Limelight Networks brings Dynamic Streaming to the web

The following is a guest post by Kevin Towes, Product Manager for Flash Media Server at Adobe. Limelight Networks thanks Kevin for contributing to our launch of Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 and Dynamic Streaming.

I’m really excited to help announce that Dynamic Streaming has arrived! Limelight Networks now has Dynamic Streaming available – and a personal WOO HOO to their engineering and product teams for pushing our software to the Edge (literally)! This means that if you want to start using the most seamless and secure solution for multi-bitrate at massive scale, you can start today knowing that over 74% of connected PC’s have full support through Flash Player 10.

I’ve been on the road a lot lately, and the recurring theme people tell me is they want multi-bitrate and many have been testing it in their labs with a lot of success and that the technology will open new avenues for monetization. Limelight Networks gives you scale and capacity – they’ve been working very closely with Adobe engineers and have a deep understanding of how Dynamic Streaming works, and how best they can offer high quality of service over their worldwide network.

So why is the world going crazy over multi-bitrate now? Publishers want to offer a higher quality video to the end user, and viewers (including me) are tired of interruptions inherent with online video. So why is it important? A publisher needs to add value to media delivery to keep viewers longer and coming back for more.

It’s an easy answer- Consumers see value for a higher quality video or experiences they can interact with. Publishers are in a position to deliver and capitalize on offering an un-interrupted high quality experience. Think about the premium you pay for HD in your home. Content publishers can also use RTMPe and SWF Verification with Dynamic Streaming in both Live and OnDemand scenarios.

And as far as capacity goes, Limelight has it. With over 2.5Tbps of capacity around the globe, they have served over 9 million simultaneous streams during the Obama Inauguration and for the US Open in 2008, they handled a peak of 650,000 simultaneous streams for the playoff. And since Limelight tightly partners with Adobe, these events are able to be streamed in Flash on their network flawlessly.

Limelight has also done a lot to enhance the relationship between the CDN and the customer – they now have a full consulting group to help make companies successful. As video players become more complex, it’s important to know how to do things right, especially when you add a CDN. This service will be most important as customers start moving from a single bitrate strategy to a multi-bitrate strategy. These guys know Dynamic Streaming well and should help shorten the time and effort it takes to deploy it.

Get ready to deliver multi-bitrate! Here’s my “Do-List” for Dynamic Streaming:

1) Learn about recommended bitrates on Adobe.com.

2) Contact Limelight Networks to talk about Dynamic Streaming.

3) Start planning to have your on demand video use Dynamic Streaming.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 11:28 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.