Updated List Of CDN Vendors and History of All CDNs Across The Industry

Dan Rayburn | Monday January 16, 2023 | 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

[Updated April 1, 2025] Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the CDN vendor landscape. Below is an updated list of vendors I am tracking in the market that offer commercial CDN services to deliver video for content owners, as well as vendors that provide CDN platforms for deployment inside telecom networks or DIY CDN buildouts. (list is at: cdnlist.com) At the bottom of the post is the history of all the CDN vendors tied to video delivery, nearly 100 dating back to 1994, along with what happened to the companies. For almost 20 years, I have been offering free help to any CDN customer who has questions on their CDN deployment, including vendor selection, latest pricing (pricing is at: cdnpricing.com, creating an RFP, CDN technologies, etc., so feel free to reach out to me if I can help. If you want to know more about the size of the CDN market, see my post from July 2024 at cdnmarket.com (Global CDN Services Market About $5B in 2023, Expected To Grow 3% In 2024, Driven by AWS)

With this vendor list comes a LOT of caveats that are essential to note. The term “CDN” means different things to different people and is an umbrella term covering the delivery of many types of content. Not all commercial CDNs specialize in delivering the same type of content for small objects, large objects, streaming, etc., and many CDNs offer a lot of other services in the cloud security, edge, and application realm. Just because all the vendors are on this list together does NOT mean they can be compared apples-to-apples! Customers have to drill down into specific requirements around their performance needs, capacity, delivery regions, SLAs, etc., and then use those metrics to compare which CDN vendors genuinely offer similar offerings. Some CDNs target SMBs (small and medium businesses), with pricing as low as $100 a month, while others won’t even quote a customer under $5,000. There is no one-size-fits-all, and the differences between CDNs can vary widely, especially regarding capacity in specific geographic regions outside North America. PoPs on a map do not equal capacity or guarantee performance.

For my list, I am including CDN vendors that deliver video as part of their core services, but not resellers, such as a hosting provider that white-labels a CDN. I’m also not including “most” telcos and carriers that have their own CDN, what we call DIY, since most of them don’t resell it as a service but instead use it to deliver content within their own network. There are more than 100 telcos, ISPs and carriers worldwide that use their own CDNs or hybrid models that mix in commercial CDNs, so there are simply too many to list.

I am not listing vendors by network size, number of customers, etc., but in alphabetical order. If you strip out the vendors in China, the top four commercial CDNs based on revenue related to delivery services (note I didn’t say “video” revenue) would be Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Fastly, and CDN77.

Every time I make this list, I get companies that say they are missing. If you think you should be listed, contact me at dan@danrayburn.com, and I will review your company. But please note: if you have a website with no info, no details on the executives, no customers mentioned, dead links, pricing at $10 a month, and call yourself an “enterprise” solution, you won’t be added. I also don’t accept payment to add a company to the list.

Companies Offering Video CDN Delivery Services or Platforms

History Of CDN Vendors and What Happened to Them
In addition to the current CDN vendors in the market, I think it’s important to remember how the CDN industry got to where it is today. Many CDNs raised tons of money but didn’t have a business model; some only focused on selling at the lowest price, and many had technology that simply didn’t work. The CDN market has been through many hard times over the past 25 years, and here’s a running list of what happened to all the vendors.

Open to corrections if you see any errors.

Filed in Analysts, Research & Metrics, Content Delivery, Media & Entertainment, Online Video Industry, Video Formats | Permalink | Comments (0)