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Archive for the ‘ISP’s’ Category:

There is no European market

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Aug 04 2009
U.S. based CDNs often ten 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 languages in Europe. You will encounter cultural and language barriers. Opening an office in London also means a geographical barrier.
In southern countries, business is done mostly via personal relations. You need to personally meet, drink, eat and laugh. And again and again. And then they may want to deal with you. Business in Eastern Europe is hard. They don’t trust you. And you should not trust them. Let them pay in advance. In other countries, business is very strict. Polish your shoes if you want to do business in Germany. Don’t small-talk too long.
English people can be very rude. They don’t say their name when they call you. “I need a quote, now!”. The French, oh the French are so chauvinistic. They even have their own words for internet protocols. They don’t do business outside France. They still think that France is the center of the world. Like many people from the U.S.A. still think they are the center of the world.
It is changing though. A younger generation grows up with the Internet. And English is the Internet language. It surprises me how well many international customers speak English, especially Italians and Spanish customers.
We have the luck of being in the Netherlands. Dutch people speak two, three, sometimes four or even five languages. We are a very open society and we have always been internationally oriented, both culturally and trade-wise. We are not that chauvinistic and are open to do business with anyone. As long as you pay.
The European market is also dividid for content, both culturally and by language. Shows who are extremely popular in Germany will never work in the UK, even if they were produced locally with local stars in their native language. The Germans don’t get English jokes and the English don’t get German jokes. Really.
Even if you find a content format that works in multiple countries, you have the language barrier. You have to produce content in multiple languages. Some countries require native spoken content. Other countries want dubbed content. And other countries prefer subtitled content. If you do this wrong, no one will watch your content.
Even pan-European broadcasters like MTV and Discovery have custom channels per country or per language region. 95% of all broadcasters are focussed on just one country or one language region.
There is no pan-European advertisement industry. Take the product overview of giants such as Unilever or Proctor & Gamble, and you wil see that the very same toothpaste product has many different names throughout Europe. Heck, we had Dove soap and Dove chocolat.
So there is no European market. If traffic stays for 90% within your own country, why sign up with a global CDN? Why not work together with a regional player?
In Europe there are a lot of regional streaming providers who do local business only. Over 90% of their business is in their own country. Over 90% of their traffic stays within their own country, even though they claim to be a significant European player.
The problem is that these small players can’t innovate fast enough. They can’t compete on support, technology, infrastructure or price.
As far as I know, our own StreamZilla service is the only CDN that has managed to capture a true European market. Over two thirds of our customers (and our traffic) comes from EU countries. We even managed to become dominant in some markets. Only twenty per cent comes from our home country the Netherlands. And about ten percent is delivered to the U.S.A, South America and the rest of the world. Where we have excellent performance too, by the way: A+ status for each streaming protocol.
StreamZilla has grown large enough to compete with larger, USA based CDN’s. We do offer better customer support. Our performance in Europe is better than most global CDN’s can offer. We have been able to invest in technology. And our rates are competitive.
This is also an opportunity for ISP’s. There is no EU market. Imagine you are a content owner. Why sign up with a global CDN if you can do direct business with an operator who controls both access and distribution in the target market?
Build a CDN and do business in your own country, in your own language, in your own cultural way.
So is this a threat to StreamZilla? Yes and no. We may lose some content owners when they can do direct business with ISP’s. But the content owners still need someone to tie the CDN’s together: to act as an overflow platform, to act as an overlay platform.
So is this a threat to local streaming operators? Yes and no. They will lose the innovation race. StreamZilla already proposed some that they stop doing their CDN part and focus instead on value added services: encoding, asset management, translation services, portal services, custom video players. In some markets this turned into a very successful partnership.
So is this a threat to the global CDN’s? Yes. Sorry!

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.

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Business, Distribution, ISP's, The Last Mile, Value chain

Why are telecom operators deploying CDNs?

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Aug 04 2009

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:

  1. optimize on-net traffic flow, reduce backbone and peering load
  2. host and deliver on-net web, mobile and IPTV services
  3. sell CDN resources to content owners
  4. Take back the distribution role in the value chain

External CDNs could only have addressed number 3 in this list. Read more »

Business, Distribution, ISP's, Logistics, Technology, The Last Mile, Value chain, Video Working Group

Peer2Peer s*cks, here’s why

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 31 2009

Peer2Peer (P2P) is sometimes proposed as an alternative for distributed content delivery. Some CDN’s are built upon P2P technology. P2P vendors, researchers and CDN’s claim that P2P lowers costs. It does. For the content owner. But it raises costs for the network owners. Significantly.

Basically the concept of P2P is that every client can redistribute content to other clients. As a content provider you don’t need to buy servers or traffic. Your audience distributes your content ‘for free’. Ingest the content into the network and let it flow. It is also hard to trace where content is hosted and ingested from. That is why P2P is so popular for (illegal) file sharing services.

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Distribution, Fiber to the Home, ISP's, Logistics, The Last Mile, Value chain

Digital Logistics

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

2002. Since I already had a background in distributed delivery, I dived deeper into the internet infrastructure, to come up with a smart distributed solution for mass-scale content delivery.

It involved a simple number of technologies I already had developed in operational or rudimentary form. Parallelized delivery servers as core and edge servers. A smart asset and live relay replication mechanism. A smart geo load balancing application. Some log processing scripts.

Technical stuff. But why and how does this work? Let’s compare this with Logistics. Read more »

Distribution, Fiber to the Home, ISP's, Logistics, The Last Mile, Value chain, Video Working Group

Video Working Group

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

2002. I had done a lot of research on broadband capacity, edge distribution and CDN management. I foresaw that the Internet would break under the increasing load of online video. I had experienced (eh caused) it myself one time.

The ISP’s would struggle to keep their business case positive. Content owners would be forced to outsource delivery to CDN’s. Who would only be able to distribute to ISP’s.

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Distribution, History, ISP's, The Last Mile, Value chain, Video Working Group

The Connected Home

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

2004. Ah, Fiber to the Home. The holy grail. According to many. Experts warned the government that if we did not invest in the Last Mile today, the Netherlands would become a third world country and internet services would never take off. So they asked the government to invest millions of tax payers money in new Last Miles.

I was a bit sceptical about their claims. Because I coincidentally had done some research about the bottlenecks of the Dutch Internet. And my conclusion was that the Last Mile could perfectly handle future growth, but that the true bottlenecks were at the ISP core backbones, the Internet Exchange and their interconnects (public and private peers).

The experts claimed that broadband services would require more than 20Mbps capacity per household. Maybe even 100Mbps in the future. But there was no research done to prove this claim.

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Distribution, Fiber to the Home, ISP's, The Last Mile

Open Play

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

In 2001 I came in contact with the Dutch Innovation Platform, from the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Because I foresaw a major shift in the value chain.

Thanks to the Internet, consumers were not locked anymore in the old walled garden, linear value chain:

Consumer -> buys television package from cable operator -> buys tv channels distribution rights -> broadcasters add advertising revenues -> pay the content producer.

The open Internet allowed multiple new value chain models:

Consumer -> buys flat-fee broadband. End of chain.
Consumer -> surfs the web for content aggregators who ask money for their service or add advertising revenues -> to pay the content producer.

I called this Open Play. Read more »

ISP's, Value chain

Sorry

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 29 2009

2000. We produced a large webcast for the EuroSonic / Noorderslag pop festival. We had built another ad-hoc CDN with streaming servers in multiple Dutch ISP networks.

Each server was connected to 1Gbps. But one of the ISP’s didn’t tell us that that was the capacity of their entire backbone. So we broke the Internet for many, many users that night.

They couldn’t get their email. Or surf the web. But we had many enthusiastic viewers. Sorry! :-)

So much for a CDN, right? We needed to talk to the ISP’s because if their networks couldn’t handle the streams, how could we grow our webcast production business? So that’s what I did.

Anecdotes, Distribution, History, ISP's, Logistics
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