Hat Trick
We are privileged to open with a keynote from Sian Baldwin, director of broadband and content services for BT Wholesale. Baldwin will discuss BT's moves to provide a special regional CDN service and the challenges that a telco faces as it engages with content delivery directly. She'll also examine marketwide questions regarding the motivations behind and opportunities available to telcos that are looking to move into the content delivery space, especially on the heels of Tier 1 networks doing the same.
The largest player in the sector, Akamai, then finishes the opening presentations talking about the scalability of online content delivery and the challenges it has faced from its dominant position.
Following on from these three "contextualising" presentations, we then have panellists from Limelight, Amazon CloudFront, and Level 3 discussing market insights and helping the audience understand their own strategies and reasoning behind their technical and commercial moves. For anyone wanting to use, invest in, or operate a CDN, this will provide a rare opportunity to hear, candidly, how the leaders of the biggest players see the market.
After lunch the panel sessions continue with a group of companies who provide infrastructure to CDNs-Edgeware, Blue Coat Systems, Verivue, and Blackwave. They'll discuss the demands for new services that are being placed on them-and the architectures that are being put together-offering architects, technology buyers, service managers and operators insights into what these vendors consider to be best practices.
Continuing the flow of conversation, it is then logical to take a look at the application trends, and we are privileged to have leading thinkers from each of the major video server vendors on the same stage! This is a rare opportunity to put the same question to all the vendors-Adobe, CodeShop, Flumotion, Microsoft, and Wowza-at the same time and understand the demands from the CDNs, publishers, and consumers that each is meeting.
The next panel is a little more "free form," with Content Delivery Summit sponsors providing a candid and lively discussion of how the online video stack is changing; participants include Jet Stream, Luxembourg for ICT, thePlatform, and Velocix.
The closing session of the day brings together several of the most influential standards bodies to discuss standardisation as the internet gears up for over-the-top television services. With MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), DTG (Digital TV Group), and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) represented, the leading influencers in the broadcast and internet space discuss interop and open their views on the online distribution challenge as IPTV, broadcast, and internet video vie with each other and decide if the internet will become the mass market TV medium of the future, or if the web and TV are only destined to persist as counterparts in a wider picture.
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned