In EdgeCast’s news release yesterday about multiple operators and service providers exchanging production traffic via a federated model, the company also very briefly mentioned they had been granted “several patents” pertaining to CDN interconnection. While I haven’t had a chance to spend a great deal of time reviewing the patents, I did notice something worth looking at.

EdgeCast was granted two patents, Systems and Methods for Invoking Commands Across a Federation (8,117,276 B1) and Systems and Methods to Uniquely Identify Assets in a Federation (8,166,108 B1). The first patent in particular is pretty interesting as there are a couple of key claims that are the foundation of how CDNs can federate. If I’m reading it correctly, the patent looks to be around the concept of loading to the edge and purging content from the edge. This covers the most basic fundamental part of how any CDN works and how they interconnect, so it seems like a pretty good patent to be awarded that is specific to the federated CDN model.

While EdgeCast won’t comment on what they plan to do with the patents, it’s not as if they can claim infringement of their patents today, as no one else is offering a federated CDN platform. There are many vendors offering managed and licensed CDN platforms, but not federated. I can’t speak on behalf of EdgeCast on what their intellectual property plans are, but I don’t think lawsuits are their plan. These patents might make others think twice before they enter the market with a similar solution to EdgeCast’s and at the very least, it makes EdgeCast more valuable to a potential acquirer.

I’ve already been asked by others if I think EdgeCast will go after Akamai with their patents, since Akamai recently announced their managed and licensed CDN platform, but that’s not relevant. Akamai isn’t doing any federation, rather they are building out private CDNs inside operator’s networks, which is a segment of the Akamai network. If an operator wants to go out and federate Akamai won’t stop them, but Akamai’s managed and licensed CDN platform is not the technology that would be making that federation work.

The patents make for some interesting reading as they are the first ones, that I can recall, that have been granted specific to the federated CDN model. (Related: www.cdnpatents.com)

Lately, there has been a lot of debate in the CDN industry as to whether or not a federated CDN model will take hold amongst independent operators. Today, EdgeCast announced that multiple operators and service providers are already exchanging production traffic, via a federated model, using their OpenCDN platform.

For those not familiar with the term, federated CDN is used to describe the idea of carriers and telcos getting together to connect their CDNs with one another, thereby creating a "federation" of content delivery networks. These carriers and telcos would trade traffic across their private CDNs, with the idea of trying to bypass service based content delivery networks.

While many people have different opinions on whether or not carriers would want to work with one another, EdgeCast says it's already happening. Operators who are exchanging traffic in the federation don't want to be mentioned by name, but I can say that there are already "multiple operators" exchanging traffic in North America, Europe and Asia and they are paying each other via business agreements. No carrier wants to talk specific traffic volume on their own network, but I can say that combined, these operators are already pushing tens of Gbps via the CDN federation.

And it's not just video content these operators are pushing across each others networks. When people hear federated CDN they tend to think of just video, but these operators are exchanging all kinds of different web content including small objects, game downloads and http adaptive streaming. Many argue against the federated CDN model working because they say carriers compete with one another, but that's not usually the case since the majority of carriers are regional, not global.

In addition to exchanging traffic, these operators are also exchanging money with one another when they send each other traffic. EdgeCast's software allows the operators using it to manage the traffic exchange amongst networks and the operators are compensated based on individual bilateral interconnect contracts with each other, not with EdgeCast.

For those skeptical about whether or not CDN federation will happen, it's already taking place, not in a lab, but in the real-world. To what degree federated CDN takes hold, how fast it happens and amongst how many operators, we still don't know. But it is the future of the CDN business and we're starting to see it today.

The business and technology of federated CDN is something we 're going to talk a lot about at the Content Delivery Summit on May 14th in NYC and we'll have presentations and discussion on this topic including: "The Business of CDN Federation", "Federation Amongst Operator Based CDNs", and "Lessons From Phase Two of the CDN Federation Pilot".

The content delivery market is rapidly changing with new products and services coming to the market including licensed and managed CDN, dynamic site acceleration, front-end optimization, mobile content acceleration and transparent caching. If you're a bit confused by all of these different technologies, you're not alone – and that's where the Content Delivery Summit fits in.

Taking place on Monday, May 14th in NYC, the fourth annual Content Delivery Summit will showcase some of the latest CDN products and services and provide live demos of these platforms and services in action. To help those planning to attend the show, I've provided definitions of some of the various technologies that will be discussed and demonstrated during the conference.

• Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA): Dynamic site acceleration is a suite of technologies and products that deals with optimizing dynamically served content across the network. Traditional DSA services often include TCP optimization, route optimization, connection management, on-the-fly compression, SSL offload and pre-fetching technologies.

• Front-End Optimization (FEO): Front-end optimization technologies help to reduce the number of page resources required to download a given page and makes the browser process the page faster. FEO technology isn't used to bring content closer, but rather makes the content itself faster by optimizing the client side delivery of website resources.

• Transparent Caching: Transparent caching platforms make intelligent decisions about which content can and should be cached inside a carriers network. By deploying intelligent caches strategically throughout their networks, operators can cache and deliver popular content close to subscribers and reduce the amount of transit traffic across their networks.

• Over-The-Top Video (OTT): Over-the-top is an industry term used to describe a video service that you utilize over a network that is not offered by your cable company (example: Netflix). It's often referred to as "over-the-top" because these services ride on top of the service you already get from your ISP and doesn't require any business or technology affiliations with your cable TV provider.

• Federated CDN: Federated CDN is a term used to describe the idea of carriers and telcos getting together to connect their CDNs with one another, thereby creating a "federation" of content delivery networks. These carriers and telcos would trade traffic across their private CDNs, with the idea of trying to bypass service based content delivery networks.

• Licensed/Managed CDN: Licensed and managed CDN refers to software and services aimed at helping telcos, carriers and service providers build and deploy their own CDN services inside their network. Licensed CDN refers to the licensing of CDN software to the carrier who then builds a CDN solution on their own. Managed CDN is when a service based content delivery vendor helps build and manage the CDN component of the carriers network for them.

• Application Acceleration: Application acceleration is a suite of technologies that combines fast packet processing with SSL acceleration, connection multiplexing, dynamic caching and adaptive compression to improve application response times. These technologies enable enterprise customers to accelerate the delivery of internal, external and latency sensitive applications to distributed users across the Internet or via their enterprise network.

• Mobile Content Acceleration: Mobile content acceleration technologies are designed to specifically eliminate latencies found on mobile broadband networks to reduce page load times on mobile devices.

It's not too late to get a pass for the event and you can use the special registration code of DRF01 and get access to the keynotes, all of the sessions, presentations and networking events for only $295. Register here and put the code DRF01 in the box at the bottom. Twitter hash tag #cdnsummit

The College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Video & Content Platforms Research and Advance Development Division at Cisco have published a white paper on HTTP adaptive streaming. The paper focuses on the problem of competing video players and describes how the typical behavior of an adaptive streaming player in its Steady-State, which includes periods of activity followed by periods of
inactivity (ON-OFF periods), is the main root cause behind three performance problems: player instability, unfairness between players, and bandwidth underutilization.

I haven’t had the chance to read the paper yet and won’t be able to until after my streaming media shows are over, but others are welcome to comment on the paper in the comments section below. The authors have said they welcome any feedback or questions.

In less than two weeks, the fourth annual Content Delivery Summit will take place in NYC on Monday, May 14th. The event will bring together telecom carriers, service providers, content owners, and industry vendors for a detailed look at CDN platforms for the delivery of video and content acceleration.

I've recently completed a CDN pricing survey and collected data from over 500 customers that use content delivery networks for the delivery of video. At the Summit, I will share the latest data collected from the survey along with details on the size of the content delivery market for video, as well as expected growth forecasts for both revenue and traffic volumes.

Attendees will also learn the current pricing points for video delivery services and hear about the market drivers and trends that will determine what customers pay in the future. There will also be an extensive Q&A session, so this is your chance to ask questions pertaining to current or future CDN pricing and market drivers.

The summit will also feature presentations and discussions pertaining to federated CDN, licensed and managed CDN, front-end optimization, transparent caching, optimizing web applications, telco and MSO CDN deployments, build vs. buy, over-the-top video and others.

It's not too late to get a pass for the event and you can use the special registration code of DRF01 and get access to the keynotes, all of the sessions, presentations and networking events for only $295. Register here and put the code DRF01 in the box at the bottom. Twitter hash tag #cdnsummit

Thanks to Google, we're giving away 12 Samsung Chromebook Series 5 laptops at the Streaming Media East show, taking place May 15-16th in NYC. To attend the Google keynote on May 15th, simply register online for a free exhibits pass and you are in. After the keynote, attendees will have the chance to win one of these laptops. An extra special thanks to Google for being so generous with the giveaways!

It's not too late to get a full conference pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DRF01, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $445. #smeast