Accounting for the Four Dimensions of Delivery

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,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.