Case Study: Conference Producer Employs Kontiki's "Peerless" VOD Solution

For anyone who needs to deliver video online, Kontiki’s solution is, well...different. It's not quite streaming, it’s not quite simple edge caching, it’s not quite a content distribution network, and it’s not quite standard peer-to-peer. Yet it offers many of the benefits of all these solutions at prices that seem too good to be true.

Kontiki’s approach is a grab bag of technological tricks—grid delivery, time shifting, edge caching, adaptive rate multiserving, self-scaling—that make techies drool but can leave enterprise customers scratching their heads. Many Kontiki clients are less interested in the technological specifics than in the bottom line results, and the company says its solutions are designed for people who don’t know or care about the subtleties of the technology. Take, for example, M.R. Rangaswami, managing director of the San Francisco-based Sand Hill Group, which produces conferences for the software industry. "I'm not a media guy. I'm a business guy," he says. "Kontiki has kept my life very simple."

Of course, Rangaswami didn't just jump into Kontiki's video-on-demand solution without testing the water first. He says he thoroughly checked out the company and its technology. He tried out all of the Kontiki sites he could, and he enlisted his non-techie family and friends to help in his evaluation. Before settling on Kontiki, Rangaswami considered other options. "I looked at the idea of hosting on our own Web site and figured, ‘This is going to cost us and arm and a leg.’" His current host would have had to provision bandwidth and charge a set fee, he says.

He admits that the Kontiki system seems complex, but says he ultimately became convinced of Kontiki’s ability to deliver on its promises. "The company has been around for a few years," he says. "It's like iTunes; it's been tested. They've mastered the Napster-like distribution system. They've assembled the components and neatly packaged them."

Central to the Kontiki solution is something the company calls Grid Delivery Technology, which creates a network of shared resources where any PC or server can deliver content on demand. With grid delivery, content is delivered not just from the originating server but from a number of network-connected computers that host copies of the requested content. Kontiki also uses edge caching to optimize delivery from the grid's many servers and PCs. The company claims that by achieving efficiency boosts 10 to 25 times greater than traditional approaches, its Grid Delivery Technology "fundamentally improves the economics of video delivery." The company claims a cost per user hour of 11 cents, compared to their estimates of $1.05/hr. for a video Internet CDN or $1.37/hr. for a video enterprise CDN, for example.