BitTorrent Entering The CDN Space?

from the there's-money-in-boring-tech dept

BitTorrent has often received a bad reputation for being associated with "piracy," when it's simply a system for more efficiently distributing online content. If you blame BitTorrent for piracy, it's like blaming FTP or Usenet for piracy. They're certainly tools used by people sharing unauthorized content, but they're hardly limited just to that sector. That's why it's a little silly for the folks at Internet News to suddenly declare that "BitTorrent Goes Legit with Content Delivery Service." BitTorrent, itself, has always been "legit." What's really interesting here is that the folks behind BitTorrent are actually looking to expand the usefulness of the basic BitTorrent concept by using it to enter the content delivery space.

As we noted over the summer, there's growing competition in the Content Delivery Network (CDN) space, once dominated by Akamai. The idea is to help larger content providers handle large amounts of bandwidth efficiently, traditionally by placing copies of the content at various servers around the world. This does two things: offload the bandwidth from a single source and also bring the content physically closer to different areas, thus decreasing some of the latency issues. Of course, BitTorrent can do both of those things in potentially a much more efficient manner, by using the excess of bandwidth of all different people to simply handle small parts of the transfer. While BitTorrent tries to position its offering as something that can work with the CDN's of the world, if it really works well, it could effectively obliterate the need for a traditional CDN. If you thought that the traditional competition in the space was obliterating profits, having something like BitTorrent's Delivery Network Accelerator could completely upend the market. While the press may go for the sensationalistic "piracy" angle (which this has nothing to do with), if this works, it could change the basic economics for large publishers in distributing content online -- and that's quite a big deal.

Filed Under: cdn
Companies: akamai, bittorrent

Competition Decimates Profits In CDN Space

from the deliver-me dept

Last month we noted a new entrant, Korea-based CDNetworks, in the red hot CDN space, where it competes with the likes of Akamai and LimeLight Networks. Since then, shares of Akamai and LimeLight have taken an utter shellacking, as investors wake up to the realization that all of this competition won't be very good for profits. Indeed, it seems that a bitter price war has already broken out, as the core CDN product rapidly becomes a commodity. This trend wasn't particularly hard to see, but the speed at which it's engulfed the industry does come as a bit of a surprise.

Filed Under: cdn, infrastructure
Companies: akamai, cdnetworks, limelight

CDN Space Getting More Crowded

from the deliverance dept

Among the big winners from the explosion in online video are content delivery networks (CDNs), like Akamai. It was a darling during the dot-com boom and Wall Street is in love with it once again. Success, of course, breeds competition. Smaller rival Limelight Networks recently went public with much success, and now Korean Firm CDNetworks says it will soon enter the US market (via Data Center Knowledge). This is great news for content firms, which should benefit from price competition in the space. The question for Akamai is whether its product can be more than a commodity. If any company can do what it can with enough infrastructure investment, then ultimately competition will just come down to price, which is the last thing it wants to see.

Filed Under: cdns, video
Companies: akamai, limelight