Yesterday, Jason Pernow of Ziff Davis blogged about “Why The Olympics Didn’t Melt the Internet,” citing Limelight Networks and our innovative technology as a main reason. Other publications have done the same.Today, one of our competitors responded to Jason’s post and questioned the viability of our technical approach.In the interest of fair reporting, Jason let us respond and he posted our points in his article as well.

Our competitor questioned the way Jason described our network, yet missed the point of the article entirely: the Olympics haven’t melted the Internet, and that’s because of Limelight Networks. In Jason’s own words, the video experience “just plain works.”  (See for yourself:  visit NBCOlympics.com on MSN to see the brilliant experience we’re enabling for what is now widely considered the largest event ever on the Internet.)

What’s more interesting, however, is what’s apparent from our competitor’s response – that their focus remains today where it has always been, on their own technical obsessions.  Limelight’s point of view, beginning the day we founded the company, has been fundamentally different.  We view the evolution of Internet media as first and foremost about human change on a global scale.  Our objective is to help content publishers evolve the ways in which they inform, amuse, entertain, and persuade and, in doing so, help them build great digital media businesses.  Along the way, we hope to help drive a better, more powerful intersection of the nearly infinite breadth and reach of the Internet with the deeply engaging, compellingly immersive use of sight, sound, and motion that have made the modern media industry’s stories so much a part of our daily lives and our lifelong memories.

The Summer Games represent a huge collection of such stories, about athletes and their families, their homes and countries, and their successes and near-misses.  It is these stories that matter, not Limelight; it is the athletes we should revel in, not Limelight’s technology.  After all, the only point of our technology is to bring these stories to viewers in all their glory, and to do it so invisibly that we attract no comment at all.

The latest Bain/IAB Digital Pricing Research was recently published. Among its key findings, the report shows that while other advertising mediums have excess inventory, video sellout rates are significantly higher than any other format.

Yesterday, Limelight Networks VP of Product Management Peter Coppola participated in a webinar entitled “Streaming with Flash Media Server.” You can catch the replay here.

Stream or progressive download? For many publishers and advertisers, this decision is a key one to make but difficult to analyze. Join experts from Adobe Systems, creators of Flash Media Server (FMS), and Limelight Networks, operators of the world’s largest FMS 3.0 deployment, as they discuss the benefits of streaming content with FMS 3.0.

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting on new stats from Nielson and NBC about NBCOlympics.com. Among the highlights:

• Online unique users jumped from 4.2 million on Friday (5.7% of the Olympic audience) to 7.8 million (7.6% of the audience) on Monday.
• NBCOlympics.com in the first four days saw 373.9 million page views and 17.7 million video streams, which works out to roughly one video stream per 20 page views. NBC research shows that 40% of NBCOlympics.com users surveyed utilized the VOD to view what they had already seen.
• Unique viewers jumped 85% on Monday to 2 million. The increase is tied in part to the at-work audience, which is in front of a computer instead of a TV during the workday.
• NBCOlympics.com saw 4.7 million unique visitors on Monday, up from 2.6 million on the opening day.
• There were 1.7 million video streams for Sunday night’s U.S.-winning 400-meter freestyle relay race (Michael Phelps’ second gold medal).

GigaOm today has posted an article listing The Top 5 Bandwidth-Hungry Apps. In addition to those listed, we’d add live online events like the Olympics where there are 3000+ hours of long tail content available. Taken individually, the amount of content delivered may not seem like much. As a whole, however, it takes a significant amount of bandwidth to deliver objects in the highest-fidelity to a million audiences (and above) of one.

We believe that any delivery service that is designed to support the growing bandwidth requirements of an Internet application must account for Four Dimensions. Build a service that doesn’t address all four, and the service will ultimately not be able to enable the user experience necessary to generate revenue.

1. Object size. The size of each piece of content created by a publisher (such as a video, music, game, or application) is growing year over year. Ten years ago, a 320×240 image was 2MB and an acceptable form of Internet video, and software came on 3.5″ floppy discs. Today, Limelight Networks delivers HD moves that are 30+ GB in size.
2. Library size. The size of the entire catalog of content published on the Internet by a single producer is growing. Five years ago, only select TV show episodes were posted online. Today, Limelight Networks hosts libraries that include thousands of games, movies, or even software patches, for some of the largest publishers in the world.
3. Audience size. The number of broadband households around the world continue to grow, and with them, the number of online video consumers, web application users, or gamers.
4. Popularity. First generation CDNs only accelerate the delivery of the “popular” items. Today, we know that there is potential for revenue from every item in the long tail, and so every object, even the less popular ones, must always be available with the same high-fidelity experience. This is because you never know which object someone might view, or when they might want to view it,

NBC has released more information about the traffic on NBCOlympics.com on MSN, , including the most popular events that are being watched on-demand. Here are the current details:

ONE MILLION PLUS STREAMS OF LAST NIGHT’S RELAY ACCESSED AT NBCOLYMPICS.COM ON MSN:

As of 4:30 p.m. ET today 1.1 million video streams of last night’s historic 4×100m relay have been accessed at NBCOlympics.com, making it the most watched video ever from the site.

• NBCOlympics.com on MSN continued its dominance on Sunday with 66.7 million page views, 5.1 million unique users and more than 3.4 million video streams.
• Through three days NBCOlympics.com has totaled 199.3 million page views. By the day’s end NBCOlympics.com will have surpassed the total page views for the entire 2004 Athens Games (229.9 million).
• NBCOlympics.com’s total video streams to date are 11.1 million, which is five times more than the total for the entire Athens Games (2.2 million).

TOP VIDEO STREAMS TODAY ON NBCOLYMPICS.COM:

1. U.S. Wins 4×100m Relay

2. Beijing and Beyond Feature

3. Phelps wins 400m IM

4. Women’s Fencing - Foil

5. U.S.-China Basketball preview

NBC has reported (and also told The Wall Street Journal) that NBCOlympics.com is off to a great start. Here’s the text from their official press release:

NBCOlympics.com followed up its record day on 8/8/08 with another enormous day of traffic. On Saturday (traditionally the lowest trafficked day of the week), the site garnered 62.7 million page views an increase of 475 percent from the opening day of competition of the Athens Games in 2006 (10.9 million).

Through two days NBCOlympics.com has totaled 132.6 million page views compared to 17.9 million page views for the first two days of the Athens Games an increase of 641 percent.

NBCOlympics.com registered 3.1 million video streams yesterday. By comparison, in Athens, the first day of competition received 115,014 video streams.

4.83 million unique users logged onto NBCOlympics.com yesterday an increase from the 4.21 million for 8/8/08 and nearly six times the unique users from the first day of competition in Athens (816,609 million).

NBC Universal, broadcasting its record 11th Olympics and surpassing ABC for the most Olympics broadcast by any network, will present an unprecedented 3,600 hours of Beijing Olympic Games coverage, the most ambitious single media project in history featuring the most live coverage (nearly 2,900 live hours in total), across the most platforms, of any Summer Olympics in history.

We asked subscribers of our customer newsletter about the HD formats they use for publishing their content. The results show an even mix of format preferences, with H.264 having a slight edge.

Does this accurately reflect your view of HD usage on the Internet? Why do you prefer one format over another? Let us know in the comments section.

Our industry is in a mode of tremendous growth across many different sectors. Internet, media, software, gaming, and e-commerce companies are making more digital assets available online as they refine their monetization models and grow loyal online audiences. In fact, in his most recent CDN Market Overview, Jim Davis of Tier1 Research wrote that CDN industry revenues will grow almost 30%, to approximately $1.3 billion in 2008. Its a great time to be competing in this market.

It is against this backdrop that we are pleased to have been named to CRN Magazine’s Fast Growth 100 for 2008. As CRN put it, “Limelight’s founders predicted an enormous need for businesses to deliver video, music and game content with broadcast quality over the Internet. The company began building an infrastructure capable of delivering that content. In today’s YouTube era, that prediction has become a reality.”

The article names only “Limelight Networks” in the #4 spot, but we recognize there are many groups that contributed to this ranking. We certainly wouldn’t have been on the list without the collaboration and support of our customers and partners. Our growth is the result of our customers willing to innovate new business models on the Internet, and our partners designing world-class solutions that enable new applications on our platform — and for both to have had the confidence in our platform to enable their efforts. We thank you for partnership and look forward to many more years of continued growth together.

We also must recognize our employees, who for seven years have tirelessly built the market-specific solutions and customer relationships that are still the foundation for our success.

You can read the full CRN Fast Growth 100 article here.

This morning, we announced that we will be providing content delivery services to NBCOlympics.com on MSN for their coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. All of the video you will see when you visit NBCOlympics.com will be stored on our servers, and delivered from our network over our media-grade optical backbone. We are very excited to be involved in such a groundbreaking event, and are working hard to make sure the online viewing experience is a success.