A large amount of Internet traffic today is conducted by a small handful of companies. Arbor Networks noted this traffic consolidation back in 2009 when it coined the term “hyper giants.” According to Arbor Networks at the time: “Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies – ‘hyper giants’ like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube – now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.”

That was nearly two years ago, and the consolidation trend hasn’t reversed. Only a small number of companies have the capacity to conduct a measurable amount of the world’s IP traffic. As a reminder of why Limelight Networks is one of those companies, here is a recap of some of the numbers we published as part of our last earnings report back in May. These numbers are an indicator of our network scale. They’re not new, and they don’t tell the whole story of what we have to offer in content delivery, but they’re certainly a good reference point. And worth repeating.

Limelight Networks Platform Scale and Reach from the May 5th Earnings Report:

• 2.5+ billion objects delivered hourly
• 6+ Tbps egress capacity
• Directly connected to last-mile networks serving 85%+ of world’s connected population
• 11+ PB storage capacity

There’s a lot of news out this week from the cable industry in conjunction with the annual Cable Show conference taking place this year in Chicago. Comcast demoed new cloud-based TV services today that are currently being trialed in Augusta Georgia, and it said it’s planning to test a cloud-based Remote Storage DVR service in the near future. Meanwhile, HBO announced that it’s hit 2.7 million downloads with the still-new HBO Go app, and ESPN is not far behind with more than two million downloads of the ESPN Mobile app. TV is indeed going Everywhere.

But how exactly are operators powering all of this TV in the cloud? Given the huge amount of resources required – bandwidth, storage, and processing power - that’s not an easy question.

From an infrastructure perspective, cable operators are working feverishly to build out new systems that support converged media delivery and take a page out of the CDN industry’s book. However, lost in the excitement of new cable infrastructure initiatives is the fact that MSOs are heavily focused on the last mile of television delivery. The last mile is what cable operators are good at, but there’s a whole lot of network behind that last mile that has to be managed as well. Throughout the entire end-to-end delivery chain, there are bandwidth, storage, and processing demands to contend with, and that’s a huge challenge for cable companies as they start to build out their cloud TV services in volume. How can TV service providers optimize the middle mile of the Internet? How will they reach the scale and capacity levels they need to deliver TV everywhere? How is it possible to manage the entire experience given the largely uncontrolled environment created by the Internet?

Cable has a lot of innovative projects in the works as the industry looks to the cloud for its next-generation television platform. But it’s also got a lot of work to do to power those projects given the scale and complexity of the infrastructure support they require. There’s nothing magic about cloud-based TV. As good as it may look in conference demos, there are still a number of hurdles ahead before cable can make good on its cloud TV promise.

Limelight Networks has had a stake in the mobile media market for several years now, which means we’ve had an opportunity to collect substantial data around media consumption on mobile devices. And the shift we’ve seen over the last 12 to 18 months is nothing short of remarkable. Based on traffic analysis across our mobile customer base, we calculated slow but steady increases in media requests during the early part of 2010. The same months in 2011, however, show that mobile media consumption has skyrocketed. From May of 2010 to May of 2011, consumption jumped roughly 600 percent. There were more than 30 million mobile media requests logged in our data reports from last month alone.

The shift is phenomenal, but it was also predictable. The smartphone boom, and the availability of new mobile content from sources like Netflix and HBO have created demand where little existed before. It used to be a chore to access media on a mobile device. Now it’s a pleasant, and increasingly addictive diversion.

It’s World IPv6 Day, and Limelight Networks is participating in the festivities with hundreds of other organizations in order to test the effectiveness of IPv6 content delivery. One of the biggest issues in the transition to IPv6 is network address translation. It’s not something consumers have to worry about, but content providers and network operators need to ensure that domain name resolution works the way it’s supposed to during this 24-hour test. If it doesn’t, some IPv6 content may be inaccessible to some consumers. And even though there’s precious little IPv6 content today, that’s changing as IPv4 addresses are depleted, and as organizations recognize the need to make the protocol switch.

The ISOC is hosting today’s global IPv6 experiment, and you can find out more about official activities on the ISOC’s dedicated site. In the meantime, here are a few facts and stats to whet the appetite.

• The length of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared to 32 bits in IPv4
• Currently, only about two percent of Internet content is IPv6
• IPv6 addresses have been available since 1999
• IPv6 has a theoretical maximum of about 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses
• Limelight Networks has been fully IPv6-enabled since 2009

One other side note, Limelight Networks is providing delivery services for the ISOC World IPv6 Day website.

The city of Chattanooga Tennessee has deployed its own gigabit broadband network, and over the holiday weekend, industry analyst Craig Settles detailed in two posts just what the community is doing with all that broadband.

In the short term, Chattanooga is applying its new bandwidth for smart grid technologies that help the city save money through reduced power outages. Over the longer term, city officials plan to use their massive data pipe as an economic development engine. Futuristic applications like 3D modeling and high-end simulations are already in the works through government initiatives and through the locally headquartered company SimCenter Enterprises. Here’s how Settles described why a gigabit network is important for this type of work:

“High-end modeling and simulation is a bandwidth hog if you want to loop in people working at other locations into the “what if” process. However, a gigabit network enables a small company in a mid-sized city to become the center of a world of supercomputers, international research teams and corporate giants.”

Lamp Post founders want to use the gigabit network to encourage entrepreneurs

Chattanooga isn’t stopping with SimCenter either. It hopes to woo more businesses with big data dreams through the promise of high-capacity broadband. The local venture organization Lamp Post Group is inviting college students for internships this summer to build gigabit applications and compete for start-up capital. And the local community college started a gaming degree program last fall as part of an attempt to recruit professionals from the gaming industry.

Chattanooga has recognized the advantages of building a foundation on big broadband, and it is seeing first hand how high-capacity infrastructure can drive innovation and business growth. Big broadband supports big data, which in turn opens up big opportunities.

Even as Android’s market share expands, and new mobile operating systems enter the fray, Apple’s iOS is still king of mobile video. After compiling our own data from mobile customers in the first four months of 2011 (comprised of more than 2.5 billion media requests), we found that a significant majority of mobile video requests still come from iOS devices. While Android appears to be gaining on iOS at a healthy pace, Apple still has a better than 2:1 advantage.

Perhaps even more interesting than the iOS and Android stats is the fact that all other media requests boil down to just about 5%. That includes video requests from all BlackBerry and Windows 7 phones across both the mobile web and mobile apps. According to study results just published by PCMag, Windows 7 actually tops Android in user satisfaction. However, that apparently doesn’t translate to increased video usage.

Today we announced the availability of two new reports from EyeWonder Interactive Advertising Services: Utilizing Video as a Path to Conversion and Tipping Point: A European Perspective on Online Video Advertising.

The first, using proprietary EyeWonder data on video ad interaction metrics, discusses how video affects brand awareness and direct response. The report also gives best practice suggestions by quoting aggregate stats from EyeWonder video campaigns, such as:

• Number of video ads by length of video
• Video completion rates by length of video
• Average video time reviewed by vertical

The second discusses the state of the European video advertising market and includes contributions from some of the region’s top industry thought leaders, including Nils Rohrig, GroupM Germany; Errol Baran, Channel 4 UK; Sonia Mamin, smartclip France; Wesley ter Haar, MediaMonks; and Emma Hallerstedt, Aftonbladet.

To download free copies of the reports, please visit the Resources section of our website.

Recently, our VP of Global Services David Frigeri sat down with Network World’s Jim Malone for an audiocast discussion on the next phase of cloud computing. The talk covers market drivers for moving into the cloud, capacity considerations, and how to plan for data and/or systems migration. It’s an excellent exploration of what many companies are facing today in an era of global audiences (consumers, employees, etc.) and distributed infrastructure. Register here, and take a listen to the discussion for free.

There’s been an explosion in both IaaS and cloud computing activity over the last six months, with new players entering the field, and more and more companies recognizing the need for distributed storage and processing resources. It’s one thing, however, to outsource hardware and CPU cycles, and quite another to have those resources provided as part of a managed service. Both outsourcing models exist, but there are still wide gaps in understanding around what specific services are available, and where it make sense to transition from the former model to the latter.

The sheer infrastructure capacity required to support an online business today is enough to force many companies to look outside their own data centers and delivery networks. The fear there, however, is finding an option that meets specific business requirements as they relate to outsourced infrastructure assets. For an enterprise, the worry might be around security and guaranteed uptime. For a media company, it might be around knowing how to manage software issues like media encoding and user authentication on an outsourced hardware platform. In addition, different industries have different major players involved. If there’s any interfacing to be done with one of these third-party industry companies – say a telecom carrier, for example – then an outsourced infrastructure solution has to be provisioned and managed for that scenario.

The bottom line here is that infrastructure outsourcing today – and its offshoot, cloud computing – goes beyond the vision of grid computing a decade or so ago. Managed services can and often should play a key role. In fact, what we may see in the coming months is a growth in specialized IaaS offerings that cater to different industries and business needs. Gigabytes (terabytes, petabytes…), CPU cycles, and bandwidth capacity do not exist in a vacuum. Putting them to work toward a specific purpose is what IaaS offerings should do for the growing legion of web-based companies looking to offload infrastructure management as a non-core business function.