Industry Interview: Jibe Inc.
sm.com: Tell us a little bit about Jibe Inc.
Neal: The company was founded by Greg Shmitzer in November of 2000. He received some venture funding from Lovett Miller located in Tampa and Lovett Miller has been the primary source of funds for Jibe up to this point. We are located in Tampa, we have 15 employees, and our peer software solution is called EdgeBurst. The intent of the solution is to deliver rich media over the Internet, via a managed multi-source download environment.
sm.com: Would you call EdgeBurst a technology or a service?
Neal: Well, we offer the technology as a service. We will host the admin for our clients, but it’s really a peer-based solution, so it’s not really a physical network as much as Jibe hosting the administrative server that brokers the communications and mediates between the peers.
sm.com: So you are really more of a platform than a layer in between?
Neal: Yes, that’s correct. We started out selling this as a software license only and we were going after the bigger players in both the corporate world and entertainment and we found that a lot of the smaller content providers were looking for an easy solution where they didn’t have a large capital outlet and they could get up and running fast and they didn’t want the expense of running their own server to administrate this whole process, so that’s when we came up with the service concept.
sm.com: Is the content mostly video or are you doing audio as well?
Neal: Video or audio. It’s really any large file, but we are targeting video and audio because of the complexity or the resource requirements for downloading large files. We’re treating it as a file, so it can be a large PowerPoint presentation used in a corporation. The advantage with video though is the progressive download. We recognize that it’s a video or audio and we can start the playback immediately – integrating with Real Player or with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.
sm.com: Is your sales pitch to show clients how they are monetizing content?
Neal: The argument we’re using with our potential customers is #1: bandwidth savings. Bandwidth costs are going to go down because we’re serving this content from other peers on the network so the origin server doesn’t have to provide all of the content anymore. #2: is a better user experience because, again, they can encode at a higher rate because we’re accelerating the download so much. Those are the two primary points that we’re hitting people with is to lower their bandwidth costs and provide a better user experience because we can provide higher, richer encoded content.
Other peer-based content delivery networks are offering multi-source download, but we have a lot of intelligence in our download capability and we select a list of eligible peers that already have the content and then we grade those peers based on their ability to serve that content. During the download we are constantly monitoring what each peer is able to serve and then we adjust, on-the-fly, dynamically, based on current performance, who is serving what.
sm.com: Is that something that you have to do on your end or is that something that the client can do through a CMS?
Neal: No, we do that all with our software.