Stef van der Ziel: The business case for CDN federation is very weak

written by: Richard Kastelein

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Published on Thursday, 20 September 2012 08:44

Jamie Beach from IPTV News recently interviewed Dutch CDN guru Stef van der Ziel, founder and owner of Dutch content delivery network (CDN) services provider Jet-Stream, on the lack of profitability for Internet CDNs from media delivery, the (lack of) business case for CDN federation, and the pitfalls of licensed CDNs.

Stef will be speaking at the CDN World Summit 2012 event, taking place in London on 2nd-4th October. For more information and to register, please visit www.cdnworldsummit.com

What is a broadcast-grade CDN?

A broadcast-grade CDN is a CDN that: runs on a telco network instead of the best effort Internet; uses active managed, guaranteed distribution technologies instead of best effort caching; and uses active managed, guaranteed request routing technologies instead of best effort DNS. This guarantees content providers and subscribers availability, performance and capacity similar to digital cable / IPTV services. Typically these CDNs offer 99.999% uptime service-level agreements (SLAs).

We see a trend where Internet CDNs stop investing in media delivery (reshifting focus into clouds, app acceleration, enterprise) and telco CDNs focus on regional premium media delivery, both for their retail services and for wholesaling their CDN to OTT providers. Internet CDNs have been unable to become profitable from media delivery. Telcos have a serious opportunity here, but just extending an Internet CDN into their network or deploying Internet CDN technology on their network is not enough. Subscribers demand QoS, and don’t like QoE: QoE is a euphemism.

We also predict that these premium CDNs will deeper interact with the underlying IP network to dynamically exchange QoS information on a per session basis and will also deeper interact with clients to instruct them to maximize uptime and performance dynamically.

Click here to read full interview by Jamie Beach at IPTV News.