Limelight: Support for Old and New Formats Crucial for CDNs
The services that content delivery networks (CDNs) are expected to provide is shifting, as a panel at the recent Streaming Forum conference in London showed, yet there's still value in supporting older video formats. Steve Miller-Jones, director of product management at Limelight Networks, explained why legacy support is critical for some broadcasters.
"The key services we've being asked to deliver from a bits-and-bytes perspective have moved over the years away from some of the legacy formats…largely toward HTTP, but there's still a range of services required across and around the world for different reasons," Miller-Jones said. "Some broadcasters, for example, have government remits which say you must support all of these legacy formats. They still buy those legacy formats and they expect those key services and that flexibility to be available from the CDNs."
That link to the past gives established CDNs an advantage.
"It's unlikely that if you're a newcomer and you fancy your hand at being a CDN you're going to support a legacy format. So I think being an established CDN with the layers and levels of customers gives us the ability to offer a wide range of key services, but it's becoming more and more focused on HTTP and HTTPS, and dealing with the security pieces and the business logic that surrounds those connections," Miller-Jones explained.
For more on the next generation of CDN services, watch the full discussion below and download the PowerPoint presentation.
Next-Generation Content Delivery Architectures
We tap some of the most visionary tech thought leaders in content delivery, asking them: what's next in the space? The speakers have different perspectives - a leading broadcaster, a pureplay CDN, a technology vendor, and a software vendor - each with a different set of expectations for meeting future network demands.
Dom Robinson, Co-Founder, Director and Creative Firestarter, id3as
Richard Cooper, Controller Digital Distribution & Operations, BBC
Chris Swan, CTO, CohesiveFT
Steve Miller-Jones, Director of Product Management, Limelight Networks
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