It’s About the Experience, Not the Technology

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 6:03 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.