Many of today’s TV and video dilemmas are at least a decade old. Take interactive television. Stop in at any iTV event today, and you could easily mistake it for an industry confab in the 1990’s. The same is true for talk of monetizing older content beyond a straight syndication model. It doesn’t go back quite as far as the iTV days, but you might remember hearing the example of Martha’s Stewart’s turkey-carving demonstration earlier this decade. The idea was that there ought to be a way to make money from people wanting to access Martha’s turkey demo after its original air date. Sounds reasonable, right? And yet the Martha Stewart dilemma still hasn’t been adequately solved.

Guvera is a company out of Australia and a Limelight Networks customer. The company is currently running a beta service in the land down under that matches targeted advertising with music libraries from Universal Music Group, EMI, and IODA. The music is completely free to consumers, but brings in revenue to the music studios through branded channels. Once a consumer logs in, he or she can search for a song, artist, or genre, and then click through to a branded page with free downloading and streaming available. Download files are all DRM-free.

Often there’s a chicken-and-egg problem of trying to line up content agreements while also getting advertisers on the hook. However, Guvera has top-notch music studios signed on in Australia, and an impressive list of advertisers including Johnson & Johnson, Dominos Pizza, Pepsi, McDonalds, and Nestle, among others.

Guvera’s ability to target brand sponsorships is what potentially gives it the ability to revolutionize content monetization. However, they couldn’t make the content delivery work without a little help, and that’s where Limelight Networks comes in. Much of the free-content landscape today is based on slow or best-effort content delivery, meaning the user experience can range from adequate to unbearable. The Guvera team knows that to make their business work, they have to start with a higher quality experience or risk losing users and advertisers alike. Limelight Networks is Guvera’s exclusive platform for delivering that experience with music streaming and downloads in Australia. And come March, we’ll also be their exclusive partner when Guvera launches in the US. More details to come, but Guvera has plans to launch video and television content by the middle of the year as well.

In the meantime, Guvera held a pre-launch party in New York last week. Several pubs have posted celebrity-laden photos from the event. We’ve got more screenshots from the service below.

Back in January, we announced that Limelight delivered President Barack Obama’s inaugural address live over the Internet to an estimated 2.5 million viewers – over two full Nielsen ratings points of viewing audience. Well, we hit another home run during the Obama inauguration.

Using LimelightSTREAM, HBO delivered “We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial”, on Sunday, January 18. Limelight was the exclusive CDN provider for HBO during the 2 hour, live event. Limelight’s scalability and network capacity was able to deliver a consistent and high quality stream to a broadcast quantity audience across our global network. Working with a short timeline, Limelight’s Professional Services team tested and re-tested the live stream to make sure the event went off without a hitch.

“In the spirit of the most accessible inauguration in history, HBO opened its signal on the linear network and also streamed the ‘We Are One’ inaugural event on HBO.com,” said Alison Moore, vice president, brand strategy and digital platforms, consumer marketing, HBO. “By partnering with Limelight, we knew that this historic event would be seen in the highest quality on our site, which HBO audiences have come to expect.”

Reseller relationships with CDN companies can be like singing in public – everyone wants to try, but only a select few actually do it well. It’s with this in mind that we re-launched our efforts to build out our alliance and channel reseller ecosystem earlier this year, under the direction of Vice President, Adam Wray. Since there have been many rumors about our program, we sat down with Adam for a quick chat to set the record straight.

What is Limelight Networks’ reseller strategy?
Wray: Our reseller strategy helps give our business focus, while also helping us rapidly extend our scale and reach. There are some things Limelight does really well – like being a world-class content delivery platform. We focus 100% of our efforts on innovation in the CDN space, whether that’s faster delivery, advanced storage or reporting capabilities or providing technical guidance through our Professional Services team.

Limelight has always been about an “open ecosystem.” What that means is that we have built open interfaces into our network-based platform, so that other companies can extend its functionality. These interfaces enable customers to take a best-of-breed approach for their business needs.  They can leverage our robust, globally-distributed CDN and then pick and choose the other vendors they want to work with to complete their unique delivery chain. Today we have over 130 members of our ecosystem that have integrated their services onto our platform. Customers can integrate home-grown or custom solutions by taking advantage of those open programming interfaces, too.

Our reseller strategy takes that open approach to the next level. There are many opportunities for us to align with companies that provide complimentary offerings to our own, where our services will be adjunct to theirs and provide a differentiated solution to the market. For Limelight, we believe we can leverage the scale and reach of select partners to rapidly enter new markets (like the enterprise or public sectors), increase the adoption of our core services, grow our customer base, provide end-to-end solutions to the marketplace and accelerate revenue and time to market.

What are the criteria for becoming a reseller?
Wray: First, to be clear, resellers are defined as companies looking to provide our services as a standalone offering or as part of a suite of standalone offerings to “legal entities.” They may have a bundle of services that they slide a Limelight-branded service into, or they may “white-label” a Limelight service as their own.

Next, we’ve been in the CDN industry a long time to know two things: 1) everyone wants to resell everyone else, and 2) reseller programs are difficult to manage successfully. A few years ago, it seemed that CDNs were taking a “spaghetti against the wall” approach to reseller relationships, where vendors signed up every reseller they could find, and then were spread too thin to make any one of those relationships actually work for the customer. It gave CDNs a bad reputation in this regard.

We intend to only enter into reseller relationships with companies that are willing to truly commit to making them work. What I mean by that is we believe the right way to manage our reseller program is to invest our time, energy, and resources into a small number of relationships, so that we can drive them successfully and really provide something differentiated to the end customer. So, I would characterize our approach to this program as “selective.”

We look to work with companies willing to make that significant commitment to us and to making the program successful. We don’t want just a handshake agreement – we want to enter committed, contractual agreements that clearly define dedicated resources, people, goals, and even the length of the relationship. If both sides aren’t willing to make that type of commitment, the partnership will not be successful and the customer will suffer.

What do resellers get from working with Limelight?
Wray: First, if they are looking to resell CDN services, its probably because they don’t offer them today, and they have realized that its hard to do what we do, and expensive to build out the infrastructure we have.

Second, when you work with us, you aren’t working with a startup fighting to stay in business in tough economic times, or a smaller company spreading its resources too thin or giving away its IP by doing reseller deals with every large name that wants to dance. Limelight has the second-largest market share amongst CDN providers – over 25% in the video CDN market along according to Frost & Sullivan’s latest report - and do business with over 1300 rich media and enterprise customers. We have eight years of experience in successfully delivering many of the largest live and on-demand events in the history of the Internet. We offer a full suite for rich media, site delivery, e-commerce transactions, storage, and hosting, and support all of the major formats (like Flash or Silverlight or Move to name a few).

I’ve already mentioned our open partner ecosystem.  We believe it is a differentiated approach for us in the marketplace compared to other established players, but what else is quickly becoming a differentiator is our Professional Services organization , which can handle customer integrations, along with advice on distribution strategies, architecture design, storage infrastructure, live event execution, and best practices for format/player selection.

Finally, our global network is unmatched in its ability to scale and delivery high-quality, reliable services. It has over 2.5 Tbps of capacity - that’s 3+ Nielson ratings points of audience - and its still growing. Over 85% of the time, we deliver content from our network to the last mile, without it ever touching the public Internet. We have over 900 of those last mile access network connections and growing, meaning our platform can provide a reseller with carrier-neutral access to millions of global end-users  This took us over seven years to get to critical mass based upon our relationships and strategic value with network providers, and will continue to be a difference maker in high-quality delivery as content and library sizes increase.

Address the rumor: Is Global Crossing reselling Limelight Networks?
Wray: Yes, I can confirm that rumor. And we are thrilled to have them as part of the authorized reseller program. We’ve had a longstanding relationship with Global Crossing and think that our new arrangement will provide great value and differentiation to both their customers as well as ours.

Thanks, Adam.

One week ago today, we reported that we delivered President Obama’s inaugural address live over the Internet to an estimated 2.5 million viewers, one of the largest live Internet events ever recorded. We chose to announce this specific number, as opposed to other network data, because we believed it was the statistic most able to provide a picture of the Inauguration Day Internet.

However, some of our competitors chose to release a different statistic, specifically the total number of all audio and video streams from all of their customers delivered on their network at approximately 12:15 p.m on that day. Since that number is different than the one we released, it has been difficult for customers and journalists to get a clear picture of what actually was happening across the entire web. And, admittedly, its caused some unfair apples-to-oranges comparisons in the media. So our world-class engineering team went back and re-processed our logs, and what we found was…

At 12:15 on January 20, 2009, at approximately 12:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 9,008,990 unique streams of Adobe Flash and Windows Media streams being delivered by our network.  Of those streams, approximately 2.5 million of them were specifically related to the inaugural address.

Some notes:

• This number is for unique streams, meaning that we only counted the first stream a viewer watched that we delivered.
• This number is for Adobe Flash and Windows Media formats only. It does not include any of the other audio and video formats we support.
• We did not cap bandwidth for any of our customers during this traffic-heavy time. This is because our intelligent, network-based CDN has the capacity to absorb spikes in traffic much more gracefully than Internet-based CDNs. When we say broadcast-quantity audiences, we mean it.

With all of those streams, its probably not a surprise that we were called one of the “clear winners” on Inauguration Day, with ATLAS data across the ten US consumers access networks showing a significant increase in traffic from our network (median of 160%).

Most importantly, we were able to service the increased needs of our customers that were directly involved in the Inauguration event, while still providing the same level of service to customers that were not.

And - wow - what a snapshot of ‘Net activity! Combine all of the public figures, and you’ll see that 16+ million streams of rich media were being watched around the world during lunchtime on the East Coast last Tuesday . That’s a very powerful and telling example of just how the Internet has become a mainstream information, entertainment, and communication platform.

Today, we are announcing that we have been named the exclusive content delivery partner for VReel.net – a new user-generated content portal that is implementing the very popular DivX video codec.

VReel makes thousands of user-created videos available online, organizing them into 18 distinct channels. The portal offers high-definition streaming using the DivX codec, a 1GB filesize limit, and no time, dimension, or bitrate restrictions. VReel is streaming using the LimelightDELIVER service, and will store the videos within the Limelight Network CDN. This means that the majority of videos will be delivered directly from our media-grade optical platform to one of the over 850 last-mile networks we are directly connected to. Since those videos will never travel over the public Internet, we can eliminate almost all buffing and stuttering, helping the viewer to have a great HD-watching experience.

VReel CEO Eoghan Hayes says that he plans on “making VReel the greatest show on earth,” and will soon implement features such as user rewards, content competitions, and mobile connectivity.

“Right now, our open beta is about getting the functionality at 100%. We have already seen thousands of members sign up, and thousands of videos being submitted to the portal, but are planning on new functionality and a full face-lift to debut over the summer,” says Hayes.

“One of the unique differentiators is our use of the DivX codec and webplayer. This highly-regarded product produces video quality that we believe is unmatched, and throughout our beta we’ve had numerous testers comment on the superb picture quality. We are very pleased that DivX gave us the go-ahead to use their product,” adds Hayes.

Here’s an example - VReel content, DivX codec, delivered over the Limelight Networks CDN (Note that if you don’t have the DivX codec installed you will have to do so by clicking here):

(Content unavailable. Please visit www.vreel.net)

Originally, VReel planned to manage analytics and reporting internally, but the company’s rapid traffic growth during the beta test caused them to rethink their options.

“It’s a funny story, actually, how we came to use LimelightEXCHANGE Premium.  We had originally turned on statistic monitoring tools on our own servers, but after about 12 hours, we received so many unique visits that our mysql database almost locked up. In order to keep speeds high for the end user, we disabled our analytics tools and instead opted for the ones offered by Limelight,” explains Hayes.

Here are some initial stats on VReel:

Members signed up: 8200+
Videos online: 5700+
Total data transferred 22nd - 28th June: 764.31 TB
Peak speed: 20Gbps

We congratulate VReel on their launch, and look forward to helping them deliver brilliant experiences to their growing user base. If you would like to join the community, click here .

In the competitive field of TV advertising, each passing second means the difference between an effective or failed ad. One of the first hurdles an effective advertisement faces is flawless playback. If the commercial freezes, or stutters, or is not in its best fidelity, the chances are pretty good that the viewer is not going to stick around and watch.

Online, video advertisers face the same challenge – if your ad doesn’t play flawlessly, your potential audience is a mouse-click away from something more engaging. With every second a chance to win or lose the attention of your audience, content delivery matters – big time.

Today, we’ve announced that Smart AdServer, a large European provider of adserving and digital marketing services to media agencies, ad networks and publishers, has turned to Limelight Networks to help ensure the quality of their ad delivery service for their growing European and international business. Using the LimelightDELIVER service, we are also helping them manage peaks of online demand while decreasing the cost of bandwidth.

Since its founding in 2001, Smart Adserver has quickly become a key player in France and is growing its business rapidly throughout Europe. Serving international brands like XBOX, FedEx, Coca Cola and Lexus, Smart AdServer now has more than 110 clients and 1000 Web sites on four continents.

The Managing Director at Smart AdServer, Cyrille Geffray, notes, “Equipping our customers with better management tools means we’re able to help our customers gain a clear competitive advantage.”

Here’s a link to today’s press release.

We’re proud to be delivering live and on demand streams for UEFA Euro 2008 with our partner, Geißendörfer & Leschinsky GmbH (G&L). G&L holds the online broadcast rights for Germany, and through our partnership we are making available live online streams of every football match (or soccer, for you Americans) aired on the German TV channel, ‘Das Erste.’

G&L shared with us some of their most recent numbers: For the 9 June matches between Rumania and France and the Netherlands and Italy, 33,000 viewers watched them online. This is a very significant number in Germany, and it comes even with the TV broadcast getting over 50% market share for the same contests.

“This is an extraordinary live stream rating,”said Alexander Leschinsky, manager of the responsible system house at G&L.

For G&L, Limelight Networks is providing live streams in both Windows Media and Flash formats in three different quality settings. Using our optical network, we are bypassing the congestion of the Internet cloud within Germany, and delivering those streams directly to the last-mile networks we connect with in the country. This means the video bits almost never hit the public Internet.

We encourage you to check out these broadcasts by visiting G&L’s site, the ‘ARD,’ at http://sport.ard.de. There’s even an on-demand archive called mediathek that will serve up replays of the past games.

See you at the finals on 29 June!