Some Vendors Making Inaccurate Claims Tied to CDN Services, Without Any Data or Details

We’ve seen inaccurate statements from some vendors recently regarding CDN services. Achieving a “50% bitrate reduction” doesn’t mean you can automatically “reduce CDN costs by up to 50%.” Beamr and other vendors promote this idea in press releases, such as the one Beamr issued for a demo at IBC, but it’s clear that many vendors don’t understand how CDN contracts work and how the services are purchased. I see this time and again with vendors, with another saying they can deliver video at a “fraction of the cost of traditional CDN,” or at a “lower cost,” but they never talk numbers.

Orange did a blog post about their CDN services in the lead up to IBC, saying that “4K and 8K are becoming the standard,” which is false. Almost no content is available in 4K, and no one is producing 8K content, let alone trying to stream it. The narrative that traffic across CDNs is going to “exponentially grow,” due to use cases involving 4K, 8K, VR or all live broadcast viewership moving from pay TV to streaming, isn’t true. That’s a fact, not my opinion.

I’m all for new ideas in the industry, but an idea alone is not enough. No vendor should start their pitch by making statements of how the current situation doesn’t work well and is broken. Delivering video over the internet today works very well at scale and continues to improve. Too many vendors say they can do better by building the “next generation” of something, at a lower price, with better performance, without any details to back that up, like we’ve seen from Blockcast, which suggests caches should be placed in consumers’ homes. They also say on their website that their solution is needed to help prevent streams of the World Cup Final from “vanishing,” whatever that means.

I see vendors using words to describe the “strength” and “quality” of their networks, with almost none of the vendors detailing capacity, regions deployed, or delivery services supported. Orange says their “footprint is worldwide,” but their delivery map shows coverage in two areas, Europe and Africa. Also, images on their CDN page are broken, above a heading that says their CDN is “reliable.” The entire capacity of Orange’s CDN solution could have handled only 5-7% of the total Tbps of capacity of the last Super Bowl. Quality, reach and capacity must all be discussed together, not independently.

Over the years, the market for delivery services and technology has been littered with vendors who all promised to do it better, at a lower cost, but are now gone. When vendors start making statements of how the current situation doesn’t work well, is broken, and they can do better by building the “next generation” of something, at a lower price, with better performance, without any details to back that up, that’s not good for the industry or for vendors.