Level3 CDN Ecosystem

Level3 is an interesting company to watch. Their stock closed under $1 today, but I think there is some real potential for this company to take off. Level3 started out in 2008 with a focus on the CDN Market. You can follow events on the archives at Data Center Knowledge, but since then they have had a change in CEO, acquired IBM's CDN patents, and dramatically increased the capacity of their CDN.

I ran across two things today that put Level3 on my radar. The first was an article at the BusinessofVideo.com blog about the Level3 Broadcast Encoding Centers. These encoding centers are a part of their ecosystem offerings that the article discusses.

"The new broadcast centers allows level 3 to provide support for encoding up to 24 simultaneous live events in Windows Media, Flash or Move Networks formats. And with both broadcast centers tied into Level 3's Vyvx offering, the company can also ingest video directly from customer's locations and downlink and uplink video from nearly 95% of the world's satellites"

The second item I found on the Level3 website -- an investor presentation that goes over the usual stock and company performance data.... but the first half of slides in the show really drive home the market they are in, how they plan to attack the opportunity, and really not a bad summary of where things are going in the market.

Kevin Rose, of digg.com and Revision3 fame .... I believe..... recently said he stopped all cable and satellite services in favor of watching everything on his computer. Maybe the IPTV movement will be the thing to watch in 2009. I know I am certainly watching a lot more shows/episodes/podcasts/whatever online anyway.

Akamai Enters the Data Center

Akamai is a pretty amazing company. They have been around since 1999, survived the dot com bust, losing their co-founder Danny Lewin in the 9/11 attacks and continue to be an innovative company among growing competition.

Today they announced a new application acceleration service. As product marketing manager Neil Cohen explains it, it takes traffic off the WAN and substitutes the Internet. The service utilizes their 27,000 + web points of presence world wide.

Akamai's software achieves faster response times by optimizing Internet routing, the vendor claims. Its server-based software opts, not for the default shortest path first as data traverses the network, but for a route that may look longer on a map but turn out to offer better response time. "We find good latency and an available path," Cohen states. Akamai also adds transport flow optimization and protocol optimization, he adds.

Pricing will be similar to their web application acceleration service. Akamai has had several trial customers for the service that claim to have recorded significant cost savings. Akamai shares jumped 8.7% on the news.

Check out the information in the following places:

Byte and Switch
Red Herring
Internet News
Reuters