Massive Live Broadcasts – U2 Concert on YouTube

Everyone is talking about the big concert U2 gave online Sunday night via YouTube. Well actually, what they are really talking about is the fact that 1 million people were watching the live stream. YouTube announced early last week that the stream would broadcast to about 16 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Even Bono himself said in an interview that the focus should be on the audience for making history. Wow. Extremely insightful. No wonder the whole blogosphere and Twittersphere are still posting about it. How often do people from so many different cultures and countries have an opportunity to participate in a big happening like this? I think we can expect more and more of this in the future as users tire of the virtual islands they have created for themselves online, and are now seeking to get back that fuzzy feeling that makes us human.

There is a lot of educational info in the coverage by MediaPost:

Jim Louderback, Revision3 CEO, who will participate on a panel at OMMA Video Friday in Los Angeles, Calif., says the Internet was not designed to deliver real-time streaming media, but rather built to “store-it-forward.”

When it comes to video, many people believe picture quality is more important. But when streaming a band, audio is just as important — sometimes more. Dropping a frame or two every now and then isn’t a big deal, but fans immediately notice a hiccup in the audio.

“To get audio and video to arrive at the same time you need a lot of bandwidth,” he says. “It’s not like television where the feeds are shared. If they are delivering a million simultaneous streams, every person watching has a unique stream being sent to them. If you have one million people watching, you have one million streams feeding from the content delivery network out to the homes.”

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YouTube will release actual figures about the live broadcast later on in the week but I would just like to point out that this is exactly what sets 3DCDN apart in this sector. YouTube had to stream one million unique streams for every single person watching. That’s quite a lot of bandwidth and we all know Google can afford it …

However 3Dcdn has developed a very unique and advanced technology that actually leverages the fact that so many people are watching the same event, to deliver a superior quality broadcast that consumes a lot less bandwidth. That is what ‘optimizing the last mile’ in our pitch is all about. Granted we are not in a position to take on Google at this stage but in an increasingly green world, it is good to know that the technology for doing more with less is coming of age.

CDN Pricing War – All About The Money?

According to a brief about Frost & Sullivan’s upcoming webinar, Content Development Network Market Improving, But Latest Pricing Data Shows Challenges Still Lie Ahead
it is clear that the CDN market will start showing growth again in the New Year. This is based on discussions they had with content owners and content delivery networks. But the problem is that where there is growth, there are new players coming aboard and that is creating difficult challenges for competing companies. The pricing pressure continues to dominate this emerging sector. Especially with the industry consolidating and carriers entering the market, vendors will have to learn some new tricks to retain their piece of the pie.

As explained in the brief, “as video content delivery services face commoditization, providers are quickly evolving to move up the value chain and provide more video ecosystem pieces. But with change come challenges from carriers and the pricing pressure being exerted in the market. How can content development network (CDN) providers – carriers, standalones and combinations of the two – position themselves to succeed, as the CDN sector continues to evolve?”

So the real defining issue is not necessarily about the pricing, but how they will position themselves to succeed. Of course money issues are very significant today but we believe that savvy users will make their decision by taking a much closer look at the features they are getting. The streaming media industry is no longer just about giving a company some bandwidth. It has evolved to really serve the unique needs of customers and it is actually newcomers who have the best handle on providing highly sophisticated features being the new technology is simply more advanced.

But hold on a second. Savvy customers may not be the issue at all in the next wave. We may be looking at an entirely new generation of service providers or marketeers who do not want to have to involve IT departments, engineers or third parties in every decision they make. They want to have the freedom to set up their business by themselves and reap the benefits. They want to have an online management system for streaming media that they simply log into and define in real time.

Granted pricing is a big issue but no matter how far we evolve there is still a very basic thing called service and that never goes out of style. The best guide about what CDN players should be focused on is outlined very clearly in Stef van der Ziel’s Modern CDN Requirements, which demonstrates how their vision evolved over the years to serve customers better.

So what it all comes down to really in a nutshell is our ability to evolve and change with the times. Foresee what’s coming to prepare and adapt ourselves to a new reality. Once you’ve mastered that a little thing like a pricing war will not really affect you, right?

What is CDN? (and why do I need it?)

According to Wikipedia, “a content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, thereby causing a bottleneck near that server.”

So basically CDN technology enables offloading heavy content from major data centers to servers that are closer to end users, to make the whole process of delivery content more fluid and efficient. But there is a lot more than meets the eye because highly advanced CDN technology can add a lot of value to the content delivery chain to enable a much more optimized and cost-effective experience for all types of content providers.

Sophisticated CDN technology enables dynamically optimizing the last mile for video to provide and in-depth analysis of the actual viewing experience on the user side and guarantee a superior overall service with no breaks or buffering – even for live broadcasts to large audiences. The kind of CDN you want to integrate enables you to cost-effectively deliver your content anywhere, quickly, easily and reliably, and watch your satisfied customers coming back for more every time.

The major issue you want to pay attention to is having the ability to stream in a globalized world. As a content owner, site owner, or media service provider, you should be able to expand your reach by seamlessly publishing, managing, monetizing and delivering your content over a global network.

Our next generation CDN will provide you with just that – for live games and concerts, for on demand feature films, for your global web casts, and for your radio, over PCs, handheld devices and STB connected TV. Nowadays, with the right partner you can have all that and more right at your fingertips. And it just takes a few minutes of your time to get up and running.

Why Streaming Media is Good For Your Brand

People don’t want to be sitting reading pages of information nowadays to get up to speed. We are the most sophisticated generation to ever inhabit the planet and that is why everything is so accelerated all around us. A big part of that is wanting to feel that we are part of whatever is happening and high quality streaming video content is the key to providing that immersive experience that customers are craving. We all want to connect to something bigger than our everyday lives. We want TV quality content wherever we happen to be.

We have been in this high-tech era long enough to expect everything to work with the click of a mouse exactly how we want it to work. But that’s not really the case. The truth of the matter is that internet users are still experiencing all kinds of breaks and buffering when watching their favorite streams and we are not just talking about YouTube. Even some of the biggest brands in the world cannot deliver on the online video viewing promise at times. It’s surprising and disappointing but that is reality. When that happens the brand looks really bad because we have just come to expect certain standards in this digital age we are living in.

So actually in this unique era of transition where everything is still pretty much up in the air, and technology has reached the point where we have a level playing field, players of all types and sizes from all over the world are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to play in the big leagues. Stream compelling content like the major players do. Share your content with global audiences. Connect with people everywhere.

Sounds pretty good, right? The only real question left is what are you doing to get there? At 3Dcdn we are enabling all types of new players to deliver content for VOD and also for streaming live events to large audiences. It’s sort of a dream come true and the dream is really happening right now. Beyond the pure entertainment aspects of quality streaming content, soon the whole world will be connected through online video for all kinds of educational and global purposes that are coming in to play. And we are looking forward to being there when that happens.

CDN: An Industry Built on Cooperation and Collaboration

We attended IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) in Amsterdam last month and met lots of nice people from all over the world.

What stood out more than any other exhibition is how much all the companies attending IBC are dependent on one another to thrive in the streaming media sector. It was like watching all the pieces of one big puzzle trying to figure out how to join together, how to work together in harmony so they could all move to a higher place together. The world of content delivery depends on a long chain of events that each have to be perfectly synchronized to work together so that the viewer at home sees the stream of their choice just like they would on TV. This complex choreography is the basis for a multitude of new partnerships being formed as customers demand more rich content, and providers are scrambling to deliver.

This phenomenon is expressed really well in Ovum’s article that is an extract from its Straight Talk service. In their case it was the Carrier World conference in London:

“For the first time wholesalers unanimously agreed that they need to cooperate and collaborate with each other. The financial crisis and changes in customer needs and behaviour have encouraged wholesalers to rethink their business models. Partnerships are now accepted by carriers as key to their ability to offer complex new services such as content distribution.”

This represents a completely new mindset for business people who will have to learn a completely new set of rules and values to thrive in this new era of interdependency.

At 3DCDN we are very focused on partnerships and especially the kind that are fully advantageous for both sides. We are in the process of building lasting business relationships with representatives around the world who stand to profit significantly from our union.

Of course this is just one facet of the much larger picture where everyone in the content delivery business is connected one way or another, so why not leverage this connection to get us where we want to go?

The demand for rich content is only going to get bigger and it appears that the more we cooperate and collaborate to deliver, the more we will all get out of the process.