This morning, Compuware announced an agreement to acquire Gomez in an all cash transaction valued at $295M and expects the deal to close next month. I last wrote about Gomez a year ago when they launched their new streaming media monitoring service called Active Streaming XF. While I don't know much about Compuware or the application performance software industry, I wonder if the sale of Gomez will have any impact on the CDNs who use Gomez today.

Currently, many of the CDNs use Gomez to monitor the performance of their network and while I have said many times the methodology used to measure the performance of one CDN to another are invalid, Gomez still seems to be what nearly all the CDNs are using when a customer asks them for third party performance data.

The reason each CDN shows a different result in their Gomez chart is due to the fact that the CDNs are all using different metrics to test. Most are showing the chart as if it represents video, yet might just be testing small objects and not video objects. Also, many times, some CDNs that use Gomez tweak the testing methods to be in their favor even if it is not a fair apple-to-apples comparison to other vendors.

With Gomez now being sold, I wonder what, if any, impact this might have on CDNs currently using their service. I also find it hard to believe that for an industry that uses the word "performance" more than any other word to describe their service, I have yet to see any CDN publish any public document that outlines the performance of their network or even the methodology that customers should be using to judge "performance". None of the CDNs have even defined in a public document what the word "performance" means when it comes to video.

Today, FLO TV unveiled their highly anticipated "FLO TV Personal Television". A portable 3.5" touch-screen device with built-in stereo speakers that will let consumers take their TV with them on the go. The device will be available this holiday season with a suggested retail price of $249 plus at least $8.99 a month in FLO TV subscription fees. It measures 4.4 inches by 3 inches, is only half an inch thick and weighs just over 5 ounces. The company says it has a battery life of more than 5 hours of TV viewing or 300 hours on standby.

Bill Stone, President of FLO TV will be our keynote speaker on November 17th at the Streaming Media West show in San Jose and will have the Personal Television with him for viewing. All keynotes are free to attend, so register now for a free exhibit pass and come get hands-on with the device.

Back in April, I reported that two colocation companies had contacted me to say that Cisco was acquiring colocation space in various third party data centers in the U.S. for what Cisco was calling a new content delivery network. While I don't know Cisco's plans when it comes to the rumors of a commercial public cloud offering, I can confirm that Cisco does not plan to offer any CDN service specifically for video delivery.

After multiple conversations last week with various groups inside Cisco, it's clear that offering video delivery services via a Cisco operated CDN does not fit into the overall plans of the company. Numerous folks at Cisco said they would not compete with the same companies they already sell gear to and that Cisco's main goal is to help third party telcos, carriers and corporations deploy their own CDN's, which sometimes requires Cisco to take space within third party colocation facilities.

I don't know whether or not this approach by Cisco also keeps them out of the cloud-based storage and application services business, but I would think the same principle of not wanting to compete with their customers would apply and for now, keeps such an offering from coming to the market.

Yesterday, Limelight Networks made two related announcements; a new global content delivery platform, called the XD platform, and two new services based on that platform, called LimelightCONTROL XD and LimelightDELIVER XD. I’ve been getting a lot of questions from folks about these announcements, especially since one of the releases contained a quote from Overstock.com, a customer that as far as I had known, had only been using Akamai.

Many are asking me if this new platform is going to allow Limelight to really push into the value add services market that Akamai has dominated for so long. I’ll be posting a deeper look at Limelight's technology hopefully later in the week, but in the meantime, here’s an overview of the news, as well as an answer to the question I’ve heard the most: is this a threat to Akamai's high margin business?

Limelight's new XD platform features the same basic architecture as Limelight’s previous network, still utilizing their 15,000+ servers deployed around the globe, connected to 900+ last-mile networks. In addition, Limelight now has 8 million externally-deployed user
agents, deployed around the Internet, feeding data back to Limelight
about conditions on last-mile networks and Internet backbones (this is
one of the areas that I hope to learn more details about during a
scheduled briefing with Limelight later this week).

The new XD platform uses new edge server software that includes something Limelight calls “Adaptive Intelligence” that adjusts protocols in real-time for each connection or user request, which Limelight says significantly improves delivery performance. All existing services run on the new platform, so there is no migration for current customers as they are already running on the new XD platform. (Limelight’s delivery this past weekend of “The Wizard of Oz” for Netflix was all done on the new XD platform).

Limelight's XD platform also supports new services, the first of which Limelight also announced yesterday, called LimelightDELIVER XD and LimelightCONTROL XD. LimelightDELIVER XD uses the new Adaptive Intelligence feature of the XD platform to provide faster and more consistent object deliveries to users and LimelightCONTROL XD provides enhanced reporting and management features, including self-provisioning.

It is important to keep in mind that “CDN services” is not one single market, but a collection of sub-markets: streaming, large object delivery, small object delivery, whole site and dynamic content delivery, and overlay routing.  As I have written in the past, CDNs are starting to do a lot more than just deliver video on their networks. CDNs offer services in some or all of these areas, and also mix and match these, or parts of these, into services aimed at particular customer business problems. What Limelight announced yesterday is focused on object delivery, not whole site and not transactions. So just by themselves, today’s announcements probably don’t fundamentally rewrite the rules of the CDN industry.

But it seems pretty clear to me that today’s announcements are just the beginning and that there’s more to come. Limelight's XD platform announcement, in particular, seems like a “foundation” announcement on which Limelight will likely build other services. Globally deployed user agents that collect data on Internet and last-mile conditions – all the way to end user devices – and feed that data back to the CDN is potentially pretty important stuff.

And the Adaptive Intelligence approach seems pretty interesting too, as it extends the CDN “toolkit” beyond just resolving hostnames to edge servers that will handle the next few minutes’ worth of content requests. It’s an approach that extends down to the individual connection and out to the very end of the last mile. If it really does make Internet connections significantly faster (by using them more efficiently) on a case-by-case basis, and if Limelight applies this approach to other kinds of CDN services, like whole site delivery and transactions, then this could disrupt Akamai's value add services.

But Limelight hasn’t announced those kinds of services just yet. So today, I’d say this is a pretty important announcement for companies doing object delivery – small or large – and that it may just be the beginning of something fundamentally very significant – but we’ll have to wait and see for sure if it has any impact on Akamai's value add services.

Related Posts:

– Rumor Of AT&T Acquiring Akamai Appears To Be The Latest Of Many

– NBC and Microsoft Kick Off NFL Season Tonight, Akamai Doing The Delivery

– CDNs Need To Evolve To Offer Tiered Performance And Pricing Plans

– Featured Article: The Future Of The CDN Market

Over the last few months, I'm noticing that a larger percentage of fan comments on NFL.com and MLB.com are starting to look like those on YouTube. Readers are posting comments that contain racial slurs, four letter words, physical threats to others as well as additional content you'd think the NFL and MLB would not want to allow.

Unlike YouTube, the NFL and MLB have professionally produced content with lots of major advertisers who can't possibly want to advertise around such user generated comments. And while no one expects every bad comment to be caught, it seems as if neither the NFL or MLB is even trying to do anything about it. It's very easy to find dozens of such comments, many times in the same subject thread on both of their sites.

On NFL.com, they are being even more careless when they randomly take user comments from the site and highlight them, in big fonts, right on the main page, as you can see here. One has to wonder why either organization would allow this, unless they don't care since user comment sections drive up their page views. One of the excuses we hear as to why it's so hard for YouTube to generate ad dollars from the vast majority of their videos is that advertisers don't want to be associated with specific UGC content or the comments that gets generated from those videos. So why would the NFL and MLB put monetizing their content with their advertisers in jeopardy?

I sent inquiries to both the MLB and NFL asking for them to explain their
policies around user generated comments, but weeks have gone by with no
answer from either company. Whatever their policies are, clearly neither organization is doing enough to address this and it's simply a bad business practice on their part to ignore it. The NFL and MLB logos/websites are highly valuable brands, being tarnished by a lot of really bad comments from users.

The Streaming Media West show and Online Video Platform Summit are less than two weeks away and between the two events, we've got 140 speakers across 40 different sessions. If streaming devices and platforms is your interest we've got speakers from: Xbox 360, Roku, Sling Media, Vizio, TiVo, FLO TV, Boxee, MobiTV, Motorola, Cisco, ZillionTV and Verizon amongst others.

In addition, we've also got many of the major content owners represented with speaking spots including: FOX, Disney, NBC Universal, MTV, HBO Broadband, EPIX, MLB, YouTube/Google, Turner, CNN Money, Comcast, Associated Press, FUNimation and Mountain Sports International amongst others.

It's not too late to get a pass and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DRF1, which gets you $200 off the ticket price. You can attend all three days of the SM West show for only $695.

The Streaming Media West show
is only six weeks away and nearly all of the speakers have now been
confirmed. Leading up to the show, I'll be highlighting on my blog some of the
sessions taking place to give everyone a flavor
for the topics we'll be covering. I'm also pleased to announce that readers of my blog can still register using
my own personal discount code of DRF1, which gives you $200 off the 3-day conference ticket, making it only $695 to attend.

You can also register online for a free exhibits pass which also gives you access to the keynotes from Xbox, FLO TV and EPIX.