A Few CDN Bites: Limelight, Level 3 Advance

Several bits of news came across the wires in the past few days in the CDN sector that were worth a look.  First of all, Dan Rayburn reported that both Level 3 and Limelight seem to have peeled off some of the Hulu traffic that has pretty much all belonged to Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) until now.  As Dan says, in this case it probably isn’t a pricing thing but rather a diversity thing.  As Hulu grows, they naturally will seek the flexibility of having multiple providers, which they can then play off against one another later on when it *is* a pricing thing.  But both Level 3 and Limelight had their own bits of news to report as well.

Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) introduced further initiatives designed to serve enterprise IT departments and e-commerce retailers.  This includes upgraded versions of the SITE web acceleration and the REACH mobile content services, new content storage solution and traffic balancing products, and new features for its CONTROL management portal.  But most interesting perhaps is their preview of a new edge computing service, which features dense regional server clusters offering enterprises managed computing capacity on demand.  Hard to believe they didn’t work the word ‘cloud’ into that somewhere, but nevertheless I do wonder where Limelight is going with this.

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) continued its European CDN blitzkreig.  First, they expanded their Content Delivery Partner program (err, I mean programme – hah) into the continent, and added NWIX as a Master Reseller alongside 14 other partners. Additionally, they won yet another video deal over on that side of the Atlantic, this time with Spanish station Telecinco.  Level 3 will be providing caching and streaming support for a variety of television series both live HD and on-demand.  They do seem to be winning more than their fair share of CDN deals over there.

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Categories: Content Distribution