Media Companies

Media Companies Google Wrecks the CDN Market

Media Companies Last week Google formally launched its Page Speed Service, the latest in a long line of Content Delivery Network (CDN) services from dozens of suppliers from big and small to hit the market over the last 15 years. In the case of Google though, I see a few novel changes that could not only materially affect but outright wreck the marketplace for CDN.

Google has offered free CDN services for video, via YouTube and Google Video, for many years now. Although we take YouTube for granted these days, it wasn’t too long ago that posting video on the internet required a lot of time, focus, and money. Life was very complicated before one could shoot a video on a smartphone and automatically upload it to YouTube. A videographer with a high quality camera would have to be hired, the resulting tape would have to be digitized, edited, and encoded (and potentially transcoded into one or more specific proprietary formats), and a streaming video hosting company would have to be found, negotiated with, and a lawyer engaged to review a contract. YouTube and smart phones have cleaned up that mess and made a single elegant process- but it only applies to video.