When people talk about Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming, the focus is often on the fact that HTTP delivery is less expensive than traditional streaming. While this is true, that factor alone undersells the value of the technology. Going a level deeper, perhaps the biggest benefit of Smooth Streaming is the addition of adaptive bit rate functionality. Adaptive bit rate is the ability to dynamically adjust the quality of a video stream based on a user’s Internet connection and available bandwidth. The benefit is that content publishers can deliver the best video experience possible to all viewers, rather than dropping the performance bar to meet a lowest common denominator.

Yet even a discussion of adaptive bit rate doesn’t go deep enough. There are other benefits to the technology; other ways it provides value.

Smooth Streaming modifies traditional HTTP delivery so that it behaves more like content streaming rather than content downloading. This means that Smooth Streaming now provides a smoother, continuous playback experience, along with the flexibility to allow users to skip ahead or back within the video “stream” even though it is delivered via HTTP. And because it is HTTP, Smooth Streaming also gets around certain firewall issues resulting from standard streaming protocols, making content more accessible.

From a delivery perspective, HTTP is highly cacheable. Limelight Networks can support Smooth Streaming delivery with global caching and lightning-fast connections – using Limelight’s network platform – between Delivery Centers that house massive amounts of stored content. For consumers, this means super fast starts and complete downloads. Smooth Streaming literally smoothes out the delivery process, meaning no buffering, no disconnects, no playback stutter.

There’s more to the story too, and if you’re interested, check out our Feature Spotlight on Smooth Streaming. There are even further benefits when you combine our XD Platform with Smooth Streaming.

In the meantime, here are a few notable points to remember. Smooth Streaming provides:

• Affordable HTTP delivery
• Adaptive bit rate
• The ability to circumvent firewall issues with HTTP over Port 80
• Fast stream start-up
• Fast seek and skip

You can see Smooth Streaming in action on Microsoft’s site.

The Winter Games have officially ended for another year, and the mobile viewing statistics for 2010 compared to the Games in 2008 and 2006 are incredibly telling. Online viewing was a novelty during the last Winter Games. The trend picked up speed during the Beijing events two years ago, and mobile viewing began to gain traction then as well. But this year, the mobile platform hit its stride. While NBC has received its fair share of complaints for the way it chose to broadcast coverage of the Vancouver Games, audiences still flocked to the content both on TV and online. Here are the mobile stats as reported by NBC yesterday:

• In 16 days, the NBC Olympics Mobile platforms served up 82 million page views, more than doubling the 34.7 million page views during the entire Beijing Games
• Also in the first 16 days, NBC served 1.9 million mobile video streams, more than six times the number during 2008
• By the time the opening ceremony started, the Olympics Mobile platforms had already generated more page views than during the entire 2006 Games

Meanwhile, if you want a sense of what it took to produce all that coverage, take a look back at the dialog we recorded after the Beijing Games. The conversation comes from a session with Microsoft and NBC representatives during a Limelight Networks event in the fall of 2008. They covered everything from metadata creation to multi-bitrate delivery. You can also check out this video featuring Limelight engineers discussing more of the technical aspects behind delivering the Games. It’s no easy task.

Many of today’s TV and video dilemmas are at least a decade old. Take interactive television. Stop in at any iTV event today, and you could easily mistake it for an industry confab in the 1990’s. The same is true for talk of monetizing older content beyond a straight syndication model. It doesn’t go back quite as far as the iTV days, but you might remember hearing the example of Martha’s Stewart’s turkey-carving demonstration earlier this decade. The idea was that there ought to be a way to make money from people wanting to access Martha’s turkey demo after its original air date. Sounds reasonable, right? And yet the Martha Stewart dilemma still hasn’t been adequately solved.

Guvera is a company out of Australia and a Limelight Networks customer. The company is currently running a beta service in the land down under that matches targeted advertising with music libraries from Universal Music Group, EMI, and IODA. The music is completely free to consumers, but brings in revenue to the music studios through branded channels. Once a consumer logs in, he or she can search for a song, artist, or genre, and then click through to a branded page with free downloading and streaming available. Download files are all DRM-free.

Often there’s a chicken-and-egg problem of trying to line up content agreements while also getting advertisers on the hook. However, Guvera has top-notch music studios signed on in Australia, and an impressive list of advertisers including Johnson & Johnson, Dominos Pizza, Pepsi, McDonalds, and Nestle, among others.

Guvera’s ability to target brand sponsorships is what potentially gives it the ability to revolutionize content monetization. However, they couldn’t make the content delivery work without a little help, and that’s where Limelight Networks comes in. Much of the free-content landscape today is based on slow or best-effort content delivery, meaning the user experience can range from adequate to unbearable. The Guvera team knows that to make their business work, they have to start with a higher quality experience or risk losing users and advertisers alike. Limelight Networks is Guvera’s exclusive platform for delivering that experience with music streaming and downloads in Australia. And come March, we’ll also be their exclusive partner when Guvera launches in the US. More details to come, but Guvera has plans to launch video and television content by the middle of the year as well.

In the meantime, Guvera held a pre-launch party in New York last week. Several pubs have posted celebrity-laden photos from the event. We’ve got more screenshots from the service below.

On February 11, we hosted a webinar with Streaming Media on the topic of boosting website performance. More than anything, we were surprised and gratified by the volume of questions that poured in throughout the online event. Our speakers touched on a number of issues that were relevant to the attendees, and we could have continued the discussion for yet another hour with all of the questions that were submitted.

Since we didn’t have time to answer all of the questions asked during the webinar, we’ve decided to follow up by addressing some of the top issues here. If you participated in the webinar and had a very specific question, don’t worry, a Limelight Networks team member will contact you directly. For the broader audience, however, we’ve listed below the top three categories of questions received along with our responses.

Website Optimization - Where to Start?

If your content delivery challenges are threatening to overwhelm, it helps to take a step back and prioritize. For improving delivery, the element you probably have greatest control over is page layout. Optimizing layout means optimizing delivery of every element on the page, whether it’s a script, a JPEG file, or a Flash video. There are numerous online resources offering tips to optimize site layout including the Yahoo Developer Network blog and die.net’s Optimizing Page Load Time article (written by a Google engineer). However, one easy trick is to insert placeholder images for any video on your site. Once a user clicks on the image, then you can serve up that asset. In the meantime, there’s no need to slow down your page load unnecessarily.

Other issues to address early include your content storage configuration, and cache control headers. If you use a CDN, it’s important to ensure that the connection between your origin infrastructure and your CDN provider’s delivery system is as fast a possible. Likewise if you use a CDN, you can improve the performance of your site by setting the correct cache control headers so that old content doesn’t slow down your delivery.

Want more suggestions? Take a look back at the “Top Five List for Optimizing Delivery” in the archived webinar.

Security - How Secure is Secure Enough?

There are a number of different ways to secure your content, but how you decide to proceed depends on your business case. Are you delivering content that is proprietary? Is it content that gives your company a competitive advantage? If so, you need to consider securing your content at its source, during transmission, and at the point of user access. Want more details? Check out the Limelight Networks Media Vault services.

Players and Platforms - How to Choose?

We get asked all the time by our customers what platforms they should use to deliver their content. It would be nice if there was a simple answer, but there rarely is. Take media players, for example. Flash boasts the largest audience, reaching more than 99% of Internet users, while Silverlight offers unique features for developer flexibility and cross-platform consumer media experiences. One or the other may be better for your business case, or it may be that you need a multi-platform, or even a multiple-device strategy. If you need guidance for your specific situation, let us know. We’d be happy to help.

This morning, we announced an agreement to acquire privately-held EyeWonder, Inc. You can read the full press release here.

If you’d like to listen to a replay of a conference call with our executives, you can dial 800-633-8284 or +1 402-977-9140 and enter passcode 21450847.

Yesterday, our corporate headquarters in Tempe was announced as one of the “Best Places to Work” in the Phoenix area.

The award, sponsored by the Phoenix Business Journal and BestCompaniesAZ, recognizes companies that create a work environment that supports and encourages their most valued resource – a talented employee base.

It’s an honor for our company to make the list and be a part of the 124 “Best Place to Work” in the Valley. The list was based on our programs, benefits, work environment and most importantly, our employees’ view of Limelight Networks.

We would like to thank and congratulate all of our employees across the globe for making Limelight Networks a great place to work while delivering brilliance on a daily basis.

The following post is written by Jonathan Cobb, CTO of our mobility and monetization solutions.

Last week, Verizon launched Motorola’s new Droid phone to much fanfare. According to Motorola, they sold 250,000 Droid smartphones in its first week, making it the most successful launch of an Android-based phone so far. And it certainly put Android on the map as a serious contender. Prior to the Droid launch, only smaller carriers like T-Mobile offered Android phones. Now the largest carrier in the US is putting all of its weight behind it, and it shows: Droid, in just short while on the market, already accounts for about one third of mobile video usage among Android phones.

So the big question to media publishers is: how will your video look on the Droid? Do you know if it even plays? Is the quality level the best it can be?

For publishers that have focused solely on the iPhone so far, making the jump to non-Apple devices can present a challenge. The sheer variety of screen sizes, operating system quirks, and video encoding parameters is truly staggering. Publishers who try to manage this chaos on their own quickly find themselves spending inordinate amounts of time playing catchup, contorting their publishing processes, and taking their focus away from where it should be - creating a compelling content experience for their audience, and growing that audience.

The LimelightREACH product was specifically designed to handle these inevitable events (and a whole lot more). Publishers using LimelightREACH didn’t have to change a thing. Their mobile websites didn’t have to change. The URLs to their videos on their mobile websites didn’t have to change. They never had to republish anything.

As if by magic, when a Droid user clicks to watch their video, the video plays, and it looks great. Which is exactly the user experience that every publisher wants their audience to have — it just works, no hassles.

With an ever-increasing number of handsets hitting the market in the coming months, Android and otherwise, this little adventure is bound to repeat itself ad naseum. Publishers who invest a little now in a scalable mobile video platform like LimelightREACH will reap huge operational efficiency rewards in the years to come.

Earlier this month Limelight Networks announced a deal with Bell in Canada to provide CDN services to the telco’s business customers. It’s a model that’s similar to the Limelight Networks partnership with Global Crossing, and representative of a trend we’re seeing among telecom companies looking to expand their traditional services. Here to provide more details is Adam Wray, Vice President, Channels and Alliances.

The new partnership with Bell is more than just a typical reseller deal. Because we operate an optical network just like Bell does, we can combine our delivery assets with their core network to integrate deeply with their existing broadband delivery services. This means a lot of joint effort between our two companies, but the upfront labor investment has big advantages. For Bell, we feed their highest revenue businesses. By being able to offer increased throughput and server availability, Bell can sell higher-value services to more customers. Bell also has access to the entire Limelight Networks ecosystem for related applications including content hosting, ad insertion, and performance monitoring, among many others. For us at Limelight Networks, the close integration with Bell gives us massive reach throughout Canada (Bell is the largest telco provider in the country), and greater insight into the Internet traffic patterns of Canadian broadband users. More visibility into the network lets us continue to refine and improve our delivery model.

We’ve found that telcos increasingly want strong CDN capabilities, but it’s a business that’s not core for them. It requires a great deal of capital and technical expertise, and for that reason, the CDN partnership model has growing support. Business customers find the CDN add-on appealing as well. Bell has already talked about signing multiple deals during the go-to-market period, including Astral Media, which is Canada’s largest broadcast of English and French-language pay and specialty TV services. The response has been incredible, and we’re just getting started.

This week’s NANOG meeting (the North American Network Operators Group) is shaping up to be one of most interesting to date. Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan, and Merit Network are presenting their findings at NANOG47 from a two-year global study of Internet traffic. The Internet Observatory Report is said to include analysis of changes in: Internet topology, commercial relationships between service providers, and Internet protocols and applications. The groups responsible for the report have already published some initial findings, and one data point in particular stands out. According to the study, there has been a rise in “Hyper Giants” of Internet traffic.

“Five years ago, Internet traffic was proportionally distributed across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers around the world. Today, most content has increasingly migrated to a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers. Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies – ‘hyper giants’ like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube – now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.”

The consolidation of traffic supports a premise that Limelight Networks has touted for some time: the importance of the middle mile. While traffic used to flow in a much more distributed fashion from end point to end point, a great number of IP packets today start in large data centers on hosted servers and are routed down the most efficient path before connecting to a last-mile network. This consolidation in the middle mile towards more efficient, network-based carriers leads to greater control and higher performance along the content delivery chain.

If that last point of emphasis sounds familiar, it should. Recently we announced the Limelight Networks next-generation XD Platform. The XD Platform is based on several patent-pending software technologies, but one of its key strengths is the ability to “see” network conditions around the world. Using that data, the platform determines the best route through the middle mile (largely on the private Limelight fiber network) and also to the end-user by adapting settings for the Internet conditions at that moment for high-performance (i.e. fast, sustained) content delivery. In other words, a lot of Internet traffic is conducted by Limelight Networks because of the promise of better, faster delivery. Hyper Giants are the companies like Limelight Networks that have perfected efficient delivery and have therefore started to gather a high percentage of Internet traffic over the last two years. We’re the FedEx and UPS companies of the IP world.

Interested in learning more? Read the complete Internet Observatory Report here.

With the rapid adoption of smartphones, widgets, set-top boxes, and other emerging devices, consumers are connecting to the Internet in entirely new ways. Wherever they are in the world and at any time, day or night, they expect a powerful online experience—with every content request they make.

To meet these escalating expectations, we’ve introduced XD, a global platform that combines network innovations with a patent-pending software layer called Adaptive Intelligence. Adaptive Intelligence operates within our network infrastructure to make real-time decisions about each content request — enabling every delivery to be handled as uniquely as the request.

The Adaptive Intelligence software layer includes four new technologies:

• Protocol Maximization configures standard delivery protocols on a per-connection, per-delivery basis for maximum performance.
• Globally Distributed User Agents gather real-time data about last-mile network conditions, providing insight into the end-user experience.
• Dynamic Origin automatically pulls copies of content from the origin based on usage and demand, protecting against overload and optimizing delivery.
• Custom Cache Hierarchies expedite the transfer of content to the edge based on the unique characteristics of each request.

To take advantage of the power and intelligence of the XD Platform, our customers can choose two new services, available today:

• LimelightDELIVER XD, a turbocharged version of our flagship content delivery service; and
• LimelightCONTROL XD, a suite of advanced management technologies that provide unprecedented levels of insight into and control over CDN operations.