thePlatform to offer CDN, cloud services

thePlatform, the Seattle-based white-label online video platform, announced Monday the launch of two new service offerings aimed at lowering the cost of providing broadband video for small video publishers. thePlatform customers can now purchase CDN services and cloud server storage capacity at rates that could save small video publishers 32 percent on their total video delivery costs, according to the company.

"We think these offerings can significantly drive down the cost of running a broadband video site," said Marty Roberts, vice president of marketing for thePlatform. "We can use the volume of video we serve, 440 million videos per month on average, to obtain better pricing for our individual customers."

thePlatform will partner with Edgecast, a CDN specializing in reselling services, to provide the bundled CDN service, named mpsManage CDN. It will provide flexible terms, distributed architecture and technology specifically tuned for video delivery.

"We chose Edgecast from among the 16 CDNs we partner with for three reasons," Roberts said. "We've had joint customer deployments with them for more than a year, and we've been very impressed by the reliability Edgecast delivers. Their team is invested in management and functionality for resellers, and they're very aggressive about pursuing those partnerships."

Roberts said thePlatform will share in the revenue generated from the sale of CDN services on the Edgecast network, and it will begin offering the service for $0.35/Gb.

As for the cloud services portion of the announcement, Roberts declined to comment on the hosted service provider thePlatform will use for the storage, but said rates for the storage service would be 75 percent less than those charged by large CDNs.

thePlatform's move into bundled CDN and cloud services could mark a sea change in the video delivery business. Online video management and syndication platforms have typically remained in the applications layer, but thePlatform's expansion into the delivery and storage realm could force other video platforms to experiment with bundled services. thePlatform's new offerings also represent an increased focus on targeting and serving smaller customers.

For more:
- see thePlatform's press release here 

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