The Broadcast Quantity CDN

We announced this morning that we have increased the capacity of our network to over 2 Tbps (2.2 Tbps to be exact). We added a few quick calculations in the press to try and equate raw capacity with a number that’s more meaningful to our customers, who are content publishers: The Nielsen ratings system.

While the calculation is rough, we assumed that the average bit rate for a piece of Internet video is 500 Kbps, which means 2 Tbps of capacity could support delivering video to roughly 4 Nielsen ratings points of audience. Now, every network has overhead, so we can’t use all of that 2 Tbps just to deliver content, but still, we think being able to simultaneously support over two million viewers is a milestone for the entire CDN industry.

We’ve now entered the era of the Broadcast Quantity CDN. Its no longer just about delivering content in its intended brilliance to one viewer; its about replicating that brilliance for millions of simultaneous Internet viewers, even if each of those viewers is watching something different.

We expect to talk more about this during today’s Digital Media Innovation Forum.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 6:43 am 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.