Distributor
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Learning who the distribution players are is as important as learning about data formats. Let's look at details about each of the distributors:
iBEAM Broadcasting is the world’s largest satellite-based network, capable of delivering more than 300,000 simultaneous streams. iBeam has solved the “too many router hops” problem associated with moving video over the Internet by beaming streams of data directly to terrestrial data centers, regional backbone companies and ISPs. When a request for video comes in from an end user, iBeam’s intelligent redirection software performs a lookup and sends the request to the server closest to the end user. iBeam places servers inside ISPs at no cost and sees them as "affiliate partners." As Peter Macdonald, Director of Strategic Planning for iBeam explains, “The data iBeam streams to an ISP via satellite represents a significant amount of traffic that does not have to travel across an ISP's Internet connection.” To further encourage ISP participation in iBeam’s satellite streaming model, the company has introduced a co-branding opportunity with the House of Blues Web site whereby a percentage of pay-per-view revenue will be shared with the access provider for traffic driven to weekly events.
Enron is the world's largest marketer of electricity and natural gas and has built a private network to facilitate a streaming media delivery platform. Designed to enhance online commerce, entertainment and financial services, Enron's ePowered Media Cast technology combines fiber and satellite technology with a distributed server network, and it's Enron's 10,000 route miles of fiber that's the key to their "one hop" model. Instead of sharing a data path with voice and other forms of data, their private fiber network moves data to 15 "city pops" or data centers in major cities and 20 ISP partners in 67 locations on the "edge" of their network. The number of route miles of fiber will expand to 20,000 by the end of 2000 and the number of city pops will expand to 25 by the end of this year. Said Kirk Wright, Product Manager for Media Cast, "With an OC12 and an OC48 network there's an unlimited amount of 'upside' growth possible in Enron's network. We're expanding to Europe, Asia and South America; and by the end of 2000, we will have roughly 500 'e-powered' ISP POPs in place for a 'one hop' model. In our system, we replicate streaming content and push them to the edge of our network. When an end user clicks on a feed, our software does a quick IP lookup and video is them streamed directly off of an 'e-powered' server in a close geographic location. This significantly cuts down on network congestion by avoiding the major bottlenecks of the public Internet."
Akamai is a Hawaiian word that means "clever and intelligent." Founded by Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin in 1995, Akamai's solution to the Internet's router hop problem grew out of MIT when Tim Berners Lee challenged student Danny Lewin and Professor Tom Leighton to solve the "hot spots" or "congestion" inherent in the Internet. Tom Leighton was Danny Lewin's professor at MIT and he is still on MIT's faculty. Together, they invented a technology called "FreeFlow" that is based on caching and intelligent routing technology. At any given moment, Akamai FreeFlow technology finds the best server to serve streams -- based on powerful intelligence built into Akamai's networks. In Akamai’s model, not all content is duplicated on all servers. Rather than replicate content on all servers, subsets of the data are stored or cached redundantly -- a solution that makes the whole network run reliably even though individual components/networks may fail.
Akamai Technologies is known for its content delivery service and not all of what they deliver is streaming. For example, Akamai delivered the Star Wars trailer using QuickTime's "QuickStart," a pseudo-streaming technology. They also distribute aggregated content for Apple's QTTV site. Senior Product manager Ray Weaver explains that although Akamai's has acquired a lot of experience working for Apple Computer, they view themselves as "content agnostic." The media formats Akamai will deliver include Apple's QuickTime, Real Audio and Video, Windows Media Player and Streaming MP3. Ray Weaver says end users will never know Akamai is in the background but they will experience better streams. As he explains, "Our goal is to blanket the Internet with servers - and that's half the battle. Akamai servers are spread across 100 different commercial networks -- we even have a presence in Sri Lanka."