of infrastructure in place in the UK. If BT starts out small and stays regional, they could see some success with their offering beginning next year. But if they want to become a global content delivery network and think they can have something out in the market by the end of this year, that’s just not realistic.
We got such a positive response to the inaugural issue of the European Edition of Streaming Media magazine that we’re going quarterly in 2009, beginning with the 2009 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook, which will publish in February. It’s our biggest issue of the year, and it includes comprehensive year-in-review articles looking at the most notable developments in 2008, as well as a look forward at what’s likely to come in 2009. It also includes case studies and a slew of how-to and buyer’s guide features, including the following:
Choosing a Camcorder
Selecting the Right Nonlinear Video Editor
Picking a Content Delivery Provider
The 2009 Video Encoder Shoot-Out
How to Add Closed Captions to Online Video
How to Generate Automatic Speech Transcripts in Flash Video
Making Sense of the H.264 Licensing Labyrinth
The Live Mobile Video Landscape
Also featured are a roster of case studies from each of the major verticals: entertainment, education, enterprise, government, and advertising. You can subscribe to the magazine here, and if you’re interested in advertising, contact Sjoerd Vogt at sjoerd.vogt (at) in4m.com.
Here’s a video that gives an even better sense of what the Sourcebook is all about.
Videos from all of the breakout sessions at this year’s Streaming Media Europe are now available here. Unfortunately, we’re not able to present videos of the keynote sessions, but if you take a look at the player, you’ll see that all 18 sessions are now online for viewing; you can also embed links to individual session videos on your own sites if you wish. I’ll be highlighting and discussing individual session videos in future posts.
Also, speaker presentations from the sessions and several of the pre-conference workshops are now available on the Streaming Media Europe programme page. If a particular presentation you’re looking for isn’t there, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to track it down.
One of the highlights of Streaming Media Europe was presenting the first-ever Readers’ Choice Award for Regional (European) Content Delivery Network. The finalists were Global-MIX and Stream UK, both from the UK, and Jet Stream from the Netherlands. Showing the truly pan-European nature of the show, Jet Stream was the winner for its Streamzilla content delivery service. Congrats to Stef van der Ziel and everyone else at Jet Stream.
Next year, we’ll be presenting an entire awards program specifically focusing on the European market. Watch this space and the Streaming Media Global site for details to come!
