Content Delivery Network Strategies, by Stef van der Ziel

The StreamZilla online store was updated to reflect the new 2010 pricing for premium streaming services.

StreamZilla is the only true pan-European streaming CDN. Regional streaming companies have a limited infrastructure, that in most cases is used for over 90% within one country. Global CDNs have multiple sites in Europe, but on average they cover just four sites, while the network that powers StreamZilla is present at over 15 exchanges throughout Europe.

But local performance isn’t the only reason why StreamZilla managed to get a lot of European professional streaming customers. I have always wondered why CDNs haven’t dared to publish their rates online. The CDN business can be as competitive as the hosting business, and the hosting industry has online stores. It looks like CDNs are afraid of publishing their rates online.

For customers this means they have to contact the CDN head office. Depending on your account size, they will call you back within a few days or a few weeks. If you’re lucky they call you during European office hours instead of US office hours. Sometimes you are redirected to a local reseller. Sometimes you have to wait for weeks to get an appointment with a sales rep. And then it takes them days (or weeks) to send you an offer. And you have to bargain, the same way you have to bargain with second hand car dealers and kitchen sales men.

When we launched StreamZilla, we took the bold step to offer an educating website (no marketing, but facts) with an online store. E-commerce! Straight forward: six products, this is what we charge for storage and traffic. Competitive rates. Order now, stream tomorrow. No hassling and dealing. If you want to save on costs, commit to a longer term.

Of course there is the risk that competitors will abuse our online rates to offer a more attractive deal. But we don’t look at competition, we look at our own strengths and we’re here for our customers, who deserve transparency. Our prices aren’t the lowest in the market, but StreamZilla is positioned as a premium streaming provider for the European market, not as a loss-leading U.S. based price fighter who is forced by investors to buy into the market.

Our prices definitely aren’t the highest, and our performance, features, ease of use and support easily compete with other premium offerings. An interesting side effect of having an online store is that customers and competitors use our online store as a reference. And that places us above the rest, in terms of market leadership.

Today, StreamZilla updated most of the products. All contract accounts now offer additional bursting capacity. Storage prices have dropped dramatically. Our traffic prices were already extremely competitive, a bit too cheap actually, so we made no big shifts here. We introduced a new monster account with 10TB storage and a 1PB traffic bundle at a very aggressive price.

Check out the new StreamZilla rates in the Online CDN Store. Stay tuned for some new products in there.