Meet me next week at the CDN Strategies Summit

Posted by Rob Gallagher Friday, October 9th, 2009

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I’m particularly pleased to write that I will be charing day one of the CDN Strategies Summit. Why? Because the conference will address one of the most fundamental problems facing telecoms operators today: How they can work with Internet and media firms to support the growing burden of video and other bandwidth-hungry services travelling over their networks.

We at Informa first covered the concept of operator content delivery networks (CDNs) in 2004, when I wrote about a startup called CacheLogic that suggested that operators could put technology for restricting burgeoning peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing traffic to more positive uses (subscription required).

Much has changed, as this excerpt shows:

Operators have typically sought to contain P2P traffic, which they view as damaging to either their revenues or costs.

Caspian Networks and CacheLogic argue, however, that operators can charge customers for providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for a number of P2P applications that are increasingly finding legitimate uses…

UK broadcaster the BBC… is considering using a P2P network to deliver TV content. Microsoft, Apple, Sun and other major operating system vendors are embedding P2P technology into their software.

Since then, the BBC launched the iPlayer to great acclaim while Microsoft has invested heavily in its Silverlight online video and web application framework. CacheLogic changed its name to Velocix, worked with the BBC and US operator Verizon, before being acquired by telecoms equipment giant Alcatel Lucent.

The whole industry’s focus, meanwhile, has shifted to direct delivery of content, which costs content providers more to support than P2P. And these costs look set to grow, particularly given the emergence of technologies to deliver online video direct to TVs, such as the UK’s Project Canvas, France and Germany’s HbbTV, Sweden’s OpenChoice and South Korea’s IPTV 2.0.

Given the impact online video is having on broadband networks, the trend has hardly gone unnoticed by operators. Earlier this year, my colleague Giles Cottle found that at least 13 were looking into how they could become CDN providers (subscription required).

Senior executives from many of these operators and others, including BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia and TeliaSonera, will be speaking on day one. I’ll also be hanging around for day two. Please drop me a line if you’d like to meet up.