Highwinds Lands Commitment from Technicolor
"The StrikeTracker dashboard platform can be branded as customer's own," said Highwind's Hayes. "They can set up subaccounts on their own and allocate different pricing and limits, including credit limits. Our channel partners love this level of control."
Owned by Thomson, one of the world's leading high-end media products and services companies, Technicolor has a history of creating additional value for high-end/high-value content. In a strong move in to the digital media delivery space, Thomson purchased SyncCast in September 2007, just before the IBC broadcast show in Amsterdam, and placed it under Technicolor.
With SyncCast, a CDN that has robust storage and connectivity, why did Technicolor need Highwinds?
"With SyncCast, we place very large content files at our four PoPs," said Dougall. "Since we have so few PoPs, we focus on large storage capacity and significant connectivity so that our PoPs can deliver very large downloadable files directly to consumers. As we've grown our business, though, we've had numerous requests for on-demand and live streaming services, from some very big customers. We didn't want to try to use our own specialized CDN to try to add streaming capability, so we went looking partner."
Technicolor's customers include record labels, movie studios, and other owners of high-value content that require both rapid and controlled delivery. Highwinds' StrikeTracker, according to both Dougall and Hayes, allows both rapid dissemination and retraction.
"Our customers also like the ability to rapidly populate content out to the edge devices," said Hayes. "Content can be populated within seconds once it's uploaded to a StrikeTracker folder; it can also, just as importantly, easily be removed off all the edge devices, by simply removing it from the StrikeTracker folder."
When asked about specifics surrounding reliance on one very high-profile customer, such as Technicolor, as its primary revenue stream, Hayes assured me that Technicolor would probably be one of Highwinds' largest customers, but not the sole large customer. Highwinds expects to announce several more high-profile customers in the next few months, all of which Hayes attributes to the level of integration and invisibility that Highwinds offers.
"As part of the Highwinds philosophy," said Hayes, "we give our customers complete account control. We don't want to get in their business, and as long as they're making relatively large committment, we're able to give them a good price and a platform that renders us invisible to our customers' customers."