The CDN industry is defined by the problem it tries to solve, namely the need to deliver content more efficiently and effectively. But traditionally, CDN services have referred to content acceleration on the web, and that definition no longer tells the whole story.

Over the last year, the cable industry has begun to talk with great enthusiasm about its own CDN models. Because there is simultaneous interest from cable operators in delivering content over the Internet, the definition of CDN for cable has been a bit muddled. However, when cable companies talk about CDNs in the near term, one of the problems they’re most interested in solving is how to improve delivery of video-on-demand content. Where VOD is concerned, the problem is not about how to optimize IP delivery, but how to optimize delivery of traditional cable (or QAM-based) video content.

Many of the same lessons apply to VOD CDNs that we’ve learned in the Internet world. Cable companies are looking to create VOD CDNs in order to distribute content more effectively by storing popular video at the edge of the network. Comcast so far has been most active on this front, building out a national CDN, and increasing its VOD library to roughly 25,000 video titles.

Beyond the VOD problem, operators are venturing into CDN territory with IP content, but solely for video delivered within their own cable footprints – so-called on-network CDNs. For off-net delivery services, operators are still offloading content to traditional CDN providers. Broadband Technology Report has an excellent article examining the difference between on-net and off-net CDNs, and how cable operators are looking at the future of video delivery. There is still a lot for the industry to figure out on the technical front, but a large part of the CDN solution will ultimately come down to the relationships operators can build with other delivery partners. Cable won’t go it alone, and, increasingly, we’ll see a greater intertwining of networks and network technologies to support content delivery from a large range of video providers.

Two of our executives hosted a webinar last week with Information Week on Solving Web and App Management Issues through Infrastructure Outsourcing. The premise of the presentation (now archived for on-demand viewing) is that the benefits of cloud-based infrastructure extend beyond reducing hardware costs. There are also scale, software and security advantages to consider.

The beginning of the presentation centers on how website and application management have evolved significantly in recent years. For example, the number of servers required to run a single website or application has grown substantially. This is partly because web content has grown more dynamic, but also partly because developers often operate under the assumption that computing and storage resources are virtually free. Resource optimization isn’t a priority when there’s no quantifiable cost. That has a big impact on the scale of infrastructure required to support online assets.

On the software side of the equation, there are new complications in web and app management because of online performance expectations, and also the need to manage distribution across multiple platforms. These are critical concerns for IT, but they’re also not core competencies for most organizations. By outsourcing infrastructure components, companies can also address these issues through services like website and application acceleration, and mobile delivery optimization.

The discussion becomes more complicated when you add in security concerns, but here again, there can be advantages to infrastructure outsourcing. For example, supporting premium content and commercial transactions introduces issues of controlling rights-based access and managing requirements like PCI compliance. For some organizations, these issues are best managed in house. For others, it makes sense to offload non-core functions and focus on other business priorities.

The Information Week webinar goes into far more detail on these topics and related issues. Take a listen and view the slide deck at your leisure for further insights from David Reisfeld, GM of Limelight Content Delivery Solutions, and Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing.

Starting on October 1st, Facebook will require all Facebook pages be secured through HTTPS. This means little for most Facebook users, who host their pages directly with the social networking site. However, if you have a Facebook page hosted on an external server, you are responsible for obtaining an SSL certificate by the end of this month.

There are several implications stemming from the Facebook deadline. First, and most importantly, it raises the issue of how connected many websites are today. It used to be that websites existed as individual, contained entities, but more and more they now rely on heavy links to third-party content, whether through integration with social networks, ad networks, microsites, shopping carts, games, or other applications. In this case, the fact that many websites integrate directly with Facebook means site managers have to be aware of how the new HTTPS requirement may affect their site performance. If managers don’t address this issue, it could result in site errors come October 1st.

Second, from specifically a security perspective, the Facebook move highlights how certain elements of website publishing are changing. It’s common practice for websites with members-only content, and websites supporting paid transactions to use SSL delivery. However, Facebook may be part of a trend toward greater security across a wider range of domains. And that has an impact on web acceleration and site optimization services. Not all vendors support SSL delivery, and that may become an increasingly important requirement going forward.

Don’t use web acceleration services? Keep in mind that encrypted pages also take longer to load, making site acceleration services even more important with HTTPS content.

It’s been a while since we’ve done a webinar, but we have a new one coming up on September 28th with Information Week. Join us for:

Scale, Software, & Security – Solving Web and App Management Issues through Infrastructure Outsourcing

Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Time: 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET
Duration: 60 minutes
Register Here

Infrastructure outsourcing is about much more than server capacity and distributed storage. New requirements in website and application management are placing increasing demands on IT departments, and many organizations aren’t able to match internal resources to the new challenges at hand. System availability and online performance are at stake, as are the competitive advantages that come with being able to move quickly to upgrade software and support new features and functionality.

This webinar will examine the benefits of Infrastructure as a Service in the areas of web and app performance, software agility, and online security management. Join us to learn about solutions to some of the most common problems facing resource-constrained IT departments today, including:

• Dynamic web acceleration
• Streaming media support
• Cross-platform content delivery
• Content security and policy management

Today we announced a new family of website, application and mobile acceleration services that combines network-layer optimization and browser-level acceleration for a more enjoyable and more productive web experience. The Limelight Accelerate suite of services includes solutions for consumer content sites, e-commerce destinations, and enterprise portals,and has been shown in comprehensive testing to boost performance on most websites between 200 and 500 percent.

While the CDN market as a whole has been improving on network-based delivery for years, browser-level acceleration has taken a back seat. It’s in the browser, however, that a delivery service can affect some of the most important changes. At this presentation layer, our new Accelerate service optimizes how web pages load, decreasing the number of required network requests and speeding up the time it takes for the most important information to appear on screen. We call it improving Time to Action. The faster users get the information they want, the faster they can act on it, and the better results publishers can count on with respect to site stickiness and online conversion rates.

There are a few critical points to emphasize with Limelight Accelerate.

• First, it is the only service that addresses content delivery comprehensively at both the browser level and the network level. It combines both our proven, traditional CDN service with new capabilities for on-the-fly page optimization.
• Second, Limelight Accelerate services are fully supported, with a team of experts dedicated to driving the highest performance levels, and a robust and growing set of features including HTTPs support.
• Third and finally, the new Limelight Accelerate services are immensely flexible. It doesn’t matter whether your content is dynamic or static, what kind of servers you’re using, or if you’re publishing large objects or small. We can handle it all.

Take a look at a demo we’re running comparing how web pages load with Limelight Accelerate technology and without. We’ve also published information from one customer in today’s press release referencing performance results in a real-world situation. After just one month of using Accelerate, Allbarstools.com saw a 17 percent jump in page views per visitor. Page load statistics are nice to have, but engagement statistics like this one are even better.

Click the image above for an interactive version of the graph

The FCC put out the results of a monumental study today detailing how US Internet service providers perform based on the speeds they advertise. While there is a large amount of information to parse, one data set deserves highlighting because it is likely to get overlooked in much of the media coverage. Among other figures, the FCC calculated page load times as related to advertised ISP speeds. The finding? While there’s a big jump in download times between advertised speeds of under 1 Mbps and speeds of 2 Mbps or more, the difference between speed tiers tapers off significantly once you hit rates of roughly 6 Mbps, and even more so at rates of 10 Mbps and higher.

So what does this mean? It means for web browsing, Internet speed isn’t everything. Once you hit a minimum speed tier, other factors create a much bigger impact on performance – factors like latency and page optimization. As consumer broadband speeds continue to increase, publishers will have to focus more heavily on these factors in order to create the most effective websites. Overall speeds will always be important, but the better measurement of success for consumers going forward will be how long it takes to view and interact with a site. That, far more than broadband speed tier, will determine the quality of the browsing experience.

The good news out of last month’s IPv6 day is that there were no major performance or security issues during the 24-hour worldwide test. The not-so-good news is that IPv6 traffic barely peaked above a quarter of one percent of total Internet traffic across six participating carrier networks. The low traffic numbers may give false hope to companies looking to put off their own IPv6 transitions. While we can’t nail down exactly when a meaningful number of IPv6-only users will hit the Internet, there are certain market factors that will accelerate the process rapidly in the next 18 months. One of these is the spread of 4G LTE networks.

LTE devices will support IPv6 natively, and there will soon be a lot more LTE devices floating around. According to In-Stat, 4G wireless subscriptions will jump 2,100 percent in the US from 2011 to 2015. And the US General Services Administration reports that the number of LTE devices available today is 161, nearly 65 percent higher than the number available just four months ago.

As IPv6 traffic grows, companies will feel the pressure to deliver at least their public-facing websites in IPv6 form. And that’s where content delivery services come in handy. At Limelight Networks, we’ve been IPv6-compliant with our CDN service since 2009. So while IPv6 traffic from LTE devices and elsewhere may not really start to matter until 2012, we’ve already got years of IPv6 experience under our belt. And, the success of last month’s World IPv6 Day shows that our efforts have paid off.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent article in Network World on the results of the June IPv6 trial. Among other useful data points, it offers a little detail on how Limelight fared during the IPv6 test.

“We have a massive infrastructure: Tens of thousands of servers, just south of 10 terabits of egress capacity, hundreds of [Border Gateway Protocol] peers and tremendously complex routing policies to support that,” says Tom Coffeen, director of Global Network Architecture at Limelight. “The scale of the challenge for us is very, very large. The relatively long adoption process served us well when World IPv6 Day rolled along.”

Limelight’s CDN delivered hundreds of thousands of Web objects and honored hundreds of thousands of client requests over IPv6 on World IPv6 Day. Coffeen says the success of Limelight’s IPv6 offering on World IPv6 Day demonstrates that the CDN is ready for an influx of enterprise customers in 2012.

The former architect of the national broadband plan, Blair Levin, has another project up his sleeve. The goal is the same, raise broadband speeds and improve accessibility. But this time Levin has a specific audience in mind, universities. Levin and others are working on something they call GigU, which aims to bring Gigabit broadband to 28 participating universities around the nation and their surrounding communities. In much the same way Google is building a 1 Gbps network in Kansas to demonstrate what higher speeds can enable, GigU aims to see what a high-speed network can spark in an academic setting.

The potential implications of GigU are manifold, but two particular thoughts on the impact of the project come to mind. First, universities are fertile ground for innovation. Students and professors alike have incentive to use resources in new ways and engage in creative problem solving. Students in particular also represent a cohort heavily predisposed to trying out new things and propagating new behaviors. (Think Facebook) Which brings up the second point. Putting faster networks in university settings will create higher expectations for Internet performance. The students who get addicted to faster speeds at school will take their expectations for what the Internet can do with them as they start their adult lives. And those expectations will create pressure on national infrastructure providers to increase capacity. In theory, GigU could start a virtuous circle – more innovation, leading to higher expectations, leading to infrastructure growth, leading to more innovation. All starting in your local university town.

Limelight Networks announced today that the Middle East Broadcasting Company is using our integrated solutions for online video publishing, site acceleration and online media delivery. MBC is the largest broadcasting group in the Middle East, and its two websites, Shahid.net and AlArabiya.net, provide on-demand content and live streaming video from the network’s satellite TV station to online viewers around the world.

While it’s always good to announce a new customer, we’re also showcasing MBC because of the returns the media conglomerate is seeing from the integrated use of our video services. Specifically, by deploying the Limelight Video Platform combined with our media delivery technology, MBC is benefiting from faster video ingest and large file transfers. More importantly, MBC is able to deliver a better viewing experience to its online customers through our ability to make near-real-time adjustments during the video delivery process. Even as network conditions change from moment to moment, we are helping MBC navigate the web so users get the best possible video playback from the company’s live and on-demand streams.

From the press release, here is MBC’s list of requirements that Limelight Networks had to meet for video publishing and content delivery:

• Guaranteed high quality video
• Video Storage and content delivery facilities for various websites
• Scalability for future requirements, including specific demands such as SmartPhones, STB or Connected TV sets support
• Pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll advertising
• Syndication to YouTube
• Video Analytics
• Ease of video publishing workflow
• Extensive APIs for content management

Netflix already reportedly accounts for more than 20% of Internet traffic during peak times in the US. And if it starts to acquire significant film rights in the pay-TV window, the streaming giant could add to that number at an unexpectedly rapid rate. Yesterday, Netflix announced a deal with the new production company Open Road Films for early streaming rights to its first flick, Killer Elite. Open Road may be new, but it was born as a joint effort by veterans of the movie industry, Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment. And Killer Elite? It stars Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen, among others. Netflix will be able to stream the film during the window when it would usually only be open to VOD and DVD release. Instead of your On Demand screen, you’ll have to fire up the Roku to see DeNiro in action.

Between gaining access to early release windows like this one, and efforts to go after original content, Netflix is pitching some serious fast balls at traditional video distribution models. Good thing it’s got the network muscle to make those fast balls possible.