Sazbean

Your customers are becoming impatient. The purchasing manager for CrowCo wants to see your newly updated online presentation, so she hits the ‘play’ button on the video viewer embedded in your demo site. At first nothing happens. A small graphic spins in the lower corner of the screen to stall for time while the browser downloads enough visual and audio data to begin a progressive start. The customer fidgets. After as short as three seconds, she becomes bored and looks around her desktop for something else to do while she waits. Finally the video begins. The manager settles in and refocuses her attention. This lasts all of thirty seconds at which point the video buffer runs empty, the video stalls and the customer gives up.

Our tolerance for delays online has become unreasonably short. The success of YouTube in the online video market has eroded what little patience we had with content delivery times. Online consumers already expect video services to provide instant starts and they are noticeably disappointed when a company falls short of that mark. This comes at a time when video is becoming the goto tool for communicating information in compelling ways. It has the capacity to captivate your online audience like no other medium.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) exploded into market in the late 90’s to tackle this special problem of content delivery time. Akamai began life as a website caching company, back when sites were finding their highly stylized, intensely graphical web pages were slow to load. The solution, put simply, was to copy the content onto many internet hotspots that were closer to the web surfer. Like an expressway, once Akamai was able to reroute your page request to the nearest data center, they could serve up the content with much shorter delays. Fast forward 10 years and little has changed in the CDN world. The technology has improved, but their goal is still to get your content as close to the web viewer as possible. This means video hosted on a CDN has a much greater chance of starting right away and finishing without buffering issues.

In following posts I will discuss some of the services that a CDN can provide your B2B company. I will also review two CDN networks, Cachefly and LimeLight Networks.

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