Join us during the IBC show in Amsterdam, September 10 – 14. We expect to have presence on multiple booths, where we will demonstrate the latest release of our groundbreaking-industry-shaking CDN technology. Stay tuned for more announcements.
I’d like to hear your opinion about the developments in CDN space. Let’s share some thoughts!
For appointments, please contact natasja@jet-stream.nl
On Friday evening Gerard from Initio dbk called that our iPad 3G’s were finally in store, in Bremen (Germany). So we had a great trip on the Autobahn. 250KM/h (155MPH) :) The iPad is a wonderful and addictive device. It is great for video. We run some test live streams in our lab (shielded off from the internet) so I actually could watch the World Soccer Championship today live in my garden. Netherlands vs Slovakia. We won!
Anyway, the short demo video below demonstrates how easy it is to stream live and vod video to mobile devices. The fact that we can stream to an iPad isn’t that exciting though. What is exciting is that our CDN solution is 100% web-based controlled… Read more
This is what the engineers in our secret lab came up with: a CDN on a stick: Read more
An interesting traffic pattern on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange during the live webcast of the year: the World Soccer game between NL and DK. Instead of a traffic spike, overall traffic was lower. A dip! (updated chart)
Yesterday I pitched logistics to the ±200 people audience of Online Tuesday in Amsterdam, in less than 5 minutes.
I used crowdsourcing to demonstrate the limited capacity of mobile networks. I wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to disrupt a mobile network. It -uhm- worked. Sorry! :) The 5 min video is available below.
Steve Jobs just announced a new iPhone on his annual WWDC keynote: the iPhone 4 with iOS4. The sleeker phone gets a higher resolution ‘retina resolution’ display (means larger video sizes means more traffic).
The iPhone also gains video calling support. This ‘FaceTime’ feature is going to be WiFi only, he says that the mobile operators have to work on their networks first before they will enable this for 3G. This looks like a proprietary iPhone feature, it doesn’t use the 3G standardized video conferencing stuff.
Users will also be able to film HD (720p) videos, edit them on iMovie for the iPhone, and send them (via WiFi and 3G) to friends or YouTube.
Netflix previewed their iPhone app, expected this summer. The app supports the full movies catalog and allows you to stream (HTTP adaptive) over WiFi and 3G.
Concluding: many new, data hungry, video oriented applications… we are going to see more mobile networks with interruptions…
During his Keynote, Jobs had many mobile network issues. Pages did not load in Safari. WiFi was filling up the radio spectrum (??). He asked the audience to kill their WiFi and close their laptops repeatedly. His primary and backup iPhone 4′s couldn’t connect to AT&T (‘Could not activate cellular network’). Someone in the audience shouted ‘Try Verizon!’. Ouch…
Many companies are investing in online content services. YouTube, Hulu, broadcasters, publishers. These companies build business cases on the boom of online video: advertisement models, subscription models and pay-per-view models. Their business cases depend on scalability and performance of the internet, both broadband and mobile.
Internet vs cable
Cable operators offer good quality and quality of service, but their limited number of channels and titles can never compete with the vast number of internet channels and billions of online videos. Consumers don’t want to be locked into a package anymore. They want to pull content. Subscribers want to be in control. The internet is open and therefore the distribution infrastructure of today and the future. Digital television operators who ignore this fact will face a very difficult future.
Telecom operators have a four-way strategy to own an on-net CDN. On-net CDNs offer deeper network penetration with better QoS and larger capacity. The CDNs that we deploy support all popular delivery technologies for the web, mobile and IPTV. This means that the telecom operators can:
External CDNs could only have addressed number 3 in this list. Read more
U.S. based CDN’s often tend to think that they can enter the European market by having an office in London, Paris or Amsterdam.
Although there is a European Union, without borders, with free economics and a single currency, there is no single market like there is in the U.S.A.
There are over 25 countries and even more languages in Europe. You will encounter cultural and language barriers. Opening an office in London also means a geographical barrier.
The CDN industry is still very young. It is an immature industry. Technology is advancing. New players enter the market and existing players keep changing their proposition. They are in trouble.
Lack of focus is killing. I’ve been around 15 years in this industry and I have seen so many companies come and go. Their problem was lack of focus.
By patching their networks together, many small and large network operators around the world have built a global virtual network: the Internet. It offers open and global access to any server and service in any connected network. The open and neutral character is what made the Internet the next big thing in humanity. So it is important to keep it open and neutral. And it is important to keep it running.
Iin the past few years, there has been discussion about Net Neutrality. Are ISPs allowed to block services? No? What about spam? Are ISPs allowed to shape traffic? No? Not even if a small number of subscribers can take their entire network down? Are ISP’s allowed to rent network resources to service providers so they can accelerate specific services?
In the USA, the Net Neutrality discussion is very polarized: either you are ‘freedom fighter’ who want laws to make sure that no single bit is discriminated or accelerated, or you are against government involvement and want the TelCos to be able to tune their network.
In Europe, we have a different view… Read more
About twelve years ago – by lack of available CDNs and CDN technology – we had to develop our own basic CDN technologies, to be able to produce our large-scale webcasts for pop festivals, events, enterprises and governments.
Our requirements back then (1996/1997) were quite simple: Read more
London, October 16 2009 - One new CDN per month
Telcos and hosting providers move into the CDN market, powered by Dutch CDN technology
Jet Stream BV, CDN technologies market leader, announced on the Streaming Media Europe show in London that it has licensed and deployed eight CDNs since the latest release of their VideoExchange CDN software suite was launched in March 2009. This announcement was made exactly a year after the software was previewed on the very same show in 2008. Read more
I have been advocating cooperation between CDNs, telcos and content owners for many years.
CDN interoperability pilot
I am pleased to announce that we are formally starting a project in the Netherlands with the NPO (Dutch Public Broadcaster, best compared to the BBC), KPN (tier-1 Telco) and SURFnet (academic ISP). Read more
So there is no European market. So how do streaming providers make a living if the market is so scattered and diffuse? What are the opportunities and threats? Read more
The StreamZilla infrastructure page just got a refresh to reflect the current infrastructure status. The network is now connected to 17 Internet Exchanges throughout Europe and to the New York… Read more
On November 4 2009, we celebrate that it was exactly 15 years ago that I produced my first webcast, and probably the first one in Europe…
Personal frustration: Some U.S. based analysts and writers tend to ignore companies that are not active on the U.S. market:
Of the 22.5 billion professional video views served during 2009, Read more
Last week I attended Streaming Media West in San Jose. The show is a bit larger than the European show. Some impressions:
Last week, Deloitte published the EMEA 500: the fastest growing tech companies in Europe, Middle-East and Africa.
Jet Stream ranked #88 with 1823% growth in 5 years. Not bad :-)
The term ‘CDN’ is pretty broad and undefined. So there is a lot of misunderstanding on what a CDN actually is, what it does, what it can be used for, what the core features are, what a CDN should not do and where it is logically placed between the physical network and the content owners.
This document used to be covered under NDA, but I thought it would be informative to share our visions about how to design a CDN technology from the ground up. I get a lot of positive feedback when I present this, so this post is to help you understand our approach on logical CDN layering and hopefully it helps you not to make the design mistakes I have seen in other CDN projects.
This is one of the core IPR parts of our VideoExchange CDN solution. It is a reflection of our +10 years experience in designing, deploying and operating CDNs. There is some pretty unique stuff in here, which has helped us deploy many CDNs in the past years, and has helped our customers enter the CDN market much faster than anyone else… Now don’t copy this, it’s protected stuff and we don’t want to spend money on lawyers. Just license it :-)
As a CDN, we have access to detailed statistics that give us a great insight in trends in streaming media. But the stats aren’t ours, they are our customers’. So we can’t share them.
Therefore, traditionally, StreamZilla publishes a fireplace stream during the winter months on www.fireplacetv.nl. These streams are watched by ten thousands international viewers and generate many terabytes traffic.
Every year we publish a small report to update our relations on the trends in streaming media: Read more
Ttime for a quick look back on 2009. This was an important year for Jet Stream, VDO-X and StreamZilla:
The StreamZilla online store was updated to reflect the new 2010 pricing for premium streaming services.
We just deployed a beta version of an upcoming VDO-X release on our public test platform. The most important new features are: Read more
Wanted: CDN engineer
Are you a senior engineer? Do you have a proven track record in PHP development, MySQL tuning and scalable software architectures? Do you have a background in IPTV or streaming media technologies? Read more
The term CDN is not well-defined. It covers many solutions and applications to geo-optimize delivery.
Jet Stream and IBM have formed a partnership to work together in CDN projects. Jet Stream was contacted by IBM about 9 months ago to learn more about our CDN technologies… Read more
The number of deployed CDNs within telcos and hosting providers is growing fast. We have deployed a lot of CDNs in the past year, and there is a waiting list for deployments for this year. The need for connecting CDNs together is growing. This post gives more details about our inter-CDN / CDN federation standards and the pilots we do in this area. Read more
We are heavily involved in CDN RfP’s and at the same time we are gearing up our R&D. I am working on some articles, but time is scarce these days. If you are interested in writing a guest-article, please send your ideas to me!
FYI we are now an official member of ETSI, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute. We have been pitching CDN interoperability standardization, with the focus on CDN federation.
Telcos sell flat-fee broadband with unlimited traffic for a fixed price. Competition is strong, prices are going down. To compete, telcos have to offer even faster connections at the same, or lower prices.
With over 85% broadband penetration, the markets are saturated. At the same time, traffic usage is growing strong. To cope with the growing demand of traffic, telcos face deep infrastructural investments. But margins are shrinking.
Besides telcos, hosting providers jump into the CDN market space as well. Hosting providers have different needs, different architectures, different problems to solve.
Where telcos need to offload their backbones and want to monetize their infrastructure by offering advanced CDN services, hosting providers need to upgrade from regular web hosting to offer video streaming services, and they need to offload traffic to save on transit costs.
Hosting providers don’t have the financial, infrastructural and human resources that telcos have.
Back in 1993 when I started experimenting with video on the web, there were a number of available video formats: MPEG, AVI and QuickTime. These codecs were optimized for NTSC/PAL encoding and playback from hard drives and CD’s. But they were horrible for the (dial-up) web. Way too large.
The Shrine of Fatima broadcasts their shrine 24/7 on the web via our StreamZilla CDN. Their live stream generates dozens TeraBytes per month. Every year in May, their largest event attracts ten thousands of pelgrims, also via the web, generating a huge traffic spike. This year is extra special: Pope Benedict XVI is present. See the webcast here: http://www.santuario-fatima.pt/portal/index.php?id=14924
I’m happy to inform you that our CDN software flagship VideoExchange (‘VDO-X’) now offers full support for Apple HTTP streaming and Microsoft Smooth Streaming.
Yesterday Google announced that they are going to push a new video codec into the market. This year Google bought ON2, a video codec development company. An impressive list of supporting companies was announced as well.
The good news for us and our customers is that we will fully support WebM/VP8 in our software and services.
I have some reservations though… Read more
The Netherlands failed in the 2010 EuroVision Song Contest. Well, what would you expect with a song called Shalali Shalala.
In case you really are a die-hard fan of this music festival, you can tune in anywhere you want.
StreamZilla is broadcasting the event for mobile clients in cooperation with Ericsson and Adactus. The live channels and VOD streams are made available for iPhones and 3G phones. Encoders in Norway are pushing out H.264 and 3GPP live streams and vod assets to the StreamZilla CDN.
We found that the best solutions for mobile streaming are Wowza Media 2 (for HTTP streaming) and Darwin Streaming Server (for 3GPP RTSP streaming) to push out the content to the clients throughout Europe. The Ericsson mobile portal dynamically selects the right pages and presents the right streams based on the client profile.
Wowza Media Server 2 (with HTTP streaming and Smooth Streaming) support within our platform and technology is in beta today and will be officially released within a number of weeks.
It started last year in New York and San Francisco. AT&T’s network was degrading. Phone calls dropped. At some peak times a third of all calls dropped. More and more AT&T customers throughout the U.S. started to complain about slow data, lost data connectivity and dropped calls.
When I attended Content Delivery Summit in New York this month I experienced exactly the same. Calls dropped, or I suddenly got voicemail messages without getting calls. 3G was slower than GPRS. The phone constantly switched between 3G, GPRS and Edge, and lost connections many times. The signal strength kept changing from max to a single bar. In-session switching between 3G, GPRS and Edge is a drama, because your IP address gets lost so your stream / email / surfing session gets lost too.
I’ve had the same issues in the past with KPN when they just introduced 3G. In the first 2 years, I had to switch 3G off to be sure I could be reached. It has been fixed, but in recent months I occasionally miss phone calls and get voicemail messages much later.
Last week, T-Mobile (another provider with exclusive iPhone contracts) publicly admitted having similar problems in the Netherlands.
CDNxite pointed us to some interesting CDN ping results… Read more