CDNs Offering End-to-End Video Ecosystem Services
What a difference a year makes. At the 2010 Content Delivery Summit, speakers still focused on delivering bits and whether or not telcos were going to get into the CDN game. At this year's event, held last month in New York, vendors and customers alike spoke more extensively about the end-to-end video ecosystem and user experience.
So said consultant Frank Childs in his introduction to a session called, fittingly, "CDN Management and the Video Ecosystem." Deutsche Telekom's Andres Jordan said he sees the role of the telecom as stacking value on top of CDN. "We are trying to become an intermediator...trying to place ourselves between the eyeballs and the producers," he said. "In my world, it's feed 'em and keep 'em; if you feed the eyeballs, you'll keep the eyballs. What we need to do as a mediator is to sort of start bundling things together that is cloud-based and easy."
Ericsson Television has seen its role changing from delivering managed TV solutions to operators, including a VOD infrastructure for delivering video to set-top boxes and televisions, to one focused on helping operators manage their network costs by providing a unified offering that helps operators deliver managed TV, CDN, and a transparent caching solution. But that's not all; Ericsson VP, systems management Paul Stallard says operators are interested in encoding, transcoding, DRM, and other content preparation services that they can provide their customers.
The driver behind demand for those services comes down to quality assurance across multiple devices, said Octoshape's Scott Brown, emphasizing the importance of monitoring and analytics. "All of these things are driving cost avoidance on the part of last-mile providers," he said. "They see a slew of video content coming their way, and not all of them are in the value exchange. (They're asking) if we can't monetize this content, how can we make it flow across the network as efficiently as possible."
But it's not only about video. Speaking for a company that's admittedly "at the bottom" of the value chain, Jonathan Wood of Interxion— a leading, carrier-neutral data services provider with 28 facilities across 11 countries in Europe—said that Interxion is seeing interest not just from broadcasters and other video providers but from the gaming sector. "They're becoming much more savvy about how to reach their markets," he said. "They know what they want; they don't make the mistake of getting locked into a single provider."
Watch the video below for the entire panel discussion.
CDN Management and The Video Ecosystem
As more content offerings emerge in the market and broadband-enabled devices get a deeper penetration with consumers, those who deliver the bits will need to have more flexibility and functionality with regards to managing the video ecosystem. This session will discuss how CDNs and carriers plan to manage content, the systems they are putting in place to deliver a quality user experience, and what challenges they see content owners facing as consumers consume more video on multiple devices.
Moderator: Frank Childs, Consultant, fjchilds65@gmail.com
Speaker: Andres Jordan, VP, Innovation, International Carrier Sales and Solutions, Deutsche Telekom North America
Speaker: Paul Stallard, VP, Systems Management, Ericsson Television
Speaker: Scott Brown, US GM, VP Strategic Relations, Octoshape U.S.
Speaker: Jonathan Wood, Director of Marketing, Digital Media, Interxion
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