Hello soup,
This is a very good post, and most of the descriptions and assumptions are accurate ... except ...
> One of the theories I floated a few days ago was that AOL (and the
> other ISP's) have actual, physical buildings set up throughout the
> country where they have fat internet pipes, central connections
> where their users dial in, and a staff already hired to maintain
> such. To me, leveraging those existing facilities and having very
> local, mirrored streams would be much easier than Akamai coming
> into a new town, hiring a new staff, renting a new building,
> building a new relationship with the local telco's, etc. etc. Plus,
> AOL has a proprietary interface and "world" that the general
> internet world can't access. AOL-TV powered by Quicktime would tend
> to be a very, very nice fit, IMHO.
The problem with this idea, is that AOL can only really do this for AOL customers. Admitted this is a large audience, but a true streaming media distribution network needs to be agnostic about ISPs and backbones ... they need to be able to deliver the content to the customers who want it. This means that they need to co-locate their splitters and servers in the infrastructure of a variety of ISPs ... the ones being used by consumers.
What Akamai is doing is fantastic ... they are creating the network above the network ... what I call "Object Routing" in my research. There are several other players ... such as the Real Broadcast Network ... Real *needs* to continue to develop this infrastructure ...
Also, Akamai doesn't have to go to each "city" and get buildings, local telco relationship, etc. All they need to do is co-locate their hardware within various ISPs existing facilities. The ISP is probably going to negotiate a favorable rate with Akamai since the presence of their hardware (caching and splitting) are designed to optimize packet and stream flow and reduce duplicate traffic on the upstream Internet connections.
This is one of many new services/businesses that I believe is going to explode in the coming years ... it's the Internet equivalent of building Blockbuster video stores in every town to optimize the flow of new videos to consumers ... ;-)
Scott C. Lemon |
