Over the last 48 hours, I have gotten almost a dozen calls from some of the major news portals and CDNs asking what's the largest online event in the history of the Internet? Clearly, many are already starting to write up their post inauguration press releases to talk about the number of users to their online broadcasts. While this is a question many want to know the answer to, it's one that nobody can truly answer. 

There is no such thing as the largest event ever since after many large-scale online broadcasts we never hear what the simultaneous stream count was. And for those that do release numbers, they are typically very generic and we have no idea if they are even accurate. Apparently CNN is already reporting numbers, but they are only giving total number of streams served and not the number of simultaneous streams they peaked at.

I have done many, many large-scale webcasts where the content owner inflated the numbers the day after the event. But the bigger question here is does it really matter what the largest event was? Should a live event be solely judged based on how many streams were served?

The bottom line is that no matter how big a day it is for streaming video on the net, the combined users of all the news sites and portals would only equal a few Nielsen points. The number of Internet viewers should not be compared to the number of viewers via the traditional broadcast medium. The Internet as we know it today is not capable of supporting the kind of traffic someone like FOX gets to a show like 24. Furthermore, it's not really fair to compare the two when the quality of the video on the Internet is only a fraction of the quality seen on TV, especially in HD. The moment the quality equation comes into the picture, the number of users the Internet can support now and into the future is even smaller when compared to TV broadcasts.

But this lack of traffic volume as compared to TV is not a bad thing, as they are two completely different mediums. I think the real story for today is not the number of simultaneous streams a website is doing, but the fact that some broadcasters were inserting ads into the live stream, offering multiple viewing angles and really embracing online video. Too bad many of them had really poor quality.

At some point you have to ask not only how many users did you reach, but what was the quality of the experienced they received? Success should be measured by more than just raw traffic numbers.

I've now watched over a dozen live feeds of the inauguration from most of the major news portals and hands down, CBS has the best quality and most reliable stream. Others like MSNBC, C-SPAN and Hulu are some of the worst and at least a couple sites has videos that would not even load. He's a quick run down on how the videos compare.

ABC News
The ABC News site had no problem delivering me an ad, but the live stream simply won't load and by the looks of it, the player doesn't even have a full-screen option. 

Associated Press
Looks like they are sharing the MSNBC stream, which makes sense since the stream does not even work. Looks like it is getting hung up on release.theplatform.com

BBC
Video takes a bit too long to load and quality is nothing special. Not bad, but lots of pixelation at full-screen. Should be a lot better for the BBC.

CBS TV Stations
Has the best looking video quality by far with at least seven HD quality streams to choose from. Clean, crisp and great frame rate. Hands down the winner for me.

CNN
Upon trying to get the live stream, I was put into a waiting room telling me I would be able to get the stream as soon as there was room. After about a minute of waiting, I got the stream which has decent video quality, but not great. And having to sit in a waiting room is just a bad idea. What is CNN thinking?

C-SPAN
Aside from crashing my browser twice, when I did get the video it was simply horrible. They are using the RealPlayer to embed the video in their page with no full-screen option and a very small video window, getting about two frames a second.

FOX News
While the video from FOX News loaded quickly, the video was quite dull with subdued colors and quite a lot of pixelation.

Hulu
Is sharing the same stream as FOX. Tons of stuttering and barely watchable.

MSNBC/NBC
Poor video quality. Very low bitrate, tons of pixelation and the stream took over 30 seconds to load. Same for the NBC News website since they are sharing the same stream.

NewYorkTimes
Probably the faster loading video of any site, with decent video quality as long as you don't want to enter full-screen mode.

Presidential Inaugural Committee
The video feed from the official website looked pretty good. Still not as good as CBS for me, but was still very good.

SKY
The SKY news site looked pretty good. Good frame rate, nice and smooth. Still gets beat by CBS, but not bad at all.

USA Today
Here's something I was not prepared for, the stream opened up in my
RealPlayer! Quality is horrible and it looks like a stream that was
setup for someone on dial-up.

UStream
Video would not load for me at all. The video player says "on air" but nothing shows up. Even tried the pop-up player with no luck.

Overall, not very impressive. Delivering live video on the Internet is not new and any major news site that relies on days like this to generate traffic has no excuse for not getting it right.

We're happy to announce that Paul Sagan, CEO of Akamai is our first confirmed keynote for the Streaming Media East conference and exhibition in May. We will have a total of four keynotes, including major content owners and one large enterprise corporation.

Some will probably say that with all of the new CDNs in the market today, why did we select Akamai for a keynote position? For me, it was an easy decision. For starters, Akamai has never keynoted our show and I think the timing could not be better. While Akamai has been feeling some competitive pressure over their CDN services, they still do more CDN revenue that anyone other vendor in the industry. People still judge the entire CDN space by what Akamai is doing and the trends they are seeing in the market. It is a great opportunity to hear what kind of traffic growth on the Internet Akamai is expecting and an opportunity for them to tell the industry why they think they should still be thought of as the leaders in the CDN industry.

I've just completed my review of all the contracts and RFPs I saw in the market for the fourth quarter of 2008 and overall, pricing from the major content delivery networks for video delivery was pretty stable without much decline in pricing from the third quarter. (note: you can easily find my latest pricing post at www.cdnpricing.com)

Looking at pricing year over year, it looks like CDN pricing for video on a per GB delivered model fell between 30-35% from 2007 to 2008. While many of the contracts from the fourth quarter was for new business in the market and not contract renewals, those with renewing contracts saw on average about a 50% decline in pricing from a year or more ago. While that might make some think pricing fell in half year over year, remember that many of these contracts are 12 and 24 months in length and also included a lot more traffic over a twelve month period. Additionally, we saw many content owners increase their video bitrates from 300Kbps in 2007 to 500-750Kbps in 2008. In many cases this increased the number of bits they pushed by two or three times without any additional growth in traffic year over year.

The other trend from the fourth quarter is that many of the major CDNs are giving volume discounts on lower tiers. In the past, customers had to be doing hundreds of TBs per month to see major discounts, but in the fourth quarter, many CDNs were dropping the volume tier to lower levels. Those doing around 250TB a month are getting better volume pricing.

While many want to say that some CDN vendors are only competing on price or are giving the business away, this is not the case with the major providers. I have seen multiple instances where Limelight and Level 3 have passed on business because the customer wanted pricing that was too low. Yes, pricing is a factor but it is not the only factor for customers when signing contracts. For the quarter, the lowest pricing I saw in the market was still from newcomer BitGravity and the highest pricing was still from Akamai.

While some are speculating that Akamai is now starting to cut pricing for commoditized video delivery, I don't see that being the case across the board. In many cases they are offering lower pricing than before, but their bottom price that I saw was still about 20-25% more than what Limelight, Level 3 and CDNetworks are charging for completely commoditized video delivery business. You can read more on Akamai's recent pricing trends from my post last month entitled "Akamai Getting More Aggressive On CDN Pricing, But More Steps Are Needed."

For 2009, I don't expect to see a big decline in pricing. Even with the lower pricing that we are seeing from folks like Cogent and others, the CDNs all know that they can't give this stuff away. The content delivery business is all about the economics of scale. CDNs have to multiply the volume of traffic on their network many times over before the next round of major pricing discounts can take place. I think it will at least a year in the market before we see that happen. So while pricing always goes down based on customers doing more volume, I don't expect a big drop at all this year.

In my previous pricing posts, I was including pricing averages from roughly 15 different CDNs. I've quickly realized that this causes the average price to fluctuate greatly based on one provider being very high or very low in the market and skews the numbers. The pricing also changes drastically based on the volume of bandwidth that one is committing to, which I have also varied over previous post based on deals I'm seeing in the market.

Starting with this post, I am only going to use the pricing I see from the 4-5 major CDNs in the market to come up with the average price per GB delivered. Moving forward, I'm also going to keep the GB volume the same each quarter so that it is easier and more accurate to compare pricing from one quarter to another. This is not an exact science but keeping the data points consistent from one quarter to another will help everyone be able to better compare pricing over the course of the year.

For content owners, please keep in mind that the below pricing is not necessarily what you should pay. Many factors can and should affect the pricing and the averages I published are for large volume commoditized video delivery contracts.

The average contract length I am seeing for video only delivery is
still 12 months. For contracts that include more than just video
delivery, things like small object delivery, static caching etc.
contract lengths average close to 24 months.

Over the past few quarters, more content delivery networks have launched services in the market or have announced upcoming offerings. To try and keep track of all the different companies, twice a year I update my list of content delivery networks who offer some form of video delivery services. (To make the list easier to find on my blog, all you have to do is go to www.cdnlist.com for the latest update)

Every time I publish the list I get many comments from those who work at some of the CDNs saying it is not fair to compare vendors on this list with one another. For the record, this list is not comparing one vendor to another. It is simply a list of the vendors who in one shape or another offer some kind of video delivery offering. It would be like making a list of all the car manufacturers and the list would contain both Ford and Ferrari. But that does not mean you are comparing a Ford to a Ferrari. It's just a vendor list.

When it comes to the term "CDN", it is one of those terms that is very generic and can be debated all day long, similar to others terms in our industry like "cloud computing" or "edge network". Everyone seems to have different opinions on what it should mean. That being said, take a look at what companies analysts and the media write about in the market and see who they do and do not reference as a CDN. Some may not agree with them, but that's reality. The market defines who they think a CDN is.

To use this list to make comparisons of one provider over another without looking at a company's size, products offered, revenue generated, geographic reach of network, number of formats
supported etc.. would simply be inaccurate. Some of those companies listed are in beta with their offering and some literally have no customers as they have just launched in the market. Again, it is just a list of vendors, some of which are pure-play CDNs, others which aren't.

The companies listed are those who provide outsourced CDN hosting services. That's why companies like Konitki and others are not listed since they provide software to deliver video across your enterprise network. Same goes for companies like Swarmcast which is many times classified as a CDN when they are really a video platform. Additionally, companies like Ascent Media are not on the list as they provide video delivery service across a closed network from one customer location to another. For this post, I also did not list the video delivery providers who target a very specific geographic region which I classify as "regional service providers". At last count, there are over two hundred of these providers and you can find many of them listed in the StreamingMedia.com industry directory.

In alphabetical order these are the video delivery networks that I am currently tracking in the industry:

• Accelia
• Abacast
• Advection.NET
• Akamai
• Aflexi
  
• Amazon Web Services
• AT&T
• BitGravity
• BitTorrent
• Broadmedia
• CacheFly
• ChinaCache
• CDNetworks
• Cotendo
• Conviva
• Deutsche Telekom
• Digital Fountain
• EdgeCast
• EdgeStream
• Grid Networks
• Highwinds
• Internap
• Itiva
• Level 3
• Limelight Networks
• Mirror Image
• Move Networks
• NaviSite
• NTT Communications
• Pando Networks
• Panther Express
• PCCW
• PEER1
• Real Broadcast Network (RBN)
• Reliance Globalcom
• Tata Communications
• Technicolor
• Velocix
• Voxel.net
• Vusion

If you think a company is missing from this list, please feel free to add it in the comments section and please make sure you read all of my post before making any comments.

Yesterday, Verizon announced a new program dubbed the "Verizon Partner Port Program" which gives content owners and CDNs the benefit of a direct connection from their content storage devices to the Verizon Internet backbone network. While Verizon is saying that they are offering "a significantly lower price to connect directly to the Verizon Internet backbone network," this is about more than just lower pricing.

Some would argue that Verizon is simply offering lower IP transit prices, which really is not that big of a deal. Agreed, from a high-level, that's all this could look like. But after speaking with two major CDNs yesterday, they are very interested in this Verizon offering and say that it may enable them to offer a lower price to any content owner who wants to reach Verizon customers.

While many of the major CDNs already connect to Verizon via peering connections and NAPs, this new service offers CDNs a lot cheaper transport costs than just a traditional IP transit link they would negotiate with Verizon. Since these new connections would be all outbound traffic and not inbound, Verizon can manage their network differently and offer a lower price. CDNs have the ability to connect to Verizon from ten data centers in the U.S., most of which are Equinix facilities.

While Verizon would not disclose pricing to me, CDNs that had already spoken to Verizon talked pricing with me that was much lower than what they would pay for traditional transit services. And one of the CDNs I spoke to said that if Verizon could offer pricing that much lower, the CDN could in turn offer content owners a cheaper price to deliver their content to Verizon subscribers. If that in fact happens, this Verizon offering becomes more than just about lower IP costs. It means it has the ability to reduce the content owners distribution costs, the CDNs operating costs and provides a better experience for users like me who are on the FiOS network.

Scott Brown, formerly from Turner Broadcasting has been named the new CEO in the U.S. for P2P provider Octoshape. Earlier this week, Turner and Octoshape announced that Octoshape's P2P technology was used by Turner for live stream offerings for both the 2008 elections (CNN) and their live sports coverage from TBS.

The P2P solution is running on the Highwinds content delivery network and while the release says that "Octoshape broke several streaming records", no actual numbers were disclosed. The real test is going to be in the next few weeks when CNN will use the technology during the presidential inauguration.