Soaring Video Demands Raise the Bar for CDNs

March Madness, the Summer Olympics and the presidential debates have brought streaming media center stage, shining a spotlight on the key content delivery network (CDN) providers. These events, combined with the expansion of streaming movie and TV series options on the Web -- including Comcast’s Fancast.com, the NetFlix/Starz Play effort and Slingbox HD -- have helped bolster the already important CDN segment. At the same time, however, performance issues and likely predatory pricing by Tier 1 service providers loom large for pure-play CDNs, as their services become a victim of their own success.

“Remember that CDNs really have no obligation to provide QoS with these events,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp.. “They only have to do an acceptable job. There are also natural constraints from the access networks themselves; there is a limit to how many users can be viewing streamed material. And interactivity may be a greater challenge, things like pause and replay, because they take up processor time at the server side and also desynchronize the stream.”

CDN Market Service Climbs

That puts broadband access providers under the gun to plan ahead for soaring use from the likes of live streaming events such as the multi-week March Madness spring men’s college basketball tournament, which CSBSportsline.com carries.

This year, CBSSportsline.com streamed 4,925,566 total hours of live video and audio, as compared to 2,130,369 hours of live streaming video in 2007. That’s because the number of visitors to the site soared from about 1.8 million last year to roughly 4.7 million this year. The Web sports portal even started a registration line last year for the limited-space event that comprised nearly 266,000 fans. CBSSportsline.com has worked hand-in-hand with CDN pioneer Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM) for many years to make its prized content available to an increasingly larger audience, without setbacks associated with heavily traveled sites that choose to go it alone, with or without buying additional equipment and bandwidth.

Addressing Access Challenges

As a result of this kind of growth, CDN operators are pushing forward to address the huge increases in streamed video consumed.

“We’re trialing a service called Express Routes to help broadband service providers manage their costs in metro and local networks,” explained Lisa Guillaume, vice president of CDN services for Level 3 Communications Inc. (LVLT), which owns citywide networks and a Vyvx backbone network for carrying broadcast video. The routes are custom-built and connect the operator’s CDN nodes directly to equipment such as DSLAMs in access networks, she added.

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