Last month I collected the latest CDN pricing information from over 150 web performance customers and 600 media delivery customers and the results show some major changes taking place in both price and competitive wins. Pricing on both services are down by a large percentage, especially on the bigger deals and many customers are now […]
Load balancing in the cloud is nothing new. Akamai, Neustar, Dyn, and AWS have been offering DNS-based cloud load balancing for a long time. This cloud based approach has many benefits over more traditional appliance-based solutions, but there are still a number of shortcomings. Fastly’s recently released load balancer product takes an interesting new approach, […]
Millennials are watching video content, but in most cases it’s on-demand video, not live TV. This is one of the reasons why, when content aggregators build television channels for them, they don’t show up. A truism that eventually shuttered Pivot and explains why Vice’s average viewer is 40 years old and their ratings aren’t quite […]
For well over a year, customers of Akamai have been complaining about Akamai’s cache invalidation times, which has impacted manifest caching, real-time news feeds, and any time sensitive content. Historically, Akamai purges used to take at least 15 minutes and sometimes, in a couple of really terrible cases, I’ve heard of hours. Competitors like Fastly […]
I’ve gotten a few inquiries lately from content owners asking which CDNs still support Adobe’s proprietary Flash streaming format (RTMP). Over the past 12 months, many, but not all, of the major CDNs have announced to their customers that they will soon end support for Flash streaming. Industry wide, we have seen declining requirements for […]
With last week’s live NFL stream on Twitter, we were all once again reminded of the delay that exists when it comes to streaming over the Internet. And as more premium video goes online, and more second screen interactivity is involved, syncing of the video is going to become crucial. Two months ago I highlighted […]
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about tips and best practices for putting together a good webcast and what pitfalls to look out for. While live webcasts about sports and entertainment events seem to get all the exposure, more live webcasts take place each day in the enterprise market than in any other […]