About three years ago, Apple started laying the groundwork for the build out of their own content delivery network. Fast forward to today and by my estimate, Apple has now moved about 75% of their traffic, by volume, to their in-house CDN. Looking at download details from the latest iOS 9.3 update shows Apple’s CDN was the primary method for delivering the update, with third-party CDNs like Akamai and Level 3 being secondary. [I first started seeing this trend with the release of iOS 8.]

And talking to suppliers that sell dark fiber, transit, wavelengths etc. it’s no surprise to hear just how much of these network services Apple has bought and the capacity they have put in place, including interconnections to the major ISPs. It’s amazing just how quickly Apple has taken such a large percentage of their content delivery to their in-house CDN, just as we have seen Netflix, Facebook, Microsoft and a few other big companies do. Apple is using their own CDN for iTunes, iOS and OS X updates, music streaming and a host of other assorted Apple content. In relying on their in-house CDN more, they are also time shifting releases so as not to spike their traffic with third-party CDNs, which is lowering the revenue that these CDNs use to see from Apple.

This all aligns with what we have heard Akamai say, which is that some of their largest customers have been bringing more traffic in-house, each quarter. And while Akamai has never said Apple by name, we know that is one of the companies impacting Akamai’s revenue, as well as Facebook. Timing wise, it took Apple about two years to bring what I would say was 50% of their traffic in-house, which is much faster than many thought possible. And for all the times a third-party CDN said things like, many customers can’t build their own CDN, or that it’s complicated, the fact is, for Apple, Facebook, Netflix and the like, it’s not difficult at all, it’s the norm.

Naturally, because what Apple and others have done, the question I get asked all the time, especially by Wall Street guys is who’s next to take a large volume of traffic away from third-party CDNs and move it to their in-house CDN? Right now, I don’t know of any other company, with a global audience and a lot of traffic, working to build out their own CDN. We do have some content owners in specific regions of the world, like Europe that now use their own CDN, (example: SKY), but these are only regional examples. For most content owners, even someone like MLB or NFL, it does not make sense for them to build their own CDN, as they simply don’t have enough traffic.

If you want to hear more about Apple’s CDN business, I’ll talk more about it during my presentation, on May 9th, at the Content Delivery Summit in NYC. Use code 200DR16 for a discount on your pass.

Google has announced that their Cloud CDN product has now moved into public beta. The company is offering content delivery services on their network with caches that are distributed at more than 50 edge locations globally. Google CDN is also offering SSL/TLS for no additional charge and supports the HTTP/2 protocol in addition to HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1.

On the pricing front, Google is charging $0.02 – $0.20 per GB for Cache egress. $0.04 – $0.15 per GB for Cache fill and $0.0075 per 10,000 HTTP/HTTPS cache lookup requests. They also charge $0.005 per cache invalidation.

From a product functionality standpoint, Google’s Cloud CDN offering still has a way to go before it is on par with the major CDNs in the market. But I don’t expect it will take too long before Google’s CDN is competing for a large percentage of the commodity CDN business. Since it’s only in beta there is no SLA and it has limitations, but this is how Amazon’s CDN platform started out and it only took them about a year before it was competing with the major CDNs for high-volume CDN business.

If you want to hear more about Google’s entry into the CDN business, I’ll talk more about it during my presentation, on May 9th, at the Content Delivery Summit in NYC. Use code 200DR16 for a discount on your pass.

Come join fellow Streaming Media professionals for a night of drinks and food, hosted by Dan Rayburn. I will cover $1,000 in drinks until it’s gone.

Wednesday, April 27th, 6:30pm – Tavern29, NYC
47 E.29th Street, Bet.Park & Madison
http://tavern29.com

No presentations or pitches, leave the laptop at the office. Meet industry people and drink good beer.

We will be on the second floor and if enough people RSVP, we will move it to the rooftop beer garden. Please RSVP so I have a rough idea of how many people might show up and I can email you if there are any last minute changes.

PLEASE RSVP TO: mail@danrayburn.com

MAKE SURE YOU BRING ID, you can’t get in without it, they card at the door.

Since this is the first one of these I am doing, I have no way to know how big the crowd might get, and the place maxes out at 150 people. So if it turns into chaos, or you can’t get in, I apologize in advance. I plan on doing these monthly.

Thursday at 2pm ET, I’ll be moderating a StreamingMedia.com webinar on the topic of “Technical Challenges of Large-Scale Live Events“, with speakers from SKY, Yahoo and Level 3. This is a new webinar series we are starting at StreamingMedia.com where end-user customers from the broadcast, media, and publishing verticals will present and discuss best practices on a host of streaming video topics.

The first webinar in the series, sponsored by Level 3, will take place Thursday and will be devoted to the topic of live streaming. Hear from Omer Luzzatti, Senior Director, Head of Video Platform at Yahoo; Ben Forman, Principal Streaming Architect at BSkyB; and Jon Alexander, Senior Director, Product Management at Level 3.

The webinar will explore techniques successfully used to provide a satisfying live viewing experience at very large scale. Learn from experts who have conquered the myriad technical challenges—how to present live video to many people, in many formats, on many devices, over many networks—all at the same time. Specifics such as encoding, transcoding, bitrate variation, distribution, mass authorization, and more will be discussed.

Register Now to attend this FREE live webinar.

I’m pleased to announce that Serge Kassardjian, Global Head of Android/Play Media Apps and Android TV Content Partnerships for Google will be the keynote speaker on day one of the Streaming Media East show, taking place May 10-11 in NYC. In his talk, Serge will share some of the trends that Google Play is seeing in content, innovation, discovery and business models. Attendees will also hear about Android TV and learn how consumer electronics devices, from cable boxes, to media players, to televisions, are expanding the total addressable market for video developers.

Access to the keynotes, discovery track conference sessions, networking events, and the exhibit hall are all free, if you register online for a discovery pass, using promo code 200DR16. That code also gets you $200 off a full conference pass.

NAB isn’t just about broadcast and OTT anymore. Today, it covers all manner of online video technologies, from production to distribution, in every vertical—media & entertainment, enterprise, education, worship, and more. So this Thursday at 2pm ET, I’ll be moderating a special StreamingMedia.com webinar on the “Online Video Technologies to See at NAB“.

Join us for this exclusive roundtable that focuses on some of the most cutting-edge solutions to some of the most vexing problems for video and IT professionals who deal with producing, managing, securing, and delivering both live and on-demand content to both internal and external audiences—from all-hands meetings to e-learning, from performances to sports, and everything in between. Whether you’re planning on going to NAB in Las Vegas or not, you’ll benefit from this webinar where we’ll discuss the following:

• How enterprise YouTube is driving an increase of video inside the firewall
• The convergence of web conferencing, videoconferencing, and webcasting
• Why security is a bigger concern than ever…and how to lock down your content without introducing friction in the process
• How real-time watermarking is poised to become ubiquitous throughout the entire production process, from rough cuts to final pre-release content
• What the move to an IP workflow means to you and your organization
• The key things to consider in making the move to an IP workflow

Sign up to reserve your seat today!

Thursday at 2pm ET, I’ll be moderating a special StreamingMedia.com webinar on the topic of “Simplifying Encoder Purchase and Configuration Decisions with Real Time Quality Metrics“. Encoding is a crucial element in multiscreen video production. It can be the difference between happy viewers and efficient operations, or a failed video business. But selecting the right encoder and configuring it properly has historically required testers to spend enormous amounts of time visually inspecting their encoder’s output to find the optimal configurations – more art than science.

In this webinar, IneoQuest will introduce you to real-time, non-reference based quality measurement technology that will inject science back into encoder selection and configuration. Using this new technology, you can:

• Compare encoder stream quality from different vendors side-by side, in real-time, ensuring an apples-to-apples comparison.
• Rapidly test different configurations side-by-side, to immediately gauge their effect on quality and bitrate.
• Create quality scores that can be used to measure the delivered quality of your video, and benchmark the effectiveness of your delivery infrastructure.

For anyone responsible for video compression, this is a must-attend event. Register Now to attend this FREE live webinar.