Content Delivery Network Strategies, by Stef van der Ziel

2003. Some potential customers asked for a demo setup of our technology. So we built a small streaming platform to demo our innovative features. The customers liked the service so much that they asked us to host their streams. They did not want to go through the hassle of setting up and managing their own servers.

At the same time I wondered why no one had tried to offer a professional streaming service in western Europe. Sure, there were some offerings, but their technology was weak, they had no focus, no good product portfolio. And their marketing was horrible.

So we decided to launch a streaming service. Since our focus is on strategy and software development we chose to outsource the hosting. We found some hosting partners, setup our software.

We are not a sales driven company. I did not want to hire sales staff. Too expensive. I also did not want my people to spend a lot of time with customers on the phone. So I had to to think of a smart way. E-commerce. We took our time to think of 6 streaming packages and a good pricing policy. We put up a 3-pages website with all packages and prices on the front page (to save on sales), a second page with tech specs (so we could save on support) and a contact page.

Our rates were fair, our services offered support for all popular streaming technologies, we had good reporting features and the service was transparent.

Within a few months we sold more accounts than we had imagined. The largest online publisher in the Netherlands became our customer. Within a year we were the largest streaming provider in the Netherlands. Actually, StreamZilla made more profit than our consulting services.

Today, StreamZilla is the leading European streaming CDN. We still stick to the basic rules: full featured service, fair rates, full transparency and e-commerce. And focus. Although StreamZilla is still not our core activity, it contributed to our growth, profitability and international presence.

And we learned a lot. We managed to get a competitive service in Europe with a staff that is significantly smaller than that of any serious competitor. Yet customers claim that our uptime and support are much better. We know how to get a CDN as lean and mean and profitable as possible.

I think most CDN’s can learn from that. And all our knowledge was put back into our software. More automation. Self service. Transparency. Our customers who license our CDN software directly benefit from that experience.