Soaring Video Demands Raise the Bar for CDNs

Guillaume noted this kind of solution is needed given that the average bit rate used has increased three-fold in the last year — from 300kbps to 1.2mbps. Concurrently, viewing times of streaming video have doubled. That’s in part because longer form content, such as the daily Democratic National Convention, which Level 3 carried, is coming to the Internet as compared with popular TV shows, which keep users online for 30 to 40 minutes.

For the DNC, Level 3 built private fiber connections into both the Pepsi Center, and into Invesco Field, for the evening that included Barack Obama’s nomination speech. The coverage was delivered in high definition. Level 3 revealed the online streaming of the DNC resulted in more than 2.6 billion Web site hits during convention week, with Web site visitors having watched more than 350,000 hours of live HD streaming video. That’s an average view time of 80.4 minutes per viewer. These stats reinforce the continued growth and support of live online streaming.

Guillaume said that by the end of October, Level 3 will have increased the capacity of its streaming platform by eight-fold. It will, in several weeks, launch encoding services that enable concurrent broadcast and streaming video of live events. Level 3 used the service on behalf of Fox Interactive Media Inc. to support the DNC effort.

Level 3 also operates a CDN cache platform that stores streaming video for delivery in a video-on-demand service that content owners buy to provide viewers access to content, such as new episodes of TV series several hours after they’ve aired on broadcast TV. This helps the company address large spikes in demand for hits like Grey’s Anatomy the day after an episode airs.

Also on the CDN front, AT&T Inc. (T) in late June announced it added new partners for, and is investing $70 million in, its CDN effort. The goal is to fuel development of services aimed at helping companies package and deliver Web content to the TV, PC and mobile device, according to AT&T.

By year-end, AT&T will complete its $70 million global CDN network infrastructure investment. In the coming months, the telco said in June, it will work with some new software partners to provide “one-stop shopping and simplified network-based solutions to encode, deliver, manage and support video and multimedia files.”

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