Follow-Up Questions from our 6/18 Webinar

Yesterday, Limelight Networks’ Jonathan Cobb, National Public Media’s Bryan Moffet, and Streaming Media’s Eric Schumacher-Rassmussen participated in a webinar entitled “Mobile Content: Why Now, and How?”

A brief description of the webinar follows:

Consumers are watching more rich media than ever before, and are doing so on a ever-expanding variety of mobile devices and smart phones with high-resolution screens and broadband wireless connections. A recent Nielsen report showed that over 13.4 million Americans watch video on their mobile phones, and average about 3 hours of mobile video viewed each month.

While mobile video has the potential to be an added revenue stream for content owners, challenges still remain in customizing, monetizing and distributing content to this growing universe of connected devices.

Join Limelight Networks mobility expert Jonathan Cobb for a one-hour webcast that explores:

• The ever-growing audience of connected devices and their characteristics
• Why publishers should begin extending their brands to mobile devices
• The most effective way to deliver content beyond the web browser
• How to integrate mobile advertising with your existing ad trafficking tools

You can view the on-demand webcast here.

We were overwhelmed with the amount of interest in the topic, and didn’t have time to answer all of the questions in the hour-long session. So, we promised attendees to follow up with a post answering the questions we didn’t get to. Here, straight from Jonathan Cobb, are those answers:

Q: For a content publisher who wants to use a subscription model, how is the billing component handled (both domestic and international)?

Cobb: Limelight Networks can send end-user activity data collected by our systems (such as: which videos were sent, URLs requested, etc.) directly to your billing system to facilitate your own billing processes.

Q: Kiptronic was just recently acquired by Limelight Networks. How does this change how customers will use Kiptronic’s and/Limelight’s service?

Cobb: Good question. Short answer – nothing changes, and our scalability and reliability increases.  If you were a Kiptronic customer, you won’t see any change to your service now that we are part of Limelight Networks. But as I mentioned, the former Kiptronic solution will now use Limelight Networks’ distributed computing platform and global resources to serve the world’s largest publishers. This gives us scale and reach that we didn’t have as a smaller company.

Q: Does Limelight plan to deploy the WowzaMedia server?

Cobb: We do not have plans to deploy Wowza at this time.

Q: How secure is live television streaming to the iPhone? How can content owners protect it?

Cobb: First, in our experience, theft of content via mobile delivery is very rare in actual practice, more than likely because mobile phone screens are much smaller than computer or TV screens. Content protection is typically done by URL authentication/tokenization: an external authentication process assigns a unique token to the request, and then Limelight Networks can ensure that only authorized users receive a stream.

Q: How is video quality managed in the “last mile” of mobile delivery? How do I know if my brand is associated with a quality experience and impression?

Cobb: Excellent question. The video encoding profiles chosen and managed by Limelight Networks make sure that the best possible quality video is packed into the fewest number of bits. This minimizes buffering and latency, and  provides the best possible chance of a brilliant end user experience. That being said, if a customer is in a spotty cellular area, or happens to drive into the Holland Tunnel while viewing your content, there isn’t much anyone can do about that.

Thanks to all that attended yesterday’s event!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 2:18 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.