This past week, Michael Jackson showed how the Internet has evolved over the past ten years into a truly global communications medium. News of his untimely passing last week drove millions not to their televisions or radios, but rather, their keyboards and cell phones. In a way Jackson’s status as a global celebrity, combined with the power of the Internet, ‘flattened’ the world, and on June 25, we, as a global community, together experienced the news of his passing .

The effect on the Internet infrastructure was experienced far and wide. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, told the L.A. Times that “this particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.” And Google Trends rated the relevance of the Jackson story as volcanic.

For Limelight Networks’ customer TMZ.com, being the first to break news meant a flash crowd of millions of new readers, as well as a web of referring links and traffic from sites referencing the original story. In this extreme situation, their site had to perform its best and serve the story to all.

UPDATE 1: Hitwise is reporting that traffic to TMZ reached a 3 year high, with visits increasing 5x in volume from the previous day. TMZ was 60th among all websites on Thursday when ranked by the market share of visits, up from 305th on Wednesday, June 24th. Click here to see traffic charts.

In a June 29 radio interview with Ryan Seacrest, TMZ.com founder and CEO Harvey Levin explains: “It seemed to me that social media [users] were keying into what was real, in some ways faster than traditional media…And so, the story itself brought down part of the Internet…Twitter and Facebook were having huge technical problems. In pop culture, it’s a whole different world now.”

What kept TMZ up and serving their story to the world was a result of their site’s ability to scale on-demand to absorb peak traffic, thanks to proper planning beforehand by the TMZ IT team. There are lessons here from which all site operators can learn and benefit.  These lessons are put into practice for our customers everyday by our professional services organization. As General Manager of this group, Dave Burkhardt and team have helped customers prepare their infrastructure for some of most extreme, high-trafficked events on the Internet, including the 2008 Beijing Summer Games and the Obama Inauguration. We asked Dave to share some best practices for making your site available during extreme conditions, and here are five points he provided:

Build a capacity plan. “Creating one in your early stages will save you time and money later on. Hence, having a thoroughly vetted capacity plan will help expedite technology expenditures when your traffic starts to expand. When building out your plan, make sure you include all layers of your infrastructure. Start from understanding the limitations of your data center and then work your way up the technology stack, while focusing on the most common bottlenecks like storage I/O, CPU, or databases,” says Dave.

Do a health check of your systems. Burkhardt explains: “Ensure your origin architecture is performing optimally. If you are using a CDN, a poor performing origin can limit the full benefits and the ROI associated with having an outsource partner.”

Offload popular content from your origin. “When traffic spikes occur, some of the ways outages can be avoided is by ensuring that your most popular content is not being served directly from your origin, “ explains Dave. “Additionally, many sites during high growth stages will experience difficulties around delivery of their images or thumbnails. Offloading services to a CDN can assist you greatly with your ability to scale and absorb traffic spikes.”

Remember the end-user. “Many companies we work with optimize their internal systems, but still hear complaints from their end-users. Why? They forgot to look at the last mile. Using third-party performance measurements to understand your end-user’s experience is critical, as is using those tools to tune ongoing performance.”

Make monitoring and reporting a constant, ongoing discipline. “Continually track, review, and update your systems and application instrumentation. These efforts will help to ensure that you have a meaningful and accurate capacity plan developed, and show you how you are tracking to that plan,” notes Dave.

Limelight Networks offers a full suite of professional services that can help companies plan for unexpected traffic spikes. If you’d like more information, please email us.

As a side note, there were some erroneous reports that the TMZ site went down, but those were corrected later on in the news cycle. For example, an AOL representative told TechCrunch (see Update 5 at the bottom of the page) “our internal records show that the site didn’t experience any interruption due to traffic. It’s possible that some people may have had trouble accessing the site due to local network issues, but TMZ was not down.”

Yesterday, Limelight Networks’ Jonathan Cobb, National Public Media’s Bryan Moffet, and Streaming Media’s Eric Schumacher-Rassmussen participated in a webinar entitled “Mobile Content: Why Now, and How?”

A brief description of the webinar follows:

Consumers are watching more rich media than ever before, and are doing so on a ever-expanding variety of mobile devices and smart phones with high-resolution screens and broadband wireless connections. A recent Nielsen report showed that over 13.4 million Americans watch video on their mobile phones, and average about 3 hours of mobile video viewed each month.

While mobile video has the potential to be an added revenue stream for content owners, challenges still remain in customizing, monetizing and distributing content to this growing universe of connected devices.

Join Limelight Networks mobility expert Jonathan Cobb for a one-hour webcast that explores:

• The ever-growing audience of connected devices and their characteristics
• Why publishers should begin extending their brands to mobile devices
• The most effective way to deliver content beyond the web browser
• How to integrate mobile advertising with your existing ad trafficking tools

You can view the on-demand webcast here.

We were overwhelmed with the amount of interest in the topic, and didn’t have time to answer all of the questions in the hour-long session. So, we promised attendees to follow up with a post answering the questions we didn’t get to. Here, straight from Jonathan Cobb, are those answers:

Q: For a content publisher who wants to use a subscription model, how is the billing component handled (both domestic and international)?

Cobb: Limelight Networks can send end-user activity data collected by our systems (such as: which videos were sent, URLs requested, etc.) directly to your billing system to facilitate your own billing processes.

Q: Kiptronic was just recently acquired by Limelight Networks. How does this change how customers will use Kiptronic’s and/Limelight’s service?

Cobb: Good question. Short answer – nothing changes, and our scalability and reliability increases.  If you were a Kiptronic customer, you won’t see any change to your service now that we are part of Limelight Networks. But as I mentioned, the former Kiptronic solution will now use Limelight Networks’ distributed computing platform and global resources to serve the world’s largest publishers. This gives us scale and reach that we didn’t have as a smaller company.

Q: Does Limelight plan to deploy the WowzaMedia server?

Cobb: We do not have plans to deploy Wowza at this time.

Q: How secure is live television streaming to the iPhone? How can content owners protect it?

Cobb: First, in our experience, theft of content via mobile delivery is very rare in actual practice, more than likely because mobile phone screens are much smaller than computer or TV screens. Content protection is typically done by URL authentication/tokenization: an external authentication process assigns a unique token to the request, and then Limelight Networks can ensure that only authorized users receive a stream.

Q: How is video quality managed in the “last mile” of mobile delivery? How do I know if my brand is associated with a quality experience and impression?

Cobb: Excellent question. The video encoding profiles chosen and managed by Limelight Networks make sure that the best possible quality video is packed into the fewest number of bits. This minimizes buffering and latency, and  provides the best possible chance of a brilliant end user experience. That being said, if a customer is in a spotty cellular area, or happens to drive into the Holland Tunnel while viewing your content, there isn’t much anyone can do about that.

Thanks to all that attended yesterday’s event!

The 2008 U.S. Open Golf Championship was memorable for two reasons: The event itself, with  Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate tied after playing 90 holes in five days and Woods winning his third Open on the first hole of sudden death; and the online streaming of the event itself, where millions of golf fans watched the Monday afternoon playoff from their office desktops.

The mixture of professional sporting events, great Internet content and broadband-connected audiences always seems to make a bit of history.

That’s why we’re excited to be have been selected by msnbc.com as their streaming provider for this year’s U.S. Open, building on our successful work together during last year’s Open and following up on the recent work our companies did together to stream the French Open online. Msnbc.com will be using Limelight Live Event Services and LimelightSTREAM for Adobe Flash to make the Open available on its ‘Golf on NBC’ website.

U.S. Open coverage on msnbc.com begins on June 18 – and we can’t wait to see what moments are in store this year (especially considering the soggy conditions at Bethpage). For a complete listing of all of msnbc.com’s Golf coverage for this year, visit http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/22965734/.

Yesterday, Limelight Networks and Global Crossing hosted a discussion about content acceleration strategies and the benefits of a carrier/CDN partnership. We wanted to recap the event in a post for those who couldn’t attend.

The featured speaker at the event was David Vorhaus, Senior Analyst at Yankee Group who opened the session with a presentation entitled “Finding Customer Value at the Intersection of Carriers and Content Delivery.” Below are the highlights of David’s presentation, and you can register to download the white paper given to attendees here.

David began his talk by noting that the market is in the process of converging multiple, distinct networks (public and private, business and residential, retail and wholesale) onto a single IP backbone. This convergence presents a challenge and an opportunity for service providers and those riding over-the-top of the network

As a result, carriers are moving away from dedicated pipes for each vertical application on their network, to a horizontal service distribution-centric philosophy:

At the same time, video traffic continues its explosive growth.  According to Cisco, global Internet video traffic will be almost 18 exabytes/month by 2013. And network operators are not provisioning for this increase, requiring publishers to find an alternate solution such as CDNs:

There are three reasons why content owners of all types are using CDNs:

1) Online video is no longer a consumer application; its use is rapidly growing in business applications

2) The buy vs. build debate is over. Building doesn’t make sense as its costly, tough to achieve scale, and there is no proven ROI.

3) CDNs can deliver immediate impact: 3x increase in site traffic and performance; 30% increase in number of page views; 10x increase in ad impressions; 80% reduction in infrastructure investments; 5x increase in user-generated content uploads; 5x acceleration of web applications; 4x reduction in application transaction time

Seven of the top 13 IP backbone providers are offering CDN services today, including Global Crossing reselling Limelight Networks.  What are the benefits?

Also presenting were David Siegal, Vice President of Product Management at Global Crossing (left), and Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Technical Services at Limelight Networks (right).

They jointly presented an overview of GC and Limelight’s services, and then ended with this key slide:

If you have any questions about the joint solutions of Global Crossing and Limelight Networks, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Last evening, Limelight Networks attended the Awards Gala for the 13^th Annual Webby Awards, hosted by Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers and held at Cipriani in New York City.

The Webby Awards have long honored the best of the Internet – the new and different innovations on the web, and the creative people behind those innovations. Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 650-person judging academy whose members include David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Arianna Huffington, Matt Groening, Vinton Cerf, and Richard Branson.

The Webbys celebrate what’s brilliant online, and that’s why we are proud to be a sponsor for this year’s event. We couldn’t think of a better alignment for our brand. To quote Biz Stone’s five-word acceptance speech from last evening, “Creativity is a renewable resource.”

Visit http://www.webbyawards.com/ to see our sponsorship in action. We’re delivering the on-demand video of the winners on the site, using LimelightDELIVER and our Adobe Flash infrastructure.

We also want to provide a special congratulations to all of the winners, many of whom are Limelight Networks customers. Thank you for continuing to push our industry forward with your innovation.

Update: Kelly Samardak for Just An Online Minute has posted more pictures on Flickr.

Here are some pictures from last night’s event:

Sponsor’s list greeting attendees. That’s our logo bottom left.

The “ICanHazSponsor” slide during the opening session.

Host Seth Meyers delivers the opening monologue.

Beaker delivers a five-word acceptance speech (“Mep. Mep. Mep. Mep. Mep.”) on behalf of the Muppets Online

Seth Meyers introduces Seth Macfarlane.

“Free. Open. Keep one web,” says Tim Berners-Lee as he received a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Other highlights from last night include:

Multiple winners such as: NPR (7); NYTimes.com (6); NBC.com (6); Next New Networks (5); PBS (4); BBC (4); The Onion (3); Digg (3); Sundance Channel (3); YouTube Live (3); and Wired.com (3).

Achieving both critical and popular consensus, 36 works won both a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award including: Boston.com’s “The Big Picture”(Best Use of Photography); “1000 Awesome Things”(Best Cultural/Personal Blog); “Stickman Exodus”(Best Animation); “Prop. 8: The Musical”(Best Comedy: Short or Individual Episode); “Mint.com”(Best Financial Services); “TheAtlantic.com”(Best Magazine); “Flight of the Conchords Lip Dub”(Best Television); Current TVs “Hack the Debate”(Best Use of Interactive Video); “The Extreme Sticky Notes Experiments”(Best Branded Content); and “Xero”(Best Banking).

Newcomers this year include Qik (Best Use of Mobile Video), aki-aki (Best Social Networking-Mobile), Animoto (Best Services and Applications), and Yearbook Yourself (Viral Marketing).

The judges and public parted ways in several popular categories. For Viral Video, pop phenomenon “Shiba Inu Puppy Cam”earned the public’s top votes, while “The Website is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude”was selected by the judges. For Best Individual Performance, the Academy chose Isabella Rossellini for “Green Porno,”while fans selected Eden Riegel for “Imaginary Bitches.”And for Best Weird, judges embraced “Jason Nelson’s Digital Oddities,”while the public voted for “FAIL Blog.”

Winners of the 13h Annual Webby Awards hail from 14 countries including: United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, Greece, India, Germany, France, and Brazil.

We are pleased to announce that this morning, we’ve acquired Kiptronic, Inc. Based in Silicon Valley, Kiptronic develops mobility and monetization solutions for content publishers, and is both a great compliment and addition to our global distributed computing platform. We’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks as our teams begin working closely together - for now, here’s the press release:

Limelight Networks® Acquires Mobility and Monetization Innovator Kiptronic, Inc.

Tempe, AZ – 21 May 2009 – Limelight Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: LLNW) today announced the acquisition of Kiptronic, Inc., a privately-held provider of dynamic solutions for device-optimized content delivery and monetization.

“A sweeping change in consumer behavior is driving a migration of media consumption from the PC to a wider variety of Internet-connected and mobile devices. Today, the distribution and monetization of content on these devices is complex and difficult to implement in a scalable fashion. The combination of Limelight Networks’ distributed computing and delivery platform with Kiptronic’s device-targeting and dynamic ad insertion technologies will allow us to provide the world’s largest media and entertainment companies a streamlined and scalable solution to this problem,” said Jeff Lunsford, chairman and chief executive officer, Limelight Networks, Inc. “We look forward to working with the talented Kiptronic team to bring to market additional innovative solutions for mobile and connected devices that will benefit our customers and our ecosystem partners.”

Kiptronic’s services enable content publishers to deliver content and dynamic advertisements tailored to the mobile or connected device without making changes to their existing publishing, hosting, trafficking, or reporting platforms. Kiptronic’s web-based tools help advertisers dynamically detect and serve dynamic video ads to connected devices with the same ease and functionality as when they are served to web browsers. Kiptronic’s open-platform approach includes integration with DoubleClick® DART for Publishers and Microsoft® Atlas AdManager, part of the Atlas Publisher Suite. Kiptronic works with publishers such as NPR, FOX, The Guardian, Conde Nast, The Economist, and Minnesota Public Radio, and was recently selected to provide dynamic mobile video ad solutions for NBC.com.

As part of Limelight Networks, the Kiptronic team will continue to remain focused on building mobility and monetization solutions.

“Today is an exciting day for Kiptronic customers, partners, and employees. Mobile and connected devices are the next phase of growth for the Internet, and by joining together with Limelight Networks, the Kiptronic solution gains the scale and resources necessary to help the world’s largest media companies capitalize on this emerging opportunity,” said Bill Loewenthal, president and chief executive officer, Kiptronic, Inc.

Terms of the transaction, which was completed with a combination of Limelight Networks common stock and cash, were not disclosed.

Safe-Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning the company’s operations and use of acquired technology and intellectual property. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially including, risks associated with the integration of acquired business operations and other risks described in the company’s quarter report on Form 10Q and other periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company assumes no duty or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements for any reason

About Kiptronic

Kiptronic makes mobile video as easy as online video, enabling the world’s largest major media publishers to mobilize and monetize their video content with ease. Kiptronic’s industry-leading solution delivers device-optimized, ad-supported video and audio content directly to the consumer via mobile phones, iPhone™, smartphones, disconnected portable media players, PC applications (i.e. iTunes®, social widgets), internet connected TVs, and game platforms. Kiptronic is integrated into the leading Content Delivery Networks including Akamai, Limelight Networks, Mirror-Image Internet, CD Networks and Level 3. Kiptronic’s dynamic video and audio ad-insertion technology also works with DoubleClick®’s DART for Publishers, Microsoft’s Atlas AdManager and Omniture. For more information, visit www.kiptronic.com.

About Limelight Networks, Inc.

Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) is trusted by the world’s most innovative enterprise, entertainment, technology, and software brands to improve the performance and profitability of web sites and end-user experiences. Our scalable, on-demand managed infrastructure solutions provide global reach and consistently high availability, by routing traffic over a private fiber-optic backbone rather than through the often-congested, unpredictable public Internet. For more information, visit our web site (http://www.limelightnetworks.com), read our blog (http://blog.llnw.com), or follow @llnw on Twitter.

Copyright © 2009 Limelight Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. All product or service names are the property of their respective owners

Interested in learning more about LimelightSITE? Product Manager Ken Iverson presented a 20-minute overview this week at the 2009 Streaming Media East conference. You can view the video here.

We’re exhibiting at the Streaming Media East trade show this week in New York City this week, and are making a few announcements via this post about our portfolio of Adobe products.

First, following up on the announcement we made at the NAB show in April, we are now rolling Adobe Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5 technologies through our production network, with support for both the features in versions 3.0 and 3.5. New features in Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 include dynamic streaming; enhanced H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support; and the ability to pause and seek within a live stream.

Second, we are announcing our full support for Adobe’s open framework for building custom media players, code-named “Strobe.” We have long provided our customers with the tools so they could very quickly build their own media players, in an effort to help content publishers focus on what they do best – create and monetize great experiences.  Adobe’s Strobe initiative provides us an even greater ability to help our customers focus on brilliant experiences, as it taps into the wealth of talent, resources, and expertise already available in the content ecosystem.

As is customary for new product announcements, we’ve provided a quote, attributable to Peter Coppola, our vice president of product management:

“Limelight Networks is pleased to support Adobe Strobe as a key initiative for helping publishers better monetize their content. We have long been an active supporter of industry-platform projects, and Strobe is a welcome addition to the open online video ecosystem. We look forward to working closely with Adobe to develop innovative ways to integrate Strobe’s framework into our video delivery technologies, including enhancing the free player tools we already make available to customers and delivering plug-ins that will enable Strobe-based players to take advantage of the robust, scalable features of our network-based delivery platform.”

We’ll be working with Adobe over the summer to contribute to the beginnings of Strobe, and expect our plug-ins and tools to be available shortly after the Strobe framework launches in Q3.

If you are attending the show, please stop our booth (#400) at Streaming Media East.

This weekend, we were pleased to distribute the following press release:

Court Rules Limelight Networks™ Does Not Infringe Akamai Patent

TEMPE, Ariz., 26 April 2009 – Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) today announced that the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts has granted Limelight’s motion for judgment as a matter of law, setting aside a prior jury verdict and ruling that Limelight does not infringe U.S. Patent No. 6,108,703 in Akamai Technologies, Inc., et al. v. Limelight Networks, Inc. (Civil Action No. 06-11109-RWZ).

“We are pleased the Court granted our motion for reconsideration in this matter and ruled in our favor. We have long maintained that we do not infringe the ‘703 patent,” stated Jeff Lunsford, chairman and chief executive officer, Limelight Networks, Inc. “This ruling affirms that Limelight Networks respects the intellectual property of others, and that our growth and success have been achieved through our own innovation, hard work, and customer-focused operations. We look forward to continued collaboration with our customers and partners as we work to enable a global shift in content consumption from closed to open networks, where consumers can enjoy their desired content whenever, wherever and on whatever connected device they choose.”

The Company expects this ruling to allow it to reverse expenses of approximately $66 million accrued for potential damages and interest.

The Court’s Memorandum and Order, issued on April 24, 2009, cites the standard set forth in the recently decided MuniAuction, Inc. v. Thomson Corp., 532 F.3d 1318 (Fed. Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 2009 WL 578715 (U.S. March 9, 2009) as a key element in deciding to grant Limelight Networks’ motion.

# # #

Safe-Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning Limelight’s operations, financial accruals for the Akamai litigation, and use of intellectual property. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially including the inherent risks associated with litigation, particularly intellectual property-based litigation. Among other factors, the court’s decision in Limelight’s favor is subject to appeal and could be modified or reversed on appeal. In addition to incurring ongoing legal expenses in further proceedings, if the court’s decision were modified or reversed on appeal, there is the possibility that the Company could ultimately face an adverse judgment that could have a material adverse effect on our operations and financial results. The Company assumes no duty or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements for any reason.

About Limelight Networks, Inc.

Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) is a content delivery partner enabling the next wave of Internet business and entertainment. The world’s most innovative Internet, entertainment, software, and technology brands trust our robust, scalable platform to deliver a brilliant online experience to their global audiences. Our innovative, network-based delivery approach enables web content to maintain consistently high levels of performance and availability, by routing traffic over our private fiber-optic backbone rather than through the often-congested, unpredictable public Internet.

For more information, visit our corporate website (http://www.limelightnetworks.com), read our blog (http://blog.llnw.com), or follow @llnw on Twitter.

Copyright (C) 2009 Limelight Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. All product or service names are the property of their respective owners

We wanted to highlight two new studies that were released this week in conjunction with the NAB 2009 trade show. One was commissioned by Accenture, the another by Nielsen, and both cover access, engagement, and audience behavior. If you are a subscriber of our Twitter (@llnw) feed you may have already picked up on these links.

The first is Accenture’s Global Broadcast Survey, which found:

• Television viewing is fragmenting as consumption of video grows.
• Viewing of all content - including television - is growing across all platforms
• Emerging markets are ripe with new media opportunities
• Consumers will pay for the right subscription services.

Visit Accenture’s web site to register and download the survey.

The second study is Nielsen’s report on social media and video site engagement. This one found that:

• The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003.
• Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same period.
• In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 percent, the number of streams grew 41 percent, the streams per user grew 27 percent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 percent.
• There are 87 percent more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883 percent more time devoted to those sites.
• In the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.
• In February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.

To download this report, visit Nielsen’s web site.